shoo!

Shoe-mania:




The guy's certainly getting his fifteen minutes of fame. (He's like an Arab Joe the Plumber!... sort of)


Spencer Ackerman suggests some more targets for shoe-throwing here, and here.

oh yeah a Senate report links Bush to detainee homicides and reveals a campaign of lies to cover it up but, you know, whatever...

Now get ready for the new rules! (and more here and here!)

Bill Moyers interviews Glenn Greenwald (vid)

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, will be expanding this recent article (which I had missed) into a book. I haven't read the article yet, but it looks good.

Obama's been working the phones:

Now that he has won the White House, President-elect Barack Obama is courting another set of voters: the 535 members of Congress who can make or break his presidency.

Obama, the first president elected directly from the legislative branch since John F. Kennedy, has packed his White House team with respected legislators and connected congressional staffers and has surprised lawmakers with phone calls — and not just to Democrats.

"This is unheard of," Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., who is retiring after 14 years in Congress, said of Obama's calls to Republicans. "I don't know of another president-elect who has done this."

Four smart people talk about Obama's first 100 days (read or listen)

Obama's Green Team


James Fallows has more on Dr. Chu here and here

The war on Festivus!

Ezra Klein is skeptical of David Brooks' skepticism:

I'm not against the sort of gnawing skepticism David Brooks displays here, but it does seem like an effort to have it both ways. Brooks isn't making the case against massive spending, he's just suggesting that it makes him uncomfortable. And it wasn't that long ago, of course, that Brooks himself was proposing massive new infrastructure investment beneath the rubric of a "national mobility project." But you could read Brooks' column without really understanding that we're on the precipice of an incredible economic calamity -- one that our best efforts may well prove insufficient at averting. Under those circumstances, there should be some recognition that the massive spending plans are an attempt to apply the best remedies we have to an urgent crisis. They're not, as Brooks would have it, some sort of psychological dysfunction, or social mania. For a columnist, the stance of caution might be a good play. But were the government to decide that spending should be pure and the policies implemented slowly, the human cost could be tremendous, and the financial cost could be far greater.

Non-political: David Foster Wallace considered the lobster. (Gourmet Mag reprinted)

In keeping with this blog's new title, here are some pics of a riot in Greece this last weekend and it's aftermath. (The Police there killed a 15 year old kid)


(OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI/AFP/Getty Images)


(LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP/Getty Images)


(AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)


(AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)


(REUTERS/John Kolesidis)