(Original post: 5/31/10 Updated below.)After last winter's visit with the family back at the farm (what I sometimes like to call "Walton's Mountain without the mountain"), I came home with four of my dad's WWII Army service ribbons. (No idea where the medals are, though they may have been donated with the rest

What's new this week other than great deals on mattresses? Well, Oklahoma got trashed and its congressional reps can't decide if it should get no federal help or none at all. And Apple, the ultra-cool corporation that has its iPads built in Chinese industrial hell-holes, also moves its profits offshore to make s

Happy 72nd birthday (yesterday) to Hibbard MN's favorite son: Bob Dylan Lay Lady Lay by FISHNCHIX2If your browser wo

As an U.N.C.L.E.-phile of long standing (see the banner above – no, farther to the right – yup, there it is), there are no words with which I can adequately express what a relief this is: It’s b

Okay, this feels a little like quibbling, but I'm having a hard time seeing how Dimon being told he can be either CEO or chairman of the largest bank in America -- but not both -- really qualifies as

The Saturday Oregonian had a front-page story about a busy identity thief who came a cropper when he stole the ID, credit cards, and whatnot from the gym locker of a Multnomah County circuit judge

A former constitutional law professor, who never cared as much the Fourth Amendment as much as he cared about plugging leaks anyway, heads an administration that seizes AP reporters phone records. One of the only two political parties we're allowed to have votes – for the 37th time – in the US House of Repre

Pete Townshend wrote this song on his 20th birthday, forty-eight years ago today. If your browser won't display the embedded version, click

But it still seems pretty misguided on Facebook's part:

Now it can be told: Congress didn't restore the sequestered funds for the FAA just so that Senators and Representatives

The Associated Press has my sympathy for its current First Amendment problems, but that hardly gets them off the hook for the

Here's the birdseye lowdownJack Bauer is back! I’ve learned that, after marathon negotiations, Kiefer Sutherland has close

It's been one hundred twenty-five yearsSince he left for the heavenly spheres.We've since stolen, quite outright,His form quinquepartiteBut the credit is all Mr. Lear's.(Hat-tip to the late Roger Ebert, whose lengthy and acceleratingly naughty tribute to Lear's verse fo

It's a nice way to say “Happy Mother's Day:” skyrocketing rates of sexual harassment in the US military, and electing Mark “Appalachian Trail” Sanford to Congress. Other items getting their moment in the toon sun this morning include Benghazi! (the exclamation point, apparently, is now trademarked, like

The especially warm and clear weather this week was very nice, but the 10-15 mph winds on Monday and Tuesday blew god-only-knows-what allergens into my face everywhere I went, with the general result that yesterday morning I woke up with a pair of size-12 sinuses inside a size-10 skull. It hasn't been pretty. S

As I read the list of reasons that many people are dismayed that Mark Sanford got elected to the US House of Representatives from North Carolina after leaving the governor's j

Note To ABC: One man's "bold words" are another man's barking peckerwood lunacy. The Preamble to the Declaration Of Independence is made up of "bold wor

That's when your ballot has to be in the

Happy Cinco de Mayo!Here are the top stories this week: The FAA gets sequester relief that Head Start and Meals on Wheels can only dream about; Collins comes out of the closet (although he can afford to); Syria crosses the line (and apparently it can afford to as well); Gitmo will be with us forever;

Funny how, when guys like this talk about taking up arms to defend themselves against the government, they never seem to be thinking of things like this.

Judy Collins put this song on the charts twice, in 1975 and again in 1977. It's about the most depressing song Stephen Sondheim ever wrote, but it's also probably his most popular (having it recorded by Frank Sinatra and Collins didn't hurt). The melancholy ballad was written for Glynis Johns as Desirée in the Broadway pr

I am very, very tired of hearing any commentary on this issue that begins, "I am a lifetime NRA member, and I support..." etc. etc. I also am very, very

Okay, I'm at least as much of as absolutist about the First Amendment as, oh, say

In the intellectual synthesis of of contemporary ultra-conservatism, the impulses of Protestant asceticism can thus be drawn upon to support business se

Two years into the Cheney-Bush war in Iraq, I looked at the question of what those two now-extinct phenomena -- the draft, and draft deferments -- really meant forty years after the Vietnam War hit its peak.

Over at Balloon Juice, mastermix calls Frank Luntz, the GOP's hydrodynamically-designed media marketing maven, a fool (among other, more picturesque things) because of his

And that's entirely correct, except for the part with words.- Doghouse Riley,

Our rule for the day: Start a war with political cartoonists at your peril. Other rules: If you're famous for not reading (clemency petitions, National Intelligence Estimates, that sort of thing), or reading at the first-grade level (The Pet Goat, that sort of thing), don't expect everyone to

We lost George Jones at 81 (seen here in the salad days of his flattop, if I may mix those metaphors): If your browser won't display the embedded version, click

The