Tonight's Rescue Rangers are Louisiana 1976, ybruti, mem from somerville, dadanation, jennyjem, jlms qkw, and taylormattd as editor.

Please enjoy reading these outstanding, ranger-selected diaries:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed around 10 pm EDT this evening.  He was the keynote speaker tonight at the Federalist Society's annual lawyers conference at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, D.C.

According to friends in the room, emergency paramedics were there to work on him pr...

My wife and I bought our house in May 2006 from Ellen and Rosemary, an elderly lesbian couple. They had done beautiful work to the house, having planned on staying here the rest of their lives. But grandchildren came, and with that, they ran off to North Carolina to be closer to the little ones. ...

In another stinging rebuke of the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror, a U.S. District Court Judge has ordered that five Algerian detainees be released. SCOTUSblog has some analysis:

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, in the first ruling to carry out the Supreme Court’s June de...

The great thing about polls is that sometimes they're all over the map. Check out the latest trifecta in the LA-04 race, which pits Democrat Paul Carmouche against Republican John Fleming.

First, the independent poll, from SurveyUSA:

SurveyUSA for Roll Call. 11/17-18. Likely voters. MoE 3.9%

MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell interviews Markos on Thursday afternoon. Not only did Markos make all the important points about why Joe Lieberman represents the status quo, but his good-natured and eminently reasonable tone also helped puncture the myth that so-called "liberal bloggers" are beside thems...

Happy Birthday to Vice-President-elect Joe Biden!

Birthday wishes and whatever else you feel like talking about...

Last year:

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn't work?

The conclusion they took away, the...

I was convinced yesterday to run numbers for finalists depending on the most likely outcomes. These aren't the only possible outcomes, since crazy stuff might happen in OH-15 or VA-05 to deprive us of expected victories in those two districts, but assuming that the only real question marks left a...

They're counting away. The latest:

By the end of the day Wednesday, the mandatory statewide recount -- triggered when the Election Day results gave Coleman a lead of less than 0.5 percent -- slashed Franken's deficit from 215 votes to 174, with about 18 percent of the ballots having been review...

Back in June, Barry Ritholtz over at The Big Picture complained that "U3," the Bureau of Labor Statistics' official rate of unemployment, the one that gets reported by 99% of the megamedia and the blogmedia, is just not accurate.

It has, over the years, slowly excluded many of the factors that ...

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 11/17-19. Likely voters. MoE 4% (11/10-12 results)

Chambliss (R) 51 (49)
Martin (D) 45 (46)

The Election NIght results of this race were 49-46 Chambliss. The poll last week, when asking respondents who they voted for on Election Night, came back 49-47. Today, that...

Gov. Sarah Palin is personally inviting Americans from all over the country to visit her home state. Well, sort of. Letters bearing her picture, on letterhead that reads “Office of the Governor” and encouraging people to sign up for a ...

Yesterday I wrote about the great gains in Salt Lake County in Utah, but couldn't do a side-by-side comparison since AP hadn't updated its numbers. Well, they're updated, so I'm posting the comparison maps so we can marvel at what progress looks like:

2004:

2008:

The glowing county is Salt...

She's at it again, denying that she said what she said:

Politico:

A month after calling for an investigation of fellow members of Congress to "find out if they are pro-America or anti-America," Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is now claiming that the whole episode was "an urban legend."

Ask...