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Continue reading →: To avid talk show listeners
Our marginal income tax rate has been a flat line since 2000. A pre-existing condition will no longer disqualify you from health insurance; in addition, you can stay on your parents’ plan until you turn twenty-five. My dating another man will not “devalue” your heterosexual marriage. Islam is no more…
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Continue reading →: Greenberg: Self-loating in a convex mirror
In which Ben Stiller — a misanthrope who in the movie’s least convincing detail still thinks Moses Herzog is a model — types bitchy letters to major newspapers, spoils a potential relationship with his El Lay bro’s personal assistant (Greta Gerwig, in an uncanny simulation of Chloe Sevigny), shows unexpected…
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Continue reading →: Patricia Neal – RIP
The most flattering statement I can write about Patricia Neal is that in life and onscreen she acted like someone who could have married Roald Dahl. I can’t imagine the intensity of her physical pain (which makes her small, charming role in Cookie’s Fortune heroic as well as interesting). Her…
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Continue reading →: Heterosexual monogamy: Unicorns and Rainbow Edition
I’ve resisted posting some of the more dimwitted responses to Judge Walker’s ruling on the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, but, sorry, I yielded to the impulse of posting the dumbest column of the year, by Ross Douthat. What offends me is its creepy, fruitless attempt to play it both…
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Continue reading →: Singles Jukebox 8/5
This week represents a milestone: never have I assigned so many 2’s, and I also graded the year’s second worthless single (this is the other). I’m tempted to increase the Dirty Heads’ score because their song defines “worthless” in its most literal sense: if I walked into a bar right…
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Continue reading →: Winter’s Bone: Dull gray
After Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) learns that her meth-producing father has not just jumped bail but placed their rural-is-an-understatement Missouri shack as collateral, she visits estranged relatives and neighbors to see what help they can offer. Ree has to babysit a younger brother and sister (Isaiah Stone and Ashlee Thompson) and…
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Continue reading →: Judge Walker, member of the loony left
The usual suspects accuse Judge Vaughn Walker of “judicial activism” and inserting a “bias” into his decision. Kevin Drum examines this lefty wingnuts CV: Judge Walker was first appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, at the recommendation of Attorney General Edwin Meese III (now the…
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Continue reading →: “Tissue is the issue”: Hitchens
My Christopher Hitchens anecdote: I saw him on the God is Not Great tour in May 2007 at a local synagogue. Rousing lecture. At the post-lecture book signing (for which he absented himself twenty minutes and returned, emitting discreet waves of scotch and Marlboro Reds), he held up the line…
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Continue reading →: So began my love affair…
Before American Saturday Night, I knew Brad Paisley as the singer and writer of some of the best novelty tunes of the last ten years. “Alcohol” broke him beyond country stations (thanks to whose support he’d already acquired a dizzying array of #1’s, with more to come), but “The Cigar…
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Continue reading →: Wasted hours: Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs
I’ve denounced the rankness of Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs enough in the last two weeks, so I’ve tried to refreshen the following litany, which has appeared in splenetic form across message boards, private emails, and conversations in bars: (1) Only one song transfigures subdivisions, ample backyards, gated communities, and manicured…
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Continue reading →: Welcome August
The still explosions on the rocks, the lichens, grow by spreading, gray, concentric shocks. They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, although within our memories they have not changed. And since the heavens will attend as long on us, you’ve been, dear friend, precipitate and pragmatical; and…
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Humanizing The Vacuum 