This is interesting — there’s a movement afoot in New York state to pardon Lenny Bruce, the controversial comedian who was hounded by the authorities for “obscenity” until he died of a drug overdose in 1966. Bruce has always been one of my personal heroes. He was a troubled soul, to be certain, and his […]

David Brake points to an amazing transcript of a recent interview on Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor” between anchor-slash-blowhard Bill O’Reilly and Jeremy Glick, whose father died in the 9-11 attacks and who signed an ad opposing the war in Iraq. (Note that the transcript is hosted by a liberal news site, so its veracity may be […]

Given that the “Bush Doctrine” says that we will combat terrorism by unilaterally attacking any state that harbors terrorists or sponsors their activities — does this mean that we’ve got another war coming?

Gary Hart has a good piece up on what happens to republics when they start to behave like empires.

Big news from Texas — the Democratic state legislators who walked out when the Republican majority tried to force legislative districts to be redrawn in the GOP’s favor have returned to Austin victorious. State House Speaker Tom Craddick promised them that, if they returned and restored a quorum, the redistricting issue would be dropped for […]

This is interesting — tech book publisher O’Reilly and Associates have adopted the limited, 28 year copyright term known as the Founders’ Copyright (since it’s the original copyright term granted by the Founding Fathers in the 1790s) for their publications. This means that many O’Reilly books will enter the public domain within our lifetime — […]

You know, I never gave much thought to MSNBC’s Ashleigh Banfield as a serious journalist. She always struck me as more of a pretty face the network trotted out to grab people’s attention while they channel-surf. But something really remarkable has happened that’s changed my thinking on that subject a bit. On April 24, Kansas […]

Oh, dear sweet God, not this. That’s wrong in more ways than I can count. Thankfully someone is doing something about it. The question is, will the Powers That Be listen?

Does this new site make Gary Hart the first-ever Presidential candidate with a blog? He denies he’s running yet, but it sure looks that way to me…

From the Times of London: Bush Sr. Warning Over Unilateral Action. How pathetic is it that we have to read British newspapers to find out news from our own country?

Josh Marshall has an excellent analysis of the seriousness of the recent escalation of the North Korean situation. Meanwhile, John Robb is contemplating the consequences that could spin out if the North decided to take advantage of our focus on Iraq by making a grab for South Korea. In that scenario, all hell breaks loose […]

Well, it looks like pioneering online magazine Salon.com is lurching toward its end — apparently they can’t even make their office rent anymore. This is sad, but expected. Salon has always had some of the best writing on the Web, but they were early victims of dot-com hubris, paying out the wazoo for fancy downtown […]

Looks like Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich is prepping to run for President. That’s great news — Kucinich is a strong, progressive, articulate Democratic voice. It’s encouraging to see him making a move towards the national stage; the rest of the Democratic field is so anemic that any signs of life from the party are very […]

Now that the British government has released its classified dossier on Saddam Hussein, we’ll surely find out why it’s so critical we go after him before we finish off bin Laden! Channel 4 News: Downing Street has been forced to admit it made a mistake with an intelligence dossier released on Monday… A spokesman confessed […]

Apparently the military is facing a shortage of a critical defense resource: bandwidth. It seems that, even though forces in the field have access to orders of magnitude more wired and wireless bandwidth than they did ten years ago, the brass’ desire for whiz-bang features like streaming video from Predator drones is causing other requests […]

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has busted the Bush Administration for hypocrisy on the issue of race. It turns out that the White House had a little tradition, started by Woodrow Wilson almost 100 years ago, of sending a wreath on Memorial Day to decorate the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. The reason? […]

From Larry Lessig’s blog: “The Supreme Court has rejected our challenge to the Sonny Bono Law.” Well, looks like the copyright cartels have won the right to fence off the intellectual commons to whatever degree they can buy support in Congress for. If we ever see another publication hit the public domain in our lifetimes, […]

You’ve probably heard by now that Steve Case is leaving AOL/Time Warner. Naturally AOLTW shareholders are cheering, as they’re tired of watching their stock deflate, and they pin the blame on Case and his management of the merger. This is 100% wrong. Seeing Steve Case leave AOL should be a sad moment for anybody who […]

Looks like the Chinese government has recently blocked access for its citizens to several major blog services hosted outside that country, including BlogSpot. Naturally, bloggers are up in arms. In a way, this isn’t too surprising; China has spent the last few years building a network of firewalls for precisely the purpose of controlling the […]

From an excellent article in today’s New York Times covering Microsoft’s new product announcements: Microsoft has built a new national wireless data network, based on the data broadcasting ability of FM radio stations. The company says that compared with traditional paging systems, this network makes it cheaper both to broadcast data and build receivers. Does […]

Anyone remember the Office of Strategic Influence? It was an idea floated by Donald Rumsfeld for an agency within the Pentagon whose express purpose would be to feed misinformation and propaganda to the press and populations of countries we didn’t like. When the public erupted in outrage over this little idea, Rumsfeld quickly backed down […]

More on the ever-widening Trent Lott story… First up, looks like even the President is condemning him now. Finally, something that George W. Bush and I can agree on! Also — and more interesting — Time has unearthed a story from Lott’s college years about him working to keep blacks out of his fraternity while […]

When it comes to people’s political opinions, the ones I value the least are the ones that are the most clearly knee-jerk. You know what I mean; the people who can be counted on to reflexively support Republicans or Democrats (or, more generally, the right or the left) just out of ideological affinity. For example, […]

A follow-up to my previous item about the bigoted remarks Sen. Trent Lott recently made: Well, it looks like Lott has finally apologized, even if grudgingly so. ‘Bout time, Trent.