It’s not a pattern, it’s a way of life for FoxNews.

The Asteroids Galaxy Tour — The Golden Age.

The latest Major League Baseball teams to participate in the It Gets Better Project (the award-winning grassroots video effort started by Dan Savage) designed to give hope to struggling LGBT youth are the Tampa Bay Rays and the Philadelphia Phillies.

The problem isn’t that all experts are worthless, the problem is that the worthless experts are the only ones that get heard.

There’s been a sudden explosion of interest in Wikileaks cables down under, after every single one of the US diplomatic cables on Australia was suddenly released online to the public this week. While hardened Aussie journalists insist there are no major “bombshells,” plenty of intriguing new stories are now exploding onto the media landscape. Overall, the US cables reveal a sovereign nation absurdly subservient to US foreign policy, with Australian ministers queuing to discuss confidential party deliberations with their friends in the US embassy.

We had one moment where this was subject to any debate at all, during the fight over the FISA amnesty legislation. But that was really about a small portion of the total data collection. Most of the surveillance remains a secret. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall tried to tease out a little more this summer, when they tried to get the intelligence community to admit to how they were misinterpreting the Patriot Act to allow for more data collection. But that never went anywhere. From NSA surveillance to national security letters to the AT&T room on Folsom Street in San Francisco, what bits and pieces we do know about point to a giant network Hoovering up every piece of information you let out into the world digitally.

Welcome to “under the bus,” environmentalists and eco-conscious Eaarth citizens. We gays have decorated it quite festively, and our Latino and other immigrant communities have added their own touches as well. We’ve all been thrown under here, sacrificed to the highest goal: Obama’s re-election.

The CBO is up with a report today showing that the stimulus is responsible for 2.9 million jobs – a show of strength for the $787 billion program.

This really all depends on the meaning of the word “troops” to Maliki. He has been trying to change the terms, saying that troops will leave but “trainers,” who would be members of the US military, would be allowed to stay to assist Iraqi security forces. Maliki has even said in the past that he could bypass the Iraqi Parliament under such an arrangement, and permit trainers to stay. As noted above, there is a negotiating process underway between Iraq and the US on some manner of training.

As people become more worried about the future and stop expecting their incomes to increase, they become less likely to spend money on non-essentials. Given how much of our economy is driven by consumer spending, this lack of optimism could easily cause any modest growth we had been seeing to stall.