Back in February, the Arizona State Senate passed a sweeping anti-foreclosure fraud bill, shepherded by Michele Reagan, a Republican who was sued by her mortgage servicer after trying to find out who owned her note. The main piece of the bill would have mandated a thorough chain of title to be presented at every foreclosure action in the state. And so naturally, the Arizona House of Representatives deep-sixed it.

I love my bee girls. I never expected such a small hobby with such serendipital beginnings to develop into such an emotionally satisfying experience. As Chris says: It’s not about the honey. It’s about the bees.

Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns’ new book, Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution As It Unfolded, provides us all with an important first hand view of this movement as it blossomed in Egypt from January 25th through February 12. Using – with permission –running accounts from twitter, the authors are able to trace the movement in the streets in the words of key activists who were there, organizing, strategizing, being surprised by successes and beaten by Mubarak’s thugs.

I agree that any serious deficit reduction plan should include an increase to the IRS budget. But there’s a way to get to this level of revenue without hoping that every tax cheat gets caught, and it’s pretty simple: let the Bush tax cuts expire.

The first Predator drone strike has hit Libya, the US military confirmed today. It’s not clear where it struck, but explosions were heard outside Tripoli, in addition to in the area around the besieged city of Misurata. Some missiles fired by NATO apparently hit an underground bunker near the Gadhafi compound in Tripoli, which looks to have been used for military storage.

The good news is that over the last two weeks or so at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear plant, there have been no further spectacular explosions, no new massive breaches of containment or as far as we know, massive releases of radiation, though there continue to be dangerous levels inside the reactors, in water and in surrounding areas.

The bad news is the Japanese authorities have been unable to make substantial progress against the massive quantities of contaminated water still leaking from the various units.

Predictably, the budget framework that Barack Obama outlined quickly became used as the leftward pole in the debate. After all, Obama gave a partisan speech! He criticized Paul Ryan! So with the Obama plan on the left and the Ryan plan on the right, the range of debate had been narrowed artificially.

The way secrecy in this country works is insidious not just because the government prevents citizens from learning the things we as citizens need to know to exercise democracy, but also because the President and other classification authorities can wield secrecy as an instrument of power, choosing to release information they otherwise claim is top secret when it serves their political purpose.

There’s a determined protest movement that will only grow more defiant in the wake of this brutality, and a determined regime which will only use more and more force to put down the protests, following the examples of Bahrain and Iran. This was the deadliest day yet in Syria, and overall the death toll in the uprising is approaching 300.

“Two cranky Republican-type guys duked it out with me” and other stories from the right.