The American Spectator

We need them to be forced to do mammograms. That’s why you see breast cancer awareness month. You see the baseball players wearing pink shoes, and you see the football players having pink, uh, uh helmets. It’s because people dread breast cancer, and you don’t get breast cancer, you can-correct breast cancer-you detect it if you do mammograms. Colonoscopies, if you do colonoscopies, colon cancer does not come because you snip off the-things they find when they go up and-no more, and we need to have insurance companies do this…

(October 14, 2010)

New Republic

Young Jonathan Chait takes time out from barking at dogs and howling at the moon to pen yet another column of timeless flumdiddle for the New Republic — not to be confused with the Banana Republic, which is more serious:

One idea that has gained oddly wide currency, especially among Republicans and moderate Democrats, is that the recession is an especially bad time to raise taxes on the rich. “If the priority is to get people back to work, is to start growing this economy again, then you don’t want to make it more expensive for job creators,” asserts GOP House Whip Eric Cantor. The plight of the rich is never far from the minds of the political establishment, and the state of the economy has given fresh urgency to the cause of sparing the very prosperous from the horrors of Clinton-era taxation.

(October 14, 2010)

The Week

Democratic political strategist Bob Shrum after reading some very misleading chicken entrails picked up at Democratic national headquarters, or perhaps it was just leftover carryout:

So let me state it plainly: I now think the Democrats will hold the Congress-yes, the House as well as the Senate-and turn back high-profile Republican challengers in California and elsewhere.

The GOP strategy of “no” worked to slow the recovery, stoke fears about factions like death panels in the health-reform bill, and persuade voters to strike out in frustration against Democrats. Their trend peaked in August, a month Democrats probably wish they could abolish given the dog days they suffered then, in 2009 as well as 2010.

But with the onset of autumn, there are signs that the Republican tide is receding.

(September 10, 2010)

The Great Books Series

The last frontier of crusading scholarship offers a splendid opportunity for double-entendres as can be seen in the introduction to this great book, Learning from the Loo, written by the ineffable Professor Harvey Molotch:

Public and Toilet do not sit well together. The discord goes beyond words. Using the facility-let’s call it that for now-involves intensely private acts. Focusing on the public restroom, as the contributors to this book make it their business to do, thus opens a tense domain. But it is a route worth taking, precisely because of the shadow under which it normally falls. By going there, we have the potential to make discoveries with implications for personal hygiene, psychological stress, and social betterment. We can also learn about power and the capacity to shape others’ life chances. Hence a group of scholars, drawn from the diverse disciplines of sociology, anthropology, law, architecture, archaeology, history, gender studies, and cultural studies, conjoin to face the facts, unpleasant or otherwise, of the loo.