Mark Morford on our duty as cybercitizens:
Attention, all who are reading this column right now, please put down your drink and leap up off the couch and put your pants back on and log in to Google and type the words “hot bunny terrorist fluffer banana” into the comely and world-beloved Google search engine. Do [...]

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Harold Meyerson:
How could a president get these things so wrong? Incompetence may describe this presidency, but it doesn’t explain it. For that, historians may need to turn to the seven deadly sins: to greed, in understanding why Bush entrusted his new drug entitlement to a financial mainstay of modern Republicanism. To sloth, in understanding why [...]

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Nice to know what qualities Democratic senatorial candidate Bob Casey and Gov. Ed Rendell support in a Supreme Court justice. “No reason” not to support him, huh?
…Federal law and the official Code of Conduct for U.S. judges explicitly prohibit judges from sitting on cases involving companies in which they own stock — no matter how [...]

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Tim Grieve in Salon:
You can make an argument that the president is entitled to some senatorial deference when it comes to Cabinet picks. The guy runs the executive branch, so maybe there’s a rebuttable presumption that he gets the people he wants to work for him there. But the judiciary isn’t part of the executive [...]

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Don’t worry, be happy:
Catfish from Maryland’s South River have a skin cancer rate as high as any found in the nation and the second-highest liver cancer rate in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and both are probably caused by polluted runoff, a study released yesterday says.
In the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service study, more than half [...]

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Actor Chris Penn, 40.

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Let me make it as simple as possible: Any health care policy built around tax breaks for money spent is a de facto assault on the working poor.
Because poor people don’t have extra money to spend. Get it, Heritage Foundation geniuses?

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Republicans said that making an issue of Judge Alito’s rulings would redound to their benefit, asserting that his legal views were more in line with the American electorate than those of his liberal critics.
“I’ll just tell you right now we welcome that debate on our side,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told the [...]

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Jordan on yet another believer in cheap, disposable labor:
These guys hadn’t just been inspected and fined a number of times over the past seven years, they killed a worker just over a year ago in a 15-foot deep trench, a fact that seems to have been left out of the OSHA press release. For that [...]

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It’s raining, snowing and there’s thunder. Weird weather.

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Bob “Me Too, Rick” Casey thinks Alito’s someone to support - and that means I think young Bobby isn’t:
WASHINGTON - Sen. Rick Santorum’s leading Democratic challenger, Pennsylvania Treasurer Bob Casey, announced Tuesday that he endorses Judge Samuel Alito’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.
For weeks, Republicans have called Casey “Silent Bob” and pressed him to say [...]

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This is about the county Democrats where I live. Good for them:
DOYLESTOWN, Pa. — The death count of Iraq casualties posted in the front window of the Bucks County Democratic Committee irks a Republican group so much that they’ve asked for it to be removed.
The count is under a sign that reads “We Honor [...]

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Larry Beinhart on Al Gore:
But how does he get the media to pay attention to such speeches?
In that narrow context, the quality of the speech doesn’t matter. The quality of the reasoning, the insights, the clarity, the fervor in the speaker’s voice, the vividness of the images and metaphors, the truths or falsehoods contained [...]

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That’s the real state of the union:
WASHINGTON - People are skeptical about the economy despite recent encouraging signs, with worries about the costs of gas, heating oil and health care.
Views of the economy show sharp partisan differences, with Republicans far more likely to be optimistic than either Democrats or independents, according to the Pew Research [...]

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But hey, it’s not as if it affects real people:
WASHINGTON - Stretched by frequent troop rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has become a “thin green line� that could snap unless relief comes soon, according to a study for the Pentagon.
Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who wrote the report under a Pentagon contract, [...]

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From Steve Clemons at the Washington Note:
General Wesley Clark is going to keynote a conference my New America Foundation team and I are putting together on the Real State of U.S. Foreign Policy 2006, and this will take place on Monday, January 30th in the Senate (Senate Dirksen G-50) from 9 a.m. until 1:45 p.m. [...]

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Will wonders never cease? Joe Lieberman, standing up to BushCo:
WASHINGTON, Jan 24 (Reuters) - Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the top Democrat on the Senate panel investigating the government’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina, on Tuesday accused administration officials of failing to cooperate and trying to run out the clock on the congressional probe.
“The problems begin at [...]

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Brad “Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps” DeLong presents an actual class for journalists: Covering the Economy.

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Duncan has two you really should read: one on the response from Press the Meat to their “all Black people think alike” questions of Barack Obama, and this:
You might want to take a look at Glenn Greenwald’s latest post, the contents of which should be pretty much the opening segment of every evening news show. [...]

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“The average 2004 operating margin of publicly owned newspapers — that’s the profit margin before such items as taxes, interest and depreciation — was 20.5%, according to the industry analyst John Morton. That’s roughly double the average margin of the Standard & Poor’s 500.” LA Times Nov. 24 2005.

See, the way you make newspapers with [...]

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From CJR Daily, pointing out that Jack Abramoff was doing more than spinning a dreidel at the White House:
Yet the press has been largely silent about all this.
The only stories we could find from this week were one Knight-Ridder article, a USA Today piece, and something in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. With the exception of [...]

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Alito approved by Judiciary, straight party-line vote.
Fuck you, Arlen “I’m A Moderate” Specter.

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No man can serve two masters, and the Republican Congress is living proof of that. When in doubt, your boss is always Big Business:
House and Senate GOP negotiators, meeting behind closed doors last month to complete a major budget-cutting bill, agreed on a change to Senate-passed Medicare legislation that would save the health insurance industry [...]

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FYI: WordPress is completely hosed and I don’t know why. I did find a back door in to post this. However, I’m posting over at the old place until it’s up and running again. I know you’ll want to read this.

I got up this morning with “A Sense of Wonder” (probably my favorite Van Morrison [...]

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Good news:
NEW YORK — A federal judge ruled Monday that the Defense Department must release the identities of hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainees to The Associated Press.
U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff told the government to provide the information in the form of unredacted copies of transcripts and documents related to 558 military hearings in [...]

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Now we don’t even have Canada to run to:
“Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party defeated the long entrenched Liberal Party in Canadian elections on Monday,” the New York Times reports. “A Conservative victory is a striking turn in the country’s politics and is likely to improve Canada’s strained relations with the Bush administration.”
The Washington Post [...]

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I’m sure the Republicans will embrace their responsibility and learn from their errors:
WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 - Citing the recent deaths of 14 miners in West Virginia, senators said Monday that federal mining officials had failed to enforce safety regulations adequately.
“These deaths, I believe, were entirely preventable,” said Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, [...]

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The Washington Post thinks all that’s necessary for BushCo to fix the new prescription benefit mess is to, you know, fix it.
You’d think by now, they would have noticed the point of the program was to 1) benefit Big Pharma and 2) to undermine the trust we have in goernment. But then, they wouldn’t [...]

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This expert says he’s figured out how men can succeed at marriage.
The problem is, how do you get them to read his article all the way through?

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I’ve been saying this for years, and E.J. Dionne agrees: the Republican strategists always telegraph their next move. He points out that Karl Rove is telling us what the Republicans will do, and dares the Democrats to get into the fray:
What Democrats should have learned is that they cannot evade the security debate. They must [...]

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