Sex and the City movie sucks and blows. Whodathunkit? They didn’t really know what they wanted – career or husband, baby or Balenciaga bag? – but what they didn’t want was to turn out like their mothers. And while straight men universally hated SATC (they professed to find Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw repellent, while in reality being unable to cope with her straight-talking prickliness), women – pretty much all

for stance on immigration. Think Progress on search terms Pope + abortion. I guess the Pope is only infallible when he agrees with Think Progress. You’d be paranoid about buggery, too, if you were such an ass. More religion in the news: Arctic Sea Ice Traps Climate Tour Icebreaker “Now, only nature can help this ship.” So start burning stuff. What is karma, again? Oh, yeah.

Academia for Conversos, only: Today, the Universities and Colleges Union is discussing whether universities should single out Israeli and Jewish scholars for active discrimination. Yes, you read that correctly. The UCU is debating a motion which not only raises the spectre yet again of an academic boycott of Israel but demands of Jewish and Israeli academics that they explain their politics as a pre-condition to normal academic contact. The motion

At Salon, Democratic pollster Paul Maslin looks at whether the youth vote can deliver the presidency to Barack Obama.  Most of Maslin’s point echo my assessment of the youth vote from May 26, but it is always good to get independent confirmation.  Maslin agrees that even a large increase in the youth vote would produce only a small impact on the actual makeup of the electorate: Despite the gains of 2004, however,

Barack Obama’s views on meeting leaders of enemy nations without preconditions is now so chock full ‘o’ nuance that it takes not one, not two, but three reporters from the New York Times to absorb it all — and not one, not two, but three uses of the word nuance! Yet even the Grey Lady’s scribes seem unconvinced: The caveats belie the simple answer Mr. Obama gave during a debate

Grab a cup of coffee and dig it. Sound track. Mmmmmm. Arbeit mit Fries.

more at Transterrestrial Musings. (The one who saved Art Buchwald).

At Ace of Spades HQ, Dave in Texas flags news from the Exxon Mobil shareholders’ meeting: Exxon Mobil Corp. chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson will retain both of those jobs at the world’s biggest publicly traded oil company after a highly public, Rockefeller-led push to separate the roles that failed again Wednesday. *** That said, none of the 17 shareholder proposals considered at the three-hour meeting received enough support to

Barack Obama’s camapign has yet to follow through with information on Obama’s health and medical history – which apparently will be a doctor’s note, rather than the massive medical records dump John McCain did last week (showing him to be in good health). At the Politico, Jeff Stier, an anti-smoking zealot associate director of the American Council on Science and Health, estimates that Obama has smoked between 50,000 and 70,000 cigarettes, which