Holy Republican talking points, Batman. Hillary Clinton actually said this:

"I think that what's happened with Florida and Michigan raises serious questions about the principles of our party."

Short version: vote for McCain.

Remember what she said last year?

Why, oh why:

Karl Rove's Garage Proves to Be Typical

Complete with inventory, as visible from street.

Just a daily smattering of intelligent, optimistic rhetoric...

Barack Obama Gives A Commencement Address

Have we failed at times? Absolutely. Will you occasionally fail when you embark on your own American journey? You surely will. But the test is not perfection.

The true test of the American ideal is whether we're able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them. Whether chance of birth or circumstance decides life's big winners and losers, or whether we build a community where, at the very least, everyone has a chance to work hard, get ahead, and reach their dreams.

More.

This is the type of stuff that always takes me aback.  A broken child is a damned drill in the heart.  Kudos to Human Rights Watch, but I wonder if they are going to be able to sell the drawings as a story package.

A Salon investigation has found that flights carrying the wounded arrive in the United States only at night. And the military is hard-pressed to explain why. In a series of interviews, officials at the Pentagon's Air Mobility Command, which manages all the evacuations, refused to talk on the record to explain the nighttime flights, or to clarify discrepancies in their off-the-record explanations of why the flights arrive when they do.

I rarely if ever read Tina Brown, but the last paragraph of her column, here, for some reason struck me as especially poignant.  Even though it tells me nothing new, it struck me as powerful in the way it is worded.

The news cycle has evolved into a pattern that strobes between overkill and silence, but reality has not ceased to exist. As our eyes are exclusively focused on a hospice in Florida or an apartment in Atlanta, you wonder uneasily: What's going on beyond that wall of noise? The earthquake off Indonesia this week was like the sudden recriminating cry of the tsunami victims who lost our interest: "Remember me. I'm still here."

Here.

He's given some good, sane perspective since publishing his book.  I saw him on the Daily Show a couple weeks ago and it reaffirmed my thoughts.  Now he's been interviewed by CJR Daily.  Read it with an open mind to his views and don't think as a partisan.

elevated from the diaries
Art soothes prisoners' souls
Group sells works created behind bars

Nick Hoover | Washington | February 18

On a piece of standard-size white paper, in gray pencil, is drawn a masked, shackled man.  A rectangular placard hung from his neck reads "incorrigible."  Prison numbers read left to right on a patch sewn onto the chest of his prison-issue:  0282118.  His body slumps, knees forced almost to the ground by the huge spherical cage he bears on his shoulders.  In the cage, an angel sits in a fetal position, her wings tattered.  A single tear has begun its journey down her left cheek.

"This work depicts the stereotyping and labeling placed upon society's outcasts and the burdens and knowledge of wasted potential harbored within the prisoner's heart," reads a note taped to the back of the piece of cardboard to which the art is affixed.

The drawing sits on an orange plastic stacking chair among other works by the same artist.  It is one of hundreds of pieces crowding the chairs, tables and walls at this monthly show in which prisoners' art fills the basement of First Trinity Lutheran Church in Northwest.

C.V. Starr Center - If George Washington returned from the dead and attempted to recapture the presidency of the United States, he would beat the incumbent President Bush by nearly 20 percentage points, according to a new national poll conducted for Washington College by the public affairs research firm of Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas, Inc.

One of the several kickers:

Asked to choose between George Washington and George W. Bush, Republicans in the survey supported Bush by a margin of more than 2 to 1, while Democrats and independents overwhelmingly favored Washington.

Is our children learning?  jnh.

Every Friday this semester, I go to the Washington Post with several of my classmates and participate in a Q&A session with Post employees.  Today, we talked to Tim Dwyer and Maureen Fan.  Every week, if something interesting is said, I'm going to bullet point the salient points here.  I know there are a few news fans who will find this stuff interesting.

From a Washington Times interview last week:

I fully understand that the job of the president is and must always be protecting the great right of people to worship or not worship as they see fit.

That's what distinguishes us from the Taliban. The greatest freedom we have -- or one of the greatest freedoms -- is the right to worship the way you see fit. And on the other hand, I don't see how you can be president -- at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a -- without a relationship with the Lord.

Daily incident reports from the department of Homeland Security from September through last week can be found here.  Many if not most have gone unreported.  All the documents are marked "for official use only."

Gabriel Allen fought for the right to sit during the Pledge of Allegiance. Meet the boy who stirred the patriotic pot.

A CJR editorial, from this month's issue:

In the wake of the election the bias symphony is reaching for a crescendo. The new refrain goes this way: aside from John Kerry, the election's other loser was mainstream media. George W. Bush, the theory goes, won despite the strenuous efforts of the press to bring him down. Here's an example of this view, from Tim Graham of National Review

Every anti-Bush angle ... was explored with great ferocity. Almost every week of 2004 was a bad media week for Bush. There was Paul O'Neill Book Week. There was 9/11 Ads in Bad Taste Week. There was Richard Clarke Book Week. There was Bob Woodward Book Week. There were two weeks of Alabama National Guard Whereabouts Hunt. There were four weeks of Abu Ghraib hype ...

What's disturbing is not the way that Graham is whining into his champagne but his little two-step away from reality. He and others are defining bias downward, as anything that challenges a GOP point of vieww.

Paul Krugman has crawled out of his shack somewhere deep in the woods, still unshaven and unkempt, to lay a smackdown.

Is this an absurd topic?

Gore Vidal doesn't think so.

A web exclusive from Vanity Fair.

Knight Ridder - The man who saved America -- and probably the world -- is living out his days on a measly pension in a dank apartment in a forlorn suburb of Moscow. He has a bad stomach, varicose veins and a mangy, spotted dog named Jack the Ripper.

This is just such a cool story I had to post it.  Ah, the simpler days of the Cold War.  jnh.

Thanks to a FOIA request from the Sunshine Project, a fascinating document has now come to light. In June 1994, the US Air Force Wright Laboratory wrote a proposal titled "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals."

...

More at the Memory Hole.

Brought to you by the college Republicans, although apparently they wanted you to think it was brought to you by the Republican Party itself.

Meanwhile, although they do have some righteous grievances, at baseline, conservative students fight for the right not to learn.

Fascinating and growing seemingly daily.

Source:  Reuters

The White House went all out to showcase the advantages of U.S. President George W. Bush's ambitious financial agenda this week, but in the end the 'challenges' proved too much. The word 'challenges' -- a main theme of a two-day White House economic conference that ended on Thursday -- was misspelled on a large television monitor that stood in front of Bush during a panel discussion.

Just watch it.  If you live in the U.S., that is.

It's been rare over the last year or so, but whenever he does, he makes good sense.  Like today, for example.

Here.