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I load my rifle, put on my game bag and lock my truck 30 minutes after sunrise. After walking a few yards I bend down to hide my keys in a clump of mustard weed growing near the road. Proceeding up a steep hill, covered in tall grass, my pants are wet from dew by the time I reach the top. I should have worn my knee boots today. Continue reading this post…

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Post image for See You At Leaguefest!

Your geocacher should read: 36° 8′ 13″ North; 115° 9′ 9″ West. On your navigation device, that’s 3000 Paradise Road, Las Vegas, Nevada 89109. From the airport, tell your cabbie, “Take us to the Hilton, man.” Or when you take the monorail, get off at the LVH.

After I’m done with my morning duty in court, I’ll be off like the sleeves on a vest. I will be looking forward to meeting fellow Leaguefesters in person. And I will, at some point, be at least mildly inebriated.

Leaguefest 2012 begins tonight. Dinner on your own or in breakout groups tonight; group dinner Saturday night at 7:30. We’ll collectively gather tonight for drinks at the Space Bar in the LVH after dinner. If you’re not already on the Leaguefest Broadcasting System (and you’d know if you were), then follow #leaguefest on Twitter, or look for the bowler hats.

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It occurred to me recently, that I haven’t actually done of these yet, and as it happens this week is the perfect opportunity. You see, this week marks the US release of New Zealand artist Kimbra’s first album Vows.

You may be familiar with Kimbra from her role in Australian musician Gotye’s Somebody I used to know, but she has her own distinct style, and it would seem that she is positioned to become one of the rare kiwi musicians that makes a mark in the US.

So to mark the occasion, here are two of my favourite Kimbra tracks, Good Intent and Two Way Street:

Note that since some YouTube videos are region locked, I can’t guarantee the above links will work for you.  Naturally I can’t test this, so if it happens please let me know.

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Post image for On Beltway Insiders and Public Attention Spans

As a DC resident, I know that most of the sins that supposedly stem from nefarious Beltway Insiders have other, more specific causes. There’s a kernel of truth within Beltway bashing, though: people here have an outrageously skewed view of how most of the rest of the country consumes political news. Whereas a campaign’s font change or a subcommittee shuffle sets District politicos atwitter, most of the country is, well, doing other stuff. They don’t much care about the merits of Luke Russert’s rise at NBC (insofar as they are aware that he is: 1) at NBC, and 2) rising there). It takes a considerable amount of effort to get them to care for long about Bullygate or Obama’s Russian secretsContinue reading this post…

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Post image for On the Eve of #LeagueFest 2012

So the time has finally come. A dozen or so Gentlemen and spouses will be converging upon the City of Sin in the next 24 hours or so. Some of the more intrepid among us are already there.

I’m looking forward to some time off – something I almost never take – and to meeting everybody. It’s long overdue.

Of course, not everyone can make it and certainly not every reader can make it. So now seems as good a time as any to discuss the site itself, how everyone is feeling about the direction the site has taken. In particular, I want to know how everyone feels about the sub-blogs. Are they working? Is there anything we can do to make them better/more useful?

Anyways, consider this an open thread.

 

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Jungle Primary In The One-Party State

by Burt Likko May 24, 2012
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I filled out my absentee ballot to vote in California’s June primary yesterday. California has recently adopted a “jungle primary” law, in which all candidates from all parties appear on the primary ballot for most political offices. The two top vote-getters compete in a runoff election in November. I noticed that this did not apply to the Presidential primary — I only got one party’s slate of candidates. It did apply to the election for U.S. Senator. There was an ...

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“College is not for everybody”

by Tim Kowal May 24, 2012
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A caller on NPR’s Talk of the Nation offered a very interesting story about whether a college degree is a sound investment.  Note the reflexive defense from Kathleen Shea Smith, a student counselor who advocates in her earlier comments on the program that “it’s worth the investment” to get that bachelor’s degree: ABRAHAM: Yeah, well, I was just going to talk about – this is kind of from an individual standpoint, (unintelligible) rather than like a macro standpoint. But when ...

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Shawn Gude gets a sub-blog

by Erik Kain May 24, 2012
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Shawn’s first post at “The Safe Depository” is live. He’s been posting occasionally to the front page, and now I’ve finally set him up with his own sub-digs as well. His intro post is here.

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MON TIKI Update 5/23/12

by David Ryan May 23, 2012

On Monday we glued up the tillers. On Tuesday we finished up the foam-core laminated tops to the deck houses, the finally pieces that close in the hulls. Today we unclamped the tillers and shaped them, trimmed and filleted the deckhouses, and laid fairing compound (the dark red stuff) on about 40% of the decks on both hulls. Tomorrow we’ll glass the deckhouses and Friday we’ll finish fairing. And then sometime over the Memorial Day weekend we’re going to roll ...

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Comment Rescue: The Right Answer?

by Patrick Cahalan May 23, 2012
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On the well-traveled thread on the front page that I’m not really following because I just spent a chunk of my day writing on the sub-blog, Ryan says: Here. Let’s put it this way. Say you’re at a restaurant and someone comes up and tells (your wife) that she shouldn’t be there because her job is to be at home making babies and dinner. Are the only two acceptable responses from you these ones? 1. “THAT’S AGAINST THE LAW! SOMEONE ...

