The Illinois Supreme Court has unanimously found Rahm Emanuel to be eligible to run for mayor of Chicago, preserving his name on the ballot.

In doing so the court smacked (.pdf) around the state appeals court that had thrown things into turmoil for the Rahm camp and election officials: “the novel standard adopted by the appellate court majority is without any foundation in Illinois law.”

We’ve now seen a series of waves of popular unrest which were, if not triggered by, at least accelerated and sustained for a period of time by social media, text messaging, easily-distributed digital imagery and all the rest of systems of our wired world. The latest reports out of Egypt are that the state has either disrupted or shutdown key social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as text-messaging and Blackberry service. It’s unclear to me in this report from the AP whether Internet connections themselves have been blocked; but clearly access to the Internet has been significantly curtailed. Read More

Readers respond to Counter-Twitter Operations … Read More

Oil dispersants lingered in the deep waters of the Gulf longer than expected and long after oil stopped gushing from the blowout.

A partner at Akin Gump, a major firm whose clients include Native American interests, stepped in it when he called the Native American prayer at the Tucson memorial service “ugly” in a blog post at the conservative Powerline.

A longtime TPM reader who is in the know checks in on Egypt, counter-Twitter operations, and the technical aspects of making the Internet less susceptible to government coercion: Read More

Why are top DC foreign policy officials, from both parties, pledging their support to a cult-like anti-Iranian government terrorist group. And who’s funding the PR campaign spreading the MEK gospel?

As events accelerate in Egypt, we’ve opened TPM’s Egypt Wire to bring you the very latest developments. Click that link or so the latest updates on the front page to the right just below the feature.

With the Egypt crisis deepening, the daily White House press briefing has been pushed back and it was rumored that the President would make a statement. But Robert Gibbs has taken the podium. You can watch it live here.