I don't quote the Chairman of the Republican Party of Alabama very often, but I'm quoting him below because according to this Washington Post article, Alabama politics have taken an unusual turn this year.

"We've got a conservative, evangelical Christian, Republican governor," Alabama Republican Party Chairman Marty Connors said, enunciating each word as if to get his head around the details, "trying to get a massive turnout of black voters to pass a tax increase so he can raise taxes on Republican constituents."

You may remember Troy McClure from such films as "Hitler Doesn't Live Here Anymore" and "It's a Wonderful Belt." How about "Gladys The Groovy Mule" or "The Revenge of Abe Lincoln"? Those films are just a small part of McClure's career. The Simpsons Archive has compiled a complete list of McClure’s work in this surprisingly extensive filmography.

Here's something you don't see everyday. It's a wooden mirror.

Fox News has sued Al Franken over the title of Franken's new book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." Fox claims to have registered the phrase "Fair & Balanced" as a trademark in 1995. Fox's complaint is surprisingly nasty. It refers to Franken as "shrill and unstable", "either intoxicated or deranged", and a "parasite." I don't know why Fox would sue Franken at all. Prior restraint suits almost always lose. All they've done is give Franken free publicity for his book. Here are articles about the case from the New York Times and the Washington Post. Franken responds in this Associated Press article.

Two new books, The Clinton Wars by Sidney Blumenthal and Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton, have attempted to put the Clinton presidency in perspective. Unfortunately, most reviews of these books ignore the broader issues these books raise and instead concentrate on refighting the impeachment or personal attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton. However, a few thoughtful reviews have appeared. The two most intersting reviews I've read are Gary Wills' review in the New York Review of Books, and Todd Gitlin's review on the openDemocracy website.

This Washington Post article presents new information on how the Bush administration manipulated intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs to justify war with Iraq. It finds that:

"The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied."

Karen Kwiatkowski is an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who recently retired. During her last three years in the service she worked for the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Under Secretariat for Policy. Kwiatkowski explains what has gone wrong with U.S. Middle East policy in this article from the Akron Beacon Journal.

This Boston Globe magazine article by Charles Pierce examines the history of polygraphs, and discusses whether lie detectors really work.

Some members of the Bush administration are surprised by the problems the U.S. is having in post-war Iraq. They wouldn't be surprised if they had asked James Dobbins, the former special envoy to post-Taliban Afghanistan, who has written a book that argues that "nearly everything this administration has said and done about postwar Iraq is wrong." They also could have asked the "Army's Most Decorated Soldier", Colonel David Hackworth.

During the Great Depression, the Federal government funded the Federal Writers' Project to provide work for unemployed writers, editors, and researchers. Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Studs Terkel were among the more than 6,600 people who participated in the project. In this New York Times article, historian Douglas Brinkley discusses the Federal Writers' Project. Some of the Federal Writers' Project's oral history interviews are now available online at Library of Congress's American Life Histories web site.

Director Sandy Collora wanted to make a short film that would help him get noticed by the film industry. So he made an 8-minute film called Batman: Dead End, in which Batman fights the Joker and two other movie villains. You can read a review of the film here, and download Batman: Dead End here.

Some filmmakers in the Philippines have also made their own Batman movie. Their version is "an outlandish so-bad-it's-good production" that includes several musical numbers. Here's a review of Alyas Batman and Robin from Film Threat.com.

In this Slate article, Sam Tanenhaus explains why conservatives are afraid of Ann Coulter.

Dateline: Hollywood is a new satirical website that focuses on the entertainment industry. It's described as "a satire of Hollywood and entertainment journalism -- think The Onion meets Daily Variety, Entertainment Weekly, and Entertainment Tonight." This week's edition includes a story about movie marketing that begins:

"It was an impressive weekend for the marketing department at Dimension Films, a division of Miramax, as the people who promoted “Spy Kids 3D: Game Over" reached out and swindled the American public out of $32.5 million."

Yesterday Milwaukee Brewers radio announcer Bob Uecker was awarded the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcast excellence and inducted into the broadcaster's wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Pretty good for a lifetime .200 hitter. Here are articles on Uecker from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and ESPN.

In this Slate article, Ian Austen explains why this year's Tour de France is "promising to be one of the great Tours of the postwar era."

Here's an "interview" with science fiction author Phillip K. Dick, who died in 1982. The interview includes Dick's views on the topics "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?" Everything Dick says is taken from his fiction, letters, or essays.

