Bart Motes

If there's a better game than the stunning conclusion to Electronic Arts and Bioware's science fiction Mass Effect series, Mass Effect 3, I can't remember when I've played one.*

Released March 6, 2012, Mass Effect 3 is simply amazing. Excellent graphics, brilliant voice acting, a compelling storyline, and sound...

Battlefield 3, the new first person shooter from Electronic Arts, has the ambition of fragging current kill leader Call of Duty.

Call of Duty, the latest installment of which went to market November 8, 2011, after this was written (an advance review copy was not provided), has given Battlefield 3...

Batman: Arkham City, the wonderfully realized sequel to 2009's sleeper Batman: Arkham Asylum, is a flawless return to Gotham. Simply put, it gets just about everything right.

Video game sequels are a tricky business. Follow the original too slavishly, and everyone yawns. Deviate too drastically, and the original fanatics will...

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a brilliant game. It doesn't quite live up to its marvelous hype, but is still addictive and adrenaline pumping enough that any fan of games like Fallout 3 or Mass Effect 1 and 2 should not hesitate to play it.

In Deus Ex: Human...

Fallout: New Vegas opens with a shot to the head.

Two of them, in fact.

You're a courier carrying something valuable for the mysterious Mr. House. Now, after being left to die, you must find out who tried to have you killed and why.

That's the basic,...

Man I wish I had bought stock in smug and snark today. Just my returns on twitter would have made me rich.

Everyone is so upset with Robert Gibbs for his attack on the "professional left."

Robert Gibbs was right, of course. Not to say what he was thinking out...

On July 25, 2010, the website Wikileaks released 92, 000 pages of classified documents, dubbed "The War Logs." Comparisons were immediately made to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971.

Frank Rich wrote a compelling column in the Sunday New...

Over at the Washington Post, Ezra Klein posts a fantastic piece on how the filibuster could be easily ended with 51 votes.

Conventional wisdom suggests 67 votes are necessary (first a vote of 60 to break the filibuster, then a vote of 67 to change the Senate rules),...

I thought I was finished with the Tea Party.

Then I wake up to the news that one of the leaders of the Tea Party posted a "satirical petition" from the NAACP to Abraham Lincoln calling for the repeal of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.

Evan McMorris-Santoro...

Lemme tell you a little secret.

No one really cares about taxes.

I know, I know, the Tea Party movement is dedicated to bemoaning the fact that we as a people are being taxed to death by a cruel and insensitive federal government intent on using those same tax dollars...

Unless you've got a 50-inch plasma hooked up to your Xbox, that is.

Earlier this year Mass Effect 2, the second installment in Bioware's sci-fi epic trilogy, lit up gaming consoles around the world to rapturous acclaim. Time magazine declared the third person shooter*/role playing adventure game...

It's the genius of Rachel Maddow that in a simple twenty-minute interview with Rand Paul she was able to expose the essential problem with libertarianism. It provides no solutions except the one your mom offered to hitting your sister: "don't do it."

As a political philosophy, libertarianism...

By now we've all heard of the "birthers" and their leader, the wackily accented dentist/lawyer/real estate agent Orly Taitz. The birther theory is simple enough: Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, he was born in Kenya. His birth certificate is a forgery and the birth announcement placed by his...

When Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070 into law, I hope that she and the legislators who passed it were motivated purely by absolutely venomous racism.

I've read the bill, and there are really only two ways to interpret what it intends to accomplish. Either:

(a) The...

"President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation"

So trumpeted Willard Mitt Romney in a bizarre op-ed at National Review Online.

This is a strange and dangerous claim. If Obama has betrayed his oath, the only constitutional remedy is impeachment. Is Romney calling for impeachment? Every interview...

Miami.

Beaches, bikinis, and drugs. Models, rappers, celebrities. And.....artists?

A quiet revolution has been taking place in Miami, one that non-residents have been slow to appreciate. In the know Miamians have been leaving behind the excesses of South Beach, with its Ko Sanh Road in triplicate of Ocean Drive,...

If you think this is a fabulous idea, you're not alone. A friend told me about the Facebook group "Making Drug Tests required to Get Welfare," which has nearly 2 million members and counting.

Great idea! I can't see anything wrong with it. I mean, you don't support...

It will come as news to rock-dwellers that Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader and Democrat, has come under intense criticism in recent days for some words he uttered back during the Democratic primary regarding now President Barack Obama. As reported in the recently published book Game Change, in the course...

Mike Leach, brilliant and eccentric college football coach, has been fired by his employer of ten years, Texas Tech. Despite leading Tech to unprecedented glory, Leach's alleged mistreatment of an ESPN commentator's son has led to his dismissal.

I just got off the phone with Leach's attorney...

Forget what the Nobel Prize Committee said about ending nuclear weapons. Forget too that conservatives have now supplied the punchline to the joke about how much they hate our President: "Obama could win the Nobel Peace Prize and conservatives would...."

The Nobel Committee states it best when they write: "Obama...