I’m going to have more about housing today because, you know, it’s Thursday. But before I do I wanted to put into context one reason why we’re not getting the housing policies we need in this country. We can talk about official malfeasance or conservative demonization but a lot of this has to do with [...]

Stephen Colbert and Herman Cain held a rally in South Carolina this morning – which may have had more people attending, over 3,000, than any Republican rally this year – which was frequently hilarious. I especially enjoyed Cain quoting Pokemon (again) and Colbert saying he was the “The Lockheed Martin Luther Burger King” of the [...]

Thrill to the exploits of New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane, aka Truth Vigilante! Watch him wonder if it’s worth it to leap tall buildings in a single bound! Witness him ask around to see if he should run faster than a locomotive! I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York [...]

Arab League officials planned to send more observers to Syria to monitor protests there, but they abruptly delayed that today. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that one observer left the mission after calling it a “farce.” A former Arab League observer in Syria has decried the organisation’s monitoring mission to the [...]

The opposition to a pair of Internet censorship bills in Congress has grown over the past week. The Online News Association delivered its opposition to the bills, joining the American Society of Newspaper Editors. As these are rights holders and content creators who would stand to gain from anti-piracy legislation, it’s significant. The State Department, [...]

We’ve learned today that broadcast media outlets want to evade campaign finance disclosure rules. Not to be outdone, print media has decided to collude to intimidate bloggers into paying them. Since I’m sure to get on their radar screen anyway, might as well excerpt: The Associated Press and 28 news organizations, including The New York [...]

This feels suspiciously like “he came in and trashed the place and it’s not his place” journalism. Maybe the ghost of David Broder animated this journalist for the purposes of the story: Mr. Obama, in general, does not go out of his way to play the glad-handing, ego-stroking presidential role. While he does sometimes offer [...]

Politifact won the “Pompous Response to Criticism of the Year” award yesterday for their rebuttal to criticism about their awarding of the Lie of the Year to the correct claim by Democrats that Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity budget would end Medicare. Dave Weigel has a pretty thorough rundown, so I won’t bother. The short [...]

You buy a hamburger from me and I give you a piece of hard black leather on a bun. You protest and I say, no, I’m still calling it a hamburger, so you got what you asked for. You start running around telling everyone I sell leather as hamburgers, and I get my local fact-checking [...]

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player What is it with guilty people (allegedly) going on television to deny their guilt in haphazard fashion? First we had Jerry Sandusky (allegedly) and now Bashar al-Assad, in an exclusive interview with Barbara Walters (?), denying responsibility for the murder of over 4,000 protesters in the Arab uprising in Syria. [...]

Kevin Gosztola has the liveblog for today’s November 17 events, so I won’t try to duplicate that here. As he reports, the police restricted access to Wall Street with checkpoints and barricades, as protesters were going to try to effect a shutdown. There have been scuffles between protesters and police and some arrests, and the [...]