Unlike the rest of the country who seemed to be up and around watching baseball, I was asleep when the news came to light originally, and didn’t find out until the dulcet tones of the NPR newsreader woke me from the speaker of my alarm clock. The story I heard first upon waking at 5am […]

Aren’t you all supposed to be young, hip, internet-saavy social networking types who were suprised to find upon moving into the west wing that government technology infrastructure was stodgy and behind the times? Assuming this is the case, I’d think that you’d be aware of one of the cardinal rules of online behavior: Really, by […]

As I’ve been perusing the social networking sites this week, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern beginning to emerge. In the last couple of days since the resolution of all that budget and potential shutdown theater we saw last week, a lot of people are starting to realize that all these proposed cuts to the federal […]

Quoth Newt Gingrich, Republican presidential hopeful for 2012, whose unlikely strategy for standing out from the rest of the pack is to portray himself as the reasonable and intellectual historian in a field dominated by raving wingnuts: I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by […]

I’ve been seeing this all over the place the last couple of days, and to be honest, it’s one of the better simple analyses of the whole Wisconsin situation that I’ve seen. Presented here for posterity: A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate […]

Courtesy of Thomas Paine, journalist, propagandist, and one of the “Fathers” of the American Revolution: Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it. A valid and worthy thought, and one that goes completely against the context in which Paine tends to be invoked these days. Just because some guy wrote it […]

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post had a brilliant, beautiful idea the other day, that I thought I ought to share here. Starting today, February 1, 2010, Milbank has vowed to, for at least one month, not mention a certain public figure, and encouraging everyone else to do so, in the hope that by the […]

…those measures, of course, being the shot, the fifth, the case, and the keg… In what’s become a tradition in this space, I shall now provide links to several, shall we say, viewing guides for tonight’s State of the Union Address. Said guides are provided as a service to the public (but not necessarily a […]

Senate Passes “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Repeal. It’s long past time we got rid of the whole “gay people can’t serve” business, even if it is the “well, you can serve, as long as you never ever talk about it” variety. I, for one, am glad to see the United States take one step closer […]

I honestly love it when I find a succinct explanation of a problem that’s been bugging the hell out of me for a long time. Today, I found it in this piece from Rick Perlstein in The Daily Beast (by way of a link from Amanda Marcotte at pandagon): When one side breaks the social […]