Russ McBee

Just a few short years ago, no one would have thought this sentence even a remote possibility: Having tried without success to unlock frozen credit markets, the Treasury Department is considering taking ownership stakes in many United States banks to try to restore confidence in the financial system, according to government officials. The US ...

Today's tech buzz has been all about Google's release of its very own web browser, Chrome. I've seen tons of breathless blog posts, comments, and Twitter updates about this over the last 24 hours; hordes of people were eager to start downloading it the very instant it became available. Why? At its heart, Google is an advertising company, not a ...

Via Rex Hammock, Paris Hilton responds to McCain's recent sleazy ad depicting Obama alongside her and Britney Spears: Maybe I'm showing my age, but it seems like every presidential campaign becomes ever more surreal than the last one.

Thirty-one members of the US House of Representatives seem to think the establishment of an American theocracy is a more urgent matter than any of the economic, military, or environmental problems we face. Those 31, including Tennessee's own resident wingnut Marsha Blackburn, have co-sponsored HR 598; the bill's stated purpose is: Supporting ...

As a consequence of this debacle in our local government, Knox County Commissioners are under a court order not to violate the Sunshine Law again, under penalty of fines and possibly even jail time. Given the events of the last year and a half in this county, one would think they'd have sense enough not to discuss the public's business in private ...

Up until yesterday, the Pentagon planned to release a landmark survey of over 600,000 seized Iraqi documents that showed conclusively there was no connection between al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein. At the last minute, the Pentagon decided to bury the study: ABC News' Jonathan Karl Reports: The Bush Administration apparently does not ...

I'll bet Dick Cheney's head is about to explode: Iraq and China are close to re-signing a $1.2 billion oil deal that was called off after the 2003 U.S. invasion, an Iraqi Oil Ministry official said Thursday. [...] Saddam Hussein's government signed a deal with the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. to develop the billion-barrel ...

First, there's this: The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional ...

This is just too funny: Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time. [...] In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation ''was halted due to untimely payment,'' the audit found. FISA ...

Elvis died when he was 42. If he were still alive (and, no, he isn't), he would have turned 73 on Tuesday.