You read it here first. The answer to the mystery of life is four.

Hey, "Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing,” the 2nd Annual Lebowski Fest was held last weekend. Lebowski Fest is an opportunity for fans of the movie "The Big Lebowski" to gather in Louisville, Kentucky for "an annual celebration of all things Lebowski." Click here to read an MSNBC article about Lebowski Fest.

Here's some internet fun. Go to Google. Type in "Weapons of Mass Destruction", and click the "I'm feeling lucky" button. Or, if you're in a hurry, just click here.

Steven Johnson writes that Google transformed "searching for information . . . from a sluggish, unreliable process to something you could do with genuine confidence." But Google is not perfect. In this Slate article Johnson discusses problems with Google.

I've seen several reunited punk bands over the last year. Last November I saw Mission of Burma. Last month I saw The Fall, and tonight I saw X. Both Mission of Burma and X put on great shows, and would be well worth seeing again. Who's next? Well, the Pixies may reunite.

BananaSlug is a search engine that helps you find new and unexpected information on the internet. According to the BananaSlug site:

"BananaSlug was designed to promote serendipitous surfing: finding the unexpected in the 3,083,324,652 web pages indexed by Google. Directed Google searches return pages most relevant to your search term, based on the pages' popularity on the Web. You may never see some of the pages way down the list that are relevant or interesting, but off the beaten path.

So we give you a little boost. We "seed" your search with another word, chosen at random, and this accidental encounter results in pages you may have overlooked."

I won't be posting this week because I will be on vacation. I'll leave you with a panorama of this year's 4th of July Fireworks from the Empire State Building.

Here are two very different articles about popular music. First, Robert Christgau of the Village Voice reviews the new Radiohead album and considers the state of rock music today. He finds that Radiohead is "the only youngish band standing that combines critical consensus with the ability to fill a venue larger than the Hammerstein Ballroom." and carries "the dubious, dangerous mantle of Only Band That Matters."

On the other hand, David Lee Roth is a little less serious in this interview from the Wave. When asked "Is it safe to say you were the first to marry rock ‘n’ roll and spandex?," Dave replies, " No. But I was the first to make sense out of it. "

Ruy Teixeira, co-author of the book The Emerging Democratic Majority and this companion New Republic article, has his own website called The Emerging Democratic Majority. It includes his weblog called Donkey Rising.

Jan Swafford tries to understand Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in this Slate article.

In this New Republic article, John Judis and Spencer Ackerman examine how the Bush administration misused intelligence information to make their case for war in Iraq. Here's an excerpt:

"From late August 2002 to mid-March of this year, the Bush administration made its case for war by focusing on the threat posed to the United States by Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and by his purported links to the Al Qaeda terrorist network. . . Yet there was no consensus within the American intelligence community that Saddam represented such a grave and imminent threat. Rather, interviews with current and former intelligence officials and other experts reveal that the Bush administration culled from U.S. intelligence those assessments that supported its position and omitted those that did not."

Daniel Gross explains how the rich are staying rich through the help of the federal government (Bush tax cut) in this Slate article.

My friend Paul has been drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon for years. According to this article from the New York Times Magazine, Paul was a man ahead of his time. After years of decline, Pabst is making a comeback.

Doug Grow examines the similarities and differences between Howard Dean and Paul Wellstone in this Minneapolis Star Tribune column.

In this Slate article, William Saletan tells the surprising story of John Kerry, comedian.

Danny Goldberg is a music industry executive and a left-wing activist. In his new book "Dispatches From the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit," he argues that one reason Democrats are losing elections is that they have lost touch with American popular culture. He discusses his argument in this Salon interview. (Thanks, Mike!)

Rand Beers was the Bush administration's top anti-terrorism operative until he resigned a few months ago. In this Washington Post article, Beers says he quit because, "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They're making us less secure, not more secure." Beers is now national security adviser to Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign.

In this Boston Globe article, Thomas Powers discusses two questions raised by the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction: "How could America's $30 billion-a-year intelligence industry get things so wrong? And why did the White House persuade itself to go to war on the basis of evidence so flimsy?"

Last week New York Times columnist Tom Friedman argued that the failure to find Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq wasn't really important because it wasn't the real reason for the war in Iraq. Now CNN columnist Mark Shields points out some things that Friedman seems to have forgotten: democracy, informed consent, and the President's credibility.

Dan Chiasson reports on the Northeast regional semifinals of the U.S. Air Guitar Championships in this Slate article.

