My wife, Kimberly Webb Joyner, died this morning in her sleep from unknown causes. She was 41.

Why we shouldn’t be surprised that police are using tools of violence against protestors.

Cynthia Tucker regrets her support for majority-minority districts.

The duty to defend “hateful, extremely disrespectful, and enormously intolerant” expression.

The relationships between inflammatory rhetoric and political violence is complicated.

Conservatives have long complained about liberal media bias. But conservative media seems to be much worse.

Markos Moulitsas gets a lesson in caveat emptor from his former pollster.

Stephen Walt laments the hyper-specialization of the social sciences: One of the more unfortunate trends on contemporary social science has been a growing “cult of irrelevance,” a set of implicit standards that encourages smart young scholars to write more and more about less and less for fewer and fewer readers. The principle of academic freedom [...]

America may be the land of opportunity but it helps to have a head start in the rat race.

Via Twitter, James Poulos passes along an interesting piece by Conor Friedersdorf titled “Iran, Twitter, and The American Information Elite.”  Basically, he noticed over the weekend that all of his blogger/journalist friends were intensely aware of what was happening in Iran whereas other well educated people he encountered hadn’t the slightest clue. I can’t help [...]

Kevin Drum notes that he’s already tired of the “kabuki” that has emerged in reaction to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. I both agree that the process is predictable and tedious and that Sotomayor would seem obviously qualified for confirmation.  I would quibble, however, with this: Conservatives, who seem constitutionally unable [...]

Hilzoy is tired of hearing about “socialism” and “class warfare” just because Barack Obama is raising the top marginal tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent.  After all, we had much higher rates under John Kennedy and even Ronald Reagan, two legendary tax cutters.  And rates are higher in most of the developed world, [...]

It’s been three decades since Ronald Reagan was elected and both America and the Republican Party have changed.

My Palin Derangement Syndrome post got a number of thoughtful responses, especially for a weekend post. My fellow Jacksonville State alumnus Stacy McCain, a Palin fan, thinks the internal debate on her role in last week’s defeat and her future as a Republican Party standard bearer is one we should have.  He objects strenuously, though, [...]

Two lawyer-bloggers who I’ve followed for years are upset with me for buying into the “Sarah Palin was in over her head” meme. Xrlq accused me of drinking “the anti-Palin Kool-Aid” for buying into claims that Palin didn’t know which countries were in NAFTA while Bill Dyer is “genuinely concerned for [my] mental health.” As [...]

Aaron Brazell is doing some research on the evolution of blogging in recent years and has asked for my input. [Update: The result, "Political Blogging 2.0," is now up.] I started OTB in January 2003 and have seen a lot of change. I should note at the outset that my experience is almost entirely with [...]

Chris Cillizza compares Barack Obama’s apparent victory over Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination to various “upsets” in sports and pop culture history and wonders if this is the biggest upset in American political history. He cites Harry Truman’s win over Thomas Dewey in 1948, Jimmy Carter’s come-from-nowhere win in 1976, and then-upstart Bill Clinton’s [...]

Yesterday’s exchange with Thers over the state of conservatism reflects a major defect in the blogging medium. For the most part, we write blogs in serial fashion, as a conversation with our readers, and presume that recent posts on the same subject have been read. Most blog readers, on the other hand, parachute into posts [...]

Kevin Drum, responding to Jonah Goldberg‘s argument that George Packer‘s “The Fall of Conservatism” erroneously conflates conservatism with the Republican Party, retorts: No political ideology lives in isolation. We judge communism by how Mao and Stalin implemented it, we judge 60s-era liberalism by how LBJ and the Democratic Party implemented it, and we judge social [...]

David All argues that most of the talk about Rebuilding the Republican Brand is too focused on the past. Instead, the party should take its cues from Internet success stories like Netflix and iTunes. Gone are the days of Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America, a plan which every Republican got behind and backed. A unified [...]

It’s not exactly news that the Republican Party is in the doldrums at the moment. It lost control of both Houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, its president is at historic lows in the polls, it has lost a string of special elections and its incumbent Congressmen are retiring in droves, and the odds [...]

