Natalie Portman certainly is lovely. This girl from Modern Family needs to fire her stylist. Julianna Rancik is a giantess, although her towering over Scott Caan did lead me to research him on IMDB where I learned he’s 5’5″ tall.

Okay, it’s my own fault. Watching the panel of Meet the Press is diving into the deep end of inanity, but I did it anyway. Even for the Meetheads, this one was outstanding. Bobo has the answer to the violent tragedy of Tucson.

It’s sinfulness.

“A detailed accounting of all of Lockheed Martin’s government contracts could fill several large volumes,” writes William Hartung, in his new book Prophets of War, a history of the nation’s largest defense contractor. “Suffice it to say that they are involved at one level or another in nearly everything the federal government does, from providing instruments of death and destruction to collecting taxes and recruiting spies.”

For those who have followed the defense industry for years, that statement is no revelation, but for the vast majority of the American public, the notion that the maker of the radar-evading F-22 Raptor aircraft has also been involved in sorting the mail is both surprising, and important.

A man about to go on trial in Switzerland for breaking that country’s secrecy laws has promised to give details of 2,000 individuals and corporations who are hiding their money in offshore accounts to Wikileaks tomorrow.

Over the past two years, Barack Obama has pursued policies that reveal an almost obsequious fealty to business. He’s expanded the War on Terror and extended the Bush tax cuts, among other things. Yet we’re still getting ZOMG HE’S A SOCIALIST!!1! columns like this from Very Serious Conservatives like George Will.

President Obama believes in cooperation with Republicans, revenue-neutral corporate tax revisions, letting corporatist Tim Geithner negotiate with business executives and the tooth fairy.

There was a frightening heaviness to the days following the Tucson shootings. Some years ago, Italo Calvino perfectly described the feeling I had last week: At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spared no [...]

The first statewide initiative from Edwin and Joyce Koupal’s People’s Lobby to appear on the ballot, the Clean Environment Act, lost by a wide margin. The Koupal’s blamed much of its failure on the huge amount of money the oil and chemical industries were able to spend on the “No” campaign.

In a major ruling Friday, a coalition of nonprofit defense lawyers and consumer protection advocates in Maryland successfully got over 10,000 foreclosure cases managed by GMAC Mortgage tossed out, because affidavits in the cases were signed by Jeffrey Stephan, the infamous GMAC “robo-signer” who attested to the authenticity of foreclosure documents without any knowledge about them, as well as signing other false statements.

On November 1, 2007 fifty-one workers at the Redco plant in my old hometown of Little Falls, New York went on strike in response to a company decision to deny new workers the kind of health and pension benefits that had made Redco, and its predecessor companies, desirable places for lifelong employment. Located on the tiny island where Christian Hansen first began to manufacture “Junket” custard in 1891, the plant was sold to Salada in 1958, then to Kellogg in 1969, and in 1988 to a German-based transnational, the Teekanne Group