Sam Boyd

Here’s a riddle. What do Brittney Spears and the writers for The Corner have in common? They both have no idea they look completely ridiculous. Really though, I shouldn’t read The Corner before I’ve had my morning coffee, it makes me think I’ve accidentally awakened in bizarro-world. In any case, some highlights from this weekend’s […]

First off, the big shot prognosticators continue to rank Rudy Giuliani as the Republican most likely to get nominated — and I continue to be confused by it. He seems likely to come in, at best, third in Iowa and second in New Hampshire, and he’s even fading in South Carolina where he once had […]

Anne Applebaum writes that Dutch anti-Muslim activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali is “possibly the greatest womens’ rights activist of our generation.” Seriously? Here’s Hirsi Ali interviewed by Reason magazine recently: Hirsi Ali: There is no moderate Islam. There are Muslims who are passive, who don’t all follow the rules of Islam, but there’s really only one […]

Occasionally, you run into a story that so perfectly illustrates a vague concept that it seems unlikely to be actually real, even though it is. Today the political appointee in charge of consumer safety has come out against expanding protections for consumer safety, perfectly illustrating what Rick Perlstein has called E. coli conservatism: On the […]

Kate, Garance, Ezra, and Scott all have interesting takes on who the various presidential candidates are likely to pick as running mates. I have no special insights into the thought process of any particular candidate, but I do have opinions about what they should be thinking. Full disclosure: I spent a very brief time doing […]

Over at his excellent, if insider-ish, campaign blog The Fix, Chris Cillizza has a video up about an attack ad running against Ernie Fletcher in Kentucky. The ad does a great job of using Fletcher’s own promises to run a clean government and contrasting them with the indictments that have destroyed his reputation. As Cillizza […]

Reading about yet another terrible stand taken by Senator James “global warming is the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state” Inhofe (leading the fight against the law of the sea), I wondered if there was much chance of getting rid of the man who might be […]

New Nobel laureate Doris Lessing speaks a little-said truth. Terrorism is a fact in the world. 9/11 was spectacular, but it was not unique: September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible,” she told Spanish newspaper El Pais. “Some Americans […]

Would actually be Tom Tancredo.The man has advocated bombing Mecca, which makes even Rudy Giuliani look like Ron Paul. I mention this not so much because I care (he’s never going to be president), but because it occurs to me that he hasn’t done nearly as well as many people predicted when he got in. […]

Matt graciously endorses my point about the impossibility of knowing the “real” Mitt Romney and adds this: It’s not as if once in office Romney is going to blossom into a kind of politician totally different from the one he’s currently campaigning as. We’re learning about his willingness to adopt whichever views are most politically […]