The rule of thumb for American politics in the media appears to be classifying politicians as being on the “beer-track” or “wine-track”, or, in the alternative Hillary Clinton formation, “Starbucks vs. Dunkin’ Donuts”. In other words, if you prefer wine over beer or Starbucks over Dunkin’ Donuts, then you are an “elitist”, and if not, [...]

Today’s WaPo has a short feature on Clear Cards, whereby travelers get to bypass TSA security lines at select airports for a small fee. Fast-pass security lanes officially opened at Reagan National and Dulles airports Wednesday for travelers with special clearance. Heres how it works: Fliers undergo a Transportation Security Administration background check and have [...]

Billy Hollis joins Rush Limbaugh, Peggy Noonan, and other conservative commenters in trying to figure out who is responsible for destroying the Republican Party and which of the potential nominees would destroy it even more. He thinks that nominating Mike Huckabee would likely lead to “a loss of Goldwater-McGovern proportions.” I’m inclined to agree, especially [...]

Steve Bainbridge is preparing to sit out the 2008 election rather than vote for anyone but Fred Thompson. If the choice is between choosing the lesser of 4 evils and teeing up a process by which the GOP reinvents itself for the 21st Century, I’m inclined to opt for the latter. Coupled with losing Congress [...]

Major Andrew Olmsted, a longtime blogger and Army Reservist, was killed in action yesterday when his unit was ambushed. His Obsidian Wings colleague Hilzoy had the sad honor of posting his final blog missive. Her lead-in: Andrew Olmsted, who also posted here as G’Kar, was killed yesterday in Iraq. Andy gave me a post to [...]

Jim Henley takes another crack at explaining why he believes Mark Steyn’s vision of Muslim immigration is essentially racist. The argument is detailed but its essence is this: Steyn reduces “Europeans” and “Muslims” to breeding pairs – “demography is destiny” – and says their different rates of breeding alone mean a future of Sharia law. [...]

RUMMY’S PLAN FOR IRAQ praises an op-ed by the former SECDEF outlining the way ahead in Iraq. Obviously, the plan didn’t work. Interestingly, though, reading it reminds me that, contrary to current wisdom, Rumsfeld not only didn’t promise fast results but he fully understood the basic principles of counter-insurgency. The principles outlined here come right [...]

As part of a continuing series, I’ll be publishing excerpts and re-posts of material buried deep in the OTB archives. Some will be profound and some silly; some will demonstrate keen insights and others painful errors. Shockingly, we are now back to ORANGE. Question: Am I going to change how I conduct my life one [...]

Two posts stand out from my stroll down memory lane of four years ago (a rather light posting day): “MUSICAL HANGING CHADS?” examines a scandal in the voting in the “American Idol” final, in which Ruben Studdard beat Clay Aiken by a slim margin. In “HANDICAPPING 2004,” I rebut the extant conventional wisdom that President [...]

As part of a continuing series, I’ll be highlighting material buried deep in the OTB archives that I still find interesting. From four years ago, today: “RENO” joined in on the debate, “Was Janet Reno the worst AG we have ever had, or what?” Not much substance to it but it somehow strikes me as [...]

As part of a continuing series, I’ll be highlighting material buried deep in the OTB archives that I still find interesting. From four years ago, today: “LEVEL ORANGE” is a fisking of the color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System which has, to this day, varied only between Yellow and Orange. In “INTELLIGENT DESIGN,” I mediated a [...]

As part of a continuing series, I’ll be publishing excerpts and re-posts of material buried deep in the OTB archives. Some will be profound and some silly; some will demonstrate keen insights and others painful errors. While I would have personally been in favor of the war simply to eliminate the threat of Saddam’s acquiring [...]

As part of a continuing series, I’ll be highlighting material buried deep in the OTB archives that I still find interesting. Four years ago today was a Sunday and blogging was light and the pickings slim. Nonetheless, I’ll carry on: “JEFFORDS DENOUNCES DNC” pondered the mind of Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords. “MUSIC IS HELL” was one [...]

As part of a continuing series, I’ll be highlighting material buried deep in the OTB archives that I still find interesting. The blog started in January 2003 and there have been over 16,000 posts; some of them have to be good! “GAY STRATEGERY” takes a look at a Kevin Drum proposal to make gay marriage [...]

