Justice Department official concedes that having to defend DOMA and DADT is “difficult.”

The accused killer of Chandra Levy has been found guilty by DC jury.

It’s looking like ‘pat-downs’ is this year’s winter equivalent of shark attacks. Good cable fare but generally a total crock. I have not flown since any of this started. So I don’t know any of it from personal experience. But my general reaction is what a complete joke the reaction seems to be. We’re going on ten years in which we’ve been conditioned to think that terrorism is such a threat that really any expense — literal or no — is warranted in preventing it. Vast wars leading to thousands of American dead and hundreds of billions of dollars of expense. Vast numbers of Iraqis or Afghans dead. No price too high to pay. Various constitutional protections dispensed with? No problem. And if you think it’s a problem get in the line marked “Pansy Weak-Kneed Terror Lovers” not the line for “Real Americans”. They’ll process you’re application there. But a simple pat-down, which might be a little awkward and weird, but basically who cares? Well, geez, life and security bought at too high a price is just not worth it.

C’mon. I’m sort of up in the air about where to strike this balance. It’s not so much that I think this is too much inconvenience. I don’t. But you can see this pattern where all al Qaida and its various franchises have to do now is mount a failed attempt and it leads to a whole new regime of checks and precautions leading to more inconvenience and — as the intention seems to be — vast sums of new dollars.

And yet, from the incident last Christmas and the other a month ago, this clampdown doesn’t seem to be coming from nowhere. It does look like the actual threat level is substantial higher than it’s been in some sign — lack of a color-coded warning notwithstanding. Read More

The jury has reached a verdict in the trial of Ingmar Guandique for the murder of Chandra Levy in a case that scandalized Washington and riveted the nation in those innocent days just before 9/11. More soon …

House and senate Dems Out Of Sync on tax cut strategy

The new Quinnipiac poll says Sarah Palin is the top vote getter in a hypothetical Republican primary race (but only barely) and would then get clobbered by President Obama.

So who started the false rumor that women in hijabs were exempt from the TSA pat-downs?

Alberto Gonzales tells TPM: I was “aware” of waterboarding.

I don’t know if there’s more to Bayonne, N.J., than Russian hookers and industrial wasteland, as Jon Stewart suggested, but I do know town officials are lacking for a sense of humor.

Little more than a month ago, I did a post on statistics on browser usage at TPM. The gist of the story (with graphs) was that fewer and fewer people are using FireFox and Internet Explorer, while more and more are using Safari and Chrome. Chrome, which is made by Google, is on pretty much pure organic growth, while Safari is being fueled to a significant degree by sales of iPad and iPhone, which basically force users to use Safari.

I just looked at the numbers again. And the shifts are striking, even over the last seven or so weeks. Read More