The Supreme Court has ruled that kids should be able to access pornographic images on the Internet. Or, rather, the fact that a lot of parents don’t supervise their kids does not supersede the rights of adults to access said content. A long legal drive to shield children from sexually explicit material on the Web [...]

In case you’ve somehow missed this video of Al Franken in tights mimicking Mick Jagger from 20-odd years ago that’s newly amusing now that the former is apparently the next United States Senator from Minnesota:

President-Elect Barack Obama has made the most controversial move thus far in his transition, naming far right televangelist Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.  While this initially struck me as a brilliant move on his part, winning points with Evangelical Christians with little downside, the announcement has sparked outrage in the gay [...]

When it was announced that NBC was turning its 10 pm time slot to Jay Leno, I had the same puzzled reaction as most.  Brian Stelter, though, argues that we’re likely seeing the future of network television. The programming and viewing habits of the last 50 years — exemplified by the checkerboard of competing programs [...]

The French National Archive has released video footage of John McCain being interviewed as a Vietnam POW.  The Sky News report opens rather amusingly: The video portrays the Republican as a hero but the message may be tarnished as he is filmed smoking a cigarette. I suspect he’ll be forgiven. He also describes being shot [...]

Hank updated his classic “Family Tradition” for the 2008 presidential campaign: While better than some of his MNF “Ready for Some Football” tunes, I must say that I prefer the original. And it may backfire: the site of someone in a Redskins jersey singing the praises of McCain and Palin might just turn Texas (Dallas [...]

In this satirical video, British humorists John Bird and John Fortune, a/k/a “the Long Johns,” explain the financial crisis. It’s actually nearly a year old but it still works. Humor across the Pond is a tad different, not least of which is less fear of risking alienating racial sensibilities. The bit about the “poor black [...]

“Saturday Night Live” parodied the debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, getting in good zingers against both. It’s starting to feel like Tina Fey is running for vice president. Fey again returned to “Saturday Night Live” to play Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin as the sketch comedy show continued to pull out all [...]

This video, called “Burning Down the House: What Caused Our Economic Crisis” (although, oddly, set to the tune of “Money for Nothing”) is apparently all the rage (at least in my wife’s office). It traces the subprime crisis to the Jimmy Carter era Community Reinvestment Act. To the extent this view is correct (and I [...]

The video of Sarah Palin (then: Sarah Heath) in the swimsuit competition of the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant is making the rounds: Per HuffPo, the announcer comments, “Sarah says she wants to prepare for a career in television broadcasting by majoring in telecommunications and political science. It is no wonder that she has also been [...]

I’m not sure who’s behind this spoof video imagining how the conversation between John McCain and Sarah Palin, wherein he popped the question, might have gone.  It is both fairly amusing and decidedly not safe for work. Via Ann Althouse via Memeorandum

I caught a bit of the Republican Convention last evening, including the Ronald Reagan tribute and as much of the Fred Thompson speech as I could take before shutting it off. I TiVo’d Joe Lieberman but it’s iffy as to whether I’ll get to it. Matt Yglesias points to a sound byte that I first [...]

The McCain campaign has launched two new ad videos in consecutive days under the titles “Broken” and “Family.” I find the juxtaposition amusing.  The spots themselves strike me as weak but, as I keep reminding myself, I’m not the target audience. “Broken” Washington’s broken. John McCain knows it. We’re worse off than we were four [...]

Just when you thought Campaign 2008 couldn’t get any dumber, Paris Hilton weighs in with a video: For those unable to watch the video, ABC News’ Tahman Bradley has the rundown: Sitting on a lawn chair in a bathing suit, Ms. Hilton says to camera, “Hey America, I’m Paris Hilton and I’m a celebrity too. [...]

Via Reuters: U.S. agents can seize travelers’ laptops: report U.S. federal agents have been given new powers to seize travelers’ laptops and other electronic devices at the border and hold them for unspecified periods the Washington Post reported on Friday. Under recently disclosed Department of Homeland Security policies, such seizures may be carried out without [...]

Despite the fact that most of the official artists’ offerings I’m finding on YouTube disable embedding, I note with some interest that this video is part of the official Warner Bros. Records channel. Here’s hoping more record companies decide to make their artists’ stuff available this way. [UPDATE: Sadly, the foregoing appears not to be [...]

OTB’s Roving Correspondent Richard Gardner sent me this clip about an unfortunate incident at Fort Riley, Kansas wherein a hapless parachutist collides with an Army band. A rogue parachutist veered off course yesterday and smashed into an unsuspecting military brass band in Kansas, injuring three musicians and destroying two tubas. Members of the 1st Infantry [...]

Michael Arrington previews what purports to be a prototype of a new Google search experience, incorporating user commenting and voting such as we see on Digg and other social media sites: The video above shows a user interface being bucket tested by Google to select (probably randomly determined) users. Earlier today we showed a screen [...]

The daring rescue of Ingrid Betancourt from FARC terrorists misused the Red Cross symbol in violation of the Geneva Conventions. A member of the military mission that tricked Colombian rebels into freeing 15 hostages wore the insignia of the International Red Cross during the operation, President Alvaro Uribe said Wednesday. Mr. Uribe said his government [...]

The gang at JibJab have released a new animation, Time for Some Campaignin‘: Send a JibJab Sendables® eCard Today! “Like the change we must change and the change we hold dear. I really like change, have I made myself clear?” is probably the best line. UPDATE:  Newsweek‘s Samantha Henig has an interesting interview with JibJab [...]

The Spin Cycle Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over.

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 [...]

Some gas stations are secretly charging credit card users more, ABC News reports. (Video here.) Many Americans have taken up a new hobby — hunting for the gas station with the lowest prices. But the hunt has gotten exponentially harder as the price of oil has skyrocketed and the posted price may not even be [...]

Jeff Jarvis argues, persuasively, that newspapers should get out of the business of printing, distribution, circulation, and ad sales and concentrate on their essential function. And he’s not just saying that they should shut down their print operations and focus on the Web. He figures that Google and others do all that stuff so well [...]

Daniel Strauss sat through a session at the center-left New America Foundation yesterday and came away with an epiphany about John McCain’s campaign: “It’s what he’s saying, not how he says it.” Jeremy Rosner observed, A lot of people have noted he’s just very incoherently between the right and the center, between offshore drilling and [...]

Jesse Jackson’s statement that Barack Obama’s “talking down to black people” makes him so angry that he “wants to cut his nuts out” has caused quite the stir. Charles Hurt of the NY Post has the most concise report: In a vulgar tirade caught on tape by Fox News, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said he [...]

Duncan Riley laments the demise of the blogroll. Once upon a time in the land of the blogs, the blogroll reigned suprmeme. Everyone had a blogroll, and it was a great way to discover new and interesting blogs. But somewhere along the way blogrolls fell out of favor, and you don’t seem them much at [...]

As if to prove Robert Heinlein correct, the House Administration Committee is, apparently with honorable intent, considering effectively banning the use of popular social media sites, including YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook by Members. Soren Dayton couches this in partisan terms: “In typical fashion, House Democrats are trying to pass rules that stifle debate and require [...]

Jonah Goldberg has sparked a minor blogospheric furor for a recent column in which he castigated Barack Obama, John McCain, and others for promoting a compulsory national service program, which he compared to slavery. There’s a weird irony at work when Sen. Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of [...]

Happy Independence Day! I don’t know about my OTB colleagues but I’ll be taking the rest of the day off, honoring the sacrifices made by the Founders by sitting around watching television, grilling and consuming meat products, and drinking beer with family and friends. Some things to keep you occupied until my return: “Putting The [...]

James Kirchich, recent nominee for an Yglesias Award for fairness, says that, while the Obama campaign is setting itself up to believe that “The only obstacle between Barack Obama and the presidency is the mountain of smears that will no doubt come his way,” the truth of the matter is that most of the smears [...]

James Cason, the U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay, has achieved rock star status in that country. Literally. [H]e learned the obscure Paraguayan Guaraní language, recorded a music album of indigenous folk songs and sold 1,000 tickets to a concert in a downtown theater. Now, in the final year of his four-decade diplomatic career, Cason has suddenly [...]

Some Obama supporters are apparently taking advantage of Google’s terms of service to silence anti-Obama blogs, Simon Owens of Bloggasm reports. The company automatically shuts down sites upon receipt of TOS violation claims until they’re able to do a human audit, a rather slow process with given little priority on the free BlogSpot service. After [...]

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 [...]

Barack Obama’s latest ad spot has him explaining that, no, really, he’s an American. And, despite what you might have heard, he likes it here. And he’s not a Muslim, either. Here’s the video: The transcript: I’m Barack Obama. America is a country of strong families and strong values. My life’s been blessed by both. [...]

The creationists deserve a few props here. Since the Dover loss they’ve switched strategies away from claiming that ID is science and are instead focusing on “academic freedom”. That the concept of academic freedom doesn’t generally apply at the elementary and secondary levels seems to be of no consequence. The Louisiana legislature has passed, by [...]

Though I’m not that fond of the Democrats on most economic matters, I don’t think they are socialists (what they are would involve a much longer discussion). The idiocy of socialism and national ownership of industry is apparent to most thinking people. Nevertheless, my first reaction to tripe like this is alarm: Link: sevenload.com Once [...]

Mark Glaser calls attention to one of the strange dilemmas of modern life: deciding whom to “friend” on various social media sites like Facebook and MySpace. Is the person a friend, a real friend, or someone who wants to be a friend? Should I add them as a friend because it’s polite, or ignore them [...]

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 [...]

The Associated Press is backing down on its attempt to use the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to stop the Drudge Retort from using short excerpts of its content after a major backlash in the blogosphere. (See Jeff Jarvis, Cernig, Michael Arrington, and others for background.) Saul Hansell reports the AP’s modified stance in today’s NYT: [...]

Howard Fineman thinks we have learned a lot about Barack Obama from the Jim Johnson incident. We know John McCain: as formed and familiar as a well-worn boot. But we don’t know Barack Obama very well, and getting to know him has been and remains the basic national task of 2008. With less than five [...]

H.E. Husain Haqqani, who presented his credentials as Ambassador of Pakistan to the United States a mere nine days ago, delivered his first public address since taking office this evening at the Atlantic Council. Following is a summary of his remarks. While our two countries have been allies since the 1950s, neither side has viewed [...]

Today’s Manufactured Outrage of the Day* is that, on a mid-day Fox News program featuring Megyn Kelly and Michelle Malkin debating the impact of Michelle Obama on the race, the production assistant in charge of writing chyrons dubbed the would-be first Lady “Obama’s Baby Mama.” Apparently, this is a racial slur which suggests that she [...]

Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, who is serving as the defense attorney for Canadian citizen Omar Khadr’s war crimes trial (previously discussed on OTB here) has divulged that the Pentagon has been urging interrogators in Guantanamo Bay to destroy all of their notes regarding their interrogation of detainees. The Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to [...]

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 [...]

P.Z. Myers posts a video immodestly entitled “I Know More Than God” that’s been on YouTube since at least March but that I’d never seen before: Myers notes that the video puts “the actual creation story as revealed by modern physics into the same kind of portentous, simple language that even a Mesopotamian goat-herder could [...]

Hotline reports that the McCain campaign will launch this ad, titled simply “Safe,” today in “unnamed battleground states.” (Although I’m pretty sure that the states have names, since I know of no states without names.) JOHN MCCAIN: Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war. When I was five years old, [...]

WSJ points to the failure of so-called ‘hyperlocal’ news portals, focusing on a WaPo venture. For believers in the power of rigorous local coverage to help save newspapers, the Washington Post’s launch of LoudounExtra.com last July was a potentially industry-defining event. It paired a journalistic powerhouse with a dream team of Internet geeks to build [...]

Admiral William “Fox” Fallon, who resigned his post as CENTCOM commander after a controversial Tom Barnett interview was published in Esquire, gave his first interview as a private citizen to CNN’s Kyra Phillips. A brief excerpt from the transcript: ADM. FALLON: I think the real story here is what’s important. What was important was not [...]