ESPN.com senior writer Rob Neyer has selected his Dream Team for each major league baseball team. The Milwaukee Brewers Dream Team is here. Yount and Molitor were so good that they both get to play two positions.

QTVR panoramas let you see a 360 degree view of a location. Here's a panorama of the Golden Gate from Lands End, San Francisco and here's the view from the summit of Mount Everest. Links to other QTVR panoramas are at the top of each page.

According to this Opinion Journal article by John McDonough, Bob Hope's films, "contain some of the boldest, most inconspicuously avant-garde strokes of postmodern sleight of hand ever seen on the screen."

The Geekmaster defines a geek as, "a person who is talented in an area outside the boundaries of social normality." To find out if you are a geek, take his geektest.

Hendrik Hertzberg compares the Bush Administration's Iraq policy with its domestic policy in this New Yorker article.

Fred Kaplan asks, "Did Iraq really have weapons of mass destruction?" in this Slate article.

Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, asks the question, "What would happen if a bomb wiped out the federal government?" in this article from The Atlantic.

According to the Washington Post, "much of his style and energy came from fury over anti-Semitism and an urge to crush Jewish stereotypes." Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. David Lee Roth.

Dr. David Livingstone and Sir Henry Morton Stanley were two of the best-known explorers of the 19th century. This New Yorker article explains how their reputations have fallen and, in Livingstone's case, risen again.

I saw The Matrix Reloaded this weekend and thought it was OK. I enjoyed some parts, like the freeway chase scene (a combination of The Road Warrior and To Live and Die in L.A.), and didn't enjoy other parts, like most of Morpheus' speeches. Overall, I thought it was somewhere between the rave Andrew O'Hehir gave it in Salon, and the pan David Edelstein gave it in Slate.

This week The Onion interviews a '90s punk who believes today's punk rock is "just a pale, watered-down imitation" of classic 1990s punk rock.

Here's an article from The American Prospect on the danger of new epidemics. According to the article, "The world will likely face numerous global epidemics like SARS -- and far worse ones -- in the near future."

In this Slate article Fred Kaplan examines the story that "before Gulf War II began, U.S. special forces had gone in and bribed Iraqi generals not to fight."

I use Blogenheimer to link to interesting things that I've found on the internet. Unlike me, some bloggers use their blogs as diaries to comment on their personal experiences. This New York Times article discusses the problems faced by these bloggers: "hurt feelings, newly wary friends and relatives, and the occasional inflamed employer."

Here's a whole page of games from a website called Orisinal.

Since we are three years into the 21st Century, Brendan Koerner wonders, "Where are the flying cars?"

Neal Stephenson's new novel, Quicksilver, will be released on September 23. HarperCollins has posted a preview here.

Did opposition to the war in Iraq have any effect on U.S. policy? In this New Yorker article William Finnegan argues that "the protesters had a greater effect on events than today's conventional wisdom recalls," and that the Bush administration is now trying to gain the support of those who opposed the war.

Michael Massing reviews the media coverage of the war in Iraq in this article from the New York Review of Books. He finds that "the BBC maintained a consistent standard of skepticism toward all sides," but, "for the most part, US news organizations gave Americans the war they thought Americans wanted to see."

You've probably heard the idea that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time will eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Some lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth tried this experiment with 6 monkeys and one computer for one month. This BBC article reports their results.

This Slate article compares the sales of classic novels like Pride and Prejudice and War and Peace with the sales of recent best sellers. It finds that, "Measured against a best seller in its first flush, sales of any classic book are piddling, of course. But the overall sales picture resembles the proverbial tortoise-and-hare scenario: As the race goes on, the classics win out."

The life and work of author William Gibson are discussed in this Guardian Unlimited profile.

Here's an article by Thomas Pynchon on George Orwell's 1984.

I saw the movie A Mighty Wind last weekend. Although I didn't like it as much as I liked the "mockumentaries" Waiting for Guffman and This is Spinal Tap, I thought it was funny and worth seeing. Here's the Filthy Critic's review of A Mighty Wind.

Chris Suellentrop discusses the success of The Matrix in this article from Slate.

This review of the book The Earth's Biosphere discusses how little we know about the biosphere. It also examines the consequences of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere and whether the earth will experience another ice age. The review also discusses the life and ideas of the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, who was the first scientist to make the biosphere "a central concept unifying the study of the earth with the study of life."

