Events

Salon has a sublime ode to the "I can haz cheezburger" crowd: By now, even the most casual observers of the Internet are aware that lolcats have become a certifiable Internet phenomenon. Their flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, is one of Web 2.0's big success stories -- on track to top a billion page views this year -- and its content is entirely user-generated. Readers upload over 5,000 homegrown submissions every day, of which six or eight are posted on the site. And in October, the lolcats got...

MSNBC reports that convicted felon and Alaska Republican Ted Stevens has lost his Senate seat to never-indicted Mark Begich: Stevens' ouster on his 85th birthday marks an abrupt realignment in Alaska politics and will alter the power structure in the Senate, where he has served since the days of the Johnson administration while holding seats on some of the most influential committees in Congress. Tuesday's tally of just over 24,000 absentee and other ballots gave Begich 146,286, or 47.56 percent, to...

Last Thursday, The Daily Parker turned three. Actually, yesterday, the dog turned 2 years, 5 months; but the blog is three years old. And in honor of this august day in November, I hit "Post" three times before correcting all the typos.

Kos reports the Democrats in the Senate have some trouble understanding that Lieberman isn't one of us: When Senate Democrats meet Tuesday to decide Sen. Joe Lieberman's (I-Conn.) fate, leaders are expected to propose that he keep his gavel at the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee but lose his Environment and Public Works subcommittee chairmanship. Senate Democratic sources cautioned that the proposal is intended to serve as a starting point for the discussion over whether Lieberman...

Burlington, Vt., is America's healthiest city: Vermont's largest city is tops among U.S. metropolitan areas by having the largest proportion of people — 92 percent — who say they are in good or great health. It's also among the best in exercise and among the lowest in obesity, diabetes and other measures of ill health, according to a recent report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Contrast with Huntington, W.Va.: The obese mayor of America's fattest and unhealthiest city says...

Sam Zell is fast-tracking the Cubs sale from Tribune: Mr. Zell expects to select a finalist from the five remaining bidding groups and submit the deal for Major League Baseball's approval sometime in December, a person familiar with the sale says. He is fast-tracking the sale — despite a credit crunch that seemed to put his year-end deadline in doubt — as pressure mounts to raise as much as $1 billion to chip away at the mountain of debt from his 2007 buyout of Tribune. With cash flow plummeting from...

Chicago almost universally loves that one of our own will be president. It turns out, only some of us predicted certain inconveniences: The dramatic increase in security around Barack Obama since the election has made a sizable impact in the Loop, where the president-elect is running his transition office at the Kluczynski Federal Building, straining an already-stretched Chicago police force and city budget. The police coverage is around-the-clock, with about 25 officers, essentially one from each...

My sister got her pilot certificate just to get me to shut up about jumping out of planes ("why jump from a perfectly-landable airplane?"). And if you think I love my dog, well, she outdoes me there, too. The combination means she has two dogs who each have their own airplane ear protectors. I can't imagine Parker in a Cessna, but I think he'd be at least as cute as this: By the way, she named her dog Codey, after the final approach fix on the runway 15 IFR GPS approach at Lincoln, Calif. Seriously.

Effective Sunday, Illinois has a plum political vacancy. Let the games begin! The choice of who will fill the remaining two years of Mr. Obama’s term now goes to Gov. Rod Blagojevich. ... Among those interested in the seat are U.S. Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr., Jan Schakowsky and Luis Gutierrez, all Chicago-area Democrats; state Veterans Affairs Director Tammy Duckworth, and retiring Illinois Senate President Emil Jones Jr. Now, for those outside Illinois, you have to understand that Illinois politics can...

Ed Kilgore at TPM Cafe has a good analysis: If today's conservatives succeed in convincing each other to embrace a more forthright message assaulting entitlements, progressive taxation, public education, regulation of corporations and Wall Street, just to cite a few domestic policy examples, they are almost certainly cruising for more electoral bruising. ...[C]onservatives today have almost completely internalized their own rhetoric about Obama's "radicalism," "socialism," "anti-Americanism," and so...