Newsweek on what life is like for women in Iraq in these days of the glorious surge:
The insurgents have been driven out of her southwest Baghdad neighborhood, but the 30-year-old shop assistant is still frightened. A year ago Al Qaeda in Iraq ruled the streets outside her home, and Mahdi Army militia units kept the […]

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Markos from Daily Kos has a new gig writing opinion pieces for Newsweek, and he’s been in rare form with his first couple of efforts. From this week’s column: “In his first Inaugural Address, Ronald Reagan remarked that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’ While the quip has provided […]

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Something I’ve been meaning to post for a couple of weeks now … I’ve long thought that Monica Kendrick is the best music writer at the Reader and the spot-on writeup she turned in just before Yoko Ono’s appearance at the recent Pitchfork Music Festival only reinforces that notion:
9:00 Yoko Ono
For decades her name […]

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POLITICS: The Senate Judiciary committee has voted 13-3 to authorize subpoenas for documents related to the NSA warrantless surveillance program. That includes three Republicans on the committee voting in favor of the subpeonas: Sens. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

Poland “stuns” other members of the European Union by demanding that the […]

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Women & Children First bookstore here in Andersonville is in danger of closing, possibly before the end of the summer, according to recent stories in the Chicago Tribune and the Windy City Times.
One factor hurting sales at W&CF is competition, of course. Borders Books & Music, for instance, has four locations—all within four miles of […]

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The White House is claiming that oops, they managed to lose a whole bunch of critically important emails, but as any decent techie knows, deleted emails aren’t really deleted. Someone better sit poor Karl Rove down and explain to him about file recovery utilities.
Speaking of recovering things thought lost forever — scientists have recovered […]

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Jessica Valenti of Feministing had a nice piece in The Guardian on Friday, mulling over the state of online misogyny in the wake of the Kathy Sierra incident. And of course she touches on Ann Althouse’s nasty attack on her for the unspeakable crime of having a figure.
If it’s any consolation, one side effect […]

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Here’s a little smorgasbord of items I wanted to blog this past week, and didn’t get the chance to. Because unlike spaghetti, time to blog doesn’t grow on trees!

John Nichols of The Nation asks whether we’re nearing an “Impeachment Moment,” noting that the I-word is finally being discussed — if not exactly embraced — on […]

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