A friend of mine took me out to a lovely Santa Monica restaurant for dinner and drinks a few weeks ago. He bought me several rounds of 18 year old Scotch. This made me very happy, as I can’t afford to do that kind of thing. So I was thinking, what else would make me [...]

Barack Obama got together at the end of June with Federal Reserve helmsman Ben Bernanke, who was handily reconfirmed for his job not long ago despite spending most of the financial meltdown that occurred on his watch in a Quaalude haze. The president and the uber-banker were pleased with one another and with the general [...]

Hundreds of thousands of Americans poured into the street across the country today demanding draconian cuts to the nation’s increasingly frayed social safety net programs in order to reduce federal budget deficits that consumers have almost overnight recognized as the most fierce among all the challenges facing the nation. Carrying signs urging lawmakers to raise [...]

That would be ABC news, for running this story with a photo of an interracial couple who seem to be having some sort of dissociated sexual experience brought on by a flying bible, as shown to your left. The photo has since been changed to show a couple named Flaherty, fully clothed and with a [...]

It’s true. The oleaginous mishap that killed 11 oil rig workers, plus the boat captain who committed suicide, and has closed beaches and poisoned waters and killed an as yet unknown number of sea creatures, and is sucking the oxygen out of the water, and triggered the release of millions of gallons of toxic oil [...]

Among my reading pleasures is the AP’s strange news department. Sometimes it isn’t really strange—a day or two ago there was a story about some guy who got pulled over for driving drunk on his riding mower, which seems to happen at least once a month somewhere— but sometimes it is. A couple of days [...]

Okay, so I don’t really have the vocabulary at the moment to describe my reaction to this and this and this, other than to say o my fucking lord, we’re all doomed. Here’s Digby, the first this: Greg Sargent has been making the argument for a while that GOP obstructionism is helping them at the [...]

Here’s the whiniest, most incoherent intra-sect rant ever, directed by semi-famous right wing blogger Dan Riehl against some guy who works for House minority leader Orange John Boehner. The guy called Riehl a nitwit, essentially, and in his indignant response, Riehl calls the insult “insightful.” One can’t but agree. One of Riehl’s commenters chimed in, [...]

Somebody had to replace David Petraeus, the magical four-star general who just vacated his post as head of US Central Command to take personal charge of that thing in Afghanistan. President Obama’s choice is Marine Corps General James Mattis. McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef—one of the stars of the only institutional press outlet offering aggressive, independent coverage [...]

There was a movie called Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston and originating in the fevered mind of science fiction legend Harry Harrison. The story is set in the future when an omnipresent government develops a miracle food, Soylent Green, to feed the desperately overpopulated world. Charlton Heston plays a police detective who, long story short, [...]

According to the Associated Press, “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is heading to South Asia on a mission aimed at refining the goals of the nearly 9-year-old conflict.” Well, that didn’t take long. Things should be well and truly decided by 2020. Clinton and a bunch of other international heavyweights are flying into Kabul [...]

You know how sometimes you have to explain a joke after telling it? And then you have to wonder if the problem was you, the joke, or the audience? Well, that seems to have happened to me with the image below. Back in July of 2008, I took Photoshop in hand and built the image. [...]

Among the prisoners indefinitely held without charge at Guantanamo are several from Algeria. The Obama administration has wanted to repatriate them, but the prisoners have been fighting the move because they’re afraid that they’ll be mistreated, tortured or killed if they go back. The Obamans say they have received assurances from Algeria that the prisoners [...]

This isn’t a big deal in the scope of things, but it really is pretty funny. As just about everyone who cared knew would happen, a bunch of people are filing lawsuits aimed at overturning the individual health insurance mandate included in the health insurance industry welfare act passed by Congress a short while ago. [...]

Except for that last line you’ll encounter, this is pretty cool: Fema has a new mobile phone app for disaster victims. Today, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced a new feature to the m.fema.gov mobile platform to make it easier for disaster survivors to apply for federal aid from FEMA, and other federal agencies, [...]

