Salt City Sinner

George Will's stunt double apparently has no problem with aliens of a certain sort...

Colorful fraudster and "Junk Bond King" Michael Milken crapped out a column on capital markets in today's Wall Street Journal - because, you know, nobody really has more credibility when it comes to finance than a guy who was convicted of six securities and reporting felonies. Whatever rigorous screening process is in place at the WSJ's opinion page did a fantastic job filtering that one out. It's a strange thing about right wing pundits - how many of them are actual , convicted-and-did-time , literal criminals. I suppose you could say the Republican approach to law and order is much the same as their approach to energy regulations or environmental policy: nobody understands the system like a real "insider."

The good folks at Sadly, No! have slowly, and with great dedication, mastered the art of the snarky takedown, and have turned this weaponized form of humor upon the various wingnut bloggers currently swarming around Pajamas Media, PowerLine, Red State, etc. etc. Today, in a particularly inspired post regarding Ed Morrisey , Gavin M. posted what is, in my opinion, the best piece about wingnuttery yet penned this year: The kind of polemical reasoning that Ed is displaying — which isn’t an especially Ed thing, but occurs throughout the WingNet, wherever its cultees confront current events — seemed for a long time to be a way of ordering the world through a kind of ritual storytelling. We saw it like this: The writer begins by eyeing some emerging news or gossip item and decides what meaning it ought to have, in the manner of a sculptor inspecting a block of marble for the forms possible within it. He then applies the chisel, removing context and uncongenial detail and adding decorative ...

My parents and grandparents have been out of town for the last few days to celebrate my cousin's wedding. I duly agreed to house (and dog) sit for my relatives while they were gone, and part of that agreement included picking up my grandparents from the airport tonight, a few nights ahead of my parents, who will be in Florida for a few days in addition to the original wedding schedule. I showed up at the "greet the arrivals" portion of Salt Lake International tonight and more or less minded my own, waiting for my moms' folks to arrive. Not long after I established a post in the "see the arrivals" section of the lower half of the terminal, a TSA "cop" in full uniform sidled up next to me and proceeded to ask me a few "friendly" questions. I am not in any way saying that this is standard TSA procedure. I just look at this as a profoundly creepy snapshot of how TSA cops operate in Utah, based on my (admittedly) anecodtal experience, and the ...

This is interesting: the Sunlight Foundation has set up a word analysis of elected representatives (which words are used most relative to the text of all speeches). Here's how Utah shapes up :

A casual exchange on Facebook today yielded the following fascinating information nugget from my pal Jonny Dover (big old hat tip, Jonny D): I had what is called ' source amnesia ' which is a very common psychological phenomenon where you remember a thing but you don't remember that it came from a disreputable/fictional source; this is why it is dangerous for Fox News to exist, because in time people will forget that they learned something from a disingenuous, morally bankrupt source, and ascribe to that fact more authority than it deserves... Source amnesia also explains why urban legends spread and why people are so convinced of their factuality: you hear a tall tale from a friend and then forget that it was from your pal you heard it and assume it came from a proper source such as the news. Thus convinced of its accuracy, you go on to spread it to other people. While I've seen this a few times on the left (mainly on the issues of gun control and the accuracy of the ...

Media Matters has the goods (via CNN):