Campaign ads are not automatically newsworthy. Certainly not worthy of time on newscasts until they’ve proven themselves so. That’s called “free airtime”, y’all. That is all.

I want to write a post heded: Ironic irony in which I point out pithily that conservatives decry ‘ironic detachment’ and lament that young people no longer embrace causes greater than themselves, their friends, and their possessions. Yet when the left coalesces with (some) enthusiasm behind an emphatically non-ironic and in-pursuit-of-something-bigger-than-any-of-us candidate, suddenly those values are worthy of mockery.

What I’m missing is links to articles in which conservatives decry ‘ironic detachment’ and so on. Any love?

This post got some attention from my colleagues in public television. And honestly, I cannot figure out why.

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On last week’s Bill Moyers Journal, I had a piece on the link between unionization and middle-class wages.

Earlier last week, I posted a web-exclusive video essay on the Bush Administration’s latest stupid plan to spy on you no matter what you do.

The Three Stupidest Guys in the Universe are now all blogging: I’m one of them, Ron Pyke is, as mentioned previously, is the second. And Steve ‘Zim’ Zimmers, is the third.

Bonus home town content: The Three Stupedist Guys’ friend and former bandmate, Joe P, is also bloggin’ up a storm.

Last weekend’s New York Times Magazine piece on a student abstinence group at Harvard is, as others have pointed out, is all-around dumb. The abstinence-only movement is crap, but so is the assumption that college kids aren’t normal unless they’re hooking up on a regular basis. It’s just as annoying to tout one’s avoidance of sex as it is to brag about one’s conquests. Now, can we please move beyond this iteration of the Culture Wars?

We went to another standup event tonight, our second in the past three months. It was an evening of African-American comedians, and it exceeded expectations. The standout was the closer, an albino African-American.

I’ve done a new video segment for the Bill Moyers Journal blog.

After you watch it, please listen to this.

My friend Ron Pyke apparently had his first encounter with the UK town, even though he’s lived in England for years. The town is disconcerting, down to the fake livestock.

The first time I encountered the phrase “Milton Keynes” was in the title of a Style Council song. And, like Ron, I thought it was a fusion of disparate ideas. He thought it was John Milton crossed with John Maynard Keynes. I thought it was Milton Friedman crossed with Keynes.

The difference says something about our personalities, but I’m not sure what.

My dear friend Ron Pyke has a new blog. You must check it out. He’s inspired me to post more here, and we’re looking into combining our efforts.