Obama’s strongest rank and file supporters come primarily in two flavors: The denialists, who are similar to George Bush’s most enthusiastic followers in that they’ll refuse to recognize any excess or failure while angrily heaping scorn upon the less faithful; and the ones who behave like abused spouses, who recognize bad behavior but always find [...]

The Associated Press and the Washington Post have not necessarily distinguished themselves in covering politics and power during the past decade or two, but both institutions have embarked upon important and large scale projects looking at issues that are central to the way the national security state operates these days (which is pretty much the [...]

As I’ve mentioned before, I like to peruse the AP’s Strange News stories because every now and then there’s something really strange. Usually it’s some element of the strange story that the AP reporter didn’t notice. Last time it was that some guy drew a life sentence in Alabama for theft. This time, the story [...]

If you don’t know the story: A US agriculture department employee, Shirley Sherrod, was fired for allegedly making racist remarks during a speech to the NAACP. In fact, she was making a point about overcoming her prejudices to arrive at the point of realizing that the real issue she needed to deal with was poverty, [...]

It turns out that high-stakes great-power diplomacy is a lot like middle school. And Brokeback Mountain too, although possibly that’s just a cheap hook. Yesterday a bunch of very important people stopped by Hamid Karzai’s place in Kabul, Afghanistan. Among them was Hilary Clinton. The subject of the conference was how to arrive at a [...]

Amid the excitement over Dana Priest’s remarkable and continuing exploration of US intelligence operations and the massive confusion surrounding and informing them, I am reminded of a story from Government Executive magazine back in 2002 when George W. Bush and a Congress still flailing about in the aftermath of 911 created the Department of Homeland [...]

What can you say? Some people overstay their welcomes, others check out too soon no matter how long they’ve been around. It’s painful watching Katie Couric and other lightweights delivering obituaries for Schorr. Offhand I can’t think of anyone really up for the job. I’m sure Keith Olberman will give or has given it a [...]

Bad news for Gulf coast residents attempting to wring restitution from BP. The same guy charged by the Obama administration to recover excessive pay from executives of financial institutions that benefited from taxpayer largesse in the bank bailout frenzy is now in charge of overseeing the yet-to-materialize $20 billion BP restitution fund. From the Associated [...]

Or pixels, anyway. Two stories from something called Examiner.com, both to do with illegal aliens. The first, reporting on an incident in Texas: In what could be deemed an act of war against the sovereign borders of the United States, Mexican drug cartels have seized control of at least two American ranches inside the U.S. [...]

Retired Air Force general Michael Hayden ran the National Security Agency from 1999-2005. Then he was the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for a year. And then he was CIA director, taking over after former CIA agent and former Congressman Porter Goss was ushered out the door under somewhat mysterious circumstances, from 2006 until a [...]

As you probably have by now heard, someone leaked a massive collection of documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan between 2004-2009 to WikiLeaks, which has become the mother of all whistleblower sites. (The site is loading somewhat slowly at the moment, presumably because everybody and their intelligence service is stopping by for a look.) [...]

A joint Pentagon/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency satellite system is so far behind schedule that the government’s capacity to track and research weather and climate may be diminished rather than improved. In the 8 years since a contract was awarded, the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS)—a tri-agency program managed by the National Oceanic [...]

For whatever reason, I find that phrase really annoying. The condition is an unfortunate one, the people who suffer from it deserve some sympathy, but one has to subtract sympathy points for the use of the phrase. If it is uttered spontaneously, subtract all the points. And now, I can tell the purveyors of it [...]

Why are some jokes practical and others, not? Physicality? Someone slipped a little joke into the financial regulatory reform package. What the president calls “the most far-reaching reform since the Great Depression” includes an item exempting the SEC from Freedom of Information Act requests. From Fox Business News: Under a little-noticed provision of the recently [...]

Anyone expecting the WikiLeaks dump of Afghanistan war documents to spur changes in US policy will be disappointed. The buzz may have made voting against the continued funding of the war easier for some among the 114 representatives who did so yesterday, but the administration, abetted and in some instances outpaced by many among the [...]