1115.org

Politicians using Twitter is a very bad idea. I think Cindy McCain will back me up on this. (no-necro)
Via Gawker

For everyone whose eyes glaze over when discussions of the financial market meltdown dissolve into a mess of technical terms and abbreviations, John Carney provides a short and simple past-and-future history, in the guise of discussing the possible suspension of mark-to-market rules. Very good stuff!
Talking about accounting rules is famously obscure, my-eyes-glaze over stuff. [...]

Paul Krugman seems to have really nailed it when he described today’s Republican party as “the party of Beavis and Butthead”:
Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.
Except that the [...]

RNC Chairman Michael Steele has all kinds of ideas about how to refurbish the image of the Republican party. There’s the “beyond the cutting edge” PR offensive, for instance, the hip-hop flavored one that will be off the hook.
But that one is still “forthcoming”. Till then, Steele is marking time just [...]

Mike Huckabee has evidently pondered the problem of how to bring Republicans bouncing back into political relevance at the national level. And he has come up with a dynamite solution: take a discredited slogan from the most discredited Republican president in living memory, tweak it slightly, and sell it like snake oil.
In a speech [...]

It’s getting so that this kind of thing hardly qualifies as news any more:
The Justice Department is defending a provision in a 2008 surveillance law that provides legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program.
The department was expected to defend the provision. But its stance in a brief filed [...]

A lawyer for Guantanamo detainees is alleging that abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office:
Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office as prison guards “get their kicks in” before the camp is closed, according to a lawyer who represents [...]

It’s been a while since John McCain made the news just for being thoroughly confused about something that nobody has much excuse for being confused about if they aren’t starting to lose their marbles.
That’s probably not because he hasn’t been confused in this manner lately. It’s probably because he’s been keeping a low profile, [...]

The one about rising to your level of incompetence.
Providing impressive proof is Porter Goss. He was incompetent enough to have risen to the level of CIA Director under George Bush. Which represents a doubly impressive level of incompetence, simply because of the amount of sheer incompetence that was going around during [...]

Close friends who I dearly love regard Chuck Schumer as one of the sleaziest Democrats in the Senate. So I tend to regard everything he says and does with a certain amount of healthy skepticism.
Take, for instance, his argument that Republican governors who are unconscionably indifferent to the plight of some of their constituents [...]