I grew up handing my father tools when he was under the sink and being shown the insides of a fuse box. My favorite books in my early years were – everything written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, the patron saint (if there ever was one) of showing you how it used to be done. Almost everything I ever wanted to learn was based on something I read about in those books: gardening, sewing, raising livestock, cooking, preserving.

Featuring new videos by FOALS and Caribou.

I’m sure that wherever he is now, John Lennon is smiling wryly at the Vatican’s inadvertent efforts to make his flippant prediction come true.

It’s Michael Steele vs. Karl Rove in an epic battle for the soul – and the wallet – of the Republican Party!

A micro-jobs bill passed into law back in March, mainly a flawed job hiring tax credit for small business. None of the other measures to boost employment have passed. The Local Jobs for America Act, which would pump $75 billion into direct hiring in local communities and is head and shoulders the best jobs program out there, hasn’t budged since it was introduced. The “Home Star” program, which would give rebates to people who do energy retrofits on their homes, just passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee, but it has a long way to go. Other ideas, like work-sharing or infrastructure spending, are DOA.

Don Blankenship, owner of what almost amounts to a company that regularly commits serial murder, Massey Energy, is also on the board of the Chamber of Commerce. In that position, he gets to determine how the Chamber spends its money. One of the things the Chamber spends it on is buying judges. So how compromised are the other judges who signed the amicus brief with Robert Young, a brief that directly benefited Blankenship’s company, Massey Energy?

New rules being developed for the handling of detained suspected terrorists fit well with the overall Obama administration commitment to injustice.

After the initial December 2002 review, CIA gave clear instructions to the interrogators not to destroy or edit the tapes. However, it appears that the review–inasmuch as it didn’t reveal glaring concerns with the tapes and didn’t actually review whether the interrogators were following instructions–was largely a whitewash of the original tapes in an effort to green light their destruction.

Djou, a Honolulu City Councilman and the only major Republican in the race, has a within-the-margin-of-error lead over Democrats Ed Case and Colleen Hanabusa. He only gets 32% of the vote, but because the special election runs under no-primary, first-past-the-post rules, he would be able to win.

I think Ben Nelson (D-NE), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), the whole Republican caucus, President Obama, who decided to not fight for a public option, and everyone else in Washington who shares responsibility for killing the public option deserves a nice big campaign contribution from Hemsley.