The District of Columbia has made it legal for residents to own a handgun after being so ordered by the United States Supreme Court.  But they’re not making it easy. The plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that overturned Washington’s strict 32-year-old handgun ban was among the first to arrive as the city started registering [...]

David Kaplan reports on a big shake-up at Wall Street Journal: WSJ is cutting 50 editorial positions as it moves to reform editing functions across print, online and mobile, according to a staff memo written by Robert Thomson, the News Corp (NYSE: NWS). paper’s managing editor. The Global News, Global Copy, Global Pagination, Monitor and [...]

Megan McArdle argues that drivers who exceed the speed limit in their cars have no right to get angry at bikers who run stop signs and red lights, weave in and out of traffic, and otherwise ignore traffic laws.  Plus, because bikes are smaller and slower, they’re not going to cause any harm: The reason [...]

Matt Yglesias points out that, the Supreme Court’s historic ruling in Heller notwithstanding, DC residents still have no effective 2nd Amendment rights. As Rob Goodspeed explains it’s all in the zoning. You can’t legally buy a gun in DC because there are no gun stores here. And to sell a gun to an out-of-state resident, [...]

Carlos Santana with Rob Thomas: Doubtless the idea of bringing guys like Rob Thomas in for Supernatural was to help the old master get the attention of the younger set. But I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that it had the opposite effect for me: It got me to pay some attention to Rob [...]

Tony Snow has died. He was only 53. CNN Breaking: Former White House press secretary Tony Snow has died at the age of 53 after a second battle with cancer. Snow, who had been undergoing chemotherapy treatments for a recurrence of the disease, left his White House job September. 14, 2007, and joined CNN as [...]

Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman camped out overnight in front of a Washington, DC Apple store in order to be among the first to get one of the new iPhones.  Megan assures us that this is a mere sociological exercise for her: “I feel no desperate urge to get my hands on one of the [...]

George Will has been at the top of the pundit game for so long that you’d think he’d have joined a sizable number of his peers in seemingly dusting off one of their stock columns every week. Not so. Will’s latest installment is on the virtues of beer. “The search for unpolluted drinking water is [...]

John McCain’s secret plan for Iran: kill them with cigarettes. Presidential candidate John McCain, who once sang in jest about bombing Iran, on Tuesday reacted to a report of rising U.S. cigarette exports to the country by saying it may be “a way of killing ‘em.” McCain, known for acerbic comments and for sometimes firing [...]

Google Maps is beta testing a new “walking directions” feature, Alex Chitu reports.  Apparently, it’s just being tested  out on a small number of randomly selected users. Since I wasn’t among those selected, I was a bit dubious since I was unable to personally verify, let alone test, said service.  A quick search of another [...]

The FBI headquarters complex has a wee problem: “The Hoover Building does not meet the Interagency Security Committee’s criteria for a secure Federal facility capable of handling intelligence and other sensitive information,” the Senate Appropriations Committee observed in a new report on the 2009 Commerce, Justice and State Appropriations bill. “The Committee finds these conditions [...]

CNN features, on the 4th of July no less, a piece entitled “National Mall in monumental disrepair, activists say.” This gathering place known as America’s “front yard” stretches from the Capitol to the Potomac River and is home to the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials and Washington Monument, but it’s starting to look like “an old [...]

The NYT editorial board want you to know that they’re very disappointed in the Roberts Court, particularly its upholding of Indiana’s law requiring would-be voters to be able they are who they claim to be, allowing Kentucky to continue using lethal injection for convicted murderers who’ve exhausted seventeen years of appeals, and its ruling that [...]

Blogger Brian Beutler was shot in DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood Monday night, Greg Sargent reports for TPM. Brian Beutler, a well-known progressive blogger, was shot and seriously injured during a mugging last night in Washington, D.C. One bullet damaged Beutler’s spleen, and he had it removed during surgery this morning at the Washington Hospital Center. [...]

The Manufactured Outrage of the Day comes to us from Joe Stephens and his page A3 piece for today’s Washington Post, “Obama Got Discount on Home Loan.” Shortly after joining the U.S. Senate and while enjoying a surge in income, Barack Obama bought a $1.65 million restored Georgian mansion in an upscale Chicago neighborhood. To [...]

Rush Limbaugh isn’t going to have any trouble affording good cigars, having just re-upped with Clear Channel through 2016 for $400 million, including a $100 million signing bonus.  And you thought pro athetes got paid a lot. Said to be Limbaugh’s most lucrative deal ever by far, the new agreement runs through 2016 and includes [...]

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his gang of mullahs are said to be “seriously considering” the latest EU 5+1 proposals on resolving the international standoff on the Iranian nuclear program and are telling President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to pipe down. Warren Strobel: Iran’s senior diplomat said Tuesday that Tehran was seriously considering a new offer from six [...]

