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There are still pirates? I mean, I figured there must still be a few if them around because every so often there would be a really stupid movie about modern-day psychos terrorizing some perfectly nice couple on their private yacht. But the news this month has brought attention to the fact that there’s a whole culture of piracy alive and well, centered in Somalia. [Read more]

So Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader (or maybe its no. 1, if rumors of Osama's demise have any credence) released a taped message today, redeclaring war on America and calling its new President-elect a 'house negro.' [Read more]

A quick hitter on the Joe Lieberman liberal blogosphere fooforaw. Barton Gellman's Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency, a book immortalized in this space as #3 (not to be confused with #4) on Articleman's Ranking of Noncommensurable Things, contains a story that sheds light on what happened today when the Democratic caucus voted 42-13 to permit Joe Lieberman to remain as Chairman of the Senate's Homeland Security Committee. [Read more]

Hey, didn't I used to write about politics? With my weekly guest gig on Wednesday morning's KRXA540.com show with Hal (805 PT/1105 ET) coming up (and, cool, Hal will join us here blogging!), wanted to hit some of this week's high points of interest. Before turning all political, I would still encourage everyone to add "That's Not My Name" by The Ting Tings to their iPod. From Arizona, where my weather just utterly rocks (62 this morning at 6 a.m.), here are five questions for the week, and my answers to them...

1. Hillary at State: Who Wins -- Obama or Clinton? [Read more]

Japan's economy is now officially in recession according to those in charge of labeling such things, which means that they beat us again. While most believe that the U.S. has already entered a recession, it's not official until we have two consecutive quarters of negative growth, so we're just going to have to wait until January. Thus, despite the fact that Japan's auto companies run circles around the befuddled behemoths in Detroit and clobbered our electronics companies long ago, even though Japanese save like misers and Americans spend like sailors, and notwithstanding our $5B trade deficit with Japan, they still out-recessioned us. [Read more]

I didn't grow up in a family that talked about politics. I knew that my step-dad's parents were yellow-dog democrats and that my dad and his mom were die-hard republicans. My mom voted for Reagan in 1980, so I figured she and my step-dad were republicans, too (turns out they SO aren't, thank goodness). Beyond that, I didn't think about it much. Dinner table conversation revolved around my parents' work lives and what happened in school that day. After dinner, we played board games or watched television. Outside of the house, our family activities consisted of going to boat shows or cross-country skiing in the winter and fishing or bike riding in the summer. We weren't the kind of family that protested together. [Read more]

Because on this question column, we try out Genghis's proposed suggestion to write the full questions in the comments section to make it even easier for you to answer them ... Also, I was eating bitter herbs while I wrote this ... Man-eesh Ta-Na ...

1) NHL Hockey?

2) Bobbleheads?

3) New Music?

4) Tivo additions?

5) Laundromats?

6) Shopping?

7) Avant-garde parenting?

8) Corporal punishment?

9) Sterilization?

10) Liberal arts education?

Bonus Qs) Column? New Format?

If you're single, and you want to meet someone, where do you go? People always meet one another at bars, right? Get a little drunk, engage in a little chit-chat with comely strangers, perhaps take one home, at least get some digits. Right? Wrong. I, for one, have never had the courage to converse with strangers. Well, that’s not entirely correct. Once engaged in conversation, I can talk with just about anybody, though I may bore them to distraction. What I cannot do is approach a complete stranger and initiate conversation. As a child, I was deathly afraid to call strangers on the phone and would engage in protracted negotiations with my mother in order to persuade her to make the call for me. [Read more]

Who'dathunk we'd end up in this mess when folks like Peter here were being celebrated two years ago?

Warning: Don't watch on the computer you'd hate to see a fist put through

 [Read more]

Hello, daggers. Thank you so much for all your for dedication, hard work, and sacrifice this past year. A special shout out to Orlando for delivering the once-red state of Indiana. And to Articleman, your cardboard obama piece gave me a chuckle. Sorry that I missed your live election blogging. Next time. [Read more]

It's bad enough the government will soon be doling out billions and billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out the bloated, mismanaged U.S. auto industry.

But please, please, do not give any of that money to the nation's car dealers.