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Thoughts Obama and Appalachia: It Ain’t (Quite) About That Southern Thing

by J.L. Wall May 23, 2012
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1) Voter registration. Kentucky, West Virginia, and Arkansas are disproportionately Democratic—that is, when you compare voting preferences with party identification.  In Kentucky and West Virginia, the margins are 56-37 and 54-29, respectively.  While the Old, Solid South has trended Republican in party ID, Coal Country has remained solidly Democratic.  There are plenty of races in Kentucky—particularly in the eastern counties that Obama lost—which are, effectively, decided in the Democratic primaries.  Turnout in these races, that is, included many voters who are ...

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IDEALog Comparison, or Maybe We’re Really All Liberaltarians

by Guest Authors May 23, 2012
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by James Hanley Thanks to all who took the time to take the IDEALog survey and report their results to me, and my apologies for taking so long to present the results. I’ll present the findings in a moment, but first some background and development (just to make this an excruciatingly long post). Background: Liberalism v. Libertarianism There has been an on-going discussion in comment threads between Stillwater and me about libertarianism, in which he has been pushing me on ...

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I don’t watch football for the violence

by Christopher Carr May 23, 2012
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Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger writes in Newsweek/Beast of the Junior Seau suicide: If you asked reporters why they were there, they would give some mumbo-jumbo reason that as hard as it may be, it was important to get reaction from the family in a case as sad and stunning as this one. Seau had been an absolute force during the prime of his playing days with the San Diego Chargers, ferocious, relentless, maniacal, beyond intense. Now that he was ...

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Culture is the villain

by Erik Kain May 22, 2012
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I’ve had this sort of nebulous notion that culture itself is a problem. Not any particular culture, mind you, but rather the entire concept of culture.  The exclusivity of the group over the individual. A lot of people will hold up individualism against collectivism, but what if that’s just scratching the surface? Culture is the thread we weave all our isms out of: tribalism, nationalism, and so forth. Identity culture is the nichification of culture writ large. It’s the perpetuation ...

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The Real Reason Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

by Elias Isquith May 22, 2012
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Well, it’s about time we had ourselves a good old fashioned front-page food fight! Things have been entirely too calm and placid hereabouts — at least on the surface. (We all know comment threads are eternal, churning whirlpools of rancor and discontent.) So let’s do this thing and see what we can make from Mark’s recent post, a post that a Huffington Post editor would likely say SLAMMED yours truly and various other lefty talkalots for overwrought criticism of Mayor ...

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The Oatmeal isn’t God and Alex Knapp isn’t the Devil

by Ethan Gach May 22, 2012
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The Oatmeal published this, Alex Knapp took The Oatmeal to task, and The Oatmeal subsequently responded with a defense of the earlier comic. Some further tweets and hundreds of thousands of page views later here we are. Freddie calls the Oatmeal’s response shitty, Oatmeal acolytes call the Knapp piece refuted, and oh, by the way, this all centers around Tesla, Edison, and one of the Internet’s favorite past times: reverse idolatry. You thought who you worshipped was worth worshipping, but ...

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This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

by Mark Thompson May 22, 2012
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I’m proud to say that I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid the blow-by-blow of the Presidential horse race this year.  In fact, I’ve spent more time – a combined 5 minutes – watching actual horse racing in the last month than I’ve spent watching the political equivalent; I find it leaves me feeling less dirty. The brouhaha over Cory Booker epitomizes why. Here’s what I’ve gathered about the situation: apparently, Obama’s campaign released an ad attacking Mitt Romney’s background ...

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Thoughts about the Ravi sentence

by Russell Saunders May 22, 2012
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When the guilty verdict was handed down in the Dharun Ravi trial a couple of months ago, I expressed some concerns.  Like many people, including many gay rights activists and writers, I felt very uncomfortable with calling loutish behavior a bias crime.  I have mixed feelings about hate crime laws in the first place, and I feared the repercussions and potential for backlash if the definition of hate crimes became too broad and unclear.  From everything I had been able ...

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001

by Christopher Carr May 21, 2012
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1. In a land not much unlike our own there is an ether that comes from a rare fruit. Those who consume this ether are consumed by it, as its effect is total regurgitation of one’s mental faculties, and, by this I mean mental faculties one doesn’t know one has, like memories long forgotten but embedded in the neurofabric, or epiphanies waiting to happen or not happen that get suddenly thrown outwards into the world. Depending on the brain, the ...

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Kids, when I was your age New Jersey was the state we all laughed at. – or – Sheesh Erik, what is it with you guys down there?

by Tod Kelly May 21, 2012
Thumbnail image for Kids, when I was your age New Jersey was the state we all laughed at. – or – Sheesh Erik, what is it with you guys down there?

For all of those righties that claim birtherism is a made-up issue by liberals because it’s only proponents are far-right crazy wing-nuts that in no way represent the GOP, it is with great pleasure that I introduce to you America’s latest far-right crazy wing-nuts that in no way represent the GOP: The State of Arizona, and AZ Secretary of State and co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s Arizona election campaign, Ken Bennett. Over the past few weeks Mr. Bennett has engaged in ...

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Why Can’t the Leftists Teach Their Children How to Speak?

by Conor P. Williams May 21, 2012
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Michael Kazin in Dissent, echoing some of my concerns in recent posts: But the meaning of liberalism gradually changed. The quarter-century of growth and low unemployment that followed the Second World War understandably muted appeals for class justice on the left. Liberals focused on gaining rights for minority groups and women more than on addressing continuing inequalities of wealth. Meanwhile, conservatives began to build their own mass movement based on a loathing of “creeping socialism” and a growing perception that ...

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