MetaFilter

What is a "Crunchy Conservative"? A new political buzzword or a lifestyle manifesto, the Crunchy Con may even be a new political species, unless you're a Contra-Crunchy Con.
comment posted at 7:58 AM on Jan-26-07

The dirty underbelly -- I'm sick and tired of these hypocritical Hoosier legislators who think that my sex life or relationship status is any of their business. Do I intrude on who they're sleeping with? I didn't, but I'm going to start now. ...Consider this a call to arms gossip. ... -- Bilerico, a GLBT blog in Indiana, fighting their proposed state Constitutional Amendment to ban marriage and all other rights for gay and lesbian couples and families.
comment posted at 6:01 AM on Jan-26-07
comment posted at 6:02 AM on Jan-26-07

Are you Smart or Stoopid? A quick, entertaining and (for me) reasonably challenging way to determine your level of intelligence. Be sure to post your score.
comment posted at 6:09 AM on Jan-26-07

Pocketshot. For when you really need to slug some rum on a long bike ride.
comment posted at 8:13 AM on Jan-25-07

Wanna get nuked? the Active Denial System [just say no?] was launched yesterday - its a microwave ray gun that makes people feel like they're going to catch fire. Wasn't there a ray gun at a certain point in a book we trashed a while earlier?
comment posted at 8:48 AM on Jan-25-07

Alberto Gonzalez says "there is no express grant" of habeas corpus in the Constitution. Previously on MeFi and AskMe.
comment posted at 8:38 AM on Jan-25-07

The helicopter that was shot down over Iraq this weekend was carrying, among other high-ranking officers, the US Army's chief medical officer for troops in Iraq.
comment posted at 8:57 AM on Jan-25-07

The modern slave trade is thriving. The Dept of State estimates that 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are trafficked - brought across borders and forced to labor. Among them, DOS estimates, hundreds of thousands are minor children. Some of those children - as young as 5 years old - are being sold as slaves and kept in cages while they are raped and sold for sex, some servicing as many as 30 men a day. They are bought for as little as $10 from desperate parents. But all is not lost: Somaly Mam, a former child prostitute, is the Mother Theresa of Southeast Asian child prostitutes, using AFESIP as her vehicle for saving them. Glamour awarded her their Woman of the Year honor, and she has been lauded in other ways internationally. Cambodian sex traffickers weren't as happy with her, though - her opponents kidnapped her 14-year old daughter, held her hostage for days, and raped her. It's hard to be on the wrong side of this issue, but some advocates raise a few hackles by claiming legalized prostitution and porn contribute to sex trafficking and child prostitution. Sex trafficking, and child prostitution, is a sizeable problem in the US as well. Although trafficking is illegal in the US, combating trafficking is tough in part because victims often fear authorities, personal reprisals, harm to their families at home, or even deportation (although special visas - T visas - are available to them in certain circumstances). In Southeast Asia (and throughout the world), child sex tourism is even harder to stop.
comment posted at 10:12 AM on Jan-25-07

Politics/PlameFilter: In opening arguments today in the Plame investigation perjury case against Vice President Cheney's former Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby, the prosecutor portrayed Libby as an agent of a Cheney-driven media offensive. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the day came from Libby's attorney, who portrayed his client as a White House-chosen scapegoat for Karl Rove's misdeeds. A conservative reporter saw in Libby's emerging defense a "dramatic split inside the Bush White House." An MSNBC host asked whether this hullabaloo could lead to Cheney's resignation. Background on the case. Liveblogging of today's arguments from an anti-administration perspective.
comment posted at 5:33 AM on Jan-24-07

Tonight, G.W. Bush is expected to announce a major energy proposal, including cutbacks in gas consumption and development of alternative fuels. High on the list is the development and subsidisation of ethanol, primarily as derived from corn. The utility of corn-based ethanol in meeting energy needs is debatable: its probably weakly energy positive, but not very good in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. More immediately, the US drive towards corn based ethanol has had major effects on the price of corn, and has caused the otherwise free market leaning Mexican President Felipe Calderon to introduce price controls on tortillas. Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown: "The competition for grain between the world’s 800 million motorists who want to maintain their mobility and its 2 billion poorest people who are simply trying to survive is emerging as an epic issue.". (This post based on a column by Barrie McKenna, unfortunately subscriber only.)
comment posted at 12:30 PM on Jan-23-07

