Category: long story short

OK, so wait a minute, is Michael Lerner (of Tikkun) “deeply silly” or not?

Every warblogger’s favorite idiotarian rag, The Guardian, has a little article today on voting-machine paranoia: One is Georgia, where all the votes in 2002 were cast on Diebold screens. The sitting Democratic senator and (to general astonishment) governor were both defeated in the election. Nine of Diebold’s 12 directors are listed as Republican donors. The…

Speaking of jumping to conclusion, MSNBC has retracted its original interpretation of the Osama tape as saying that bin Laden encouraged the overthrow of Saddam. Apparently, while Ba’ath socialists are infidels, it’s OK to stand with them to fight against the U.S. Meanwhile, the invaluable Mark Kleiman tries to sort out the layers of meaning…

Ken Layne is concerned that airlines may be dropping the ID check at the gate. He calls it “one of the only sane security checks—is the guy with the boarding pass the same guy who cleared the first security gate?” John Gilmore sees it the opposite way. He points out that “People in the US…

Looks like I jumped to conclusions. The news appears to be that Kerry will have surgery for prostate cancer, not that he will be dropping out of the race. When TPM posted that this news would “shake up” the race, I mistakenly assumed this meant a reshuffling of the candiates. My bad. Best wishes to…

TPM hints that a prospective Democratic presidential candidate is about to drop out of the race for health reasons.

For years I’ve been bugging my friends about an untenable, unmarketable, too-expensive-to-produce idea for a dynamic atlas. I’ve always been a huge fan of historical atlases, those books that show not just where the borders and populations are now but where they used to be and how they’ve changed. What I like about the idea…

With the demise of the nonpartisan exit-polling service and the news of uncheckable voting machines owned by Republican politicians, Douglas Rushkoff has concluded that voting rights in the U.S. are in even worse shape than some of the dirty tricks in the last two election cycles may have indicated: My farewell is also a sad…

Check out the excellent work at Is That Legal? covering the Howard Coble story. Coble, who you may recall was opposed for reelection by blogger Tara Sue Grubb recently stated that the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II was done for their own good. This is the man in charge of Homeland Security…

If you didn’t find Bush’s state of the union message convincing, maybe you need to read between the lines, as in this remixed version of the SOTU speech. [via Hyperbole]

Last night a creepy wind blew west from the hills, in strange pulsing gusts, dying down to nearly nothing and then growing almost instantly to gale force, whipping shrubs and vines against our drainpipe and windows, stripping new buds from plants fooled by the false spring we’ve been having around here lately, tossing the top…

This graphic published in Yahoo! News – Politics yesterday speaks volumes:

I rejoiced a week or so ago when I learned that Peet’s was about to reintroduce Aged Sumatra beans after a several-year hiatus. I am drinking it right now. Sumatra is fine as it goes, but the aged stuff is just incredible. Mellow, chocolate-y, rich, flavorful. My endorsement for the day. However, over the weekend,…

“The moon landscape depicted in Petr Ginz’s drawing attests to his aspiration to reach a place from where the earth, which threatened his life, could be seen from a secure range.” (from Holocaust-era Art from Yad Vashem’s Collection sent into space with Israeli Astronaut)

I suppose it was inevitable that the frootbats would crawl out of the woodwork almost immediately with conspiracy theories about the shuttle disaster, in this case claiming that it was a deliberate act of self-sabotage in order to provide distracting news coverage during the ramp-up to war in Iraq. And I thought I was being…

There was no warning of a problem until the explosion, it seems. Columbia was NASA’s oldest shuttle but has been entirely refurbished somewhat recently. This means the cause of the accident is still a mystery. They also seem to be ruling out human error/pilot error. A spokesman for NASA told people who may be in…

I felt paranoid wondering if there was any chance of sabotage or other hostile actions, but I realize now that I was far from the only person to have this thought, and I flipped to Peter Jennings saying that this has effectively been ruled out, or at least that the accident happened too far up…

I hate getting those calls or email that say, “turn on your TV.” That’s how 9/11 started for me. With all the talk lately about the Challenger disaster it seems cruelly ironic that the Columbia has broken up on reentry. Anything else I was going to post or write about seems trivial right now.

Says Kurt Vonnegut, in this short interview from In These Times: “I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers.”

Robert Reich dissects Rove’s Machiavellian chops in “The Rove Machine Rolls On” in The American Prospect, detailing his techniques. Among them: Count on the American public’s (and the media’s) inability to remember anything from one year to the next. The Rove machine gave Bush tough talking points on corporate fraud when the newspapers were full…

San Francisco based film maker and photographer Bijan Yashar will be projecting George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in real time onto the wall of the Shell Station at Market and Sanchez. He will filter the live speech through a camera utilizing extreme and shifting angles to “reveal implicit perspectives and points of…