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While I was covering Mike Huckabee for a profile in 2008, people kept insisting that he wasn’t your “typical politician.” This was true in some ways. He was terrible at raising money. As governor he took positions with no conceivable political payoff; he supported the funding of college aid for the children of undocumented immigrants, for ...

The story of the gate-crashing Salahis was with us for the duration of the holiday, given top billing at every major paper, and half-heartedly justified by the pretense of their presence as a “security issue.” The commentary was predictable because we’d seen the same when balloon boy descended from the attic. We created the Salahis. This is our ...

Bill Bennett has a post up at National Review demanding that Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s murder of 13 people be deemed “terrorism.” Forty-nine percent of Americans apparently prefer the phrase “killing spree.” This, we are to understand, is the terminology of the morally unserious, the purveyors of “psycho-babble,” the “politically ...

Gina Kolata points out, once again, that diet and exercise have not been shown to affect breast cancer rates. Massive, well-run observational studies and randomized controlled trials turn up nothing. This finding appears to be unacceptable; popular culture rejects it utterly. Women’s magazines continue to preach the holy gospel of five fruits ...

Nobody cops to “political correctness” anymore; policing language is what the other guy does. The rest of us are just, you know, telling it like it is. But playing PC-policeman officer is a relatively peaceful and noninvasive way to nudge the culture in a particular direction, a form of persuasion in a democracy built on consensus. And ...

Like Lauren, I enjoyed Jim Windolf's insightful attack on cute culture, but I find the otters-holding-hands/Iraq War connection to be a bit of a stretch. Windolf suggests that we're asking for forgiveness through penitential offerings of cuteness, but it's not my impression that most Americans think we need to be forgiven. Maybe popular cuteness ...

Dan Halloran is the next City Council Representative for New York’s 19th district. He is a Republican. Also, he is the ''First Atheling,'' or prince, among members of a local pagan group that worships Norse gods. ''It is our hope,'' he explained on his now-missing website, ''to reconstruct the pre-Christian religion of the Germanic branch of ...

The ban on travel to Cuba was as pointless seven years ago as it is today, but somewhere in the interim, a significant number of Cuban-Americans turned against it. In a 2002 poll, 46 percent of Cuban-Americans said they wanted the restriction lifted. According to a September survey, 59 percent said the same. This is especially striking ...

Natasha Vargas-Cooper delves into the universe of Twlight fan-fiction, where Bella and Edward generally exchange more than longing looks. We get some heavy breathing and if not bodice-ripping, definitely thong-ripping ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

I’m glad you found some redeeming bits of wisdom in “The Shriver Report,” Amanda, because I find the whole thing cringe-inducing in a post-recovery-balloon-boy sort of way. It’s not just that it’s some kind Maria Shriver vanity project masquerading as a progress report on less notable women. (Or maybe a progress report masquerading as ...