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  • It’s In The Mighty Hands of Steel

    Stan Bush serenades the Transformers. Now I am an unabashed fan of this absurd movie; as a kid I must have seen it more than 30 or 40 times, and even into adulthood it gets a viewing every year or so. I even own the soundtrack — with the bonus tracks. (Which actually has some great instrumental scoring…

  • Let’s Get More Humans

    Jen McCreight has a very smart take on the issue of a lack of ethnic diversity among we seculars. The biggest problem in her mind is the denial that a problem exists by many within the atheistic ranks. Many dismiss it as a simple fact of the matter, and that to highlight minorities at things like conferences…

  • Peace

    In DC, I earned a master’s degree in political management, interned for a major network’s news operation, worked on a historic presidential campaign, and ran the communications operations for two national nonprofits. I performed in children’s theatre, and even got to compose songs for a new kids’ musical. I discovered my political calling in the atheist…

  • Jail

    That’s where the two thugs who attacked me are going, I found out today. I don’t know for how long yet. I hope to be able to tell you more in the coming weeks. But that much I do know. I guess it’s something. But I can just imagine them, indignant pouts on their faces. Angry, cursing me, cursing…

  • One Personal Consequence of Violence

    I still intend to write in more detail about my recent assault, but what’s most on my mind about it in my day to day life has to do with my kid. You see, in the attack, I was knocked down face-first by the thugs, and braced myself each time with my hands. Then, as I…

  • A Little More Huckabee, a Little Less Bloomberg

    John Heilemann might be my favorite political journalist these days, if for no other reason than because of this phrase from a 2007 profile of Mitt Romney: At first glance, he has the appearance of an attractive standard-bearer. A successful businessman (he made a fortune as the CEO of Bain & Company and founder of Bain Capital)…

  • The Lizard Brain of Michael Gerson

    Michael Gerson has gone off the rails. Common wisdom holds that he’s one of the sane Republicans, a man of words and ideas rather than rage and wrath. I’m sorry, Mr. Gerson, we’re going to have to revoke your sanity card. Gerson’s column this week is jaw-dropping in its pandering and its juvenility, betraying any claim he…

  • I’m More Interested in Whether Being a Douche is a Choice

    Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Colorado, Ken Buck, made a little news today saying on Meet the Press that he believes that being gay is “a choice,” and that homosexuality may be akin to alcoholism in that some can be predisposed to it from birth. His opponent, incumbent (and appointed) senator Michael Bennett, asserted this placed…

  • My New Career: Full-Time Daddy

    In 2004, I decided to begin to move away from my life in theatre to one in professional politics. I was tired of being on the sidelines, feeling unable to take part in what felt like was “the important stuff” while doing Shakespeare around the country (which I also think is very important, but I’d…

  • John Kerry and Barack Obama as Leaders

    Ryan Lizza’s recent New Yorker piece on the aborted climate change legislation of John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsay Graham is dispiritingly illuminating. Like previous long-form pieces we’ve seen of late (George Packer’s New Yorker article on the Senate, Todd Purdham’s morbid look at Washington in Vanity Fair) it is heavily discouraging in its recounting the mangling of a well-intentioned bill, as well as…

  • Waterfowl, Nazis, and Birth Certificates

    For your reading pleasure, I present the first comment posted on a short and fairly banal Politico blog post about Charlie Crist and the Florida U.S. Senate race, written by “Eileen for Freedom/Liberty”: LEAVE NO DEMOCRATZI ‘LOON’ STANDING IN NOVEMBER’! America…I believe there are more old time Democrats…like my parents and grandparents…then there are Democratzi ‘loons’! Those patriots…

  • Thanks for Nothing, Ken Mehlman

    I was at the RNC’s winter meeting in 2007, immediately following their electoral drubbing the previous year, interning for ABC News. There, I watched Ken Mehlman, manager of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign and then the outgoing RNC chair, give a speech on expanding the GOP’s appeal beyond its base. Even then, it struck me as…

  • Do the Douthat Twist

    I know I’m a little late to this, but I was reminded of Ross Douthat’s column a few days back about reactions to the Park51 project from what he sees as two distinct Americas. Refreshingly, the conservative Douthat uses some appropriate terminology in explaining the second America, the opponents of the mosque. He uses words…

  • Clearing the Smoke from History’s Horrors and Heroes

    I’ve just read Nicholson Baker’s take on the first years of World War II, Human Smoke, and it is certainly unsettling. But I have come across a couple of reactions to the book of late that complain that Baker is trying to convince the reader that WWII was a bad war that should never have been…

  • Toby Meets His Great-Great-Grandma Fidalgo

    This was such an important moment for me: my 8-month-old son meets his 96-year-old great-great-grandmother, with his great-grandma (as well as her cousin), his grandpa and his mommy and daddy all there to introduce the two.