U.S. District Court Judge Virginia A. Phillips ruled late Thursday that the U.S. military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy is unconstitutional, violating the First Amendment rights of gay and lesbian service members.
In Delaware, ultra-conservative Christine O'Donnell is running for the GOP nomination for senator against moderate old Mike Castle. Most Republicans -- even ones who consider Castle a terrible RINO -- can't bring themselves to support O'Donnell, because O'Donnell is gross and crazy. Like, for example, she keeps insinuating that Castle is gay. And she is also opposed to masturbation.
As of Thursday, Sept. 9, 2010, at least 1,176 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to an Associated Press count.
Radical cleric Terry Jones has apparently decided not to burn Qurans on 9/11. So ... that's that! Everyone wins, but Terry Jones -- whose joke of a church has received a staggering amount of free publicity over the weekend -- wins the most. According to early reports, Jones talked to Cordoba House imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and Rauf agreed to move his supposed "ground zero mosque" from its proposed site, which was never ground zero. In exchange, Jones agreed to not burn copies of Rauf's holy book.
I recently started receiving e-mails intended for Pastor Terry Jones, the Florida nutjob who is planning [Update: And just called off] a publicity stunt the same day that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck planned their own publicity stunt. (On the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's biggest and worst publicity stunt of the century, so far.) This is because many people on the Internet are Internet illiterate. They Google "Quran burning pastor e-mail address" and my byline -- with my e-mail address attached -- pops up. And they e-mail me. They don't care that the address contains the name of a longtime liberal online magazine, and that the site they found the address on contained my name, which is not "Terry Jones." Google sent them an e-mail address when they asked for one. So they used it.
A new study of terrorist attacks and plots in the United States questions whether "homegrown jihadis" are indeed a new phenomenon -- and suggests instead that they represent a very consistent element in most alleged terror conspiracies over the past nine years.
Usually, I don't pay much attention to the musings of Michael Barone, who used to be an unusually astute political analyst but who now mainly churns out predictable right-wing punditry, but this is just too much.
Do you ever think to yourself, "I wish I had some way of finding out what MSNBC personality Joe Scarborough and peripatetic editor/columnist Michael Kinsley think about the important political issues of the day"? Then have I got a free DC-area newspaper for you!