For those of you who haven’t yet seen it (it’s an old post, but Allah featured it on Hot Air recently), go read Bill Ardolino’s post detailing the heroism of one Fallujah policeman whose family was targeted by insurgents. Obviously, this man is exceptional — and there are likely a number of Iraqis who would just as soon surrender freedom for a bit of stability at this point — but

Or, “If the Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial board helps the FBI and the citizens of the Pacific Northwest identify possible terror plotters, the terrorists will have already won.” Up is down. Black is white. Nobody much cares for Raymond.

Tuppence a day: Pounded and strained by heavy traffic and weakened by missing bolts and cracking steel, the failed interstate bridge over the Mississippi River also faced a less obvious enemy: pigeons. Inspectors began documenting the buildup of pigeon dung on the span near downtown Minneapolis two decades ago. Experts say the corrosive guano deposited all over the Interstate 35W span’s framework helped the steel beams rust faster. TMI? An

From a blog called (appropriately, though not for the reasons its author imagines) “The Supreme Irony of Life”: At Firedoglake Sunday, Dave Neiwert wrote a good post on being a stay-at-home dad. One of the points, is one that I was raised to believe: People who talk about masculinity — especially conservatives, who seem to obsess about it, but in a peculiarly juvenile way — have always seemed a little

Because I don’t much feel like it today, that’s why.

In case you missed it, Dr. Helen defends herself from Neiwert’s (willful?) misinterpretation of her post, which started this whole brouhafuffle. EcoPunk reads back a little ways, but not to the radish of the issue. John Cole’s brain hurts. Personally, I don’t think that makes him feminine. And I have a confession to make: I like Regina Spektor’s music. Does that (in and of itself) make me teh ghey? Feel

In an effort to determine how masculine I appear to others — and what role perception plays in that determination — I spent the better part of this afternoon in my front yard, lifting weights in a sleeveless tartan flannel and steel-toed work boots, sipping gin gimlets and listening to a mix tape heavy with Depeche Mode and Erasure. The idea was to contrive a social text consisting of a

Amanda Marcotte is still blogging? Even after being exposed as an embarrassing opportunist and a purveyor of gross libels against those wrongly accused of rape (and their defenders)? Wow, who knew? And about my cock again, no less… Not that she can help herself, the poor dear. Much as she tries, she just can’t seem to quit the hypermasculinist bad boys. — Which, on the plus side, there’s yet another

Enforcing illegal immigration laws = enforcing runaway slave laws, according to Latino Movement USA’s Juan Jose Gutierrez (not surprisingly, a hard-core Marxist). Which, I guess the quickest way to pawn yourself off as the Latino Frederick Douglass is to set up the rhetorical conditions for your own reluctant self-importance, profess outrage on behalf of “your” people, then let a fawning press sympathetic to the strained historical analogies pushed by grievance

Give David Morris and Salon credit: they certainly do their best to cram into a single sentence as much of the progressive narrative orthodoxy as they can before certain inconvenient facts (which themselves seem to take on a greater urgency somehow when surrounded by Marines) compel them to veer a bit toward the optimistic center: Despite Bush’s deceptive rhetoric and mishandling of the war, the Marines I rode with here