John McCain has, on balance, a good op-ed in the WaPo refuting Michael Mukasey’s embrace of torture. McCain’s larger point is that our approach to the Arab Spring will have a key role in our ability to defeat terrorists, which is a point not being made vociferously enough. And while he places himself in the [...]

Our entire country’s mediascape will no doubt get suckier as Comcast returns to its typical bad behavior after having eaten NBC. We will become less well-informed. We will fall further behind the rest of the world for broadband access. And we will continue to wait for ComcastSucks repairmen. And all so Meredith Attwell Baker could [...]

Eclectablog, who has been doing solid reporting on the takeover of Benton Harbor by an Emergency Financial Manager, has been wondering why MI’s Democratic Party hasn’t been more vociferous in supporting Benton Harbor. Today, he reported that MI Dems Chair Mark Brewer told Berrien County’s Dems that the MDP would not help them. The occasion [...]

Some of us have been having fun on Twitter discussing the reported power struggle in al Qaeda to replace Osama bin Laden in terms we’d use to discuss an American election. Which made this report–which Frontline linked as part of their Kill/Capture program that aired last night–all the more chilling. The author, Kate Clark, consulted [...]

To be fair, Steny Hoyer can’t lay sole claim to be the Congressman representing the National Security Agency–the NSA actually gets three Congressmen: Steny, John Sarbanes, and Dutch Ruppersberger. But I think it fair to note that Steny has, at key times, been the beneficiary of big political contributions from corporations with NSA sensitivities–like AT&T [...]

According to this post, this op-ed in the WSJ got badly edited after it was originally published. The bolded words are just some of what WSJ axed after the fact. (h/t Naked Capitalism) The official wisdom is that Greece, Ireland and Portugal have been hit by a liquidity crisis, so they needed a momentary infusion [...]

The Obama Administration was gung ho to brag about the GM IPO last year. But if I’m not mistaken, this is the first time the White House has bragged nationally about jobs created thanks to the auto bailout (Ron Bloom, who got promoted into an official Assistant to the President role at the beginning of [...]

Used to be, when you vanquished your enemy, you declared victory and went home. Not this time. Just a week after the death of Osama bin Laden–who declared war on the US in 1996–Buck McKeon has renewed his effort to rewrite the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force so as to include our secret wars [...]

As Mark Bittman said when he tweeted this press releasem, “If bottled water is getting recalled we’re all in a lot of trouble.” FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – May 4, 2011 - Officials at the Arkansas Department of Health (ADH) announced today that test results on a sample taken from certain lots of Mountain Pure bottled drinking [...]

Robert Chesney notes that the HASC Mark on the Defense Authorization bill includes a section on cyberwar. Here’s the entire section: This section would affirm that the Secretary of Defense has the authority to conduct military activities in cyberspace. The committee recognizes that because of the evolving nature of cyber warfare, there is a lack [...]