Why We Should Start Electing Smart People Because here's the sort of thing dumb people do. From a NYT piece by John Carney: Let's start with the credit card rate freeze. The rising rates charged by issuing banks that inspired Mr. Dodd's legislation are themselves the unintended consequence of an earlier attempt to assist the... »

In Western Culture, You Just Get Grounded But, disobey Mommy and Daddy as a Muslim, and you might end up maimed or dead. Margaret Wente writes in the Glode & Mail of how it works: The young woman, Eman Al Mezel, was 23 when her father lost control of her. She lived at home, and had... »

"All Cattle And No Hat" That's what David Carr (@carr2n) called Cormac McCarthy after reading this terrific WSJ interview with him by John Jurgensen. An few snippets: WSJ: Why don't you sign copies of "The Road" CM: There are signed copies of the book, but they all belong to my son John, so when he... »

They Aren't Naughty If They Have Brown Skin From the skools r stupid deprtmint, My pal Heather Mac Donald does it again, taking Tucson Public Schools to task in City Journal for their recent idiocy: As part of its plan to comply with a federal desegregation order now decades old, Tucson's school district adopted racial... »

Do You Watch This Slide Show And Walk Away Yawning? Slides from Hasan's talk, published in the WaPo. Check out #42 on "The Verse of the Sword," commanding Muslims to slaughter the rest of us. Numbers 32 through 34 are particularly comforting. Salient quote #48: "We love death more than you love life!" (Note the "We.") ("Jinn,"... »

Carrie On Larry Carrie Prejean finds Larry King "inappropriate." And "inappropriate." And "inappropriate." More here. »

The Stupidest People Are Running The Schools An aside: Are these incidents below the single best reason government should not run health care? Mark Steyn writes of an additional idiocy from the same school district that went after the first-grade boy with the boy scout utensil set: This is the same Christina School District that in... »

Paglia Hates On The Health Care Bill On Salon. She might be left, but she's right as ever on this: As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the... »

How The Wimp Dates An excerpt from a column I just posted, responding to a question from a guy who'd do anything to avoid possibly enduring 11 seconds of feeling like crap (if rejected) and asking a girl out: If a hunter approached eating the way you approach dating, he'd sit in his truck sipping... »

Take 13 Lives And Call Me In The Morning Krauthammer, via NRO, thinks the real moral scandal is the attempt to medicalize mass murder: All of a sudden we hear that he heard these terrible stories from soldiers who had suffered and he snapped. Well, what... »

See "Rude People" In Psychology Today! The serial of my soon-to-be-published book, I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society, is in this month's newsstand version (with the chimp on the cover), and now online. Here's the accompanying photo you won't see in the online text-only version. Click... »

Look Left For The Real Deal On Obamacare From a WSJ op-ed, left-wing New Yorker writer John Cassidy tells the truth: Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. "The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment," he writes. "Let's not pretend that it isn't a big deal, or that... »

Political Correctness Kills Dana Priest writes in the WaPo about a weird talk Muslim mass murderer Hasan gave -- one that nobody wanted to think ill of: As a senior-year psychiatric resident at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan was supposed to make a presentation on a medical topic of his choosing as... »

Where Science And Babeliciousness Meet Here's a science broad I wish lived near me: the beautiful and brainy bioengineering instructor Joanne Manaster, of joannelovesscience.com and Gummi Bear-obliterating renown...all in the name of teaching science, and teaching that science can be exciting and fun. Here's Joanne, doing the sexy lab lady variation on the sexy librarian:Below,... »

The Health Care Bill Of Goods Harvard Med School's Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, reviews pans the just-passed health care bill on that famous right-wing site, The Huffington Post: Conservative rhetoric notwithstanding, the House bill is not a "government takeover." I wish it were. Instead, it enshrines and subsidizes... »

One Employer Is Still In Full Hiring Mode I'm betting at least a few will guess who. I did. Those still wondering, click here. »

The Verse Of The Sword And who it got this time (more on that below). But, first, here it is, the verse from the Quran commanding Muslims to murder anyone who doesn't believe in Allah: Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them, and besiege them,... »

The Wages Of The Pill Paranoids We're so terrified that somebody might get high that we needlessly leave people suffering horrible pain. NYT's Tierney takes on the issue, often covered by Sullum in reason: At a news conference Wednesday, Dr. Portenoy and the other co-chairman of the Mayday panel, Dr. Lonnie Zeltzer of the University of... »

It's A Medium, Not A Message Poor David Brooks. He finds the combination of love, dating, sex and cellphones so terribly disturbing. The truth is, human nature hasn't changed; it just has more technology and plays out faster. Brooks wrote in The New York Times: As the journalist Wesley Yang notes in a very intelligent analysis... »

Make Your Doctor Appointment Fast! That is, before you need to get elected to Congress to get in to see a doctor. (Expect Soviet-style waits, dearies.) Betsy McCaughey lays out the nightmare that is the Pelosi plan that the pandering fools elected to The House just passed. A few choice tidbits from her WSJ piece,... »