Today’s New York Times piece by John Branch on big American flags belongs to a genre perhaps invented by the Grey Lady (see, e.g., the paper’s elitist coverage of suburban chain restaurants), in which the paper attempts to explain the alien culture of the United States to its core readership: Once the gaudy lure of attention-seeking car dealerships or other roadside attractions, big flags have found a comfortable home inside the ballparks, arenas and raceways

As Karl and Allah note, we’ve got Obama! I mean, who needs more than the quintessence of nuance? That’s the pharmaceutical grade stuff.

I’ve been out to see the sky anemones with the younger Monsterlings and Mrs. Horrible up in Bristol on a chilly Vermont evening with temps in the mid-fifties, probably, and I’ll be working tomorrow and Saturday to buy a little breathing space for some co-workers. My buddy Bob is taking Brendan to see Cheap Trick at Summerfest in Milwaukee, while he’s got a little time off from the summer Arabic

Yesterday, I posted a link to an article about scientific research indicating that men’s and lesbian’s brains are similarly asymmetrical, with a preponderance of development in the right hemisphere, whereas women’s and gay men’s brains are more symmetrical. I jovially suggested in the title that lesbians were “men with breasts.” After I’d retired for the evening, Dr. Caric appeared in the comments and stated that my post was homophobic. What

Barack Obama now says he would be open to “refine” his policies about a timeline for withdrawing troops from Iraq after meeting with US military commanders in Iraq later this month.  This statement follows three different versions of his Iraq policy floated by Obama’s advisers and surrogates over the past two days. As Rick Klein of ABC News puts it: There will be only one relevant question now out of Obama’s trip now:

Head to the nearest Home Depot and ask if maybe you can give one of their industrial belt sanders a little test drive. Then, while the clerk in the unpressed orange apron stands frozen in horror, run that fucker along your forehead and temple until hairclumps and pressurized skull dust create a kind of chalky-smelling mist that settles on the wood plank like some gruesome sandstorm. — After which, turn

Dark Lord Karl Rove and RCP’s Jay Cost both look at Barack Obama’s bold general election ad campaign.  Rove questions the whether spending nearly $20 million in early TV advertising is prudent.  Cost argues that the buy is more about framing Obama’s campaign in an aggressive posture than the actual expectations of the campaign. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s PowerPoint presentation to fundraisers tends to support Cost’s argument, as it suggested that

Inasmuch as people here seemed interested in the upcoming bat-flick, there is a pretty high-quality bootleg of the first few minutes I saw in IMAX a while ago online… until the WB notices.  It’s a little spoilery, as you might imagine.

In my email, a message from the application, “Circle of Trust”: Dan, these are the people you don’t know but can trust, because of your trusted friends’ trust in them. That’s about the dumbest thing I ever heard. These people are in my Circle of Trust because they believe they can trust ME, fercryinoutloud.

Lucky bastards: Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström, of the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, now report that the brains of heterosexual men and homosexual women are slightly asymmetric—the right hemisphere is larger than the left—and the brains of gay men and straight women are not.