On gender “bias” and being “underrepresented”… What’s interesting is that Tierney still frames the question in terms of women being “underrepresented” in certain professions and areas of study. But this rather begs the question. How do we know that 1:1 gender parity is some natural, default state, from which any deviation must be construed as evidence of bias? On what basis – besides ideology – can we determine that there

Alex Trebek: “This long-handled garden tool is also the name for an immoral pleasure seeker. Chuck?” Chuck: “What is a hoe? Alex.”

La Hamsher at NPR: Hamsher is especially angry about the changes to FISA. Proponents say those changes actually strengthen privacy rules for certain phone calls, but in fact, the bill also streamlines the government’s ability to sweep up large amounts of data without court warrant. What really gets Hamsher’s goat is the fact that congressional Democrats agreed to give immunity to phone companies that may have cooperated with past illegal

I am happy to offer up my quips and pearls of wisdom, my lapidary analyses and spot-on insights on these front pages of Protein Wisdom, but I wish to bring to your attention once again and after a too-great hiatus the tremendous efforts of our colleagues at the Protein Wisdom Pub. Among those deserving notice are RTO Trainer with positive news from Afghanistan, where hopiness and changeitude, it is said,

Mr. Obama: “For a long time now, and — most tellingly — amid a political climate suffused in the kind of macho militarism that is antithetical to peace and prosperity, I’ve been saying that the so-called ‘surge strategy’ devised by the Bush administration would not work in Iraq. As it turns out, I was completely correct in my assessment: on the surface, sure, the strategy looks to be a success.

It has been almost a month since I last reminded folks that to help you get your weekend started, you can access hours of streaming music — the good, the bad and the ugly — via the page I have set up for my other web gig, via the fantastic Hype Machine.  You can access tracks individually, or let them play through as a jukebox.  The new additions for this Friday are mostly

MSNBC’s First Thoughts: So was this week a turning point in the presidential race? The Obama campaign certainly believes it was, and that this will be the moment that Obama grabs the lead for good. If McCain never catches up at this point, his campaign’s actions this week (its blistering criticism of Obama and the media, the visuals it picked, its body language, its VP games) will get second-guessed for

In today’s New York Post, Kirsten Powers may overestimate how juggernauty Barack Obama’s campaign may be, but she is generally correct about the way in which the McCain contraption (credit Allahpundit) is still sputtering: “If he wants to run as Hillary 2.0, then McCain should rip off some of her better stuff.” Camp McCain does not lack for analysis of the campaign’s weaknesses.  Powers follows Time magazine’s Mark Halperin (h/t RTO

Although I avoided spoilers in last week’s review, I note that novelist Andrew Klavan has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal examining “What Bush and Batman Have in Common”: There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by

George W. Bush is yesterday, the Texas version of the arrogant world power. Obama is all about today: the “everybody really just wants to be brothers and save the world” utopia. As for us, we who sometimes admire and sometimes curse this somewhat anemic, pragmatic democracy, we will have to quickly get used to Barack Obama, the new leader of a lofty democracy that loves those big nice words —