Improv Everywhere Is Improbably Cute

They threw a random wedding reception as their latest prank, or mission if you will which is what the group terms them...



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Read This Now - Richard Clarke Was There

One of the current arguments of the day coming from Bush apologists and torture pushers is that you have to remember and imagine what it must have been like to be them and inside the White House in the days after September 11 and that given those circumstances they made the right call.

There are many many things wrong with this argument, but Richard Clarke was inside the White House at the time and he says Cheney in particular is full of it...

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

And Then There Were Two...

Well, not just yet there aren't. Minnesota still has only one Senator and former Senator Norm Coleman with an assist from from Governor Tim Pawlenty is continuing his obnoxious quest to deny the citizens of his state full and equal representation in Washington.

The State Supreme Court heard arguments in the case this morning which means that things are inching along at least, but shouldn't be taken to mean that things will be wrapped up any time soon.

TPM says that for what it's worth the Justices gave Coleman's lawyer a hard time. For all the details head over to TPM and check out Eric Kleefeld's continuing coverage of the Mess in Minnesota...

David Who?

I recently finished Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece on David vs Goliath situations and I had the same beefs that a lot of readers seem to have had. Suffice it to say that the piece is structured around a really flimsy basketball analogy.

I just saw Ezra Klein's wrap up though and I definitely agree with his bottom line on Gladwell:

But Gladwell isn't an academic and he's not a traditional reporter. Insofar as he has a beat, it's modern fables. Stories with a point. He's like Aesop for the corporate class. To wit, the grasshopper isn't really a lazy insect. But then, the point of that story is the importance of hard work, not the characteristics of different bugs. And it's true that hard work is important. Similarly, full court press doesn't guarantee victory for weak basketball teams. But the point of that story is that weak agents need asymmetric tactics, which is also true. You get this in his books, too. Gladwell's core competency is finding fun stories that illustrate interesting -- and even true! -- concepts. It can be a bit precious and, in terms of the stories, occasionally wrong. But it lets him explore useful theories in a readable way. If you want to attack the work, you really need to go after the legitimacy of the basic theories. Questioning the stories doesn't get you very far.

Liar Liar

It runs in the family must be Liz Cheney's excuse but her dad Dick, has pretty much run out of them at this point. I haven't commented on the great Cheney fib fest because he's a sad old man with a horrendously mistaken notion of reality who won't let go and he doesn't deserve your attention.

But the Cheney's, and other Bush and torture advocates and apologists, just won't go away and the main stream media seems more than happy to help them burn through the bottom half of their collective wardrobes. So here is Rachel Maddow with a similar takedown...

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Way To Keep It Classy Lebron

So Lebron James, the face and future of the NBA, didn't want to shake the Magic players hands after his Cavs were eliminated from the playoffs because he's a winner? Does that mean he only shakes hands when he wins? How did he think that was the right explanation?

Farewell To Fisher

Marc Fisher is changing jobs at the WaPo and you'll no longer have his doggedly determined columns to look forward to or his always entertaining blog for that matter. Fisher will be running a new experimental local news team within the Post, it remains to be seen how this stab at local coverage will work out but as City Paper points out you don't just take your number one local columnist out of print without intending to put him to use elsewhere (insert your own joke about newspaper downsizing here) so hopefully things will go with the project.

It should at least be something worth watching especially considering all of the talk and concern of late over the future of local news and reporting in the face of increasingly hard times for local papers. I'd offer that this is an area where blogs may well be able to step in to the gap quite readily. The ist family of blogs already does a ton of local coverage, although they are often directing readers to local papers content if that content didn't exist would the ists be able to step and create it or would the papers take them down as collateral damage?

Only time will tell.

While you're waiting go read Fisher's farewll column.