In the midst of my latest site outage (which led first to apoplexy, then to a mini-stroke) I fell unconscious for a several minutes, during which time I dreamed I was standing on an old wooden peach crate in Hyde Park, my shabby clothes in a state of obvious disrepair, preaching the righteousness of a recent Colorado supreme court ruling that’d forced upon a disapproving public, by judicial fiat, the

In response to what are increasingly pointed questions emerging in the mainstream press about those drowned NOLA buses, the HuffingtonPost’s Harry Shearer, in an email to Glenn Reynolds, tries to mitigate the local response (or rather, lack of one): Sunday’s lonnnnnng Washington Post piece on Katrina makes it clear, as I suggested to you last week, that, by the time Nagin declared his evac order (and even Haley Barbour warned

This examination of free expression by Salman Rushdie, excerpted from an interview in the August / September issue of Reason (print only), seems to fit well with the motif of today’s posts: reason:  Do you think freedom of speech is threatened by cultural relativism—by the idea that principles like free expression are not universal truths but simply local cultural constructs? Rushdie:  The idea of universal rights—the idea of rights that