How Iraq and climate change threw the right into disarray.
comment posted at 12:07 PM on Jan-23-07

Who owns your church? A few congregations disagree with the direction their church heirarchy is going. They vote to leave. Who gets the buildings and the church property? If you are politically connected, you might try to change the law in your favor.
comment posted at 6:05 AM on Jan-23-07

Newsfilter: China successfully knocks one of its satellites out of orbit. This brings the race to militarize space to the public eye again. The Chinese central government has been working for years to keep up with the Americans.
comment posted at 9:57 AM on Jan-19-07

An Impartial Interrogation
One of the things I miss about my eighteen years in the US Senate are the stories of the old Southern Democrats. I didn't always vote with them, but I loved their technique of responding to an opponent's questions with a humorous story. Once when Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina had to handle a tough question from Mike Mansfield, he said, "You know, Mr. Leader, that question reminds me of the old Baptist preacher who was telling a class of Sunday school boys the creation story. 'God created Adam and Eve and from this union came two sons, Cain and Abel and thus the human race developed.' A boy in the class then asked, 'Reverend, where did Cain and Abel get their wives?' After frowning for a moment, the preacher replied, 'Young man--it's impertinent questions like that that's hurtin' religion.'"
comment posted at 9:53 AM on Jan-19-07

Porn Bread: recipes for making your own Vagina Danishes, Bukkookies, and Ejaculaires! SFW, but may be difficult to explain to prudish or hungry co-workers.
comment posted at 10:04 AM on Jan-19-07

"Why do they hate us?" was a fairly common question asked by Americans in the wake of 9/11. In his new book The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, Dinesh D'souza gives us the answer: "the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world." Some reviews: WaPo, The American Conservative, Esquire. D'souza previously on mefi: [1] [2] [3]
comment posted at 10:50 AM on Jan-19-07

The Plantation Mentality
The veteran broadcast journalist Bill Moyers spoke on Friday before 3,500 at the opening of the National Conference on Media Reform in Memphis. He announced his return to the airwaves and outlined his vision of media reform. "As ownership gets more and more concentrated, fewer and fewer independent sources of information have survived in the marketplace; and those few significant alternatives that do survive, such as PBS and NPR, are under growing financial and political pressure to reduce critical news content and to shift their focus in a mainstream direction, which means being more attentive to establishment views than to the bleak realities of powerlessness that shape the lives of ordinary people."
comment posted at 10:38 AM on Jan-18-07
comment posted at 6:15 AM on Jan-19-07

An Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq. "As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq . Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home." (via the Seattle Times.)
comment posted at 12:07 PM on Jan-17-07

Carol Lam was the first one to receive much publicity. A federal prosecutor fired for not making guns and drugs a top priority. She was also Duke Cunningham's prosecutor. No big deal, she just hadn't prosecuted many cases during her tenure. Except that Lawyers called the firing "virtually unprecedented And FBI people claimed the firing would jeopardize cases. Then there was Daniel Bogden, a federal prosecutor in Nevada was also canned for "fostering low morale". And actually it turns out that as many as many as eight federal prosecutors have been fired in the past two months.
comment posted at 6:02 AM on Jan-17-07
comment posted at 11:02 AM on Jan-17-07

Chief Justice John Roberts, decrying “the personalization of judicial politics,” describes his efforts to increase comity on the Supreme Court and to decide more cases unanimously. In Roberts' first term as chief justice, “while a relatively large number of the Court’s decisions” were unanimous, “several important, closely divided cases” were decided by 5-4 votes, with Roberts joining the more conservative justices.
comment posted at 6:13 AM on Jan-17-07

Global warming skeptic Ronald Bailey--Reason's science correspondent, adjunct scholar at CATO and CEI, and editor of the 2002 book Global Warming and Other Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death--has changed his mind.
comment posted at 11:15 AM on Jan-16-07
comment posted at 11:40 AM on Jan-16-07
comment posted at 11:42 AM on Jan-16-07

