Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

An inspired choice.

Speaking at a campaign event in Jacksonville, Florida, Mitt Romney said even though he doesn’t remember invoking Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Sean Hannity’s show back in February, he stands by his comments.

“I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said whatever it was,” Romney said.

The Republican governor of Kansas has signed a law allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for drugs they believe may induce abortions, a move opponents said could hinder some women’s access to birth control.

Governor Sam Brownback’s office said on Tuesday that the bill “gives more legal protection to Kansas health care providers who refuse to participate in abortions” based on their conscience.

[...]

The law states that no person can be required to provide any device or drug that he or she “reasonably believes may result in the termination of a pregnancy” – but does not specifically lay out which drugs could be refused.

This is all getting so confusing. Which Party is in favor of small government and individual liberties again?

The billion-dollar question for automakers is whether this shift is truly permanent, the result of a baked-in attitude shift among Millennials that will last well into adulthood, or the product of an economy that’s been particularly brutal on the young.

There are plenty of reasons to suspect the latter. The Millennials have become notorious for delaying, or entirely skipping, the traditional markers of adulthood.

Among the factors I observe in Millenial reluctance to purchase automobiles: buying a new car means an acceptance of the shift into adulthood — and all the stresses, responsibilities and social expectations that accompany that shift.

In other words, we’re the boomerang generation, and it’s doubtful that leaving the recession behind will change a societal mindset that tries to distance oneself from adulthood.

What nobody’s talking about, though, is the fact that automobiles have less ‘social value’ than they used to. The things that demonstrate Millenials’ social worth to their peers — for whatever reason — are no longer the Baby Boomers’ expensive, enduring items like houses, cars, and Rolex’s. Instead, Millenials favor disposable items like $199 iPhones or $100 H&M outfits.

The difference isn’t just dollar value.

Almost everything in digital magazine publishing reminds me of web design in the mid-1990s. Back then, I had to fight hard against people who would attempt to render entire web pages as images, because this would enable everything to be laid out precisely. Never mind the fact this screwed things up from an accessibility perspective, and also totally ignored the benefits of the new medium. But at least there was some excuse back then—browsers were basic and no-one had experience to draw on. The arguments were new. Today’s web standards, however, provide a ton of control from a typographical and layout standpoint, but things are just different to how they are in print.

This. The Newsstand magazines using text look fine, no, fantastic on the new iPad. It’s the ones using image files for page layouts that are the problem.

And the solution isn’t to double the size of the image files.

I figured Weinstein and Labash were his young associates at the Daily Caller, Buckley his brother, and Lowe his random reader who had won the privilege in some kind of online contest line. Breitbart, self-described “media mogul” performed the role of grinning and menacing bomb-thrower of the radical right. His record included actively assisting the demise of ACORN, efforts to damage Planned Parenthood, and the profoundly dishonest discrediting of Shirley Sherrod at the Agriculture Department, which led to her dismissal (followed by official apologies from the White House, NAACP, Agriculture, and others).

Entertaining and civil, guaranteed.

Lovely stuff. It’s hard to believe that folks from the right and left can sit down and break bread civilly, what with the state of public discourse and all. But it happened.

It’s a thing that’s easy to forget with our experiments in changing the world: ideologies can be shit; people’s actions (especially the collective, anonymous group-think the internet can breed) can be shit; people rarely are.

In 1966, George Romney tried to beat them. In 2012, Mitt Romney hopes to join them. In 1966, moderates seemed destined to rule the GOP forever—and George Romney was their great hope. In 2012, the moderates are on the verge of extinction—and Mitt Romney devotes most of his days to distancing himself from those aspects of his record that make him look like one of them.

I share Frum’s wistfulness about the demise of moderates in public discourse.

Despite their much smaller numbers, Americans in the middle of the 1900s took more public transit trips on buses, trains and so on than we do today as a whole. Many more. In 1947 — the peak year — they racked up 23.4 billion trips in total. Last year it was a paltry-by-comparison 10.4 billion.

Keep in mind that in 1947 the US population was 144 million, compared to 313 million present day.

David Kurtz thinks he knows why the big shift happened:

There’s so much about the history of the 20th century reflected in those numbers: the emergence of the automobile as the primary form of transportation, the mobilization of the domestic work force to contribute to the World War II effort, 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, 1956’s National Interstate and Defense Highways Act which paved the way for white flight, the shift to two-car families, and the bottoming out of urban decay in the 1970s.