Wall Street Journal

Via Kevin Drum, the NY Times is reporting that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has reached an agreement to buy Dow Jones and Co. (and so the Wall Street Journal). This is a very bad thing.  The editorials in the Journal are some of the craziest, but the reporting is some of the best in the [...]

Good News

It’s nice to see good news, so here’s a few pieces:

the first of the Khmer Rouge, chief inqisitor Kang Kek Ieu, has been charged under the international tribunal
Cuba seems to opening up a little bit under Raul Castro
a UN team says that North Korea ‘cooperated fully’ with the team that monitored the shutdown and sealing [...]

Supreme Court Redux

Lilly Ledbetter has an editorial up in the Christian Science Monitor.  She’s the woman who lost the sex discrimination case against her employer that was decided by the Supreme Court on May 29 of this year.  I wasn’t blogging at that time, so I’ll use this an excuse to talk about the case.
It seemed pretty [...]

Hamas and the Gaza Strip

I have a problem with religion in government and so I have a problem with Hamas.  Still, I think the US and Israel should negotiate with them for a few reasons:

they won the last election in Palestine and now control the Gaza Strip
the reason they won the last election was because Fatah was and is [...]

More Iraq

Iraq is certainly doing much better.  Here are a few statistics:
According to the 45-page report released in Amman, almost eight million Iraqis are in need of immediate emergency aid with children the hardest hit by worsening conditions. An estimated “43 percent of Iraqis suffer from ‘absolute poverty’.”
“Children are hit the hardest by the decline of living [...]

Bill Walsh

Bill Walsh died today of leukemia.  My favorite sports team has been the San Francisco 49ers since I was about 6 years old.  Bill Walsh was the coach that made the 49ers into one of the best teams ever.  And he is almost universally considered one of the best coaches ever.  He redesigned the offense [...]

Progressives and Science

I was reading Kevin Drum’s note about Yuval Levin’s beginning of the inevitable demonization of ‘progressive’ (since Senator Clinton says she leans more to the term than ‘liberal’) and decided to go look at the article where I clicked one of the links.  On the Left and Science, which has some great bon mots:

Much of what [...]

More Gonzales

The NY Times is trying to explain why Gonzales can claim that he did not lie:
A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.
Therefore, he can technically [...]

FISA

Let’s see–AG Gonzales has been testifying to Congress this week and there’s a bit of a controversy about the TSP (the NSA wiretapping thing) and now Bush wants FISA ‘updated’.  Here’s Bush:
“Our intelligence community warns that under the current statute, we are missing a significant amount of foreign intelligence that we should be collecting to [...]

Khmer Rouge

A bit of a hopeful sign in the world.  The trial of Khmer Rouge leaders might actually be starting soon.  The process started in 1997 and it looked like the trial might be delayed so long that none of the players might still be alive (Pol Pot died in 1998 and the highest surviving Khmer [...]

More North Pole

As an update to this post, here’s another article about Russia’s attempt to claim much of the North Pole region:
About 100 scientists on the Akademik Fyodorov are looking for evidence that the Lomonosov Ridge — a 1,240 mile underwater mountain ridge that crosses the polar region and connects Russia and Greenland — is a geologic [...]

Friday Random 10

Well, here’s the last 10 songs that have come up:
She Bangs The Drums by The Stone Roses 
What It Is by Bad Religion 
Midvikudags by Björk 
Hang On To Your Ego by The Beach Boys 
I Am A Rock by Simon & Garfunkel 
In The Garden by Bob Dylan 
Get It While You Can by Janis Joplin 
Through The Dark by KT Tunstall 
Breakout by Foo Fighters 
Heal It Up [...]

More Gonzales

Here’s a nice analysis of AG Gonzales’ testimony.  It seems the options now are he lied or the TSP program was worse than what was revealed.  My guess is for both to be true.

Tillman

Well, it’s now obvious why there was a cover-up of Tillman’s death in Afghanistan.  There is a possibility that he was murdered. That certainly wouldn’t have looked good since he was considered a hero and was also a critic of the Iraq war.  At least there was appropriate punishment, the general that was responsible for [...]

Iraq Pullout

It’s good to see that the guy in charge (Defense Secretary Gates) is a bit more sane than Edelman (see my previous post here). He says that plans for a pullout are a priority for the Pentagon and that it’s not a bad thing to talk about the plans (this is in a separate article).

No Honor

It’s always good to see wackos get their due. The mother-in law and husband of Surjit Kaur Athwal plotted and then killed her because she wanted to get a divorce which would have brought dishonor on the family–but killing a woman apparently is fine. They were convicted of murder in a court in England–in India [...]

Gonzales

We really shouldn’t be so hard on AG Gonzales.  He has a tough job.  He lied in an obvious and verifiable way to the senate under oath (see here), now he has to show that he did not lie.  That’s tough.
One of his obvious lies was that there was no dissent about the Terrorist Surveillance [...]

No, Today

Another full day, so here’s a poem:
Rolling rocks flow towards nothing
Glowing green the field remains
Never knowing the future approaching
Towards a new day, yesterday.
 

Impeachment

In many of the important issues it seems that Democrats aren’t doing much except talking.  Let’s look at impeachment as an example. For example, if you have been paying attention, it should be obvious that AG Gonzales has lied under oath, knew of and did nothing about the abuse of National Security Letters, did nothing [...]

Republican Filibusters

Remember the big outcry by Republicans over the use of filibusters by Democrats before the last election?  It turns out the Republicans aren’t really against them.
Nearly 1 in 6 roll-call votes in the Senate this year have been cloture votes. If this pace of blocking legislation continues, this 110th Congress will be on track to [...]