According to a Yahoo story, an auto bailout package is likely to pass in large part because of pressure from the American auto dealership lobby. Even worse, a spokesman for the National Automobile Dealers Association says he wants dealers to get some of that money. [Read more]

I first learned about the concept of micro-lending in 1996, when I had the opportunity to meet Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank. Professor Yunus founded the bank in 1983, to provide small loans to poor Bangladeshi women who wanted to start small businesses. To date, the bank has served over seven million women and, in 2006, Professor Yunus and the Grameen bank were the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Grameen Bank was founded on some specific ideas. First, that access to credit is a human right. Second, that women and children who bear the brunt of worldwide poverty have less access to credit than men. And third, that self-employment for women is the road out of poverty for entire families. [Read more]

For those who thought Alaskan politics was all Sarah Palin, you may be pleased to learn, as I was today, that Anchorage, Alaska's popular mayor, Democrat Mark Begich, is almost inevitably replacing Ted Stevens as one of Alaska's two Senators.  It's not a done deal, but Begich has moved ahead by 814 votes with few left to count, and with most votes remaining to be counted coming from precincts that voted for Begich in their already counted votes, analysts agree:  this is the 58th vote in the new Senate for the Democratic caucus (counting Vermont's actual socialist, Bernie Sanders, and Connecticut's Joe Lieberman).  Five takes on the elevation of Mayor Begich: [Read more]

Funny short by filmmaker Ilya Chaiken, set during the great power outage of '03. It was a bizarre moment in New York. The city stopped for almost 24 hours, depending on where you lived. People couldn't get up to their high-rise apartments or hotel rooms. I had a date scheduled that night, but with the mobile network down, I couldn't reach her, so I went to find a friend of mine instead. I had to creep up a dark stairwell, using my cell phone as a flashlight, to leave a note on her door. She found me later, and we drank warm beer in a candlelit bar. Unfortunately, we missed the massive bonfire in nearby Tomkins Square which I only heard about after the fact. [Read more]

Many of you out there share my disappointment in California's approval of Proposition 8.  However, over the last week I've heard too many voices, even those rising from prominent gay communities like the Castro district, that have been far too quick to blame black voters for the proposition's passage.  The evidence being offered here, we are told, comes from exit polls.  How solid is this data?  As it turns out, not very. [Read more]

The elections are finally over, and the world is starting to seem normal again. Kind of. We also have two new long-awaited bloggers, so I felt that it would be a good time to meta-post. When Deadman, Articleman, and I started dagblog, we didn't have a clear idea where it was headed. Mostly, we wanted a forum to express ourselves and our wacky ideas about the world, but it was never meant to be just for us. We hoped to bring in a number of talented writers with diverse interests and ideas to share the space. Though we vaguely imagined that the writing would be sophisticated and snarky but not pretentious, we decided to let the brand and direction evolve organically. That has been happening, and it's been a pleasure to witness.

Some developments that have surprised me: [Read more]

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I've always been a bit puzzled by our rush to declare something over. I suppose it shouldn't be so surprising since, as a nation, we suffer from a mad case of ADD, always enthusiastically moving on to the next new craze, be it hula hoops, cabbage patch dolls, energy drinks, or those cute boy bands made up of brothers with floppy hair.

Yet at the same time that half of us are rushing headlong into the future, the other half of us have to be dragged kicking and screaming. Could be fear of change. Could be love of drama. But whatever it is, there are those of us who prefer to look back on the mythic past as bygone days of a better era, glossing right over inconvenient truths like racism and sexism. [Read more]

For more information about protests in NYC go to http://theimpactinnyc.devinguinn.com or http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=33598248873.

Find out about protests in your area at JoinTheImpact.com.

The day after Obama won the election, a Republican friend of mine on Facebook joined a group that planned on getting together on Inauguration Day to mourn 'The End of Capitalism as We Know It'*.

Members of the group were waxing bitter in the message board, complaining about how Obama was a socialist who was going to destroy the U.S. economy.

I had to laugh ... and cry.

Cry because these people were so caught up in their own right-wing economic philosophies (many of which I actually agree with) that they couldn't even for one moment take the time to appreciate the historical significance of what this country's voters had just done. [Read more]