Quote of the Day: Patented Blogging

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From Matt Yglesias:

What if Mickey Kaus held some kind of patent on policy blogging?

The mind reels. I suppose we’d all owe him royalties and be forced to write a certain minimum quota of anti-union posts every month.

More realistically, of course, blogging never would have taken off and the world would have to continue making do with the likes of Tom Friedman and George Will. All of which is an excellent argument for not allowing the patent office to issue patents for vague, moderately obvious evolutionary trends expressed via software. Congress should get on that, since they don’t really seem to have anything better to do at the moment.