Tête-à-Tête-Tête

Since exactly what is and what is not torture has become an item of confusion in our society I was wondering if any of you would hesitate to use any of the following if it might save the life of one child?

Everyone knows you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theatre, and you shouldn’t.
Everyone knows you can yell “smoking gun mushroom cloud” on the Tee Vee, but you shouldn’t.
The New England Journal of Medicine examines a somewhat more difficult situation. Can you put Dorothy Hamill on ice skates and sell that drug (one of [...]

Ed M. at Captain’s Quarters uses the personal relationship between Larry Flynt and Jerry Falwell as a jumping off point for a brief note about seeing the humanity in your political enemies and behaving in a manner consistent with that practice.
A brief note: I added Captain’s Quarters to my RSS feeds just so I [...]

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said opponents of the ban “have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases.” (-link
I’m still mulling this over. I won’t jump out there and say I’m smarter than the Supreme Court, that the decision was wrong. But it [...]

Here. It’s not quite an egalitarian view, but it shows that even some hard-core rightwingers have a spark of conscience that outshines the propensity to tread on the backs of gay people. Nice showing, guys.

Mike Huckabee get’s one wrong… might be thought of as a biggie (via Atrios). Of course, the clueless, godless liberals defend him, and also get it wrong. The Golden Rule is none of the “commandments” - not even the “Second Greatest”. It’s a pretty good one, though, as is the “Second Greatest”.
This screw-up [...]

But it is dead-on. Lots of vertigo here. And applications far outside academic development.

I have a lot of it. Go Vols, you know. But Senator Finney really isn’t a source of it.
I hope the BoE gives him the smack-down he deserves.

They Found Jesus’ Bones, and his family’s, including his kid’s.
Let’s go back 27 years, when Israeli construction workers were gouging out the foundations for a new building in the industrial park in the Talpiyot, a Jerusalem suburb. of Jerusalem. The earth gave way, revealing a 2,000 year old cave with 10 stone caskets. [...]

I’ll disagree with Atrios on this post. He says the Daily Show is only liberal in the sense of “picking on the powerful” - Democrat and Republican both. It is liberal in that sense, yes - and more-or-less non-partisan in that sense. That’s good. Partisanship kills humor, and it can become a [...]