The American Spectator

Washington Post

Under the headline, “Glenn Beck’s gun-toting followers,” spiritualist Dana Milbank traduces a model citizen for one little miscue in an otherwise irreproachable life and presumably for watching too much television:

Late on a Saturday night two weeks ago, an unemployed carpenter packed his mother’s Toyota Tundra with guns and set off for San Francisco with a plan to kill progressives.

When California Highway Patrol officers stopped him on an interstate in Oakland for driving erratically, Byron Williams, wearing body armor, fired at police with a 9mm handgun, a shotgun and a .308-caliber rifle with armor-piercing bullets, Oakland police say. Shot and captured after injuring two officers, Williams, on parole for bank robbery, told investigators that he wanted “to start a revolution” by “killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU,” according to a police affidavit. His mother, Janice, told the San Francisco Chronicle that her son had been watching television news and was upset by “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.”

(August 1, 2010)

New Republic

Leon Wieseltier launches out on one of his periodic efforts at poetry, this time on the face, his face, your face, possibly his dog’s face. Where it all ended maybe a plastic surgeon could tell you. I had an appointment with my mixologist:

Is there any more eloquent or definitive evidence of human individuality, of human dignity, than the face? My face shows that I am unlike you, that I am myself; and in this beautiful incommensurability we establish solidarity with each other, because your face also looks only like itself, only like you.

(August 12, 2010)

New York Observer

A stirring defense of the Manhattan mosque from Joe Conason, who would look very comely in a burqa:

The impulse to violate the First Amendment rights of Muslims-as-Muslims is so blatantly wrong and so radical, in the worst sense, that it almost defies outrage. Until now, nobody in a position of responsibility has sought to deny basic religious liberty to any group whose practices did not somehow trespass the law. Despite disagreements around the borders of religious freedom, the nation shared a consensus in favor of the concept for everyone, with no exceptions.

(August 3, 2010)

The Nation

Over at the Nation the reliable bugaboos stir up the animals: