Kathleen Parker at the Washington Post has done it again: made me a candidate for high-blood pressure meds. Her column today declares that Elena Kagan “can’t be characterized as anything close to mainstream America.” OK, fair enough, except — who exactly does Parker hold up as… Read full post »

Conservative David Cameron is the new prime minister of Britain, and Nick Clegg, of the Liberal Democrats, is the new deputy PM. The Tories (conservative) and LibDems will form a coalition government. Gordon Brown, long kno… Read full post »

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will announce today the Obama administration's intention to split the Minerals Management Service into two separate agencies. The MMS is charged with overseeing inspections, leasing, and royalty collection of offshore drilling rigs, a/… Read full post »

^{President Obama and SCOTUS Nominee Elena Kagan in the Oval Office/ Pete Souza/Flickr.}

Solicitor General Elena Kagan has been nominated by President Obama to fill the Supreme Court seat that Justice John Paul Stevens will leave after this term. He announced this at the White House earlier today.… Read full post »

There's a piece up at Salon today about Elena Kagan's tenure as dean of Harvard Law School. Four law professors from other schools make the point that, while Kagan was dean, the school went on a huge hiring spree -- and managed to hire hardly any minorities or women during that… Read full post »

Borders is now taking pre-orders for the Kobo e-Reader, the newest entry into the eReader market. It’s just like every eReader you’ve admired so far — except this one costs only $149.

To reach that point, Kobo has cut (or changed) a few features. Unlike the Kindle, it doesn’t… Read full post »

I’m a vegetarian. I’ve been a vegetarian for something like 6 years now. Every once-in-a-while, though, I fall off the vegetarian wagon and onto a fish sandwich. It turns out, fried halibut isn’t such a bad place to land. Sure, you get a little greasy, but you also get an… Read full post »

The big(ish) journalism news of the day is that The Washington Post, the second most popular national newspaper in suburban Maryland, has decided to sell off Newsweek magazine. The Washington Post Company owns Newsweek, Slate, a smattering of other newspapers and TV stations, and Kaplan, Inc.¹… Read full post »

I had no idea:

An ancient English “sport†called “ferret legging†has contributed to the myths about ferret behaviour. The contestant had to tie his trouser legs around the ankles, then place two ferrets down his trousers before tying the waist closed. The object was to be the person that kee

… Read full post »

Here are a few maps to ponder. This one shows graphically the states that currently have pending laws very similar to Arizona's recent SB1070, as reported by the Wonk Room:

This one shows states that have the highest estimated illegal immigrant populations in the United States (from the… Read full post »

Aw, the woman who’s played Nancy Hughes on the soap opera “As the World Turns” forever has died:

Actress Helen Wagner, who played mild-mannered Nancy Hughes on the CBS soap opera ”As the World Turns” for more than a half-century and spoke its first words, has died at

… Read full post »

I have been reading my way, out of order, through Henning Mankell’s Wallander series, as I’ve noted elsewhere. The mysteries are a striking combination of the usual detective tome — crimes are committed and investigated — and social commentary literature, as Wallander a… Read full post »

Today we went for breakfast at a diner we’d never tried before. The review for said diner promised “manhole cover-sized pancakes.” The group’s consensus (OK, mostly between R and I) was that this could not possibly be true, but that it did signal some larger-than-usual pancake… Read full post »

It's Friday. Let's gossip.

So it turns out Bob Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary who's barely beat out Larry Summers to be the Least Popular Member of the Committee to Save the World, had something of an affair last year with Iris Mack. How did this news come out? Leaked… Read full post »

On the same day we're hearing that the Obama administration -- faced with disastrous evidence -- may, after all, be changing its policy related to oil drilling in the Gulf, Politics Daily notes that scientific and environmental decisions ar/… Read full post »

The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico resulting from last week's BP oil rig explosion is reportedly five times worse than was earlier thought. The Coast Guard says that BP has now told them of a second leak, and they now estimate that 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) are spilling/… Read full post »

Alert Alaska: Charlie Crist is goin’ rogue! The Florida governor is set to announce today that he’ll continue running for governor, but as a non-affiliated candidate, not a member of the Republican party (hat-tip: Kathy Riordan)./… Read full post »

I have a total cookbook crush on The Silver Spoon: Pasta. It’s a $40 cookbook, translated from the original Italian, in which every recipe involves pasta. Because it is $40, I love it from afar, often stopping to pet it or memorize recipes from it when I’m at the bookstore, and… Read full post »

I find it disingenuous that Karl Rove is opposed to the recent passage of Arizona’s immigration law because there will be “some constitutional problems with the bill.” Did he not get the memo that the new GOP way of pushing forward extremely conservative agendas is to pass unconstit… Read full post »

Jason Rosenbaum had a piece at FireDogLake recently discussing the overwhelming influence that Don Blankenship, head of Massey Energy, has had on the judicial branch. Massey Energy runs the Montcoal, West Virginia mine where 29 miners recently died in a massive explosion. Essentially, Massey has bee… Read full post »

I’ve been watching an enjoying “Parenthood,” and as of last night (thanks, Hulu!) I’m all caught up.

To recap for those who’ve never seen the show: It’s about the Braverman family, a set of parents and their four children and their children’s children, all l… Read full post »

I just listened to Joe Biden’s eulogy from the funeral for the miners who died in West Virginia. It’s an old joke that VPs get dispatched to funerals, and it’s not even that accurate — Obama attended this one, too, and spoke as well. Biden’s speech, though, is authentic… Read full post »

Matt Yglesias makes the point today that “Ben Nelson Has Apparently Learned Nothing.” Nelson, you’ll remember, was the Democrat that last night voted against continuing debate on the Financial Regulation bill in the Senate, defeating it (for the time being) … Continue… Read full post »

The next time someone starts telling me about the liberal New York Times, I’m going to remind them that, at the moment when the financial regulation bill failed in the Senate, the ol’ NYT put up this charming front page headline:

Yes, that’s right, this is all just a victory… Read full post »

This is troublesome. “Libel Case, Prompted by an Academic Book Review, Has Scholars Worried” via The Chronicle of Higher Education:

[I]t came as a shock to journal editors to learn that one of their own, Joseph H.H. Weiler, editor of the European Journal of International Law, would face a

… Read full post »