Republicans Made a Bad Bet Against Online Poker

The British online gambling firm PartyPoker is taking it in the shorts after the U.S. cracked down on online gambling last fall. The company lost $47 million in the past six months and saw a 70 percent drop in profits. I have an crazy theory about the 2006 mid-term elections, and I am going to share it on the principle that every American is entitled to one off-the-wall explanation for an election's outcome, per election.

Your SEC: Still Enabling Corruption

Your SEC, working for.....ummm, it seems to depend on how much juice you have. Just ask former SEC staffer Gary Aquirre, who went from good performance reviews to good-by shortly after ignoring his SEC superiors' desires to protect their friend, Wall Street hotshot John Mack.

Working on Iraq's Electrical Grid is One Dangerous Job

Sometimes you find the oddest information tucked away in a story about something else entirely. Like how dangerous it is to work for the Iraqi government trying to restore and maintain the electrical grid that supplies the country with power.

R.I.P. (Run In Peace) Bradley Schlozman

Bradley Schlozman, a one-man example of partisanship in action, has tendered his resignation in order to join a law firm in the Midwest. The DOJ and Congressional investigations of him probably have nothing to do with it. Really. R.I.P.

Crazy Critics, Krauthammer, Noonan and the Death of BDS

Do you have to be crazy to really be bothered by President Bush's actions, attitudes, and policies? Charles Krauthammer seemed to think so, when he apparently coined the phrase "Bush Derangement Syndrome" to describe people who were rabidly critical of Bush.

Why Exactly Do We 'Need Another 9/11' in Order to 'Save America?'

Stu Bykovsky, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News recently wrote a column on the fractured state of the U.S. today. After lamenting our divisions, he offers up this, in a column titled "To save America, we need another 9/11."

Conservative Group Calls for Bush Dictatorship

A writer for a national security group set up by a conservative think tank has called on President Bush to declare himself "President for Life" and remove all Arabs from the Middle East so he can "repopulate the country with Americans."

As Home Values & Mortgages Crash, Guess What Consumer Credit is Doing?

According to a report in Business Week, consumer credit debt--especially revolving credit such as credit card debt--is mushrooming:

The Making of 'A War We Just Might Win'--Hats Off to Glenn Greenwald

At the end of July, Michael E. O'Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack published an Op-Ed in the NY Times and elsewhere headlined A war we just might win. Its optimistic view of the current state of things in Iraq made war supporters ecstatic and caused mainstream media to pass on the observation that these were war critics, see, and even they think things are looking up. Of course, all was not what it seemed.

Major D.C. Charter School Fraud

As WTW discussed not that long ago, Charter Schools seem ripe for the defrauding. Now the District of Columbia's former chief of the Office of Charter School Oversight has pled guilty to almost exactly the kind of fraud I was hypothesizing: