I’ll be heading over to the University of California Washington Center at 6:30 for an event with Nobel laureates Shirin Ebadi and Jody Williams; should be interesting.

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“1984” by freshly-signed Righteous Babe artist Anais Mitchell, who has a blog but needs to make more liberal use of the paragraph tag. (OK, technically the song was released in 2004, but I only just heard it, so it’s the Orwell-inspired folk song of my year…)

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Apparently, Sealand is for sale. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out Wired‘s 2000 cover story on the artificial micronation.

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Iraqi police officer Jamil Hussein, a source for multiple AP stories whose accuracy has come under fire, is now confirmed to be, in fact, an Iraqi police officer, despite several weeks of charges from the hawkish blogosphere that he was some sort of fictional character, as his name was absent from both Iraqi and U.S. […]

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Citizens Against Government Waste compares their own ideal earmark reform with proposals offered by the president and congressional Dems. Short version: They’re not utterly satisfied with what’s on the table, but this is a good first step forward.

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I meant to link this back when it first appeared a couple weeks back, but Justin Logan has an excellent short response to the proponents of a “surge” strategy for Iraq.

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Jagdish Bhagwati argues that technological innovation—rather than everyone’s favorite bugbear, globalization—is responsible for keeping down the wages of low-skilled workers.

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The wording is ambiguous, but a presidential signing statement tacked on to a recent postal reform law asserts a vague executive power to read mail without a warrant in “exigent circumstances.” There’s a longstanding Fourth Amendment exception for certain sorts of cases like this—a package believed to contain a bomb that could go off any […]

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So, on the theory that one of the surest ways to produce better writing is to read it closely, I’ve been on one of my periodic kicks of poring over some of the hoary classics of “literary nonfiction” or “new journalism” or “long form narrative reportage” or whatever the preferred term is this week. Largely […]

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TPMmuckraker catches the following interesting admission from Trent Lott, interviewed by Chris Matthews on last night’s Hardball: Matthews: I think [Vice President] Cheney had his thumb on the scale, do you agree? That they were pushing this war so hard, they were working to look at any evidence that backed the war and ignore any […]

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