082012_MILLER_THOMPSON Where were you when you first heard Joe "Put Y'all Back in Chains" Biden's latest gaffe? I was taping an interview with Dennis Miller when the story broke. The two-segment interview aired yesterday on the Dennis Miller Show. This is the second time I've appeared on the show and, as you can hear by clicking here -- 082012_MILLER_THOMPSON -- though we sometimes occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum, I Read more...

Since last week’s publication of Better Off Without ’Em, reader correspondence has been running about 60-40 against me. But amid it all, some have been sending along a few interesting items. Like this link from the Center for a New American Security, which shows U.S. Marines marching through Beirut beneath a Confederate battle flag. The photo is from 1958, but read the comments below and you’ll find service members revealing Read more...

On the eve of the publication of Better Off Without 'Em, how about a couple of crazy cool of wolves and bears? I shot both a couple weeks ago during a four-day kayak trip through Glacier Bay National Park with my longtime hiking/camping pal and pro photog and game tracker extraordinaire Pat Costello. Pat is one of the best outdoor photographers in Alaska. If you want to see a whole Read more...

Early reviews for Better Off Without ’Em (available on August 14) have been positive. Kirkus Reviews calls the book “often thoughtful, always irreverent” and “a raucous road trip through the South with a funny, informed, sardonic and opinionated Yankee.” Kirkus full review here. Publishers Weekly calls the book “hilariously over-the-top” and “thought-provoking.” Publishers Weekly full review here. The July/August issue of Washington Monthly magazine includes a lengthy essay review by Read more...

The big news out of Livingston Parish, Louisiana—and how often you can say that?—is state Republican (of course) Representative Valarie Hodges renouncing her once-solid support of Governor Bobby Jindhal’s pet education project, a school voucher program that would use taxpayer money to allow students to attend “private” religious schools in lieu of public schools. Hodges (who looks like someone’s sweet, peach-cobbler-baking mom, btw), had been super keen on the idea Read more...

In Better Off Without ’Em, I touch briefly on the 2001 case of Talmadge Branch, the African American politician who was refused service in the “whites only” section of a segregated bar in Florida. Those who might consider this decade-old story ancient history—or at least an anomaly in the pasteurized “we don’t tolerate racism anymore” South—should check out a story that ran last week on Jezebel documenting the case of Read more...

I’ve never been part of an organized effort to pick up trash along a highway, much less ever wanted to hang around a stretch of “adopted” roadside while 4,000-pounds of steel flash past at 70 mph a few feet away while I’m hunched over picking up a Taco Smell wrapper. A Ku Klux Klan chapter in Georgia, however, has decided that part of being an upstanding civic organization is doing Read more...

A recent short article in Scientific American by North Carolina native Scott Huler outlines the latest loony southern denial of science. In the face of forecasts that Atlantic Ocean levels will rise by more than three feet before the end of the century, a group of 20 legislators from coastal counties in North Carolina have introduced a bill in the State House of Representatives that would make measurements of anything Read more...