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May 2008 - Posts

Saturday "Lost" blogging: "There's No Place Like Home, Parts 2 and 3"

Saturday, May 31, 2008 12:20 PM
The fourth season of "Lost" ended with a bang. In my opinion, this has been the best season so far, due in no small part to the narrative discipline imposed by the writer's strike. With or without the strike, though, Season 4 has focused more on exposition
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Greenwald on the "liberal media" myth

Wednesday, May 28, 2008 9:25 PM
Glenn Greenwald has two pieces in Salon on the persistent myth of the "liberal" media. In the first , he notes some comments from Scott McClellan's explosive new book that portray the media as willing lapdogs of the Bush administration in its run-up to
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McCain fundraiser tanks

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 10:36 PM
This is hilarious : A Tuesday fundraiser headlined by President Bush for U.S. Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign is being moved out of the Phoenix Convention Center. Sources familiar with the situation said the Bush-McCain event was not selling
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The Phoenix has landed

Monday, May 26, 2008 10:04 PM
NASA's Phoenix mission to the polar regions of Mars landed flawlessly this weekend. The mission's goal is to drill beneath the frozen surface and extract samples of ice and soil, which the lander can then subject to a battery of chemical tests. This is
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A typical Twitter exchange

Friday, May 23, 2008 10:14 PM
Here are snippets of an ongoing conversation thread that happened on Twitter today; it involves five different people. These updates were interspersed with other "tweets" from me and the 62 people I follow, so the meandering, cloudy nature of Twitter
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Energy expert says $12 per gallon gas isn't far away

Friday, May 23, 2008 8:43 PM
Robert L. Hirsch , former senior energy adviser for SAIC, author of the Hirsch Report on peak oil, and all-around energy guru, appeared on CNBC the other day to discuss current oil and gas prices. Here's what he said about gas costing $4 a gallon ( via
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Marsha Blackburn and other wingnuts sign off on theocracy

Wednesday, May 21, 2008 10:50 PM
Thirty-one members of the US House of Representatives seem to think the establishment of an American theocracy is a more urgent matter than any of the economic, military, or environmental problems we face. Those 31, including Tennessee's own resident
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The fruits of deliberate ignorance

Tuesday, May 20, 2008 10:33 PM
Despite the fact that creationism and its dark twin intelligent design are nothing more than religious dogma tarted up to look like science, a disturbingly high number of science teachers in US schools insist on presenting that propaganda to their students
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DOJ security trumped by copy/paste

Monday, May 19, 2008 10:06 PM
Matt Blaze accidentally discovered some arguably sensitive information in a US Justice Department audit of wiretapping expenditures. Blaze is a security wizard, so it should come as no surprise that he is well-versed in the art of breaking secure systems.
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Friday "Lost" blogging: "There's No Place Like Home, Part 1"

Friday, May 16, 2008 10:32 PM
This week's "Lost" episode is the initial chapter of the Season Four finale. " There's No Place Like Home, Part 1 " invokes the ending of "The Wizard Of Oz" in its title, although the homecoming for the Oceanic Six turns out to be substantially more complicated
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Quote of the day (on media pundits)

Friday, May 16, 2008 11:30 AM
On the subject of TV pundits, the always-wise Sven had this to say : The real issue is why this doofus was invited in the first place. If a journalist interviewed winos about Federal Reserve policy, our first question probably wouldn't be why winos don't
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Why punctuation matters

Thursday, May 15, 2008 11:11 PM
This is a true story, but I'm changing the names to protect the innocent. A co-worker, whom I'll call "Mark," has been on assignment recently about 10 or 11 time zones away. Back home, his co-worker "John" sent him an email about a meeting that transpired
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Does Bush think the Secretary of Defense is an appeaser?

Thursday, May 15, 2008 12:57 PM
Yesterday, President Bush delivered a speech in Israel in which he called "appeasers" anyone who advocates talks with Iran. He even drew an explicit parallel to 1930's-era Nazi appeasers : "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with terrorists
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The slow implosion of the GOP

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 9:34 PM
The Republican Party seems to be ensnared in a slow-motion downward spiral of late. Party unity on Capitol Hill has all but evaporated, the rank and file are disassociating themselves from the White House like rats from a sinking ship, and the prospects
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The kangaroo courts begin to collapse

Tuesday, May 13, 2008 9:30 PM
The sham "trials" of detainees at Guantanamo have always been legally and Constitutionally invalid, but they were continuing anyway. Now, the process of these show trials has met some blowback from within the Pentagon (in contrast to civilian trials,
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The numbers speak

Monday, May 12, 2008 10:41 PM
The numbers speak for themselves : Eighty-two percent of Americans now say the country's seriously off on the wrong track, up 10 points in the last year to a point from its record high in polls since 1973. And 31 percent approve of Bush's job performance
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Saturday "Lost" blogging: "Cabin Fever"

Saturday, May 10, 2008 12:50 PM
" Cabin Fever ", this week's episode of "Lost," brought us a little closer to the rescue of the Oceanic Six, reinforced the suggestion that Claire is dead, painted a picture of John Locke as some sort of Dalai Lama over the island, and revealed that the
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Another Yoo torture memo

Thursday, May 08, 2008 11:40 PM
In August 2002, John Yoo wrote an infamous memo on behalf of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel which attempted to justify the use of torture by the CIA. The memo has since been released ( PDF here ), widely circulated, and then disavowed
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Veto bait

Wednesday, May 07, 2008 10:27 PM
The pending House appropriations bill that would provide "emergency" funding for the continued occupation of Iraq is certain to draw a veto from the White House (and how much longer is this five-year-old occupation going to be falsely labeled an "emergency"
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Some interesting quotes from a recovering neocon

Tuesday, May 06, 2008 10:30 PM
Lawrence F. Kaplan, one of the premier neocon cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq, has had a change of heart. He no longer considers himself a neocon, and he has had some very unflattering things to say about the Iraq invasion (which he and William
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Sanchez speaks

Monday, May 05, 2008 8:52 PM
From a new memoir by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of US forces in Iraq : Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily
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Destroying the Grand Canyon for fun and profit

Sunday, May 04, 2008 10:11 PM
Because of the resurgence of nuclear power, uranium mining claims in the western US have skyrocketed from 2,000 in 2001 to over 43,000 last year. Those claims are now encroaching on the Grand Canyon and other western monuments: On public lands within
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Bush spins ethanol, lies about ANWR

Saturday, May 03, 2008 11:20 PM
Following a speech in Missouri yesterday, President Bush engaged in an exceedingly rare question-and-answer session with employees of the company where he was speaking. Among other topics, he repeated his threadbare spin of ethanol as a viable fuel source
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Friday "Lost" blogging: "Something Nice Back Home"

Friday, May 02, 2008 10:50 PM
As I do every week, I watch "Lost" online a day or two after it airs on TV. In the meantime, I deliberately avoid reading any reviews or commentary online about that episode. Before writing this post, I've maintained that practice, so I still haven't
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