News Scrap (It's On!) The battle between O'Reilly and Olberman, the remix. From the always wonderful On the Media.
comment posted at 11:36 AM on Jan-16-07
comment posted at 11:19 AM on Jan-17-07

Adultery could mean life, Michigan's second-highest court reported that anyone involved in an extramarital fling can be prosecuted for first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to life in prison. Michigan's Supreme Court majority has held that it is for the Legislature, not the courts, to decide when the absurdity threshold has been breached.
comment posted at 11:52 AM on Jan-16-07

Why is the US bombing Somalia? Salim Lone is the former spokesperson for the UN mission in Iraq, and a journalist in Kenya. In an interview he discusses possible reasons for the attacks. The recent history of the country is bloody and the country is beset with poverty, and our own history of involvement there is quite ugly.
comment posted at 5:35 AM on Jan-10-07
comment posted at 8:57 AM on Jan-10-07

House of Deception is dedicated to the history of the deceptive arts, including magic, carnival sideshows and pro wrestling.
comment posted at 9:00 AM on Jan-10-07

The Ideological Animal. We think our political stance is the product of reason, but we're easily manipulated and surprisingly malleable. Our essential political self is more a stew of childhood temperament, education, and fear of death. Call it the 9/11 effect. Or the Metafilter effect. [ducks]
comment posted at 10:32 AM on Jan-9-07
comment posted at 12:51 PM on Jan-9-07
comment posted at 5:47 AM on Jan-10-07
comment posted at 11:20 AM on Jan-10-07

Newsfilter: Contractors in war zones lose immunity. American civilian contractors are now subject to military law.
comment posted at 5:27 AM on Jan-9-07
comment posted at 10:35 AM on Jan-9-07

California's Governor Seeks Universal Care: Under a plan by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California would become the largest state to attempt to provide near universal health coverage.
comment posted at 5:37 AM on Jan-9-07
comment posted at 6:29 AM on Jan-9-07
comment posted at 6:48 AM on Jan-9-07
comment posted at 10:40 AM on Jan-9-07
comment posted at 1:00 PM on Jan-9-07

"[T]he heart of the Christian religion, all that is good and compassionate within it, has been tossed aside, ruthlessly gouged out and thrown into a heap with all the other inner organs. Only the shell, the form, remains. Christianity is of no use to Parsley, Blackwell and the others. In its name they kill it." From Michelle Goldberg's searing Salon interview with Chris Hedges, whose War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning I admired the hell out of.
comment posted at 6:45 AM on Jan-8-07

Those of you who support illegal immigration oops, i mean undocumented workers: Remember, there is no problem at the southern border.
comment posted at 12:52 PM on Jan-5-07

...The point that I do want to stress is that when this economy collapses, it is bound to be much worse. Another point I would like to stress is that collapse here is likely to be permanent. The factors that allowed Russia and the other former Soviet republics to recover are not present here. In spite of all this, I believe that in every age and circumstance, people can sometimes find not just a means and a reason to survive, but enlightenment, fulfillment, and freedom. If we can find them even after the economy collapses, then why not start looking for them now? Thank you.

Closing the 'Collapse Gap': the USSR was better prepared for peak oil than the US
comment posted at 1:08 PM on Jan-5-07

. . . a group of us were talking about a particularly irksome message board contributor and the subject of sociopathy came up again. This particular person seemed to be oblivious to the rules of the board, didn't pick up on the social cues of other participants or moderators to modify his behavior, and was making public personal attacks against others while complaining that others were doing the same to him, even though they were not. Anyone who runs a community site, has comments on their blog, or participates on a message board knows this guy -- and it usually is a guy. Maybe he just suffers from cyber-disinhibition. One guy has some ideas about the problem.
comment posted at 8:45 AM on Jan-4-07

A second career? The President pens an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. For extra credit compare and contrast attitudes towards bipartisanship in the op-ed to this speech or this one. Gold star for the best answer.
comment posted at 9:16 AM on Jan-4-07

Paul Theroux's writing is, at it's best, a long, dreamy meditation on a place, it's people, and the time he spent among them. His latest piece, an op-ed in the New York Times about America in 2007, is no exception.
comment posted at 9:57 AM on Jan-3-07

You have reached your destination.
comment posted at 5:53 AM on Dec-22-06