David Broder uses Elvin Lm’s book The Anti-Intellectual Presidency to argue not only that presidential speeches have steadily dumbed down over the years, which we might have guessed, but that this dumbs down public policy, too. In what must have been a heroic effort, he applied standard techniques of content analysis to state papers of [...]

Barack Obama has apparently been on the campaign trail so long that they don’t recognize him in Washington anymore. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) may have one of the best-known faces in the world, but that doesn’t mean he is recognized everywhere, even in Washington. Washington Sports Club employee Takehia Wheeler was manning the front desk [...]

Noting the hubbub over Barack Obama’s attempts to walk back his statements on the DC gun ban, Howie Kurtz echoes a sentiment Dave Schuler and I have made numerous times on OTB Radio: Wouldn’t it be better for Obama to say he had thought more about such-and-such an issue and simply changed his mind? Is [...]

Ezra Klein awards Snark of the Day honors to Megan Carpentier‘s stunning discovery that babysitters don’t earn a lot of money. Child care professionals are responsible for the health, well-being and development of the fruit of other women’s loins (not mine!) But in exchange for that, the median average salary in 2006 was $17,160. The [...]

OTB projects, with 0% of the precincts reporting, that Robert Mugabe will be re-elected as president of Zimbabwe by a wide margin. Exit polls reveal that the prime factors in motivating voters are a fear of being murdered and the lack of opposition candidates on the ballot. Security was also a prime concern: “I’ve got [...]

North Korea has destroyed the cooling tower at its Yongbyon nuclear complex. In a gesture demonstrating its commitment to halt its nuclear weapons program, North Korea blew up the most prominent symbol of its plutonium production Friday. The 60-foot cooling tower at the North’s main nuclear power plant collapsed in a heap of shattered concrete [...]

Megan McArdle has some interesting thoughts on the Supreme Court’s decision today overturning DC’s handgun ban. As she readily admits, you can get better legal analysis elsewhere. This, however, is a unique contribution to the debate: There is a distressing lack of attention to the female market in gun companies. I want something with accuracy [...]

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has overturned the D.C. handgun ban, thwarting the democratic process. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the District of Columbia cannot ban a citizen from keeping a handgun at home, throwing out one of the nation’s strictest gun control laws. The Supreme Court has overturned Washington, D.C.’s strict [...]

Drew Carey asks, “How are we supposed to compete against something that doesn’t get paid, doesn’t get health insurance, and never goes on breaks?” No, not illegal aliens, silly. They get paid (a little) and take the occasional break. No, he’s talking about robots. Today, we don’t need human workers to book our travel, do [...]

George Carlin, a comedian known for his combination of raunchy language and intellectual humor, died of heart failure last evening. He was 71. Carlin was an interesting guy, combining brilliant observational humor with political activism. Like too many comics in the HBO era, though, it often seemed that he was vulgar and outrageous simply because [...]

A Newsweek poll of registered voters shows Barack Obama with a whopping 15-point lead over John McCain, 51 to 36. Newsweek‘s Michael Hirsh is stoked. Barack finally has his bounce. For weeks many political experts and pollsters have been wondering why the race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain had stayed so tight, [...]

The gang at Foreign Policy wants you to know that, “Sure, it’s ruining the global economy and making everyone miserable, but there’s an underappreciated upside to the high price of oil.” They’d have to be awfully good to offset ruining the economy and making everyone miserable, no? Well, here they are: Slightly more people may [...]

The cover story of the current Atlantic (Monthly) is an interesting piece by Nicholas Carr which asks, Is Google Making Us Stupid? It begins with the standard “the Internet is giving us short attention spans” meme but eventually gives us much more than that. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that [...]

Tim Russert has died of a heart attack at the age of 58. Family members say NBC’s Tim Russert has died. They tell The New York Times that Russert died of an apparent heart attack. The host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” was 58. Longtime NBC anchor Tom Brokaw has now confirmed Russert’s death, in [...]

Reuters: “Dutch statisticians have established that Friday 13th, a date regarded in many countries as inauspicious, is actually safer than an average Friday.” They answer (sort of) the most obvious next question: “I find it hard to believe that it is because people are preventatively more careful or just stay home, but statistically speaking, driving [...]

Terrorist suspects detained at Guantánamo Bay (and presumably, anyplace else under American jurisdiction) have the right to file habeus corpus petitions in U.S. civilian courts the Supreme Court ruled today in a 5-4 decision. Further, Congress could not pass a law waiving these protections absent rebellion or invasion. Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in [...]