Big Tent Democrat rightly excoriates Frank Rich for hypocrisy in denouncing Don Imus only after he could no longer benefit from using his show for self-promotion. His conclusion, however, is troubling: And to call this a free speech issue is a joke. We’re supposed to worry about the freedom to tell racist and sexist jokes? [...]

Beccah Golubock Watson has a longish piece at the Nation highlighting the plight of lefty bloggers who are unable to sell advertising space for $10,000 a week and quit their day jobs. As bloggers become some of the progressive movement’s most effective voices, the left still has not figured out how to provide them with [...]

Andrew Sullivan begins a somber discussion of the implications of using anti-gay slurs as fodder for jokes with a pretty good line: I watched Ann Coulter last night in the gayest way I could. I was on a stairmaster at a gym, slack-jawed at her proud defense of calling someone a “faggot” on the same [...]

Conn Carroll believes the blogosphere is increasingly moving away from its amateur roots: Looking at the top 10 most trafficked blogs, only DailyKos, Crooks and Liars, Michelle Malkin, and Instapundit started out as lone blogger-hobbyists. The other 6 (including The Huffington Post, The Corner, and Think Progress) are either planned business enterprises, outgrowths of existing [...]

Reacting to the contrast between Karl Rove‘s purported campaign strategy of emphasizing “terrorism and turnout” and Brad DeLong‘s hope that the GOP will begin “building pragmatic technocratic policy coalitions from the center outward,” Kevin Drum responds, Over the past 30 years the Republican Party has gone from Gerald Ford to Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich [...]

A conservative blogger’s perspective on the Declaration of Independence.

This weekend’s raid on the Capitol Hill office of Rep. William Jefferson, who the FBI filmed taking bribes last summer and whose freezer was full of the proceeds of same, has lawmakers on both sides of the aisle screaming about Separation of Powers. WaPo fronts a story by Dan Eggen and Shailagh Murray. An unusual [...]

Chris Bowers, long irritated by the Red-Blue maps that came out after the 2000 and 2004 elections that “over-emphasized large, thinly populated expanses of land” is pleased to turn the tables with these county-by-county and state-by-state maps based on President Bush’s popularity levels. “It is a blue nation. I’d love to see these map on [...]

A group called Campaign for the National Popular Vote has been pushing a plan to essentially do away with the Electoral College without amending the Constitution. I read about it in The New Yorker a while back and it’s apparently gaining some steam. Basically, they want the president to be the winner of the most [...]

In his discussion of the Michelle Malkin-SAW contact information kerfuffle, Dan Riehl makes a point that I wanted to address separately Still, only faulting Michele isn’t really fair. I believe she’s the most frequently read conservative politics only blogger. Things like that happen for a reason. What it ultimately speaks to is the current state [...]

Jane Hamsher takes John Cole to task for attributing to the “Jane Hamshers of the left” things that Jane Hamsher herself never wrote. Glenn Greenwald emails congratulating her for “shocking, relentless (and appropriate) tenacity” and argues this incident is emblematic of those who “hate the blogosphere because it holds them accountable.” While I suspect it’s [...]

John Aravosis contends that liberals are much less angry and nasty than their conservative counterparts. They have terrorists – pro-lifer murderers. Who do we have on the liberal side who outright murders their political opponents? Well, there are various ecoterrorist groups like the Animal Liberation Front, the Animal Rights Militia, Greenpeace, and others. The various [...]

Glenn Reynolds (here and here) points to a budding controversy about bloggers running with stories based on tips from public relations firms without disclosing the source of the tip. The apparent spark for this is an impending story by Michael Barbaro, who writes anti-Wal-Mart stories for the NYT and is apparently steamed that he is [...]

Richard Cohen uses the anecdote of a girl who dropped out of high school because she couldn’t pass algebra as the basis for a column arguing that one can get by just fine without math. I confess to be one of those people who hate math. I can do my basic arithmetic all right (although [...]

When I saw the headline, “Study: Most College Students Lack Skills ” on Yahoo!News this morning, I had to chuckle. Like recent news that some professors at UCLA have far-left views, this was not a news flash. It turns out, though, that the article is not about the inability of students to do basic research [...]