Making sense of dogs, sluts, and the early days of the general election campaign.

French super computer models entire observable universe for the first time.

The rogues gallery of players in the News Corp. saga.

The initial reaction: “News Corporation is carefully reviewing the Select Committee’s report and will respond shortly”

The kicker on the new Obama campaign TV ad going up today in Ohio, Virginia, and Iowa: “It’s just what you expect from a guy who had a Swiss bank account.”

British Parliament’s report concludes that “Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.”

You can read the full report here.

Al Armendariz was by all accounts a well-liked and effective official in a key region of the country for the Environmental Protection Agency.

But when America’s climate-change-denier-in-chief Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) decided to make a big deal about a two year old video of Armendariz that had, up to that point, been considered totally innocuous, the right-wing outrage machine spun into action. Armendariz resigned in a matter of days.

Here’s how it happened.

As you’ve probably noticed, at the end of last week the skybox links at the top of every TPM page were replaced by a curated selection of poll averages from PollTracker, TPM’s proprietary poll aggregating and trending application.

We did this for two reasons. Read More

This paragraph from Jon Meacham’s piece on the fight over the bin Laden ad captures quite a lot … Read More

For the last twenty years or so, Republican presidential campaigns have used the British tabloid press to pitch their hit pieces that couldn’t get placed in the more professional US press. (Yes, it’s a pretty sad commentary on journalism in the UK but that’s where foreign intelligence services usually plant or pay in their disinformation campaigns too.) You can see here the first efforts of the folks around the Romney campaign to push what amounts to a ‘Navy Seals for Truth’ pitch to defend the former Massachusetts Governor. (The piece is being pushed on Drudge, which has worked closely with the Romney camp all through the primaries. Read More