Former President, and some would say war criminal George W. Bush cancelled an appearance at a Swiss human rights gala because he feared being arrested.  So now Bush joins Henry Kissinger in the ranks of Americans who don't feel that they can safely travel to or even through certain countries, not for fear of assassination or kidnapping, but for fear of arrest and trial.

Then Why Is It Snowing, Mr. Gore?

The former Vice-President and climate change activist offers a number of responses to this most pressing question.

By your reckoning, the Earth is 6,000 years old.  Give it time.

Because you keep voting for people who make sure that you can’t afford to retire some place tropical.

It snows on the righteous and the just and, well… you. 

It’s not snow, it’s angel kisses. Feel better now?

The Ski Resort Industrial Complex.

Soros!

Simply stunning.  The lesson that outgoing (but not outgoing) Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman has learned from Egypt's oppressive dictator Hosni Mubarak is that the President needs to be able to order the shutdown of Internet access in the U.S., too.

This is outside my usual subject matter so forgive me if it's trite or has been done before, but I've had a couple of Internet experiences lately that have really driven home for me how much things have changed.  When I started using the Internet back at the end of high school (around 1993) it was a bunch of bulletin boards with text interfaces.  It probably wasn't a commerce thing for me until around 1998/99 (making me a late adopter, I know, but for awhile I got an employee discount at a book, movie and video store so why Amazon?)  Throughout, there was a sense of the public square to the

So I got paid on the 15th and something bugged me about the number I took home.  It was lower than it was in December and yet it shouldn't have been.  This pay cycle was the first one where I benefitted from the 2% payroll tax holiday, something I believe I touted here before when Obama agreed to it.

Maybe that's a flip way to say it, but the one thing I remember most about the first Gulf War was all of the hyperbole around it.  Saddam Hussein was Hitler.  Kuwait was Poland.  If we didn't stop him then, we'd never be able to stop him as he rampaged throughout the region, taking over Saudi Arabia and Iran in the process.  Saddam Hussein had, we were told again and again, the fourth largest army in the world.

Every now and then Atrios has a short post that says something like "Silly, Silly, Japan - hostile to immigration."  His point, so much as it needs explanation, is how often we criticize other countries for acting stupidly and making obvious mistakes that only serve to make life worse abroad than it is here at home, where everything is great.

The mushy middle has spoken and the bipartisanship that we saw during the extraordinarily productive lame duck congressional session just won’t do.  Yes, that’s right.  The very people who have been agitating for both parties to “reach across the aisle” are not happy with the way in which it was done.

Meanwhile, back over at TPMCafe, Jon Taplin makes an interesting argument in his post "Merchants Of Fear."  Two, actually.  The first is that some people, especially peddlars of gold and survivalist rations, are purposefully overselling the state of American decline in order to make a buck.  Granted.  But then there's this:

I agree that hearing Julian Assange's lawyers outrage that leaked information pertaining to the rape charges against him should have never been made public is funny.  I also agree with David Seaton that politics is politics and that anything that makes Assange look like a hypocrite is bad news for him.  In the game he's playing image is important.  You can't be for the release of all secrets except for your own.  All absolutists find their petards hoisted sooner