Return to FRIAA ver

Music as promised, Zappaesque and alt, as you like it. A ten-song, 43-minute set stashed at your favorite server: Rapidshare!

You’ll survive the experience some how, I’m sure, but just to bait the hook:

Click the playlist to be whisked away to the land of German FRIAAnity and this week’s music set. Music that would destroy a lesser mind but which will only make you, my chosen ones, stronger.

Next week we’ll learn how to make placemats using just oatmeal, toothpicks and a pair of pliers.

*Fuck the Recording Industry Association of America (I’d think by now that’d be obvious)

A conversation worth dying for

Crappy as the GE brand is for digital cameras, I do love mine. It let me zoom in on the driver of the purplish silver car that just got an earful of fully loaded cement truck horn for trying to turn right on red into the path of certain death. Yes, she was talking on a phone. No, she didn’t immediately turn right after that. She paused for two full moments before continuing on her way, considerably shaken but still talking on her fucking phone.

The laws about this need to be very specific. Talking on the phone whether handheld or headset needs to be made 100% illegal, and if you’re pulled over for it, your phone should be taken away from you, never ever to be returned.

I’ll go even further. All cell phones should be registered, and if the traffic cops take yours away you shouldn’t be able to get another one for a designated period of time, however long legislators think it would take to firmly get the point across. Fines don’t stop everyone, but fear of losing your cell phone privileges might put a dent in this radically stupid trend.

The car driver came very close to death.She was a couple of feet into the intersection before she stopped. Worse, the poor schlub in the turn lane opposite the cement truck driver could also have been killed had the truck driver’s reflexes caused him to jerk the wheel, a natural reaction to sudden input like a car pulling out in front of you when when no power on earth could stop your mega-ton vehicle in less than a quarter of a block.

How heavy is a fully loaded cement truck? 33 tons. That’s 66,000 lbs. of which 40,ooo lbs. is the cement itself. An empty cement truck weighs 13 tons but it has considerably better stopping time. When fully loaded trucks go by (and they do all day long) my monitor shakes. My monitor is sitting on a hard rubber desktop which is part of a very sturdy former USMC metal desk which rests evenly on a carpeted floor on the third floor of a very soundly built building about 90 feet away from the intersection. Truly, I’m surprised the driver didn’t feel the truck coming but again, my point is that cell phones are incredibly distracting.

Stop talking while you’re driving. Even on an empty stretch of road you’re putting yourself at incredible risk. Not to mention being an all-round selfish douche who is endangering others.

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So far as I know, the woman Rep. John Campbell says is his mother did give birth to him. Otoh, it could have been the STD-ridden Mattress Mary who camps over by the docks who sold one of her “love” babies to the woman who then raised him as John Campbell. I mean, it’s not like Rep. Campbell has proven otherwise.

Still, I’m keeping an open mind about this and am inclined to think John Campbell’s mother is his mother.

His father I’m not quite as sure about.

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By now many House Dems are thinking nasty thoughts about Jeff Flake’s parentage but the Arizona gadfly is right. Defense earmarks have got to go. They were evil when the Republicans were in charge, and now that we’re running things I’m even more offended by their existence.

Jack Murtha is corrupt. He was corrupt when he gladdened all of us with his opposition to Bush-Cheney’s war in Iraq, and he’s corrupt now.

Murtha has got to go.

And no, I don’t feel even slightly hypocritical. When every vote counts in an effort to stop the wholesale immolation of the U.S. Treasury, you deal with the devils. But when you’re in charge, a higher standard applies.

Money spent on defense is money not spent on our communities, and the same dollars stretch much further at home than they do in foreign hell holes.

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Also from David Waldman, the interesting observation that Mike Enzi isn’t part of the Gang of Six for negotiating purposes. He’s there as the right’s “political officer” to make sure Chuck Grassley and Olympia Snow don’t deviate from the party line.

Wikipedia has more on political officers for readers unfamiliar with the term.

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Thanks to a forwarded email from Bonedog, I now know that the Wurlitzer is spamming out the euthanasia lie. Most egregiously they pin part of their authentication on it not being addressed by Snopes.com.

How cold is that? Make up a lie and then quick spam it before Snopes calls you out on it. They’re deliberately taking advantage of the fact that Snopes can’t hear about a lie until it’s in circulation, and since they just made it up they can safely say it’s not at Snopes so it must be true.

