White Cities

White elites, shockingly, seem to enjoy cities where the culture is dominated by white elites. Aaron Renn breaks the news. Among the media, academia and within planning circles, there’s a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities. The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, ...

Olympia Snowe is Impregnable

Andrew Sullivan says Olympia Snowe can do pretty much whatever she wants, "Because she has more Democratic support in her state than Republican, and the combination makes her impregnable." She's 62 years old, for goodness sakes. Surely, if she were planning to have children, she'd have done so by now.

Limbaugh: Reporter Should Kill Himself

Rush Limbaugh has gotten everyone from Media Matters to The Guardian to Andrew Sullivan to Paul Krugman to Raw Story to FireDogLake up in arms because he allegedly suggested that a NYT reporter kill himself.  Except that, to anyone familiar with either Limbaugh or the conventions of American English, it's rather obvious he was illustrating absurdity by being absurd. Here's the ...

Gay Marriage

Andrew Sullivan illustrates his latest post with this photo: It's a amusing question made unintentionally more clever by omission of an apostrophe.

Youthful Sex Offenders

A posting at a blog called Classically Liberal, which apparently covers this topic with some regularity, draws attention to the criminalization of adolescent sex. Not long ago a curious adolescent or child, caught exploring, or playing doctor in the back yard, was given a talking-to, sent to bed early, and warned to not do it again—a warning most heeded for at ...

Census Worker Lynched in Kentucky

A census worker was found hanged in Kentucky in a bizarre and grisly case. When Bill Sparkman told retired trooper Gilbert Acciardo that he was going door-to-door collecting census data in rural Kentucky, the former cop drew on years of experience for a warning: "Be careful."  The 51-year-old Sparkman was found this month hanged from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery ...

Losing Our Religion

Dan Gilgoff passes on word of a new survey projecting that a quarter of Americans will be atheists or non-believers twenty years from now. If current trends continue, a quarter of Americans are likely to claim "no religion" in 20 years, according to a survey out today by Trinity College. Americans who identify with no religious tradition currently comprise 15 percent ...

Andrew Sullivan and the Rule of Law

Jonathan Last has somehow obtained a memorandum [PDF], dated yesterday, written by U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert B. Collings in the matter of Andrew  Sullivan, who was caught in a federal park with small amounts of a controlled substance but whom the U.S. Attorney declined to prosecute in the "interests of justice." To wit: Paying the $125 fine would make ...

Andrew Sullivan Goes Off-Grid

Andrew Sullivan has been blogging nearly ten years now and notes "it's grueling month after month being responsible for up to 300 posts a week."  So he's taking a month off to avoid burn-out. Which is fine, of course.  Sully is as prolific as any blogger out there.  Indeed, Jim Henley argues, he likely blogs too much.  (He said the same ...

Bad Customer Service: Why Do We Put Up With It?

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that Daniel Indiviglio argues that "We like bad customer service." Actually, though, while he states it, he doesn't really argue that at all.  Rather, he argues that we're not willing to pay more for good customer service and thus provide no incentive to companies to provide it. Let's say you have two options for a flight from ...

Quote of the Day – Dualing Conspiracies Edition

"I think it would be awesome for Andrew Sullivan if all the documents end up proving that Barack Obama is Trig Palin’s father." - Jim Henley If you have no idea what the hell he's talking about, your life is richer for it.

Cash for Clunkers and its Critics

Andrew Sullivan thinks Republicans hate the cash-for-clunkers program, wherein the government gives people up to $4500 of taxpayer money to trade in their cars for newer ones that get slightly better gas mileage, out of "emotional reaction to the end of the far right's dominance of American discourse." [C]ash-for-clunkers is one example of the government actually doing something right, helpful and ...

$20 Per Gallon Would Really, Really Suck

Andrew Sullivan gushes over Chris Steiner's concept of  $20 per gallon gasoline. $20 a gallon is about the only thing that could unleash the genius of the market in energy innovation. And nothing else will really do anything to abate climate change. Bring it on! Now, it's quite conceivable that the forced innovation would indeed make our lives better in ways that ...

Better to Be A Pessimist and Proved Wrong . . .

Responding to a rather harsh reader email criticizing him for a recent series of posts expressing his disappointment with President Obama, for whom he note only voted but wrote a whole series of pre-election mash notes, Andrew Sullivan responds, I am not a cheer-leader and I don't think Obama wants cheer-leaders. He wants and deserves criticism when merited. Methinks Sully is setting ...

Overstatement of the Day – Gay Rights Edition

Andrew Sullivan: The survival of my own marriage is entirely in the hands of the federal government. I have no right to stay in my own home with my own husband - just the government's permission until they choose to revoke it. Gays do not have core constitutional rights in America. They have no right even to a secure home. And ...