Newly Online Reason Column From Me -- "City of Rats: 'Thinking Big' at the Municipal Level Means Abandoning the Basics'": First six words:

Washington, D.C., is lousy with rats

When Coalitions Dissolve: As the GOP breaks apart, some blame the vanishing breed of free market Republicans.

Ron Paul's Mistake: Why a message of freedom works better than whipping up white resentment.

05/06/2008 08:40 AM  |  Reaction (0)

Coming to California for a Bunch of Events! Read all about them here. Condensed version:

May 4: Palm Springs Book Festival, two panels, lots of signings, booze.
May 10: Rancho Palos Verdes Democrats discussion, no booze.
May 14: Pasadena Public Library lecture, booze only in my hip flask.
May 15: Zocalo L.A. on "Deconstructing McCain" at L.A.'s fabulous Central Library downtown. Definitely booze.

Follow the link for more details, and see you peoples soon!

05/02/2008 07:32 AM  |  Reaction (0)

New Washington Post Column From Me & Nick Gillespie -- "How Dallas Won the Cold War": Here's how it begins:

Let us now pause in somber tribute to the 30th anniversary of a momentous -- and shockingly unremembered -- turning point in the long twilight struggle between communism and capitalism. An event every bit as important as the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate, Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down this Wall" speech and Yakov Smirnoff's defection to the West.

We write, of course, about the debut of "Dallas," the 13-year soap opera that shook the world.

04/27/2008 04:38 PM  |  Reaction (5)

MLB Gameday -- An Abomination: So here I am, a big rich rock star editor, right? So I finally cave in to the top-hat/monocle luxury of buying Major League Baseball's "Gameday" video program, for like $114 a year, so that I can watch an inning or two of Angel games on the computer before going to bed at night. No sweat, right?

Christ. They make you download a bunch of crap -- Silverchair, I think it is? Plus various Flash/Adobe nightmares -- then none of it works, then you uninstall, then you scream bloody murder loud enough that even your baseball-hating (but amazingly tolerant!) French wife comes over and performs complicated computer tasks ... several times over. After the you'll-never-get-it-back time-wasting, the video stuff looks like claymation, with stop-start images catching up every five seconds or so, a full half-minute behind the audio. It's terrible, terrible. So then, after becoming so frustrated with something so insignificant you decide to punt the video component altogether just to hear the radio broadcast (the $14.99 option) ... it drops out randomly at important times, like, say, the 7th inning of the Red Sox game.

Anyway, this is a pointless complaint in the scheme of things, but on the odd chance anyone else has been having this problem, or that the fucktards who run MLB do some Google-surfing on their shitty product, I submit this whine for the Permanent Record.

04/23/2008 06:00 PM  |  Reaction (7)

Hi! What are you doing down here?