Andrew Sullivan should be thankful that The Atlantic’s fact-checking department has no purview over the magazine’s website.

Later, Goldberg offers this line from Clive Crook, also of The Atlantic:

Andrew has so many opinions to ventilate, and so little time to think about them . . .

As a former subscriber to The Atlantic (I miss Michael Kelly), I think it besmirches the magazine to be affiliated with such a clown, no matter how much traffic he brings in. I generally avoid theatlantic.com because of the fact that they financially support Sullivan’s asshattery. If the other Atlantic bloggers now realize how much he damages their reputation and are turning on him, that might be a reason to start reading them. Or it might just be a clever marketing shtick by The Atlantic: “First we’ll employ a jackass who makes lots of people angry, then we’ll employ people who attack the jackass, thereby getting all the readers!”

To be on the safe side, I’ll continue to not regularly visit the website until they stop employing such a man.

Democratic leaders should be asking themselves just how they have gotten to the point that their strategy is to amend a law that doesn’t exist yet by passing a bill without voting on it.

I think in a few years, once this is all behind us, people will look back in disbelief at the utter inability of a party that controls the White House and large majorities in the Congress to convince the American people or a single member of the opposition party that its primary policy objective is one worth supporting. The attempted legislative chicanery is merely a symptom.

1)  That Reid would be desperate and sleazy enough to secretly run a fake Tea Party candidate.

or

2)  That multiple US Senate hopefuls would publicly entertain the paranoid delusion that Reid was secretly running a fake Tea Party candidate.

Either would be sufficiently hilarious for me.

Captain Kirk might want to avoid taking the starship Enterprise to warp speed, unless he’s ready to shrug off interstellar hydrogen atoms that would deliver a lethal radiation blast to both ship and crew.

There are just two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter on average in space, which poses no threat to spaceships traveling at low speeds. But those same lone atoms would transform into deadly galactic space mines for a spaceship that runs into them at near-light speed, according to calculations based on Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

The original crew of “Star Trek” featured as unfortunate examples at a presentation by William Edelstein, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, at the American Physical Society conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 13. The physicist showed a video clip of Kirk telling engineer Scotty to go to warp speed.

“Well, they’re all dead,” Edelstein recalled saying. His words caused a stir among the audience.

This pseudo-scientist has clearly failed basic Warp Theory, Astro-navigation and Elementary Starfleet Engineering. In the first place the deflector array is there to take care of these issues while at impulse and at pre-warp speeds. At Warp Speed they are dislocated from the normal space time continuum inside a subspace bubble.

Duh!

Nice try, Mr. Scientist.

I think the last time I geeked out this hard was when I was standing in front of Steven Spielberg at Sam Goody…while buying Close Encounters…

My first five years of life we spent in Skagway, Alaska, right there by Whitehorse. Believe it or not — this was in the ’60s — we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse. I remember my brother, he burned his ankle in some little kid accident thing and my parents had to put him on a train and rush him over to Whitehorse and I think, isn’t that kind of ironic now. Zooming over the border, getting health care from Canada,” Palin said a speech Saturday night, according to the Calgary Herald.

OMG – this obviously means that SarahPalin LOVES socialized medicine. What a hypocrite! What a Liar.

Ummm, whoops.

Turns out Canada didn’t have Socialized Medicine until well into the 80s. Properly understood Sarah’s quote can be read as “Yeah I used to use  Canadian Health Care when it was free from government control and awesome, but I wouldn’t think of using it today.”

Note to my liberal friends: Next time learn history before making an ass of yourself.

Two things are worth noting as this farse continues to unfold. First, if the anti-abortion Democrats actually do stand firm, I will be flabbergasted. Honestly, I’m flabbergasted that they’ve stood firm to this point. This debate shows how deeply ingrained pro-abortion sentiment is among Democrats; that these ostensibly “pro-life” politicians were willing to have a D after their name made me believe they weren’t really that firm in some of their beliefs. I’m pleased to be wrong.

Second, all the libertarians who spent all eight of the Bush years griping about social conservatives should take note. Government takeover of 1/6 of the economy is being thwarted not by eloquent libertarian arguments about economic freedom, but by a strange coalition of those who object to using the government to promote abortion.

I’ve thought for a long time that the opulence of American higher education – universities with tuition greater than the average income of an American family, fundraising departments raising hundreds of millions to fund endowed chairs for tenured faculty who produce nothing of worth and will earn six figures well into senility, unnecessary administrative employees as far as the eye can see, with most of the actual work of teaching students being done by minimum wage adjuncts and TAs – is unsustainable. It simply makes no sense to have so much of our national wealth and resources tied up in doing so little, when it could be done for so much less.

This probably isn’t the reckoning I’d like it to be (though it would be delicious if said reckoning began in the UC system), but I think we’re going to see much more of this. When soft institutions meet hard times, Reality won’t much care how much it’s denounced in scholarly journals.