Category: long story short

  • Cheney coverup

    Oliver Willis cites Dick Cheney for obstruction of justice. What happeend to that story circulating a few weeks ago that the energy task force documents included maps of Iraq’s oil fields? Speaking of connecting the dots, when is someone going to connect Bush et al., Ken Lay, Enron, the California energy crisis, the northeast blackout,…

  • Twice the casualties

    I heard on the Lehrer news hour today that the number of U.S. casualties in Iraq since the declaration of an end to major combat operations now equals the number of casualties during said major combat operations. So now the occupation is already technically as deadly as the invasion was and we are still only…

  • The Internet as political tool

    In Net gains, an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Cory Doctorow argues that a political sleeping giant – the Internet-savvy – is waking up and trying to learn how to go beyond pointing out flaw and poking holes. He mentions the greater sources of news information online, weblogs, and things like the campign Meetups and…

  • Money gets your home on the range

    I lost five productive years of potential 410(k) accumulation at the beginning of my working life because I expected the international monetary system to collapse within the decade. You should always have bought a house 15 years ago, no matter how outrageous the price seemed then. One of my favorite books of philosophy is Money…

  • Stupidity lessons

    I was really not at my best yesterday. Everything felt like a struggle. I forgot simple things when shopping, brought home fruit with gouges or visible patches of mold on them, knocked over two beers next to the refrigerator so hard that I loosened their caps and they started foaming up all over the linoleum.…

  • Bush toy a disappointment

    Apparently the aviator-flashback doll of President George W. Bush didn’t play well with others in the household (and backyard) of this writer.

  • Please all, please none

    Matt Welch deftly illustrates how Gray Davis, a trimmer, has micromanaged himself into standing for nothing and for nobody. OK, I guess “raising money” and “himself” might fit the bill, but the point is that those of us who fear another right-wing coup legal project have little to fight with here. We can be against…

  • O’Reilly as USENET-type troll

    In this Blogcritis post, Stephen Silver fisks Bill O’Reilly’s “editorial” defending the Fox network’s lawsuit against Al Franken (for people outside the Instapundit orbit, fisking has come to mean interlacing a source text with refutations and rebuttals). While scanning the article (it isn’t too hard to debunk O’Reilly’s half-baked bluster), I noticed a familiar typo:…

  • A life in miniature

    I’m continuing to assemble scraps of past weblog/journals into this one. I just retrieved all the entries to the Diaryland journal I called Still Breathing. It was my first attempt at taking the experiment of Breathing Room from an entirely hand-coded flat-file system to an automated one. It was still in the diary/journal form that…

  • I’ve got your ‘fair and balanced’ right here

    Oliver Willis sees conspiracies (Dear Fox News) what the rest of us rubes attribute to shortsightedness and malice.

  • Apologia for Michael Moore

    This front-page post to kuro5hin includes a point-by-point defense of Michael Moore and “Bowling for Columbine”. I still haven’t seen the movie, but I keep meaning to so I can make up my own mind about it.

  • Depends on the meaning of ‘imminent’

    Apologists for the Bush team and its war policy now say that Bush et al. never declared the threat from Iraq to be an “imminent” threat. Slyblog, among others, isn’t letting them get away with revising history. I thought this kind of parsing of words to excuse half-truths and outright lies went out with the…

  • Best analysis of recall yet

    Once again, The Onion has the best political coverage around.

  • Reclaiming our political history

    The liberal project has miles to go, but the Republican habit of vilifying the word liberal stops here with me right now.

  • Lieberman breaks Reagan’s 11th Commandment

    Regardless of which Democrat eventually gets the nomination, by no means should the candidates be tearing each other down at this stage. I was dismayed to see Lieberman attacking Dean as too liberal, as quoted in this Dean interview with Larry King: KING: Speaking of the others attacking you, yesterday, on Sunday, Senator Joe Lieberman,…

  • The Cluetrain candidate

    Influential weblogger, academic, consultant and author David Weinberger (one of the coauthors of the Cluetrain Manifesto), has come out For Howard Dean: [W]hat I’ve been doing so far: Sundry writing for the campaign and talking with them about Net issues. I’ve also done a little speaking on behalf of the campaign – well, once, substituting…

  • SRO on Coulter

    I generally try to ignore Ann Coulter (as I do all trolls) but I couldn’t resist mentioning that over at Standing Room Only, Hugh Elliott has some Queer Tips for the Right-Wing Bitch.

  • Pictures of the boys

    When I was in New York I got to spend one evening with my mom, brother, sister-in-law, and nephews, who have since turned one year old. As is often the case, most of the pictures I took came out blurry, but some seemed worth preserving, even with motion lines. I tried using the flash, but…

  • California Insider weblog

    Via Tim Porter’s First Draft we learn that Sacramento Bee politcal columnist Dan Weintraub has got a blog called California Insider: Weintraub started the blog in April. Even though he self-identifies as a member of the “dreaded mainstream media,” he inspires bridge the gap between David Broder and Mickey Kaus, “hoping that the combination produces…

  • The sore losers

    People keep asking me what I think about this recall. I’ve never been a fan of Gray, Grey, Gumby, Eraserhead, Gravy Davy, or whatever else you may wish to call him, but I am uncomfortable with the growing willingness of the Republican Party to push at least to the limit of the letter of the…

  • Protect, restore, celebrate

    They got her title wrong and gave her credit for some things that should have gone to her coworker, but the Sunday Chronicle’s article on the Bay Trail, BAY TRAIL ADVENTURE / Tramping East Bay to the Bay Bridge, featured some extensive quotations from B: Out in the grass, Briggs Nisbet and her crew bent…