Dragons are part of the mythology of various cultures all over the world. This New York Times article discusses how "cultures that had no contact with one another constructed mythical creatures so remarkably similar."

A few months ago I posted a link to a web site that compared locations in San Francisco used in the 1968 movie Bullitt with how those places look today. Now I have found a web site that shows before and after pictures of several San Francisco locations used in Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo.

I like the new White Stripes album Elephant. I think it lives up to the hype and good reviews. Here's a Slate article on the White Stripes and their new album.

Here's a web page that combines Star Trek geekiness with computer geekiness. It's called "How to make a Starship Enterprise out of an old floppy disk".

This New York Times article examines the revival of the Seattle music scene. The Times finds new life in the city it says was once "the rumbling epicenter of a coffee-fueled grunge nation."

Here are two articles from the New York Times. In the first article, Frank Rich discusses the "brilliance" of The Daily Show. According to Rich, The Daily Show is funny "without being particularly ideological," and "a place to find a smart take on the war that does not abide by the strict guidelines that come with either blind support or apoplectic rejection of "Operation Iraqi Freedom."

The second Times article is on the battle against spam. It discusses strategies used to stop spam, as well as the countermeasures used by the spammers.

Here's an article from the Nation about John Stewart and The Daily Show. Like the Salon article on The Daily Show a few weeks ago, this article discusses the show's humor and politics. Stewart says, "The show is neither Democratic nor Republican but simply seeks to represent the 'politically disappointed'." The Daily Show's ratings are good, for basic cable. According to the article, "More people (4 million) tune in to The Daily Show in a given week than watched Fox news at the height of the war (3.3 million)."

Slate's Fred Kaplan explains what we still don't know about the war in Iraq in Eight Questions About the War.

Here's an article about a man with "Wisconsinaphobia". The phobia and associated severe back pain were triggered by "anything related to Wisconsin - sports scores on television, license plates and business names, for instance - and anything that had to do with public utilities."

Here are two articles on the war in Iraq from the Washington Post. The first article discusses how "what ended as a military victory that toppled the Iraqi government in 21 days was filled with moments of uncertainty, miscues and unexpected successes for U.S. forces." The second article tells the story of one member of Saddam's Fedayeen.

How did the United States win the war in Iraq? In this article from Slate, Fred Kaplan explains how the U.S. military has changed and improved since the last Gulf War in 1991. These changes include "a new war-fighting doctrine, advanced digital technology, and a less parochial culture."

How many of you remember Norm Coleman? Norm won the Senate election last November in Minnesota after his opponent, Paul Wellstone, died in an airplane crash. Last week Norm told the Washington newspaper Roll Call "To be very blunt and God watch over Paul's soul, I am a 99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone. Just about on every issue." (The link is to an AP story. I would link to the original story, but it costs $200 a year to access the Roll Call site.)

Norm was surprised that anyone was offended by that statement, and "tried to put his remarks in context, saying he was making the point that he was close to President Bush, while Wellstone 'was never with the president.'"

When that didn't work, Coleman said "I apologize without equivocation. . . . It was wrong."

All this controversy has made Al Franken ponder the other 1%.

John Stewart has always been funny, but lately his Daily Show has been particularly good. Here's an article from Salon about John Stewart and the Daily Show.

Sight and Sound magazine’s once-a decade list of the best films ever made was released late last year. It was based on lists of films submitted by movie critics and directors. The top 10, including movies like Citizen Kane and Battleship Potemkin, did not include any movies made in the last 30 years. But according to this article from the Boston Globe, film students have their own ideas about what should be considered classic films.

In this New York Post column, former Army officer Ralph Peters examines the war in Iraq and concludes that "The troops are winning impressively - despite Secretary Rumsfeld's micromanagement."

In this article from Haaretz, Israeli military officers and historian Martin van Creveld discuss the media coverage of the war in Iraq. They agree that because of the high level of disinformation, "nobody knows what is really happening in Iraq." As Van Creveld says, "Everyone is lying about everything all the time, and it is difficult to say what is happening. I've stopped listening. All the pictures shown on TV are color pieces which have no significance."

Gregg Easterbrook is writing a series of daily dispatches about the war in Iraq. This dispatch is about the dispute between Rumsfeld and the Army generals over planning the war. In this dispatch Easterbrook discusses the deaths of Iraqi combatants and Iraq's incredibly weak tactical position.

