Ready to lube up and take one for the team.

But markedly unenthusiastic, according to the latest John Hawkins poll.

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Please be gentle.

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. . . when there isn't anything good on the internet.

I may have to go read one of those dead-tree thingies.

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How does it feel to have the credibility of your reporting disparaged by, ahem, The New Republic?

Good question.

But they may be too busy scrambling for readers to come up with much of an answer to that.

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. . . in a cold sweat, wondering about Cream of Wheat. Concerned about whether it . . . you know . . . plays for the other team.

Today, I read this awful confirmation.

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J. Peter Freire, writing in AmSpec on the current (somewhat anemic, IMO) McCain scandal:

The story is simply a catalogue of potential sins that are never realized, offered by sources that are never named. No wonder McCainiacs are ticked. Yet this is precisely the sort of scrutiny of moral conscience that McCain has supported.

The NRA and the ACLU both can't buy ad time in the days before an election because doing so, by virtue of the ethical senator's own philosophy, is manipulating the people and hurting democracy. But when McCain hops a flight with a campaign contributor, it ought to be obvious that he's maintaining his integrity. Why is it that associations comprised of every day citizens are suspect, but a powerful politician is not?

Sure, he's a son of a bitch. But he's the son of a bitch who's getting crammed down our throats.

Via Megan McArdle, who mentioned this over at Insty's place.

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And so do I. We're both in Neocon's club.

My affection for semicolons has led to complaints in the past, from other bloggers who felt that I truly abused these handy little punctuation marks.

They are wrong, though—my real vice is the em-dash, which can be used in much more flexible ways than the semicolon.

Via Althouse, blogging over at The Court of Insty.

Note: You think I'm joking? What do you imagine copyeditors talk about over lunch and dinner? Substance? Or style?

Note II: At the risk of being accused of too much free association before I even take my nightly Ambien, does anyone want to place this quote?

You could say she has an individual style;

She's part of a colorful time.

Q: What sort of person actually inserts quotation marks into the song lyrics he or she quotes?

A: A copyeditor, of course.

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Stage fright. You know how that goes.

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1 Alternately, you do your best work for your regulars.

Posted by: Darrell at February 21, 2008 01:59 PM (Wo4hX)

2

Posted by: Attila Girl at February 21, 2008 02:47 PM (larLB)

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My boss called me when it started, and told me it was visible from the parking lot at work. I went on down, but couldn't spot it; he might not have been taking the ambient light in that neighborhood into account, or maybe it was blocked by a building.

But it was waning (is that the word?) as I drove home. I kept looking at it, and finally pulled over to try to get a shot with my tiny camera and rather sad command of "digital photography" (and what a funny term that is, now that I think of it—as if we took pictures with our fingers).

No dice, of course. But I'm sure someone's getting a good picture of it, somewhere. There are people out there with good equipment, who know what they're doing.

So I just came home, fired up the laptop, and walked outside to admire the moon every now and then from my driveway.

That's the reason I bought this house, you know: the view of the moon from this street.

I hope I can still find a way to look at it after I've left. Do they have the moon at night in other cities? Can one see it from a condominium? I just want to be prepared, you know.

Tonight, the moon was, indeed, the North Wind's Cookie.

UPDATE: Aha! Here we go! Eclipse pix!

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Thanks for the traffic, Darlin'. Just let me know what you need, and . . . I'll be there.

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"When you publish these little character sketches, snippets of dialogue, bits of gossip and the like, how do your political readers react?"

"My readers? I'm supposed to be thinking of my readers?

"Yes; your readers."

"Oh. Now that you mention it, that explains a few things."

That's why some of us become CPAC's Blogger of the Year, and others do not: Dedication. Stuff like that.

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"That's okay," he responds. "When you get home, you can switch to Scotch."

"Oh, right. Fair enough," I reply.

At first I think he's joking, though he doesn't drink. Later, I realize he is not. Not joking at all.

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"Mature? I'm not mature! I'm derelict!"

Yeah; I've been listening to some of the tracks from Psychoderelict. Love that album.

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Good morning, David!

