I sort of feel bad for Pat Burns, who wrote this story on the dramatic drop in residential building for today’s Intell. Because while it’s a fine story - a relevant story - any time you do a story like this you’re forced to listen to the eternally sunny rhetoric of the homebuilding or homebuying industry. […]

[Read more →]

First, take a look at this picture:

 
Then ask youself, so who’s the guy?
Why, that would be Richard Mellon Scaife, owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. This Richard Mellon Scaife:
funder of the Arkansas Project, the American Spectator during its prime Clinton-hunting years and virtually every right-wing operation of note at one point or another over the […]

[Read more →]

Don’tcha like how this works?
At least 55 people have been killed and 300 wounded in Basra and Baghdad after the fighting spread to the capital’s main Shiite district of Sadr City, police and hospital officials said.
The ultimatum came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was in Basra to supervise a crackdown against the spiraling violence between […]

[Read more →]

And now, YA-TA-TA-TA…
In an interview with ABC News yesterday, Vice President Dick Cheney asserted that President Bush “carries the biggest burden” of the Iraq war and even compared staying the course in Iraq to the pardoning of President Nixon. But Cheney also took time out to insult Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) […]

[Read more →]

Love-ly. Glenn Greenwald links to a just ducky post on a conservative blog which, beneath a wonderful Easter poem and picture of the crucified Christ, goes on to air some rather pungent thoughts about Barack Obama’s proposed national discussion on race:
On the other hand, I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. […]

[Read more →]

And so, on the heels of a Pentagon report which confirms there was no direct link between Saddam and al Qaeda, Wingnut Inc. just can’t let it go.
Well, of course. That’s how we got here in the first place; and so ThinkProgress documents for us the latest atrocity, and it’s exactly that, this time from […]

[Read more →]

And it is. Happy Easter, y’all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Opz_drg1O8

[Read more →]

Because it is Saturday night, after all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2Y5LKZPwV4

[Read more →]

Owtch. Gore Vidal, whose writing is some of the sharpest I’ve ever read, skewers his old and now dead foe William F. Buckley - using not the rapier but the chainsaw:
Parenthetically, I should note that, back in 1968, ABC TV had asked me and Buckley to “debate” each other at the Democratic and Republican conventions. […]

[Read more →]

This one came up on the MP3 player today, brought back good memories. 1986, spring semester freshman year, and there was this blonde girl…
Good lord. That was 22 years ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONIvoZJDiPU

[Read more →]

The incredible shrinking GOP:

The balance of party identification in the American electorate now favors the Democratic Party by a decidedly larger margin than in either of the two previous presidential election cycles.
In 5,566 interviews with registered voters conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press during the first two months of […]

[Read more →]

Via Matt Yglesias, a glimpse into how Iraq is being run these days:
During the war in Iraq, young Army and Marine captains have become American viceroys, officers with large sectors to run and near-autonomy to do it. In military parlance, they are the “ground-owners.” In practice, they are power brokers.
“They give us a chunk of […]

[Read more →]

Boy, when Chris Wallace - that being Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace - rips into the Fox and Friends crowd for their “excessive” and “somewhat distorting” commentary on the Wright-Obama thing, maybe the worm really is turning.

[Read more →]

Creepy:
If you have some tinfoil handy, now might be a good time to fashion a hat. At the Digital Living Room conference today, Gerard Kunkel, Comcast’s senior VP of user experience, told me the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into devices so it can know who’s in your living room.
The idea […]

[Read more →]

Don’t you sometimes think you’re living in an echo chamber, where things said five years ago bounce back at you, sounding only slightly different?
But most striking was Bush’s accusation that Iran has openly declared its nuclear weapons intentions, even though a National Intelligence Estimate concluded in December that Iran had stopped its weapons program in […]

[Read more →]

Hey, maybe when Sen. Mike Brubaker’s done making sure Teh Dreaded Queers don’t get hitched he can line up a few one-way cruises.

[Read more →]

Ah: Now I see. McCain didn’t really mean that business about Iran and al Qaeda.
Except that he did:
But while the McCain campaign is backing away from the specific claims about Iranian training of Al Qaeda, it is asserting that Iran collaborates with Osama bin Laden’s organization.
Mr. McCain’s national security adviser, Randy Scheunemann, told The New […]

[Read more →]

See, I’m not opposed to this, I’m not opposed to this at all:
U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel writes in a new book that the United States needs independent leadership and possibly another political party, while suggesting the Iraq war might be remembered as one of the five biggest blunders in history.
Well, yes on both the former […]

[Read more →]

Via Kevin Drum, Rick Perlstein explains why that “Thank you, President Bush” was planted in that Lititz lawn in the first place:
The “Reagan rebound,” he said at this morning’s panel “Bushed: Conservative Failure and the Danger the Legacy Lives On,” “allowed them to define conservative government as a success.” It had, indeed, been a conscious […]

[Read more →]

Hm. So here’s John McCain saying that, no no no, we shouldn’t read anything at all into his little gaffe about Iran arming Teh Most Nefarious Terrorists of Ever, al Qaeda:
Asked if it’s “a fair question” to wonder if it was more than “simply a slip of a tongue,” McCain replied that “to think that […]

[Read more →]