Fellow Columbia ’83’er [yes, on THIS blog, it IS always about me] Illinois’ junior senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President from the state capitol in Springfield, the situs of Lincoln’s “house divided against itself” speech to a crowd of onlookers and supporters… and we’ll be damned if Obama’s message wasn’t largely of the same theme as many of Lincoln’s… we’d better come together, we’d better end a lot of the pettiness of our current political era… that sort of thing. While I doubt that Barack is going to reach back to his college class for campaign staff [no,...

Other than to say, perhaps, “You go, Girls!” to Pandagon‘s Amanda Marcotte and Shakespeare’s Sister‘s Melissa McEwan, I was going to try to avoid the whole issue of the John Edwards campaign hiring those two big-time lefty feminist bloggers as part of his campaign’s web operation. But alas, the non-controversy controversy (the always polite, civil and courteous Michelle Malkin says that Amanda is potty-mouthed… the unbiased and non-partisan Mr. William A. Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, says she is “anti-Catholic”… I hear she might even be some kind of feminist or something… and...

Alas, we see that aside from losing the talents and inbound links of some of the greatest bloggers ever to… blog (Berube and Billmon, in recent weeks alone), we see from our new friend, Jon Swift, that the Mighty Atrios has taken to de-linking some of us less-kewl kidz… In lieu of actually thinking, let me just re-post, taken from my comment at Jon’s site (and corrected for, you know, grammar and s**t): Bless you, Jon Swift, for pointing this out. I see that the great Duncan has seen fit to jettison m’self (which given my recent traffic trends amounts...

The military authorities have announced the first three contestants among the Gitmo “worst of the worst” for the first three military tribunals under the new “Congressionally approved” show trials military commissions… meaning these three must be “the worst of the worst of the worst”. Fortunately for our readers, we happen to be familiar with all three of them, having, coincidentally, interviewed attorneys for all three. The lucky first of the worst are… David Hicks from Australia (Joshua Dratel is one of his attorneys); Omar Khadr from Canada (Rick Wilson is one of his attorneys); and the famous Supreme Court case...

The Grey Lady gives us this discussion of the aftermath of the jury death sentence verdict of Ronell Wilson in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn (the first federal death sentence in New York City since the era of the Rosenbergs); Wilson had previously been convicted for the brutal execution style murder of two New York City undercover detectives, James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews, in Staten Island, a crime that shocked the City at the time. A death verdict in a case in New York City (not even Sheik Abdul Rahman, Ramzi Youssef and the perpetrators of the first World Trade...

The Democrats managed to pass a minimum wage increase in the Senate (from a pathetic $5.15 per hour where it has been for over 10 years to a still low $7.25 per hour); against the threat of a filibuster, Harry Reid and the gang allowed some extensions of “small business” tax breaks, offset by some millionaire executive tax increases… a lot better deal, all told, than the Republicans had gone in with. On the whole, really a small price to pay for dramatically improving the incomes (by nearly 40%!) of those workers at the bottom of the economic ladder who...

Oy. First, the President decamps around 100 yards or so from where I work, to tell a bunch of Wall Street millionaires about how well the economy is doing… further telling Wall Streeters and CEOs to… wait for it… watch those executive compensation packages! Meanwhile, one of the most vocal and eloquent of the President’s critics, best-selling writer Molly Ivins, lost her battle with cancer, and passed away at 62. She famously called the younger President Bush “Shrub”, and quipped that he “was born on third base, and thought he hit a triple.” It appears that the Justice Department will...

Such is the conclusion of this piece in the Grey Lady that examines the real effects of Europe’s craze for bio-fuels, in particular palm oil grown in Indonesia and Malaysia. The conclusion is that while there may be some modest reduction in greenhouse gases in Europe, these modest reductions come at the expense of humongous carbon releases (third largest in the world) in Indonesia and Malaysia as carbon-trapping peat bogs are drained, and burned, to make way for palm oil plantations! Remember… burning wood, or corn oil, or sugar cane, is arguably “renewable”, but if the problem is the overall...

Apparently, as we come up to around a year (I think it was February 11th or 12th) since Dick Cheney accidentally blasted fellow quail-killer Harry Whittington down at the Armstrong place in Nowhere, TX, and as Dick has to come to grips with his good friend I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby probably facing jail time as a result of the Vice President’s personal vindictiveness (and the fact that Karl is so gooooodddd….) the rest of Dick’s mind seems to be getting as reliable as his aim, at least in this lengthy diatribe by Dan Froomkin writing in the WaPo… hat tip...

And so, it seems, that one of the most dangerous pandemics out there is not some new and exotic strain of avian flu from East Asia, or even some virulent germ warfare smallpox launched by our suicidal enemies… but good old tuberculosis, particularly a medication-resistant variety of TB now ravaging South Africa, particularly among its already AIDS ridden population. TB, of course, is something that is already running around America’s vast system of prisons… even TB of the drug-resistant kind. The thing with disease of this kind is that, like climate change, social class and money cannot guarantee protection from...