The Soft Set is playing THIS FRIDAY NIGHT at the Carousel with Summer Wardrobe. Any of you theoretical readers who can conceivably be there, please come!

Brilliant economist James K. Galbraith rips Alan Greenspan a new one for treating Social Security like a privilege rather than a right and for glossing over the impact his choices have had on its future.

Salon is on fire today. Both of these articles are worth clicking through the ads.

Lynne Cheney's cultural war

The late, great J.T. Walsh

Here's a great article on dealing with faith in the context of a happy-happy rah-rah Jesus camp. I think that this cheerleader-quality type of religion contributed more than anything else to my inability to be a Christian. My parents, their siblings, my cousins -- all of them subscribe to this nauseating rose-colored view of Christianity, a view that completely ignores the meat-and-potatoes of what it means to suffer and be moral in the face of a harsh world (which is what Xianity is about, right?) for the creme brulee (if you will) of Jesus-loves-me-so-I-don't-care. I wish I could believe in spiritual meaning, and I admire those I know who believe unflinchingly with their eyes open, but I just can't. I'm a humanist and afflicted with existential doubt. The only meaning I see in this world is how people treat each other while they're here and what they leave behind when they're gone. The concept of Heaven and eternal reward sullies the nobility of morality (which actually seems to me to be a deeply Christian approach - my problem was that I read the fucking Bible too often and really listened in Sunday School. I might be able to be a Christian if I didn't take it so seriously, I guess). Anyway, rambling aside, I think that the author of that piece hit the right notes of ambiguity. Consider me spoken to.

This link was shamelessly stolen from John James's ultrasharp blog. Read it every day.

Anybody but Bush? Who would you vote for?

No child (or immigrant) left behind.

Patrick Smith at Salon has a bit of an old fart problem when talking about music, but his Ask the Pilot columns are usually somewhere between "pretty sharp" and "revelatory."

Wall Street Journal writer Annie Jacobsen's bullshit terror-in-the-skies flight story is currently being passed around conservative circles as if it proved something (when, in fact, it has little discernable content whatsoever). Here's his take in three parts. These being from Salon, you might have to click through some annoying ads.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

How is the interrogation of Saddam Hussein going, anyway?