Orbital Matters
Saturn Smith
- Title
- Ms.
- Company
- The Solar System
- Bio
- Real name: Jenn Kepka.
Still orbiting from far away.
MY RECENT COMMENTS
- “I do worry, Kent, about
Google's estimation of me,
since they
own my soul.”
11:49PM - “The "possibly" you're
talking about, OcularN, isn't
mine, but
from
the…”
February 08, 2010 09:38PM - “Bonnie, I totally agree
that it was to the detriment
of the
rest of us. But
that…”
February 08, 2010 07:14PM - “Yeah, he was a strange
mix of a behind-closed-doors
player
and someone who's
very…”
February 08, 2010 06:25PM - “I promise, Juliet,
nothing's really changed. I'm
secretly
composing a love
song…”
February 06, 2010 02:11PM
Saturn Smith's Links
- My Posts On:
- Foreign Affairs
- Military/Defense Issues (Iraq, Afghanistan)
- Journalism
- Congress
- The Obama Cabinet
- The Auto Industry
- The Economic Crisis
- Image Use Information
- Images used are in the Public Domain,
- or used under Creative Commons Licenses,
- or under GNU Free Documentation Licenses.
- Me, Me, Me
- My Web site
- Intermittent blogging elsewhere
- The Skypeview
- Tags I Use
- How I Blog
- Still a Planet, After All These Years
- Also, I Twitter.
I'm a Google fan. I use GMail for the 1,700 e-mail accounts I juggle (exaggeration). I use Google Reader for the 5,000 articles I scan monthly (not an exaggeration). I use GoogleGroups to coordinate my family holiday plans. Want to call me? Here's my Google Voice… Read full post »
Rep. John Murtha, as of Saturday the longest serving House
member from Pennsylvania, has died at age 77 from
complications after gall bladder surgery. Murtha, a Democrat,
represented Pennsylvania's 12th District and had served in Congress
since 1975.No one who's won the ribbon of Longest Servi…
The bell tolls again for Tim Geithner
Again, there's a murmur on the Internet that Tim Geithner's gotta go, this time from Simon Johnson:
The White House is floating, ever so gently, the notion that they are open to nominations for the position of “Tim Geithner’s Successor.”
It’s not clear if they mean this job
… Read full post »
Updated: Hi, I'm Jenn.
It's never been that hard to figure out who I am. I don't mean this in an existential way -- I'm a writer, after all, I need some mystery in the world -- but in a purely practical way. For the whole time I've been writing at Open Salon, my real… Read full post »

"Unemployment's about to go a little higher, Ben. I'd add at least one to that new figure."
It looks like things are about to get very interesting for
America's foremost expert on what to do (what not to do?) in times
of steep unemployment:
How do you fight money?
It's a question that every under-funded campaign has to ask itself
daily, and a question that many, many more progressive candidates
are going to be facing after
today's landmark Supreme Court ruling lifting all limits on
corporate spending during campaigns. Money, to the… Read full post »

The Massachusetts Senate results have got me down. I'll admit it. I hear statements like those from Barney Frank and Jim Webb, saying that health care reform is now dead, that this was a referendum Democrats can't ignore, and I get a little blue. I see shades of the 2000/… Read full post »
Holy Toledo Batman, Robin, and Poison Ivy,
she's coming to TV:Former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has signed on as a contributor to the Fox News Channel.
The network confirmed that Ms. Palin will appear on the network’s programming on a regular basis as part of a multi-year
… Read full post »
Politico's front page right now is leading with "How long
will Rahm remain?" and a huge picture of the chief of staff looking
speculative, pensive, mischievous, evil... whatever. The story
starts like
this:
The retirement of Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) announced
today is being headlined as a sign that the Democratic Party is
under attack and flailing. New York Times: "Democrats
Face Shifting and Perilous Political Environment." Yahoo!
headlines the AP story in more texty language: "Losing 2 sena… Read full post » Terrorism: Shouldn't we have an app for that?
The New York Times is leading right now with "breaking news" that the U.S. had information about a holiday attack before the Detroit would-be bombing:
Two officials said the government had intelligence from Yemen before Friday that leaders of a branch of Al Qaeda there were talking about &ldqu… Read full post »
Representative Parker Griffith, nominally a Democrat from
Alabama, will apparently announce today that he's switching over to
the GOP, according to POLITICO:
The Health Care votes are dragging onward, and with them comes both awesome tweeting about Tom Harkin's tie (does anyone have a picture?) and the opportunity for every Senator to get his stupidity on. The lack of sleep seems to have hit John McCain particularly hard, as th/… Read full post »
Should we sob for Saab?
This week in unfortunate quotes, we feature John Smith, an executive vice president at G.M. What's John got to say? "This is a business that has struggled for more years than not. Sometimes things just don’t work.”
It's easy to imagine Mr. Smith (who might have the worst
witness… Read full post »
Ben Bernanke's having a good week. Not only was he named
Time's
Man of the Year1, he's now been confirmed for a
second term by the Senate
Banking Committee. Somewhere between all these accolades, he
also managed to chair a
Federal Open Market Committee meeting where interest rates were
held co… Read full post »
If Ross Douthat can take time off from infuriating liberals everywhere to infuriate hipsters everywhere with his indictment of Natalie Portman, I figured I could take today to write a bit about reading. I said I was going to occasionally write about books I love, a la Laura Miller, and… Read full post »
Well, I take back my apology to Joe Lieberman, and would like to issue a new one: I'm sorry for being sorry when clearly I never should have been sorry, Joe. Thanks for threatening to block health care reform.
And while I largely agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates' take that maybe the friends… Read full post »
Citigroup has cut a deal with investors and its regulators
and will repay its bailout loans. Citi, you may remember, was among
the weakest of the weak last year, but now things are
a little rosier:
President Obama accepted his Nobel prize in Norway today
and gave was seems to be an elegant, even moving
speech explaining the many different reasons that war and peace
are part of a package deal.
In this speech, he used the word "war" 51 times.… Read full post »
What to Read
Amanda Knox, Sen. Maria Cantwell found guilty
I have no idea whether Washington-state resident Amanda Knox is guilty of killing her study-abroad roommate, Meredith "Mez" Kercher, or not. I have followed the trial only loosely and intermittently, and mostly only because I retain a passing interest in All Things Italian from my own… Read full post »
The Palm Jumeirah in Dubai
Hey Paul Krugman, where the hell are you, man?
Let me say this up front: Paul Krugman is a genius. He's got
a Nobel Prize, he's got a New York Times column, he's got a
John Bates
Clark medal and a full professoship at Princeton. Neither he
nor anyone reading this needs me to say he's a genius, and yet… Well, you had to know that on the day Salon posts its Sexiest Man Living, I'd be doing a Tim Geithner post, right? But I come to study Geithner, not to ogle him*. He's having another extremely rough week, as both a Democrat and a Republican have taken to the public… Read full post »
There's word today that Rudy Giuliani is not
going to run for governor of New York in 2010, but that he's
probably
going to challenge Kirsten Gillibrand for the same Senate seat
he started to run for in 2002. The New York Daily News
says this is all part of… Read full post »
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