Well Snopes has now read their email. As of last Friday they have this bullshit flagged as FALSE. But take this as the gold standard of spam verification: if someone’s argument includes a line about there not being anything about whatever at Snopes, chances are excellent that there should be something posted because someone is pounding sand up your ass.

As one of the right’s favorite politicians, Winston Churchill, once said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.”

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Kos has polling data that shows most Birthers are Republican Southerners.

Since only 6% of Midwestern Republicans buy into this B.S., I guess that makes my Mom pretty special. I know our last phone conversation was. Now she’s all about blacks and their special privileges. No one has the right to mouth off to a cop, not in your own home or on your own porch. Not ever.

Sick shit from a woman whose mind has been poisoned by Fox News. If the doctors ever tell me I’ve got six weeks to live, it’ll be hard not to strap on some dynamite and paying those lying bastards a call.

I cannot believe the 1st Amendment allows TV networks to manufacture lies. Laws are being broken, and their broadcast licenses should be revoked before they take the next step towards becoming a Dixie-fried version of Radio Rwanda.

I haven’t given up on Mom. She was also all about blaming the entire economy on Obama so I sent her the Washington Times’ coverage* of the $5 billion in bonuses handed out last fall on Bush’s watch, and then pleaded with her to accept the fact that BOTH political parties are in the bag for Wall Street, and that anyone who points at one side only is lying. But the sad truth is that short of Sean Hannity getting caught in bed with Henry Louis Gates, she’s never going to filter their lies and will live out her days in a state of delusion.

How do you not hate the people who lie to your mother?

* Pretty much a straight wire story most notable for not mentioning Bush, Republicans or anyone but Democrats. Mike Elk has more on proposals to regulate CEO pay.

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Interesting. The Chicago Tribune’s The Swamp now cites the Great Orange Satan’s polls.

Not all Republicans are flaming assholes. Some are still conservatives, and sickened by what’s happened to their once proud party.

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Scott Horton on Mohammed Jawad.

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Private, no public — no, private wait wait I mean public, er private!

Whatever’s most convenient, I guess.

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Iran.

It’s really sad the wingnuts refuse to read Juan Cole. Cole is objective, and not at all shy when it comes to pointing out who the real bastards are.

But he was 100% right about Iraq, and the wingnuts will never forgive him for that.

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Bought and paid for blue dog whores.

Maha has more.

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Naperville is Illinois’ butthole.

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More proof that mainstream Christian denominations are run by buttholes.

Ray McGovern blames Emperor Constantine, and I think he’s 100% correct.

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Ezra Klein, right, except when he’s wrong.

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Republicans have been reduced to calling the truth “pretentious.”

Meanwhile, fellow Texan slimebag Kay Bailey Perrysafag Hutchison has now fallen back on the lie that the site automatically generated those key words based on the search engine popularity of “rick perry gay.”

If that is in fact true, where’s the meta code for all those people searching for “kay bailey hutchison lying bitch”?

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Until just now I didn’t think it would ever be possible to ascertain with any certainty the identify of the two stupidest people in Florida.

Baker looks like the usual wingnut goon, but Plakon has that “I jerk off to the racier parts of the Bible” look about him. After which I’m sure he’s ashamed and considers punishing himself but then that passes and he goes about his business until the next King David moment arises.

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There will be more music tonight as I just got a CARE package from Alaska. Alas, not more rain, but instead two jars of fresh Alaska sockeye salmon. The second jar was smoked. Yum. Farm-raised can’t touch this stuff. I took a nibble out of each jar and each bite contained an entire farm-raised salmon’s worth of flavor except better.

Thanks so much dude, I’ll try to make tonight’s set as Zappa-esque as possible, or at the very least I’ll make it music to read Mick by.

(If you want to watch the new Coen Bros trailer about life in St. Louis Park, you should probably turn the music off entirely or it may muffle the thumps.)

More links than you have time for

The usual suspects:

NRO humiliates itself with a “serious” piece on the Birther “controversy”

Max Blumenthal on Orly Taitz, QotB

Dave Neiwert on Lou Dobbs

More race baiting from John Cornyn

Newsweek wants to send George Bush to the Middle East?

Why do Republicans want government to coercively promote euthanasia?

