Politics
From an article in Foreign Affairs: The Afghanistan crisis has dramatized and intensified antecedent changes and strains in the Western alliance. There was unanimous, if separate, condemnation [...], but there were also divergent, and often acrimoniously different, assessments of the causes of aggression and the nature of the challenge. The difficulties
Houston
Met Thomas and Lori Gray at the Doghouse Tavern in Midtown to watch UH play East Carolina. An entertaining game, that Houston won 27-13. Because it was a beautiful day, I walked the two miles to the Tavern before the game, taking Waugh to Fairview to Bagby. Fairview through
Politics
An e-mail to Fox News: your story last week about Wesley Clarka request from The Weekly Standard Have you requested that the White House check its logs for calls to and from Robert Novak during the month of June? If they'll do a log check for a
Politics
Brad DeLong asks the question I have asked many times since 1995: Where are the grownups in the Republican Party? I recently read Henry Fairlie's 1978 book, The parties: Republicans and Democrats in this century, and Fairlie agrees with Hubert Humphrey that [pgs. 215-16] (Again, that was
Politics
Kevin Drum says it better than I could. Remember: [the Plame affair] is not just some run of the mill political dirty trick. It's perilously close to treason. No truly principled conservative administration would do a thing like this, and the fact that they've been trying
Education
A "Viva Mexico" party held by Duke University's Sigma Chi fraternity has angered Mexican-Americans at that campus. Sad to say, the anger of the aggrieved students, as they are now expressing it, will not deter future such parties or even provide catharsis. Protests, denunciations, administrative
Intellect
Geoffrey Wheatcroft scorns how silly many of "the literary intelligentsia" were when responding to September 11: Imaginative writers are distinguished not by a sweeter character (too often very much not), greater intellectual honesty, or even deeper intelligence, but—apart from the gift of expression which is their stock
Media
A recent Associated Press article demonstrates how the news media often miscover medical and scientific news. The title and first paragraph of the article sound promising: Study: Even mid-life diet change can extend life WASHINGTON (AP) -- It has long been known that laboratory animals live longer on a low-
Sports
I was a Jim Tressel fan even before he was hired as Ohio State head football coach, and the work he has done in Columbus has only increased my admiration. Tressel has been criticized recently for the Buckeyes' three consecutive close wins at home against weaker teams. San Diego
Houston
Jason Smith, bass player in Strangelight and a friend from high school, helped put together a show at Helios Friday night, featuring Alan from Dallas and Pale from Houston. I enjoyed both bands -- standouts were Alan's fiddle player and closing song (called "Sigh"); and Pale'
Books
I have given up on Ed Regis' book, The Info Mesa (Norton, 2003), because of the shallowness of the writing. The final straw: [page 50] "Catholics have a lot of kids" is cliché, and calling a man a "good Catholic" right after mentioning his divorce
Education
A middle school teacher in Nebraska, on mandatory standardized testing: Politicians (and business people/capitalists) are competitive. They have a challenge, they try harder, and succeed. They see this as the solution to education: raise the bar, tougher standards, more competition. They don't see the reality, that not