When:  Thursday, 3 PM EST Where:  Rightalk Radio Guests:  Charles Johnson, Rob Harrison, and special guest lefty Oliver Willis Topics:  The Islamist threat; the state of political discourse; music; Nazism / Chimpy McHitlerBurton.  And Hobbits! Toll-free Call-in number: 1-866-884-8255 (866-884-TALK) Disclaimer:  Not everyone knows Nathan Lane personally.  Or so they claim. Offer:  If you have any questions you’d like me to ask Charles or Rob, leave them in the comments. 

No, seriously.  Look → A peanut butter cup dipped in raw honey?  Oh yes he did, too!  And now he’s going to prance shoeless across his front lawn.  As in, without shoes. The whimsy—it’s overtaken me.  I blame the blasphemy of spring. **** update:  And the found art of a month-old Thai stick, too.  So long as I’m footnoting things.

me: “…and of course, when Stanley Fish notes that ‘every decoding is another encoding,’ he’s really only saying that whenever we interpret, we are essentially summarizing or paraphrasing the original signs presented us—hopefully to the point where we are interpreting the intentions of the utterer in a useful way.” steamed beef dumpling: me: “…though this is clearly not always the case.” steamed beef dumpling: me: steamed beef dumpling: me: steamed

Bloomberg: Iraq’s National Assembly today named Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani as the country’s first democratically elected president in more than 50 years, breaking a two-month deadlock on forming a new government. The appointment resolves differences over power sharing between the United Iraqi Alliance, which won the most seats in the Jan. 30 vote, and the second-placed Kurdish Alliance. Shiite Interim Finance Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi and former Sunni President Sheik

Unfortunately, the show hit a hard break, so we’ll never know for sure what that other way might have been —though if I had to guess, I suspect it would have involved having Hillary Duff strap on a Semtex vest and pose for pictures with a smiling Baghdad Bob and a battalion of Fedayeen Saddam from the turret of an Iraqi tank.  Then, Americans would have seen the softer, more

From the San Francisco Chronicle‘s David Kipen: Saul Bellow, the 1976 Nobel Prize-winning Canadian-born writer whose groundbreaking 1953 novel “The Adventures of Augie March” helped craft the template for half a century of first-generation American fiction, died Tuesday in his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 89. “The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists—William Faulkner and Saul Bellow,” Philip Roth said Tuesday. “Together they are