The too clever by half Kay Bailey Hutchinson gubernatorial campaign website uses meta search engine bait like “rick perry gay”

The New Yorker runs a soft soap profile of über-hater Michael Weiner Savage (but the free abstract includes enough to raise most eyebrows)

Tony Sutton, a name that rang a bell for MnO, but not anyone in the MN press corps

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Saner voices:

Dave Johnson on minimum wage agitprop

Meteor Blades on junk mail and unwanted phone books

Rachel Maddow with some surprising info on the Colonel who wants us out of Iraq (the video speaks directly to the vast gulf that exists between real conservatives and warmongering Republicans)

Steve Benen has more on kneecapping arrogant committee chairs

Lisa Derrick on the joys of playing by the rules set by heathcare insurers (stay healthy and they win, get sick and you lose)

Tristero on embracing contradiction

Scott Horton on the DOJ’s investigation of the Stevens prosecutors the nature of which leads me to wonder if this is the necessary first step before moving against the entire Bush DOJ regime’s reign of legalistic terror (that or Holder’s a complete douche and we’re all doomed)

Digby on mancrushes

Steven Benen on Kevin Drum on selling the cure

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World:

Honduras, Bloody Honduras

Human trafficking in Israel (sounds severe but really it’s just the Lou Dobbs anti-immigrant thing, so yeah, it’s nasty)

Teabagging, Thai style

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Even as the Veterans Administration continues to earn the respect of serious healthcare analysts, Army medical centers are understaffed, under provisioned, and turning away military families in need of healthcare services.

Not exactly the rosy scenario painted by Bill Kristol on The Daily Show. I guess the money was needed for the F-22. I’m sure military families understand, and will continue to economize and sacrifice.

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Bryan, Texas, has been evacuated due to a chemical fire putting out toxic fumes.

More on Texas from Jon Talton.

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Three cheers for the guy who had the real American beer, even if it was a light.

Clunkers v antiques

I really don’t know what it means that the state has finally sued URS Corp., the infrastructure consultants who failed to flag the I-35 bridge. Minnesota is now saying that URS’s inspections “violated the applicable engineering standard of care.” The problem with that is that URS told the state that for what they were getting paid:

“We will not calculate actual capacities of all of the connections since that is too much work, although that provides the most accurate results,” the firm wrote in March 2006. “Instead, we will do some approximate but conservative adjustments to the member capacities per [the] design specifications.”

In other words, you’re not paying us to do this the right way, so we’ll try to do it this way. URS got three contracts because they were amenable to MnDOT’s cheapskate ways.

I expect a noisy trial with more bluster than facts.

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TANSTAAFL. *

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Cash for Clunkers may not have worked for me, but I’d say the remaining car dealerships owe their existence to this program.

As of midnight last night, the program is over. emptywheel explains what happened.

Needless to say, the media is viewing instant success as some kind of failure.

No. This is some kind of failure.

The tone deaf humor of the Villagers. As one of thousands of vile bloggers who’ve been pointing out that mocking the less fortunate isn’t funny, I’m not surprised by how this is playing out.

First Milbank and Cillizza “mock” themselves to prove they’re OK. For most people that backfires because if you read much Milbank and Cillizza, the smoking jackets are perfect. They think they’re over the top, we think the wardrobing is brilliantly apt.

Then you get to the business of mocking the powerful. I didn’t click their link to watch their wretched video. I didn’t have to. They’re not mocking Obama, they’re ridiculing him. That’s only funny if you’re not an American patriot and you love seeing American presidents denigrated. Right now in Russia, oligarchs are wiping tears from their cheeks after busting a gut laughing.

Now that my generation has become the establishment, we are every bit as odious as the establishment that sent so many of us to Vietnam to die for a parody of democracy and freedom.

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Firedoglake has been busting their butts to get progressive members of Congress to agree not to vote for healthcare insurance reform unless there’s a public option. I’ve been ignoring their efforts and emails to spread the word because I’m not a petition/letter writing kind of guy. I think nothing short of mobilizing tens of millions of Americans penetrates the consciousness of this Congress.

FDL deserves some serious credit. They’ve gotten 57 House progressives to agree to the public option or fuck you plan, and that more than outweighs the Blue Dogs’ clout.

And Minnesotans can take pride in the fact that Keith Ellison is on that list.

Cue more Blue Dog lionizing from the WaPost and handwringing from the L.A. Times.

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Good Krugman.

The key thing you need to know about health care is that it depends crucially on insurance. You don’t know when or whether you’ll need treatment — but if you do, treatment can be extremely expensive, well beyond what most people can pay out of pocket. Triple coronary bypasses, not routine doctor’s visits, are where the real money is, so insurance is essential.

