It’s almost kinda sad, watching Norm Coleman commit political suicide on the apparent orders of his Republican minders. Here he is, a guy who switched parties and later cultivated Karl Rove and Dick Cheney so he could skip merrily up the political ladder all the way to the White House, being made to end his political career not with a bang or a whimper, but with the metaphorical tossing of battery acid into the collective faces of Minnesota residents.

Does anybody remember Muntadar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush? The media doesn’t. Blogs don’t. But we should.

The Israeli strategy to control access to news from Gaza is escalating along with its military actions.

What does the Office of Management and Budget have to do with our health and our environment? Well, the OMB effectively has the last word on the regulations Federal agencies write to implement Federal Law. For decades, OMB’s been where proposed Federal rules to keep poison out of our lives meet lethal doses of deregulation.

Having failed in their mid-campaign attempt to blackmail Prop 8 opponents, Prop 8 supporters have now filed suit to end any disclosure of donations to political campaigns, citing evidence of harassment and menace.

Will 24 continue to paint torture as an effective tool?

Discussions of American politics in the media are dominated by conventional wisdom and lazy stereotypes rather than serious inquiry into the data. The cure to this disease is Andrew Gelman’s Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State an inquiry into “why Americans vote the way they do” that’s brief and about as readable as a rigorous, data-driven book can be. Gelman crunches the numbers and uses words and graphs to explode much of what people think they now about American political behavior.

It looks like Barney Frank is trying to reverse the really punitive aspects of the auto rescue plan that were stuck into the loan terms by Bush.

70,000 voters asked President-elect Obama if he would appoint someone to prosecute torturers. The disappointing response is that the new Administration prefers to “look forward” and punted the decision to DOJ.

Pinch me.

Oil giant comes in from the cold

Exxon funded global warming denial for years. Yesterday, in an astonishing U-turn, it called for the imposition of green taxes.

The boss of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, has called for a carbon tax to tackle global warming, marking a volte-face by the firm once described by Greenpeace as Climate Criminal No 1.