Patti LaBelle — The Alphabet gospel style on Sesame Street.

Happy End of The Canuckistan Olympics, everyone! And — you may now go back to loving San Francisco best of all the West Coast cities.

Last night I took a stroll up to a performance by my favorite theater company. Remy Bumppo was presenting Athol Fugard’s The Island and I was looking forward to a good production and one of Remy’s interesting post-play discussions. It was all of that but so much more – and it got me thinking about [...]

A few too many words comparing the Democratic Party with good old fashioned Pro-Wrestling.

Moshe Adler’s Economics for the Rest of US is a strong introduction to the core conceits and theories of modern economics. The book takes readers on a well written tour of leading thoughts on key topics of perennial concern. Employment, equality, efficiency, wages are thrown around moving minds and legislation. As we struggle with high unemployment, stagnant wages and international competition, these issues must be understood. I would recommend this work as a intellectually curious guide to thinking about vital issues and the discipline of economics. It is valuable to have a fast, smooth run through of these topics. The interplay between the field of economics and the economy is a long ignored and vital discussion.

In this post, I will reconstruct the letter, to the extent possible, to show what John Rizzo has to say for himself. I laid out the raw mentions of Rizzo’s letter in this working thread. Here, I just put those raw mentions in the paragraph order in which they appear in Rizzo’s letter.

“CIA did not ask OLC to provide an exhaustive memorandum that thoroughly discussed all possible counter arguments,” but rather sought ‘OLC’s best judgment about the correct answer to a difficult question of law.’ Rizzo was ‘aware that the issues were uncertain and that there were no controlling precedents.’ ‘When [Rizzo] asked for OLC’s views, [his] overriding objective was to secure a definitive opinion on an expedited basis.’”

I wondered in January if Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a/k/a Abu Dujaanah al-Khorasani, the al-Qaeda double agent who killed seven CIA & Blackwater operatives at FOB Chapman in Khost Province, was tortured by the Jordanians during his crucial moment in their custody in early 2009. According to a new as-Sahab “martyrdom” video of Khorasani — basically his last propaganda testament before the December attack — probably not.

“First Senator from the Tea Party” Marco Rubio got hammered last week when it came out that he ran up large personal expenses on the Florida GOP’s credit card — and that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Senator Corker knows that good financial regulation isn’t a partisan issue. Let’s hope he and Senator Dodd were paying attention to the good idea of President Obama to regulate swaps by reducing the concentration of the swaps “market”.

In the late 1930s, Depression-weary Americans turned to a movie (based upon the James Hilton novel), Lost Horizon, about a hidden Himalayan paradise, Shangri-La. In the 2000s, anxious Americans turned to Lost, a sophisticated sci-fi mystery television show set on a hidden island. As Lost’s Mr. Eko warns, we shouldn’t mistake coincidence for fate. Still…