Goodbye "Gilmore Girls." The sharp-witted saga of an independent mother and daughter that added to the luster of the young WB network, will end its run after seven seasons.
The New York Times today named its next public editor, Clark Hoyt, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor who oversaw the Knight Ridder newspaper chain's coverage that questioned the Bush administration's case for the Iraq war.
finally did the di fara pizza experience......forgettaboutit best pizza ever!!!.....might go back manana for the porcini pie
PBS American Masters profiles the late great Ahmet Ertegun tonight at nine. My dad used to tell me how he knew the Ertegun brothers in DC in the early ‘40s where he was a naval civilian and they were the Turkish ambassador’s sons, hanging around the music scene. He said Ahmet always wanted to borrow his jazz records but was not so good at returning them.
I’m still recovering from a May Day marathon in Prospect Park, not to mention a turn through Owl’s Head in the neighborhood this morning, where it looked like a lot more birds were on the move than yesterday. To protect myself from the incredulous I got a new 12X image stabilized camera, which I am in the process of figuring out how to use. It’s possible to capture images of small songbirds, if you can manage to focus on them. Here are a few for May
Commentator, author and bird lover Julie Zickefoose provides an update on the birds of spring — and how they fared during an unseasonable cold snap a few weeks ago, when temperatures dropped to the 20s at night and 30s by day at her home in Whipple, Ohio.

Zickefoose was concerned that the migratory birds might not be able to find enough food during the cold spell.

But she tells Melissa Block that the birds stayed put down south — and followed the re-emerging leaves north. The birds are arriving now in one great front, albeit later than usual.

She discusses the many birds she has spotted and photographed in recent days, including the blue-winged warbler, and shares a sad story with a happy ending about a bluebird nest on her property.
yglesias at tnr in a rebuttal to the chait piece mentions the townhouse listserv which serves as a backchannel clearinghouse for the liberal netroots. he downplays its influence but i thought id note it here. as for smackdowns of chait check the usual suspects: digby, atrios, yglesias.
Townhouse is a by-invitation-only liberal listserv begun by blogger and Democratic campaign consultant Matt Stoller.

Participants agree to keep their information exchanges confidential or risk being removed from the private listserv. Townhouse provides the web equivalent of a political backroom where self-selected liberal bloggers including Glenn Greenwald, Markos Moulitsas and Atrios, leaders of liberal think tanks including Campaign for America's Future, liberal journalists and pundits, advocacy groups such as MoveOn, and Democratic campaign and PR consultants can all discuss and debate their common concerns, strategies and tactics.

An article on Salon.com reports "Townhouse began after the disastrous 2004 election, when young Democratic activists began meeting on Sundays for beers at Townhouse Tavern, a subterranean watering hole in Washington's Dupont Circle neighborhood. ... Here was the next generation of would-be D.C. power brokers, kids in their 20s and 30s who planned to mold the political future. At some point, Matt Stoller, the preppy enforcer of liberal blogging, helped organize the group into a formal e-mail list. ... Over time, the e-mail list and the Sunday afternoon boozefests grew. ... Through it all, Stoller controlled the membership. If you stayed in his graces, and met the group's qualifications, you got yourself a ticket to both the electronic and the alcoholic conversations. At all times, the whole enterprise was declared off the record, to be spoken of in hushed tones only with others who knew the proverbial secret handshake. ... the public introduction of Townhouse now presents the big-name bloggers and online activists with a transparency dilemma. On the one hand, bloggers like to talk of themselves as a democratic, grass-roots movement. (Moulitsas often conflates himself with the entire 'people-powered movement' in his blog posts.) On the other hand, the blogosphere boasts an emerging leadership elite, which is increasingly profiting on its insider status in both the Democratic Party and among one another." [1]
this looks interesting but its behind the times select firewall :
In Nixon’s Tricks, Rove’s Roots

David Greenberg on how the Bush presidency grew from the soil of Nixon’s.
Tom Poston, one of the classic veterans of TV comedy, died earlier today at his home in Los Angeles. He appeared on The Steve Allen Show in the 1950s and Newhart in the 1980s.

Poston played handyman George Utley on Newhart, and was also a regular on another Bob Newhart series, Bob. And to keep the connection to Newhart going, he played Cliff "The Peeper" Murdock on The Bob Newhart Show in the 70s. Poston also appeared on Grace Under Fire, Mork & Mindy, The Simpsons, Will & Grace, Home Improvement, Murphy Brown, Get Smart, Coach, The Love Boat, Studio One, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, Just Shoot Me, That 70s Show, and dozens of other shows over the years.

Poston was married to actress Suzanne Pleshette, who played Newhart's wife Emily on The Bob Newhart Show.
For Sally McKay, a Branch of May, full of Cowbirds.


COWBIRDS
they write letters...
has anyone used a vacuum coffeemaker?
because being a mormon wasnt creepy enough...
no shortage of us engineers, just excess of corporate greed.
Happy Mission Accomplished Day!

Cue Applause!
the scope of their treachery is boundless.
final month to spay your pets.
Tucked inside Frank Rich's Sunday column in the New York Times is indication that the newspaper will no longer play ball with the annual White House Correspondents Association dinners in Washington, which he calls "a crystallization of the press's failures in the post-9/11 era." He writes that the event "illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows....
you are what you eat. (file under crossfiled)
So Vaynerchuk, 31, has taken over the liquor store his father started and built a 40,000-square-foot store in Springfield, N.J., devoted mostly to wine. He also started Wine Library TV, an almost-daily video blog featuring his wine tastings that he posts on his Web site.

"Bush is seeking "outputs" as a means of ensuring eventual "outcomes" that will, he hopes, in the end, lead to "signs of success." It's not exactly Churchillian: We will fight for every output and we will never surrender! In the meantime, Bush will be content with any "sign of activity." And as we've seen before from Bush, in the morbid spectacle he made of Terri Schiavo, any sign of activity, no matter how remote, justifies not pulling the plug.

The somber, measured tone of Sanger's piece in the The Times, without a hint of irony in it, conveys that we are all supposed to just play along with what everyone--from congressional Republicans to Petraeus to the poor grunts on the streets of Baghdad--knows to be a huge charade."
fucking enabling eunuchs.
The Senate's No. 2 Democrat says he knew that the American public was being misled into the Iraq war but remained silent because he was sworn to secrecy as a member of the intelligence committee.

"The information we had in the intelligence committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn't believe it," Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, said Wednesday when talking on the Senate floor about the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002.

"I was angry about it. [But] frankly, I couldn't do much about it because, in the intelligence committee, we are sworn to secrecy.

We can't walk outside the door and say the statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that is being given to this Congress."
were #15!
as the man himself might say, teh stupid, it burns!
If only these two excerpts had been sequential, perhaps the absurdity would have been apparent:


While mainstream reporters must sign their names to news stories and submit to the editors and ethical guidelines of their organizations, the bloggers -- many operating freelance -- often write under anonymous sign-ons and without the bureaucracy or controls of a mainstream media organization.

...

But one key state Democratic strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of concern for riling the netroots crowd, warns that such efforts are potentially positive and negative.

Netroots commentary can frequently be intensely personal, even "totally mean and irrational," the strategist said, with some bloggers finding power in their ability "to assassinate political characters online."

"It's amplified by the anonymity, and it can be scary that it's so irresponsible," the insider said. "And it's pulling the mainstream media in that direction."


-Atrios 15:10