Christopher Reeve — Brush Up Your Shakespeare, on The Muppet Show, episode 418.

Hopefully, you’ve been too busy in recent weeks following real news — like the ongoing events in Egypt — to have heard about someone’s lame attempt to relive the Clinton years by writing a gossipy pseudo-biographical novel about Barack Obama.

Think the it’s-not-rape-unless-there’s-screaming “No Taxpayer Money For Abortion Act” is bad? Check out the GOP’s Orwellian “Protect Life Act.”

The events in Egypt bear a remarkable similarity to the “Green Revolution”.

The big story in Texas this week was loss of electricity and the need for “rolling blackouts” in major urban areas and other load centers, which affected natural gas supplies into Northern New Mexico. What does it tell us?

I was not necessarily surprised by the absence of a pro-Mubarak crackdown on this “Day of Departure” in Egypt, simply because of the masses of the crowd on hand. The thugs would have been outnumbered. I am surprised by the presence of government officials in Tahrir Square, in a supportive capacity. . . .

One of the main narratives emerging in coverage of the violence that plagued Egypt’s popular uprising on Wednesday and Thursday is that the Interior Ministry is primarily responsible, as seen for example in the CNN video here. We heard from Al Jazeera English on Thursday that Egypt’s attorney general has banned former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly from leaving the country and has frozen his assets. In this post, I provide some background on the Interior Ministry and how its 1.4 million employees are deployed. But one should not assume that the Interior Ministry is the only other problem once Mubarak is gone. As Jane Mayer has pointed out in detail, Vice President Omar Suleiman, who is now being openly discussed by the US government as the leader of a potential interim government should Mubarak step down, has been the primary conduit for CIA renditions to Egypt for torture.

Keep in mind that we have a letter signed by Larry Summers, during the transition, saying that the Administration will undertake “reforming our bankruptcy laws” to help keep homeowners in their homes. And we have assurances delivered in writing to lawmakers like Donna Edwards and Jeff Merkley that they would take this up. All of this has gone down the memory hole now, but this was a fundamental promise, and they broke it. As a result, we have a program to help homeowners that it entirely voluntary on the part of the servicer, with predictable results.

There are just 14 WikiLeak cables in this database mentioning both Egypt and bloggers (out of 325 that mention Egypt) but just one–dated March 30, 2009–that talks in detail about the actual content of blogs rather than Mubarak’s persecution of them as a human rights issue.

HR3 – “The No Taxpayer Money for Abortion Act” – is a vile piece of legislation by its title alone. That the bill contained, until yesterday, a provision to redefine rape as “forcible” rape was even more insidious. In a Republican-controlled House, it’s not shocking to see this kind of medieval treatment of women become a priority over, you know, job creation. But let’s focus on the Democrats involved in this travesty. A look at the DCCC’s contributions to and on behalf of the 10 Democratic co-sponsors of HR3 show the committee spent a whopping $3,379,322.85 to keep these members in office – in 2010 alone.