CIVIL LIBERTIES ALERT….Via Atrios, the Center for Public Integrity reports on sweeping new “Patriot II” legislation that is currently being drafted by the Department of Justice. It’s just chock full of new restrictions on civil liberties, but my favorite is this: Section 501, ?Expatriation of Terrorists?: This provision, the drafters say, would establish that an […]

TERROR ALERT….Here’s the latest from CNN: a permanent little bug in the bottom right of the screen reminding everyone that our current terror alert level is now ORANGE (or HIGH). Yecch. But what to do? The talking head on Crossfire is saying, well, we should be careful, but on the other hand, if we actually […]

CHESS FINALE….Man vs. machine is over: Garry Kasparov offered a draw after the 28th move and it was accepted by the Deep Junior team. The final match score is 3-3. The ESPN2 commentators were surprised, even shocked and “dissatisfied,” suggesting that Kasparov’s position was promising and he might have been able to eke out a […]

SOME MINOR KVETCHING….Can I just take a moment to complain about something trivial? Thanks. I’m about two-thirds of the way through What Liberal Media? and I’ve already counted an even dozen proofreading errors ? and that’s generous since I’m counting repeatedly misspelled names as only a single mistake. I might be wrong about this, but […]

ANOTHER HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST….TBOGG has a list of all the Hollywood celebrities that are currently being boycotted by the good folks at FreeRepublic.com. They just added Dustin Hoffman and the list now includes 89 celebrities. No, that’s not a misprint. 89.

CHESS UPDATE….LIVE!….Heh. ESPN2 is televising the sixth and final game of the Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Junior chess match. Right now the announcers are comparing Kasparov to Michael Jordan….

BUSH AND HOMELAND SECURITY….One of the things that Democrats could do a better job of is criticizing President Bush’s lame efforts to increase domestic security. Today Alex Gourevitch, writing in The American Prospect, tries to make that point: Bush’s problem is not that he’s doing too little for national security but that he’s doing it […]

SELLING OUT THE KURDS?….American foreign policy has a long history of creating long term problems in return for short term gains. Exhibits A and B (this year, anyway) are the aid that we gave to both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. To some extent these tradeoffs are inevitable in an imperfect […]

COOKING THE BOOKS….The Bush budget is so bad that I literally haven’t had the heart to dig into it and blog about it. It’s just a nightmare, and one that’s difficult to explain even with the most cynical possible view of both human nature and the Bush administration in general. The worst part of the […]

HARD-CORE CREATIONISM….Chris Mooney points to a post today by Brian Montopoli about the Michael Dini evolution case (no permalinks, scroll to “Dini does it”). Brian reports, not surprisingly, that the whole thing is a put-up job and Micah Spradling is little more than a pawn in a bigger game: Liberty Legal, the religious legal group […]