No, there isn’t any WMD in Iraq. But the Army Corps of Engineers believes it has found evidence of a long sought chemical weapons cache buried in my neighborhood during World War I. According to the local paper (PDF): The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has unearthed three broken glass jugs in Spring Valley that might have come from the longsought Sgt. Maurer burial pit, according to a D.C. Department of the...

This has to be seen to be believed — and having seen the whole thing, I still am having trouble believing it. You can watch the video at Crooks and Liars; John Amato’s text explanation is below:

Beyond the issue of whether Justice Alito was substantively right or wrong when he mouthed at last night’s SOTU that Pres. Obama’s characterization of the Citizens United decision was “not true,” there is another issue that very few (if any) bloggers or pundits are discussing — and that is whether it was improper for Justice Alito to visibly react to what Obama said.

Yesterday, Howard Zinn. Today, J.D. Salinger. The famed author of Catcher in the Rye, which achieved both literary and commercial success, and inspired an entire generation of misunderstood, rebellious young anti-hero books and movies, was born on January 1, 1919, making him eight months younger, to the day, than my father, who was born on May 1, 1918.  I’m not sure what that means, if anything, but still...

Eighty-seven is a ripe old age, but it’s still a great loss. The Boston Globe has a long, detailed, very meaty obituary. Here are some quotes, in that article, from a range of people, famous in their own right, who knew Prof. Zinn:

Yesterday was Wednesday, and Chris Matthews said something dumb again.

Until his peroration “to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and to strengthen our union once more,” the President spent more than an hour last night calling out everyone in the chamber, including himself, for “a difficult year.” Congressional Republicans, Democrats, even the Supreme Court came in for their share of scolding. The unusual tone of this State of the Union came from both...

I was watching the State of the Union address last night and, as I saw half our legislators sit on their hands while their president tried to rally the nation, it dawned on me what a difficult task this man, this Mr. Obama—this mere mortal—has ahead of him. And for some reason I thought of the Creation. Now, don’t get me wrong. Trying to fix the mess our country finds itself in doesn’t even...

AMERICAblog’s John Aravosis was one of the first to point it out, in his SOTU live-blogging:

I am not very computer savvy, nor “Twitter,” “Facebook,” or other social-networking-sites-savvy. However, at the insistence of my “kids,” I joined Facebook. I use Facebook sparingly, mainly to look at photos of relatives and friends and, being concerned about privacy, I have kept my “Profile” very lean and my posting very limited. On the other hand, I notice that many include a lot of personal...

In case you’ve missed it there is a brewing controversy over a coming Super Bowl ad featuring college football star Tim Tebow and his mother. The ad is paid for by a conservative religious group (Focus on The Family) and recounts the fact that when Mrs. Tebow was pregnant with Tim that she got sick with dystenery and was advised to abort the fetus. For personal religious reasons she did not abort and had...

Ezra Klein made this point on Countdown last night:

As the number of U.S. troops arriving in Haiti was quickly mounting during the early days of the humanitarian relief effort, there were scattered wails that the U.S. was invading and trying to occupy that country. Those who had such worries may want to read recent reports where some officials with extensive experience in humanitarian relief and peacekeeping now express concern that “the troops, ships and...

Glenn Greenwald’s article about the automatic, unquestioned exemption of military spending from inclusion in the spending freeze Barack Obama reportedly plans to announce in the SOTU tomorrow evening has this stunning pie chart:

“Ever since I started covering politics, the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.’s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.’s. The Republican ruling class has been driven by the fantasy that voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.’s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.’s. Members of the ruling class...

Greg Sargent, noting a new CNN poll that shows, for the first time since Barack Obama has been in office, that a higher percentage of Americans think that Democratic Party control of Congress is bad for the country than think it’s good for the country, puts the question to us:

America, or the entire cinematic world, celebrates next month the centenary of Hollywood’s first movie. The filming in February 1910 of D. W. Griffith’s “In Old California” was considered a cultural landmark. Equally fascinating are the details about the development of Hollywood (situated just 11 kms from Los Angeles) coinciding with the birth of the first movie. Director D.W. Griffith...

A snip from Barack Obama’s interview with Diane Sawyer:

Tomorrow it will be two weeks since that massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti. I have written on the efforts by the U.S. and other countries, organizations and individuals to rescue those trapped in the rubble and to save lives, to treat the injured and to reduce the immense suffering. There have been many stories on the stoicism, the perseverance and the endurance of the Haitian people. Those rescued...

Hello there, Dr. E. here. The following is a Guest Contributor opinion column by Will Marshall, who is the founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute, which describes its blog as “…Lively political commentary informed by rigorous analysis and evidence. Inspired wonkery — a constant stream of bold ideas for solving big public problems. And a distinctly progressive point of view...

NPR ran an important three part story last week on the half-million people sitting in jail — petty, nonviolent offenders who are there for only one reason — because they can’t make bail. It’s an expensive proposition; in Broward County, FL, for example, jail costs $115 a day per inmate. A far cheaper alternative, a pretrial program in Broward costs about $7 a day. That program saved...

South Carolina has a new embarrassment: Andre Bauer, the lieutenant-governor — and the man who is running to replace Mark Sanford as governor:

When the truth doesn’t serve, lie:

The world expectantly awaits word from its most powerful man, Barack Obama who delivers his State of the Union address on January 27. On that day, France’s Nicholas Sarkozy will make a keynote speech at Europe’s most prestigious annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, of global political, business and civil society leaders. The only significant American personality at the World Economic Forum’s Davos...

Fiction. As in, not real. Which is pretty much what the United States Supreme Court has made of our fundamental right to freedom of speech when political speech is involved.  As in, made it not real but just a fiction of a concept. From SCOTUSblog on this point of corporations being only legal fiction: Justice Stevens, writing for the dissenters, turned Chief Justice John Marshall’s celebrated comment in...