Domestic Affairs

Dallas: We’re looking for an experienced and versatile journalist for a National Correspondent position in Dallas that will focus on the religious right and its increasingly powerful role in U.S. politics, while also providing spot news coverage in a territory that includes part of Texas and three contiguous states. This reporter will explain to an often mystified world the whys and hows of a group whose vote has become critical in national elections and as a result, with friends in…

When I blogged about this last summer, the figure, according to Computerworld, was this: About 8 million passports are renewed annually out of some 57 million passports in circulation. Now I read in Slate, from 2001: The United States issues three types of passports. There are currently about 44 million holders of the familiar, blue tourist passport (a few thousand people have green passports issued during the bicentennial of the U.S. Consular Service). About 400,000 have a maroon-covered “official” passport.…

Here’s an awesome photo of my favorite bridge. The Chronicle published it today in conjunction with this piece saying that the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge won’t be done until 2013. Most interesting part comes from the timeline: November 1998: Residents of San Francisco, Oakland, Emeryville and Berkeley vote that passenger rail service should be “part of the redesign of the Bay Bridge” — an advisory measure initiated by Willie Brown. Awesome!

Ok all you oil pundits and economy experts out there, riddle me this: So the current price of oil is about $60 a barrel. That means that one liter of oil is $60 divided by 159 liters (= 1 barrel), which is $0.37 per liter. Amazon (yeah, it’s weird, I know) will sell you two liters of Coca-Cola for $1.19. That means that Coca-Cola is more expensive than oil. Huh? Let’s review: 2 liters of Coca-Cola: $1.19 2 liters of…

Here’s something for all of you law geeks out there: Anna Nicole Smith’s legal wranglings over the estate of her former husband against his son, has landed her in the Supreme Court. WashPost: Sober as always as they wrestled with the legal dispute at hand, the justices nevertheless seemed aware of stepping into an epic soap opera of the kind that could have happened only in Texas. The battle between Anna Nicole and Pierce “is quite a story,” as Justice…

Sarah Vowell, NYT: Seems as if American voters picked the current president because they thought he’d be a fun hang at a cookout — a jokey neighbor who charred a mean burger and is good at playing Frisbee with his dog. What we should be doing is electing a president with the nitpicky paranoia you’d use to choose a cardiologist — a stunted conversationalist with dark-circled eyes and paper-cut fingertips who will stay up until 3 tearing into medical journals…

Is that former Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) is now lobbying his wife, Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) on behalf of Dubai Ports World. John of Americablog.com says it best: As if this deal to sell off control of US ports to the United Arab Emirates couldn’t become any sleazier, we now have former Republican Senator Bob Dole being hired as a lobbyist to influence – who? – HIS OWN WIFE. Yes, Bob Dole’s wife is a Republican Senator from North Carolina.…

Dear Editor, I am writing to you to take issue with your editorial dated February 10, 2006. I find your argument against installing a municipal wireless network in Pleasanton to be overly paranoid and in some cases factually wrong. You wrote that San Francisco has a great deal of “hot spots” and presented a scenario where Pleasanton would become “jammed with laptops.” I work in San Francisco and despite what you may think of our local digerati, Market Street has…

WashPost Op-Ed by William Easterly (via Drezner): Jeffrey Sachs and Angelina Jolie toured the continent on behalf of MTV, with Jolie asking how we can stand by and let it be destroyed. The world’s leaders gathered at the United Nations in September to further discuss ending poverty in Africa, apparently unfazed by yet another voluminous U.N. report highlighting the failure of the grand plans (the “Millennium Development Goals”) to make any progress. They repeated a familiar refrain: If aid efforts…

For those of you who don’t know who he is, he’s done a great series in The Atlantic over the past few weeks. He’s appearing at a Cody’s Books event on Tuesday, Feb. 7: BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY tracks AMERICAN VERTIGO: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville. For the past year celebrated philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy has been traveling in the tracks of another Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, who in 1831 wrote what remains the most influential book about America,…