Here’s what I’m trying to figure out about “Super-Duper Tuesday” — the ridiculously early multi-state primary-palooza on Feb. 5: How are the candidates going to manage their concession/victory speeches? Here’s the Feb. 5 list (copied from TPM/Election Central): Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho (D), Illinois, Massachusetts, Minesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico (D), New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia (R). [Oops, and Arizona.] So we could, in theory, be treated to the... Read more

I spent a year getting out of debt by doing corporate training — lots of three-day weekends in hotel meeting rooms with our account managers talking about sexual harassment and not creating a hostile workplace environment. If I were still working in that capacity, I would have to advise our managers not to hang this recent Pat Oliphant cartoon in their office. It’s exactly the sort of misogynist garbage that would get the company sued. And we would lose the... Read more

“In the real world they pay professionals. That’s why we call them pros.” — Carver I finally caught the first episode of Season 5 of The Wire. Now that the show’s focus has widened to include my own trade, its almost Aristotelian* emphasis on virtue and craft seems even more emphatic. This thread runs throughout the series, a constant opposition of those who care about “the job” and those who care about the career. The “natural po-lice” are craftsmen. They... Read more

So with Jan. 6 come and gone, everybody seems to have taken down their Christmas lights. We have an Epiphany and the world gets darker — that seems backwards. – – – Al-Qaida has frequently employed a “sleeper-cell” strategy, with its agents posing as peaceful, innocent citizens. Now, let’s be very clear — I’m not saying that Adam Yoshida is a concealed terrorist, a Manchurian blogger. But on the other hand, it’s impossible to rule it out. These things are,... Read more

The invaders are everywhere, spanning the globe from the Far East to even here, in the United States. More than a billion of them. They are unruly, uncivilized, irrational. It’s not considered “PC” to say so, but millions of them are simply incapable of reason. And history has taught us, again and again, that they cannot be controlled; they cannot be ignored; they cannot be denied. They cannot be stopped. Forgive me again for being politically incorrect, but most of... Read more