Lost in Tarnation: Unattended conference a huge success

at-Largely: Coup in Honduras...Vioent reaction might come from South America

alicublog: Build a better crackpot, and the world will beat a path to your door

Dissident Voice: How a Saudi deception protected bin Laden

Petrelis Files: Cops raid Texas gay bar on Pride Sunday

Princess Sparkle Pony's Photo Blog: It's never too early to politicize a celebrity death

Lawyers, Guns and Money: This is your court on conservatives – a strange enthusiasm for punishment of the innocent.

TransGriot: 10 busted myths about the Canadian health care system.

Intrepid Liberal Journal: Living on only $2 a day – an interview with economist Jonathan Morduch.

Cab Drollery: Your money at play – outsourcing oversight. (What could possibly go wrong?)

The Bobblespeak Translations: Meet the Press with Sam Nunn and Fred Thompson, translated.

Guest post by Batocchio. Temporarily e-mail tips to batocchio9 AT yahoo DOT com.

Sometimes I wonder if reporters have any damned sense at all. The reason the unemployment rolls have dropped is simple - people (like me!) have tapped out their benefits:

June 18 (Bloomberg) -- The number of Americans receiving claims for unemployment benefits dropped for the first time since January, adding to evidence the job market is starting to thaw.

The number of people collecting unemployment insurance plunged by 148,000 in the week to June 6, the most since November 2001, to 6.69 million, the Labor Department said today in Washington. Initial claims rose by 3,000 to 608,000 in the week ended June 13, in line with forecasts.

The average number of claims over the last four weeks fell to the lowest level in four months, an indication that the U.S. economy is stabilizing after the worst recession in half a century. Even so, companies are likely to be slow to hire new employees, sending unemployment rates higher, analysts said.

“The labor market remains weak but it’s starting to stabilize,” said Maxwell Clarke, chief U.S. economist at IDEAglobal in New York. “An improvement in employment conditions and improvement in confidence go hand in hand with an improvement in consumer spending.”

the daily green: Swine flu, factory pig farms and the pandemic waiting to happen

Group News Blog: A Vietnam veteran reflects and writes: "It's easy to tell yourself that 'it's not my job or my business,' or, 'It's more important to move forward, this isn't the time for looking back.' I always have to look back.  Too much of what I see I don't like. We cannot afford to make our national memory like mine."

Blue Gal: Structural Damage vs. Clutter

Lexington's notebook: The living dead...they walk among us

Southern Beale: Karl Rove Memory Hole

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Unsolved: Mr. E's Blog Stump, The Progressive, Morning Martini, Sick Days

Amygdala: Always trust your government. Just don't trust anyone else's

The Reality-Based Community: Grampa McCain on net neutrality: NO

The Pump Handle: Congress demands more info on Labor Secretary Chao's mystery proposal for risk assessment.

Wonk Room: What kind of economist is Phil Gramm?

Pharyngula: Fight back against phony-baloney Catholic, Bill Donohue!

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: The Black Snob, Prairie Sun Rising, Lambasted!, earth family alpha,
Actors and Crew

Yahoo News (h/t NonnyMouse)

Hurricane Katrina victims whose homes and businesses were destroyed when floodwaters breached levees in the 2005 storm cannot recover money from their insurance companies for the damages, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

The case could affect thousands of rebuilding residents and business owners in Louisiana. Robert Hartwig, chief economist at the industry-funded Insurance Information Institute in New York, said in June that a ruling against the industry could have cost insurers $1 billion.[..]

The decision overturns a ruling by U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval Jr., who in November sided with policyholders arguing that language excluding water damage from some of their insurance policies was ambiguous.

Duval said the policies did not distinguish between floods caused by an act of God - such as excessive rainfall - and floods caused by an act of man, which would include the levee breaches following Katrina's landfall.

But the appeals panel concluded that "even if the plaintiffs can prove that the levees were negligently designed, constructed, or maintained and that the breaches were due to this negligence, the flood exclusions in the plaintiffs' policies unambiguously preclude their recovery."

God forbid the insurance agencies have to pay out for these people with devastating losses.

I've seen some misplaced comparisons before, but this George Will column is absurd.

There are the tantrums -- sometimes both theatrical and perfunctory -- of talking heads on television or commentators writing in vitriol (Paul Krugman's incessant contempt, Ann Coulter's equally constant loathing).

Please. As hilzoy put it, "I can't wait to see what Krugman quotes Will thinks are even remotely comparable to such highlights of the Coulter oeuvre as: 'My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building', or 'We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee.'"

Let's see, Krugman is a respected economist at Princeton. Coulter is a hateful circus clown. Will sees a similarity?

Look, when self-described "Reagan Conservatives" are doing it, I think Godwin's Law no longer applies.

Raw Story (h/t DLBB)

An economist who once served as President Reagan's Assistant Secretary of the Treasury compares President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler in a column at the libertarian website Anti-war.com.

"Bush is like Hitler," Paul Craig Roberts writes in a column entitled The Surge: Political Cover or Escalation?. "He blames defeats on his military commanders, not on his own insane policy."

"Like Hitler, he protects himself from reality with delusion," Roberts continues. "In his last hours, Hitler was ordering non-existent German armies to drive the Russians from Berlin."

Wampum reports that NPR has been drinking the same GOP Kool-Aid.

Ignorance can kill so don't listen to Laura Bush. Incompetence is just as deadly. Is character assassination the only thing the Bush administration knows how to do?

Not a blog, but definitely worth reading...A Nobel Prize-winning economist and a former Assistant Secretary of Commerce report on the Iraq War's stunning price tag --between $1 and $2 trillion.

Catch: One of the Wicked--Conrad Burns

Scrutiny Hooligans: 9/11 did not turn our nation into a belligerent monarchy, George Bush did.

Catch: One of the Wicked--Conrad Burns

Scrutiny Hooligans: 9/11 did not turn our nation into a belligerent monarchy, George Bush did.

via Virtual Matter: A former chief economist in the Labor Department during President Bush's first term now believes the official story about the collapse of the WTC is 'bogus,' saying it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.

Here's the article by Greg Szymanski