Here is a New York Times article about the Marquette University basketball team. Marquette has reached the NCAA Final Four for the first time since Al McGuire led the team to the championship in 1977. The article is ok, but I posted this link because to the right of the article is what may be the World's Greatest Sports Team Photo. (Be sure to click on "Enlarge this Image".)

This New Yorker article by Seymour Hersch discusses how Donald Rumsfeld overruled senior Pentagon planners and reduced the number of American ground troops for the war in Iraq. According to several of Hersch's sources, "Rumsfeld simply failed to anticipate the consequences of protracted warfare."

Here are some weblogs that provide news on the war in Iraq. As I've mentioned before, The Agonist is a good source for news on the war. Intel Dump and The Command Post follow the military campaign, while Talking Points Memo focuses on the diplomatic and political aspects of the war.

Why did we go to war with Iraq? According to Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo:

"This war isn't really about Iraq or deposing Saddam or even eliminating his WMD, though each of those are important benefits along the way. Nor is it something so mundane as a 'war for oil.' The leading architects of this war in and out of the administration see this war, and have pursued it, as an opening blow in a far broader war against political Islam. They see it as the first in a series of wars and near-wars which will lead eventually to the overthrow of most of the current governments in the Middle East, the establishment of western-oriented democracies throughout the Arab world, and the destruction of nothing less than the political world of Islamic fundamentalism."

You can read a short discussion of these ideas on this Talking Points Memo post, or a longer discussion in this article from the Washington Monthly.

Mark Bowden discusses the upcoming battle for Baghdad in this New York Times Op-Ed column. Michael Tomasky explains why the war with Iraq is not a quagmire in this article from the American Prospect.

In this New York Times column, Paul Krugman explains what connects pro-war rallies, Clear Channel Communications, and the Bush administration.

Several months ago I linked to an article about people who explore the tunnels under Moscow. Now, here's an article about a Japanese journalist who thinks he's found evidence of secret tunnels under Tokyo.

The best coverage I've seen of the war in Iraq is on the weblog The Agonist. For example, here is the Agonist's list of questions the media is not asking.

Each year the Village Voice asks a few hundred American music critics to submit their lists of top albums and singles of the year. These lists are then combined into the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop poll. According to the poll, 2002's best album was Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The top 40 albums are listed here.

The Village Voice's Robert Christgau, the "Dean of American Music Critics", writes an introductory essay here, and the Washington Post's music critic, David Segal, makes fun of Christgau's essay here.

Slate has a page of links to many of the best internet sites that provide news about the war in Iraq.

A few years ago my father discovered steel drum music. He loved the music so much that he began building his own steel drums and started 7 steel drum bands in Mayville, Wisconsin. (Surprisingly, Mayville had not had a steel drum band before 1992.) They have recorded 2 tapes and a CD and have performed all over Wisconsin, in Florida, and on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. For more information, go to the Mayville Steel Drums website.

Here's a weblog written by Kevin Sites, who is reporting from Iraq for CNN. His blog is a "first-person account of a solo journalist's life on the front lines of war."

Here's something you don't see every day. It's a story from the New York Times about a talking fish.

The story begins:

"And so it came to pass that a talking carp, shouting in Hebrew, shattered the calm of the New Square Fish Market and created what many here are calling a miracle."

Are you thinking about trying a new look for spring? Why not try a hat of meat?

Here's a fun online game. You are a spider trying to catch and eat flying bugs. Watch out for the fireflies.

I pretty much gave up on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the year they inducted Billy Joel but rejected the Velvet Underground. However, this year the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted an impressive group of musicians including the Clash, the Police, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and AC/DC. Read an article about the induction ceremony here.

In this New Yorker article Hendrik Hertzberg discusses the diplomatic catastrophe being caused by the upcoming war with Iraq.

I recently discovered the British comedy The Office on the cable channel BBC America. The show is a funny mock documentary about office workers at a paper supply company. Here's The Office's official home page and reviews from the Washington Post, Slate, and USA Today. The show is on Thursdays at 9:20 Central time on BBC America.

Global warming is causing the world's mountain glaciers to melt at a rate of about 90 cubic kilometers per year. This melting is making new archaeological and scientific discoveries possible as this article from the Boston Globe explains.

Should the American intelligence community be held accountable for failing to predict the events of September 11, 2001? If so, what changes should be made to American intelligence? In this New Yorker article Malcolm Gladwell discusses these questions by examining previous intelligence failures and subsequent reforms.

Here's a story from last week's Onion that I found particularly funny. It's called "Man has Derogatory Nickname for Every Neighboring Town".