Even though many news outlets think it’s over for Lance Armstrong, I’m not so convinced.

There’s a question as to whether the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency even has the jurisdiction to strip Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles and Olympic bronze medal. The International Cycling U… Read full post »

The opposition to women’s reproductive rights, where such a package of rights includes the ability of a woman to decide when, how, and why to reproduce, is pretty easy to explain. My theory covers everything from opposition to birth control to female genital mutilation.

We begin in a state of n… Read full post »

Mittens Romney, two days ago:

My plan, like his, really expands Medicare Advantage. It says, let’s give people more opportunity to take advantage of not just the standard Medicare, but also the policies that are available in the marketplace.

Romney was talking about how both “his” p… Read full post »

I love this takedown of 21st-century technobabble in The New Republic. Everything the author says about Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna could apply equally to Thomas Friedman, The New York Times‘ resident expert about everything from international banking to Middle Eastern diplomacy. And yet,… Read full post »

Another news/opinion piece that laments the death of the personal computer. Except that it doesn’t. Generally, editors — not the writers — generate the headline. “The PC looks like it’s dying” not because of the Rise of the Tablet. Someone whose job it is to study the PC m… Read full post »

Here’s a thought exercise: after six episodes of The Newsroom, has a female character done anything right? In episode six alone, two of the three major female characters made big mistakes. Will McAvoy (a man) soundly put Mackenzie MacHale in her place after she went on a tirade about how Will… Read full post »

In the summer of 2001, life was really good. Business was booming, housing prices were going up, and the worst thing that President George W. Bush had done so far was tell a bunch of green peaceniks that they couldn’t see who was on Cheney’s energy tax force.

President Bush entered… Read full post »

$60 million in fines and cancelation of Penn State’s football victories between 1998 and 2011 is almost as good as disbanding the football team. Maybe better, in fact. The football team lives on, but with an appropriate amount of shame that will serve as a reminder that a sports craze —… Read full post »

After last week’s shooting in Aurora, Colo., the National Rifle Association has wisely remained mum. Someone must be holding on to Wayne LaPierre’s leash, which is good for the NRA and for everyone else. Speaking out about the necessity of guns after a horrendous, gun-facilitated massacre… Read full post »

Looking for a burrito? You might go to Yelp to help you find a taqueria, and ideally, you want a taqueria with high ratings. Bad restaurants get low ratings for lots of reasons: the people who work there are nasty, the food is bad, the place is dirty. On many reviews,… Read full post »

While this article still relies heavily on anonymous sources, it thankfully doesn’t say that fifteen militants were killed. Perhaps the Times has finally taken to heart its own reporting on the fact that the Obama Administration counts all military-age males in a strike zone as “militan… Read full post »

Judge Richard Posner is kind of awesome. He is beyond simple “conservative” or “liberal” labels; he just believes what he believes.

[Federal Judge Richard Posner: The GOP Has Made Me Less Conservative : It's All Politics : NPR.]

Remember the Fast and Furious Scandal? Remember how the ATF bought guns for Mexican cartels with the intent to track them, and then lost a bunch of them, resulting in the death of a Border Patrol agent at the hand of one of those guns?

Remember how that last sentence is… Read full post »

Conservatives are predictably foaming at the mouth over the Supreme Court’s decision today in Nat’l Federation of Indep. Businesses v. Sebelius, the Obamacare case.

“We, the American people, have just been deceived in ways that nobody contemplated. And what we now have is the bigge… Read full post »

Kent Sepkowitz criticizes TED conferences in The Daily Beast today. The TED conferences (Technology, Entertainment, Design), says Sepkowitz, value form over substance:

Nowadays, though, TED spells trouble for several reasons. First, it doesn’t celebrate a love of smart people, really; it celebrat

… Read full post »

Slate makes its money by being Your Source for Contrarian News. Indeed, Twitter came alive in October 2009 with contrarian Slate-style headlines like “Soccer: It’s Time to Let Players Use Their Hands.” Slate, to its contrarian credit, actually thought some of them were pretty good.… Read full post »

Tomorrow, March 21, is the National Day of Action for Syringe Exchange. Since the Reagan administration, Congress has expressly prohibited any federal funds from going to syringe exchange programs. This ban on federal funding is an outgrowth of the ineffectual War on Drugs, the theory being that prev… Read full post »

It’s hard to say that the cost of militarizing America’s civil police forces doesn’t outweigh the benefit. Stephan Salisbury, writing in Salon, observes:

Yes, it’s true that Montgomery County, Texas, has purchased a weapons-capable drone. (They say they’ll only arm it with ta

… Read full post »

Dalia Lithwick, writing in Slate, thinks Judge Stephen Reinhardt’s Proposition 8 decision doesn’t go far enough. She’s right in that he could have gone further. Judge Reinhardt declined to address the reasons offered by District Court for why Prop. 8 was unconstitutional: (1) that “it deprive… Read full post »

Let’s be clear, here. Despite Anonymous’s protestations to the contrary, Megaupload did not exist primarily as a way to let users share large files. That was a sham that Megaupload perpetuated for its own P.R. Quite to the contrary, Megaupload existed primarily to pirate copyrighted conte… Read full post »

The Small Business Coalition, which represents the interests of small businesses, seems to have a problem with Citizens United. Unlike the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents giant, multinational, Fortune 500 companies, the SBC represents those businesses that make up the vast, vast majority o… Read full post »

Libertarianism, says Jeffrey Sachs, is beguiling in its amorality:

By taking an extreme view — that liberty alone is to be defended among all of society’s values — libertarians reach extreme conclusions. Suppose a rich man has a surfeit of food and a poor man living next door is sta

… Read full post »

As it turns out, white people can be terrorists, too.

Tom Junod, “Counter-Terrorism is Getting Complicated,” Esquire, Feb. 2012.

Read full post »

The 10 Most Ridiculous Lawsuits of 2011. The point of this list, I guess, is to show us that the legal system is wacky-screwed up, and doesn’t there need to be reform? Sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has really no beef at all with large corporations suing smaller… Read full post »

It’s been quite a week for nerds. No fewer than three film trailers have sparked our nerdly interest for 2012. It can’t come too soon, either, as 2011 was a crappy year for the nerds. (Non-nerdly films, however, were great. I’m thinking here of Drive and Tree of Life.)

The Dark Kn… Read full post »