The GOP is finally able to get rid of one of their more embarrassing Senators.
The reason?
Money…
The writing on the wall may have been the news reported Sunday by the Louisville Courier-Journal that more than 100 former Bunning donors have signed up with Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a fellow Republican who has formed an exploratory [...]

I honestly never thought it would come to this, but here we have Robert Gibbs talking about the willful ignorance that is the birthers movement.

I think we all need to step back for a moment and realize just how amazing this is.
Because, to the best of my knowledge, nobody in the White House has ever [...]

My plan is to post these roundups on the weekends. This week was a little tough as I live in NJ and my Rabbi got into some trouble with the law. I was in charge of Hebrew School all weekend.
Actually, that’s not true. I was visiting friends and swimming in the Hudson [...]

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has an interesting statistic: a majority of criminals serving time in federal prisons are non-violent drug offenders, while “72% of state prisoners have committed either violent offenses (53%) or property crimes (19%).”
This ties into an important national discussion: the criminalization and potential abuse of the federal code and [...]

There’s a classic scene in the West Wing where gay rights activist Ted Marcus denounces President Bartlett for refusing to publicly condemn an anti-gay measure being considered by the House.
MARCUS
Why won’t you say that publicly?
BARTLET
[yells] Because I know what I’m doing, Ted! Because I live in the world of professional politics, and you live in [...]

I stumbled across an interesting article on eggs yesterday while sitting in Borders reading up on something I’m going to be doing an in depth series of posts on. Apparently a study at the USDA has shown that factory farm eggs are far less nutritious than pastured eggs. I don’t know what causes this… although [...]

“In CBO’s judgment, the probability is high that no savings would be realized … but there is also a chance that substantial savings might be realized.”
That was the CBO’s lead in to their analysis about the Independent Medical Advisory Council that Dems want to add to the health legislation in order to keep health care [...]

Early this month, Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge reported on the case of Sergey Aleynikov (pictured above), a former employee of Goldman Sachs who allegedly stole the code that runs their automated high frequency trading software.
Well, this could have been the catalyst for the recent focus on high frequency trading and may ultimately lead [...]

If you’re a fan of Tina Fey be sure to click below on the “Support Sarah” ad!

Another day, another incredibly questionable Wall Street practice. And this one is particularly galling.
Basically, some of the stock exchanges allow companies to see trades 3 milliseconds before they hit the market. It’s called “flash” trading, and the only folks who can take advantage of such information are the ones who pay a fee (of course) [...]

So yeah…what was all that talk about never seeing any of the TARP money again?
And this is after 10 banks said last month they’d be paying back $68B worth of TARP money. Goldman was one of them. And the American taxpayer turned a tidy profit on the deal.
From Bloomberg:
Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s repayments to the [...]

The A.P. continues to come up with one dumb idea after another.
I have more on this craziness over at True/Slant.

Anti-reform advocates are the gift that just keeps on giving. Take the case of David McKalip, who sent the above image out to his email list.
Does he genuinely not understand the implications of distributing trash like this? Because not only is it guaranteed to get out to the broader media, it also seriously undermines any [...]

About a month ago, when most of the unrest in Iran was happening, I wrote about the fact that Nokia Siemens seemed to be helping the Iranian government track down protesters.
Well, it looks like the Iranian people are doing something about it and protesting with their wallets. Perhaps you should too?
Not so fast…
More at [...]

The Wall Street Journal uncovers what happened, but we’ve discussed it quite a bit here already. The banks were allowed to over leverage themselves to the point of failure. Sure, relaxed rules on home ownership were a contributing factor to the downfall, but that was a symptom of the disease of easy credit, not the [...]

In one of those “every silver lining has a cloud” kind of situations, state and federal government road maintenance funds are dwindling as people drive less and use less gasoline per mile as they buy more fuel efficient cars. The federal government had to put $8 billion into the Highway Trust Fund because plummeting gas [...]

I’ve been genuinely intrigued at how much fiction and reality have been intersecting recently.
See, there’s this film called MOON and it follows the story of a guy working on the far side of the moon who figures out that there’s a lot more to his mission than collecting the natural resource Helium-3. It’s a [...]

This is an excerpt from Obama’s town hall meeting today in Cleveland, courtesy of the Washington Post…
If you have health insurance, the reform we’re proposing will give you more security. You just heard Rick’s story. Reform will keep the government out of your health care decisions, giving you the option to keep your coverage if [...]

They’re actually going to go on vacation instead of trying to pass it.
Wow…
Reid told reporters he expected the Senate Finance Committee would approve its version of the legislation before the Senate starts its recess August 7.
“We’ll come back in the fall,” and work in the full Senate on the bill, he said.
Get ready for the [...]

About the author: Byron C. Tau is a journalism graduate student at Georgetown and a recent graduate of McGill University in Montreal. You can find him all over the Internet, from his politics and commentary website Heartless and Brainless to his Twitter account to his personal blog. His favorite topics tend to be civil liberties [...]