Some Wednesday morning Ink & Dagger while the coffee brews. My girlfriend and several friends of mine are hook line and sinker into this ‘Twilight’ fad, and I pass no judgments. But it just makes me think that Sean McCabe and Don Devore were 13 years ahead of their time. (Or 12? When did the [...]

I wasn’t sure what to make of Una Vera’s post about a new Afghan anti-corruption effort, and she was good enough to respond to clear things up. Bottom line: who knows if it’s for-real right now! I think Ershad Ahmadi and Eshaq Aleko are sincere when they say they want to stamp out the kind [...]

Israel, in violation of Obama’s call for a settlement-construction freeze, plans on building 900 more homes in Palestinian East Jerusalem. Robert Gibbs put out this statement: We are dismayed at the Jerusalem Planning Committee’s decision to move forward on the approval process for the expansion of Gilo in Jerusalem. At a time when we are [...]

Via Dave Bry at The Awl — who is disturbingly easy on Juelz Santana — comes this Juelz abomination sampling “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” To be clear: this was inevitable. Someone was going to use Dylan’s proto-rap drug ballad as the basis for a plodding and obvious coke-rap at some point. Ever since Danny Cohen pointed [...]

I swear, I didn’t mean to make this Jew Day on Attackerman, but I’m working on a kind of involved story for the Windy and this really jumped out at me. Credit belongs to Abraham Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League, an individual and an organization I’m rather quick to criticize for blind spots and tribal-based [...]

Una Vera at Change.org writes a roundup about a new anti-corruption effort within the Afghan Interior Ministry. I can’t tell if she thinks we should take this thing seriously or not. Anyone know anything here?

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the EconomyWhen my Washington Independent colleague Daphne Eviatar is on MSNBC, she makes the most of her time, doesn’t she?

One of my closest friends is an impossibly tall Jewess of Israeli parentage — we make quite a pair; honestly, it’s like a goddamn Bialik poem come to life — and so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but Shtetl Affairs Basketball Correspondent Matthew Yglesias alerts me to the first Israeli NBA player, [...]

If you didn’t grow up in central Brooklyn, you probably have no reason to know who Dov Hikind is, but I’ll enlighten you free of charge. He’s a New York State Assemblyman who specializes in the rankest of Shtetl identity politics. To some degree he’s an outgrowth of who he represents. As late as the [...]

In the absence of a Moe Tkacik China report, I pluck this graf out of a NYT piece. It describes the aftermath of Obama’s Shanghai townhall: “I will not forget this morning,” one Chinese Twitter user posted on the Internet, apparently using software to get around the government firewall. “I heard, on my shaky Internet [...]