Eli has a made a cute joke this morning. In case you missed the context, at the end of the day yesterday, the City announced that it was suing six contractors it found to have kept insufficient records of a little more than $200,000.00 paid to them through NOAH. (If you need more NOAH context at thi...

According to this article a woman in Houston named Marsha Farmer has spent the past seven years exposing a scam in the city's Department of Housing and Community Development.  In 2001 when her home was damaged in a flood and 17 months later she received an estimate from a contractor in the city's h...

Right then. You might have been wondering when the hell this mix was going to be online, and rightly too considering we announced it a while back. In the end, with life and other fun things getting in the way we decided to hold it back until the festivities were starting, kind of like a [...]...

Mickey Kaus quips, “We need a Czar Czar, to crack the whip on all the czars. … P.S.: Also a federal czar policy. Right now, czar decisions are made on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis, with no attempt at czar harmonization.” I have to agree that we’ve gone czar crazy.  WeR...

Remember “change we can believe in”? How about “the straight talk express”? The first is the mantra of believers in Barack Obama, the second was John McCain’s war wagon during his 2000 primary fight for the Republican nomination. Though Dubya ultimately prevailed, McCai...

New Fallout 3 preview, this time in Norwegian from Gamer.no, a snippet from a translation at NMA by ericjones: The source material wasn’t the best. Nonetheless, here’s a quick and rough translation: “It’s hard to believe that the guy who showed us the game, Pete Hines, was fr...

I spent part of last week at an FHA conference and had a chance to learn all about their upcoming changes which Rhonda blogged about here.  In the past I have been critical about the lack of HUD auditors regulating their laws.  Regulation has mostly been left up to state agencies. Personally, I&...

Crank the Wayback Machine to Summer, 2006. When the U.S. Supreme Court allowed New London, Connecticut, to use eminent domain to take the property of people living and doing business in the waterfront neighborhood of Fort Trumbull. The Supreme’s decision on Kelo v. New London was the cherry on...

It was hard to imagine anything less menacing than Hud Morgan in a bar fight, but a helpful tipster has supplied one: the Men's Vogue writer, dressed we presume as a gangster, at up-and-coming socialite Serena Merriman's fancy dress party, last weekend in Little Compton, Rhode Island. 28-year-old Mo...

Style.com wants to tell you who the cool kids are. They've compiled a field guide to "2008's Coolest Cliques" using the following six dubious categories: The New (New) Bohemian, The European Union, The Swans 2.0, The Catwalk Queens and The New Kids on the Blog. Julia Allison is mentioned three times...