The campaigns of John McCain and Barack Obama have rejected a proposed opening debate proposed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg that would have been broadcast exclusively on ABC and hosted by Diane Sawyer. While Obama has accepted in theory McCain’s suggestion that they have ten, unmoderated, town hall-style debates while suggesting that they be [...]

A crazed Tokyo man has killed seven people in a stabbing spree. A man who police said “was tired of life” drove into a crowd of pedestrians Sunday and then went on a stabbing rampage in Tokyo’s premier electronics and video game district, killing seven people and wounding 10, authorities said. The deadly lunchtime assault [...]

Aaron Brazell is doing some research on the evolution of blogging in recent years and has asked for my input. [Update: The result, "Political Blogging 2.0," is now up.] I started OTB in January 2003 and have seen a lot of change. I should note at the outset that my experience is almost entirely with [...]

Now here’s a headline you don’t see every day: “Deputies subdue naked man who was claiming to be Jesus and George Bush.” A naked Pinson man claiming to be Jesus Christ and George Bush was shot four times with a stun gun by Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies this morning after he repeatedly refused to heed [...]

The big news overnight is a secret meeting between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama somewhere in the DC area to talk about something or the other. The meeting was reportedly “productive.” What did they produce? Nobody’s saying. Regardless, the press corps is quite excited about the whole thing, mostly because Obama gave them the slip, [...]

DNC Chairman Howard Dean’s “50-state strategy” has been controversial but Barack Obama is going to attempt to test it this fall, Sam Stein reports. Obama will likely start the general election with 180 or so “reliably Democratic” electoral votes. With the goal of getting to 270, the DNC believes it could play a role in [...]

Along with a few hundred thousand other folks in the area, the power’s been out at my place since yesterday afternoon, so I’m a bit behind on my blogging. As everyone knows by now, Hillary Clinton has put out word that she will suspend campaigning and endorse Barack Obama at a rally in DC Saturday. [...]

AP BREAKING: Clinton set to concede delegate race to Obama Hillary Rodham Clinton will concede Tuesday night that Barack Obama has the delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, campaign officials said, effectively ending her bid to be the nation’s first female president. Obama is 40 delegates shy of clinching the nomination, but he is widely [...]

Breaking News from Reuters: Men don’t like bad marriages. Bachelor Carl Weisman got fed up of being classified as a playboy, a loser or a commitment-phobe so he set out to find out exactly why he and a growing number of eligible men were steering clear of marriage. Weisman, 49, conducted a survey of 1,533 [...]

Fighting back against growing support for the ordination of women as priests, the Roman Catholic church has announced it will henceforth automatically excommunicate the priests and the presiding bishops. The Vatican issued its most explicit decree so far against the ordination of women priests on Thursday, punishing them and the bishops who try to ordain [...]

Seen this morning in DC: An advertising poster with the caption, “Married people earn more money.” I thought perhaps someone has been reading Stuart Buck and is seeking to take the romance out of marriage. It turns out that this is a campaign aimed at curbing teen pregnancy: Since 1987, Campaign For Our Children (CFOC) [...]

Newsbusters’ Rich Noyes observes that the mass media seems much more excited by Scott McClellan’s new book trashing the Bush Administration than it did with predecessor Ari Fleischer’s book which had mostly good things to say about his former boss. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, while McClellan’s yet-to-be-officially-published book has already become the liberal media’s favorite [...]

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has published a tell-all book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, taking swipes at the Bush administration. Politico’s Mike Allen has an extensive review and summary. The upshot of the book: “I still like and admire President Bush,” McClellan writes. “But he [...]

Martin Walker reports on a distressing new phenomenon in Russia. An alarming new word has been born. It is “hypermortality,” which might be defined as an extraordinary tendency toward death. It jumps from the first page of the U.N. Development Program report entitled Demographic Policy in Russia. “The Russian phenomenon of hypermortality comes to be [...]

Reggie Love was a standout wide receiver and basketball player at Duke that the Dallas Cowboys, for some odd reason, unsuccessfully tried to turn into a pro linebacker. Love was occasionally flat on his back in his college days. He’s landed on his feet, working as the body man for the presumptive Democratic nominee for [...]

Former Representative Bob Barr has won the Libertarian Party nomination for President, narrowly defeating longtime Party activist Mary Ruwart. This is a rather welcome change for the LP, who have taken to nominating more radical, but relatively unknown candidates in past election cycles. As I’ve said before, Barr is their best candidate since Paul in [...]

FDL’s Thers is piling on the “has conservatism run out of ideas” bandwagon and inadvertently helped demonstrate why conservatism will never die. The piece is entitled “The Autumn of Wingnuttia” and doesn’t disappoint. He dismisses “a belief in free markets, free people, and in the greatness of the American people and the American nation” as [...]