Via Memeorandum, some sad news from hilzoy at Obsidian Wings: Andrew Olmsted, who also posted here as G’Kar, was killed yesterday in Iraq. Andy gave me a post to publish in the event of his death; the last revisions to it were made in July. Andy was a wonderful person: decent, honorable, generous, principled, courageous, sweet, and very funny. The world has a horrible hole in it that nothing can

I really had not planned on writing more on this subject, but the sheer number of extreme reactions — ranging from oozing Obamamania on the Left to the unwise bashing of Huckabee supporters  — has goaded me into it. Well, that and Byron York, who seems to believe that Iowa “wasn’t about infrastructure at all,” somehow overlooking Huckabee’s organized networks of evangelical conservative Christians, home-schoolers, and gun-rights groups.  You would think

In “The Big Picture(s),” I noted the case of Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi stringer working for the Associated Press with a history of taking staged photographs of Islamic terrorists, who was detained by the US military as a security threat in April 2006. In the last update to this story, an article that ran at Harper’s (and excerpted at Editor & Publisher)  smearing the US military was found to be authored by Scott Horton 

Courtesy of JD:

thanks to Serr8d!

Matthew Yglesias whines about preordained media coverage: Watching Chris Matthews, I just saw that Tim Russert has already booked John McCain as his featured interviewee for this Sunday. Republican presidential candidate who won the Iowa Caucuses? Well, sorry, you’re out of luck. It’s already been decided that the “real” story out of Iowa is McCain… Guess who Russert just had on last Sunday?

I saw a werewolf drinking a virgin Piña Colada outside the Kum and Go in West Des Moines. His hair was… “too perfect.”

Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world. Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

Geno’s Steaks owner Joey Vento says it’s one thing to criticize his “When ordering, please speak English sign”, but attacking one of his workers goes way beyond anything that’s been said.” It was just trash talking.  It should have never led to that.  It was something that happened so quickly that I wasn’t prepared for it because I never thought it was escalating to that,” says Vento. Joey Vento hopes

A new on-line video game is opening old wounds from the September 11th terrorist attacks. Images of planes crashing into the Twin Towers, as part of the game, have relatives of those who died at the World Trade Center very upset. The Internet video game is called New York Defender II. It can be found on a French Web site under the “Chaos” category. In New York Defender II, the goal