Here's the pivotal quote from Jonathan Rauch in that book of his I got from a Virginia Postrel bibliography, and cannot stop pimping, Kindly Inquisitors:

It is quite useless to pretend that it is "fair," in the sense of evenhanded, to kick someone's beliefs out of the canon if they do not happen to be deemed science by the intellectual establishment. If we on the Darwinian side of the question are going to insist on preferential treatment for our way of looking at the world (and we should), and if in the process we are going to cause pain and outrage to people who do not see the world our way, then we had better have an awfully good reason—a much better reason than "because we're right and you're wrong and that's that." If we do not, then shame on us.

In point of fact, David, I probably come closer to your view of science than I do to Ben Stein's in No Intelligence Allowed. But that isn't quite the point: this isn't about what you think, or what I think. This is about what one may and may not say in the Academy without being called a nut. It is about protecting the system of rational inquiry. It's about reminding ourselves that "the solution for the problem of bad speech is more speech." And the solution for the problem of bad research is more research. Bad papers, more papers.

All I'm asking for is tolerance, rather than the narrow-mindedness that insists that we abstain from mentioning the possibility of God's existence in a university classroom.

More is at stake, by the way, than the definition of science: there is the issue of intellectual diversity in American Universities. This is the problem Evan Coyne Maloney has been calling attention to with his documentary Indoctrinate U. If your problem with "Intelligent Design" has to do with its not being science, are you equally consistent with respect to professors in other academic disciplines sticking to their own areas of expertise?

Because many of your colleages are not, and have no problem with teaching left-wing politcs from the podium. I trust you aren't among them, but it is a real concern for those of us who don't like to see the Ivory Tower getting too narrow at the top.

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Larry Kudlow on the End of Inevitability:

Hillary's best bet to preserve her career as a professional politician? Pull back significantly in Texas and Ohio, as a prelude to withdrawal. Bill will say no, 'cause his career is even deader than hers. But Hillary has more class than he does. She still has some vague sense of reality, of the difference between right and wrong, even if he does not.

The Intrade pay-to-play prediction market shows Obama with a 7.5-point gain tonight, giving him a 78 to 20 lead. That's right, 78 to 20. Hillary has suddenly become an incredibly steep inverted yield curve, with a rapidly declining credit rating and a complete drying up of liquidity. She won't be able to raise two wooden nickels, and not even Bill can raise enough money in Dubai to keep her out of bankruptcy.

As of tonight, the market has officially pulled the plug, terminating her campaign. The only thing left for her is to muster some grace, humility and character to begin the process of pulling out. To do otherwise will destroy the Democratic party and what's left of the Clintons' badly tarred and tattered reputation.

The real winner tonight? That chap from Arizona. Captain John McCain.

Ann Coulter couldn't be reached for comment, but that likely won't last long . . . She and I are now both officially out of options. It's McCain.

There. I said it.

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When one is matching a dinner of three blueberry mini-muffins with an appropriate wine, one should look at reasonably full-bodied cabernets, such as the 2005 Fish-Eye California Cabernet—reasonably price at $5.99 and available in a handy screw-top, corkless, high-tech bottle.

I happen to have one sitting on the table by the couch.

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I'm working on the long answer to your post. But here's the short one: we can solve this very easily.

We get two intellectually juicy Jewish guys into a mud pit—let's say, you and Ben Stein.

Then we get another intellectually juicy Jewish guy in there as referee—let's say, Jonathan Rauch. To give you a slight edge over Stein, he's an athiest, and a staunch believer in traditional evolutionary biology.

And then we see what happens in the contest between Scientific Orthodoxy and Free Speech Informed by Faith.

Rauch will adjudicate it fairly. Really: He has honest eyes.

No? Fair enough. You'll get a real answer once I've gathered my thoughts, and/or whittled my real post down to novella length.

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Holding my breath; starting to turn blue . . .

(Via Memeorandum.)

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Fake Dixie always enchants me after midnight. I prayed God to keep my hand off her knee.

—"Midnight at Tim's Place"

(From memory; someone can fact-check me on the quote, but I'm pretty sure I'm spot-on.)

In the same vein I intend someday to party with The Blogger Formerly Known As Feisty Republican Whore. If RightGirl were to join us, however, I fear Western Civilization might end—and rather abruptly, at that.

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Hillary's a hunter!

She learned how to hunt from her father in Arkansas . . . she did grow up in Arkansas, didn't she? Or she used to go duck hunting in suburban Illionois—one of the two.

Via Insty.

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