I didn’t explain the “blog grammar” thing very well, but it goes beyond idiom, I think. That’s what I get for not using note cards. If you’ve ever read, say, Gravity’s Rainbow or Foucault’s Pendulum, you’ll note that the first fifty or so pages are incredibly slow going and, from a purely passive reading level, difficult to get through. The reason is, I think, that both Pynchon and Eco are

The NYT’s Frank Rich is so uniformly lame that I cannot recall ever having bothered to write about him.  But today’s dross on Barack Obama’s derision of small town America and lousy debate performance is too delusional to pass up: [V]iewers of all political persuasions were affronted by the moderators’ failure to ask about the mortgage crisis, health care, the environment, torture, education, China policy, the pending G.I. bill to aid veterans,

Yesterday, I noted that the story behind Celeste Fremon’s piece in the Huffington Post — reporting Hillary Clinton’s derogatory comments about MoveOn and the “activist base” of the Democratic party — might be as interesting as the story itself: The sudden appearance of the Fremon piece makes me almost as curious about what goes on behind closed doors at the HuffPo and OffTheBus as what goes on at Democratic fundraisers.  OTB’s co-publisher, Jay Rosen,

With the Iraqi Army defeating Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Basra, the L.A. Times has moved on to tell its readers how terrible things might get in Najaf.  Buried in the middle of the piece, however, is a bit about the battle for Basra: This time, the grand ayatollahs have declined to aid the incendiary cleric. Three days into the Basra campaign, Grand Ayatollah Najafi issued a fatwa, or religious

I could have hoped that he’d been more cryptic about it, but McGehee’s got the dope, the lowdown, the 411: Jeff Goldstein, of Protein Wisdom blog, spoke at some kind of panel thingie about blogging today, and via a comment by Happyfeet there’s a link to some video of the panel thingie. One of the things Jeff talked about was commenters and the way he has attracted such an unusually

Patrick Ruffini notes the ongoing efforts by Ron Paul supporters to elect delegates to Republican county conventions, who in turn elect state convention delegates, who often elect the delegates to the GOP’s national convention in the Twin Cities.  Ruffini links to stories from Alaska, Florida, Missouri and Minnesota.  For example, in Kansas City, the caucus elected more than 170 Paul delegates out of an estimated 187 available; Paulians ultimately snagged about a

Oh, for X’s sake!  This is just absolutely inappropriate! What does he think this is?  Graduate school? Can’t be too hard on the guy, I guess, considering he’s probably not a racist.

From  Rusty, via Ace: Rozita Swinton, the woman arrested today for falsely tipping off the police that she was an abused child bride at the FLDS polygamy cult in Texas is a PLEDGED BARACK OBAMA STATE DELEGATE!! It was her initial false report that started the investigation which has led to the removal of 400 children from their parents’ custody. Presumably, like those Japs running around in the jungle long

We’ve got Bernie Sanders and Pat Leahy, and Howard Dean’s from here, too. For kicks, I subscribe to Bernie’s email newsletter, and in his latest he petitioned us for our woeful stories of our situation in the midst of the collapsing middle class. Well, property taxes here in Vermont are among the highest in the nation, despite stringent environmental and population-density regulations. Now, Vermont is attempting to impose its own

Over at Vodkapundit, Will Collier has a great post up about Newspeak censorship at Thesaurus.com–one involving our friends at Feministing and the concept of “weakness.” David Thompson has an excellent post up on weakness, as well: A position of relative weakness is, bizarrely, deemed one of de facto virtue, one that “overrides” other considerations, no doubt in the interests of convenience. Thus, for instance, a random Muslim can be designated