Yet private markets for health insurance, left to their own devices, work very badly: insurers deny as many claims as possible, and they also try to avoid covering people who are likely to need care. Horror stories are legion: the insurance company that refused to pay for urgently needed cancer surgery because of questions about the patient’s acne treatment; the healthy young woman denied coverage because she briefly saw a psychologist after breaking up with her boyfriend.

And in their efforts to avoid “medical losses,” the industry term for paying medical bills, insurers spend much of the money taken in through premiums not on medical treatment, but on “underwriting” — screening out people likely to make insurance claims. In the individual insurance market, where people buy insurance directly rather than getting it through their employers, so much money goes into underwriting and other expenses that only around 70 cents of each premium dollar actually goes to care.

But we knew all this. It’s sad it has to be repeated and repeated, but the media keeps pumping lies into the debate and we lose sight of the original built in Fail. When you try to make money from health care, everything falls apart.

The real “profit” to be derived is societal. Only government wins when everyone’s healthy. There’s a built in Fail there, too. If government runs health care AND is the primary employer, then you risk bureaucrats growing the system to gain more power.

Single payer is the ideal. Let the private sector deliver services, and let the government pay for them. All the inherent Fails are short circuited and suddenly we’ve got world class health care for all, instead of just some.

I am, deep down, an optimist. We can do this thing. My cynicism comes from our refusal to do things the right way because we instead listen to the “right” people, all of whom want to do things the wrong way.

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I did a doubletake.

‘s’what happens when you hire interns/low level employees based on their legs and not their brains.

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SusanG on the $5 billion bailout bastards.

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Another round of fascination with vampires. To their estimable credit, Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan actually put their finger on the essence of why vampires persist in our culture.

[I]n contrast to timeless creatures like the dragon, the vampire does not seek to obliterate us, but instead offers a peculiar brand of blood alchemy. For as his contagion bestows its nocturnal gift, the vampire transforms our vile, mortal selves into the gold of eternal youth, and instills in us something that every social construct seeks to quash: primal lust. If youth is desire married with unending possibility, then vampire lust creates within us a delicious void, one we long to fulfill.

In other words, whereas other monsters emphasize what is mortal in us, the vampire emphasizes the eternal in us. Through the panacea of its blood it turns the lead of our toxic flesh into golden matter.

In other words, give up your immortal soul (religion) for very real rewards here and now. The lure of a better life (for real) at the risk of losing eternity (pie in the sky).

In still other words, think of billionaires and their ilk.

Vampires do live among us.

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Flash security update recommended.

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{T}here’s nothing anyone can do to convince these folks. You could hand them, in person, the original birth certificate and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background … and they still wouldn’t believe it.

Which raises the question: Why, in this country, is it always the religious right that won’t take anything on faith?

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Like most farm families we had a “teen” car. Mom drove the good car, Dad drove the pickup, and my brothers and I drove clunkers. Our first teen car was a ’49 Ford but I would never call that one a clunker. More like a post-WWII classic, ugly on wheels with a side of old car smell.

Our first clunker was a salmon-colored Dodge Phoenix that replaced the ’49 Ford.

The Dodge Phoenix was to ugly what Joachim Phoenix is to weird. It had a push-button transmission, power windows, power seats, power door locks and power gas consumption.

Even if I still had it, it wouldn’t have qualified for the clunker trade in. It’s an antique now, just like everyone who ever drove one in real time.

Rain, blessed rain

Knees are feeling pretty creaky today thanks to last night’s Maharajahs. But that’s OK because it rained today. Not a lot but just enough.

a song that speaks to the moment

and from these guys, a song that’s been stuck in my head for a couple of years now

Click the images for the music.

Click this link for William Shatner reading Sarah Palin’s tweets.

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Dept of Idle Thoughts:

Why haven’t we picked a Sunday for National Single Payer Day yet?

Major breaking news

A huge day in the news. I think a lot of establishment insiders are getting royally pissed and the quality of information is suddenly getting much, much better.

We’ve just learned that right after the big banks got bailed out last fall, they handed out FIVE FUCKING BILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF BONUSES to themselves for screwing everything up. This one’s going to be hard for Fox News to cover up, and because it happened last fall it’s going to be really hard to blame Obama for what Bush, Bernanke and Congress did.

More on Wall Street from Matt Taibbi and more on mortgages from Mick.

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Healthcare:

dday on Enzi

Gail Collins on single payer (ignore the Brooks half of the discussion)

Floyd Norris on changing the rules

mcjoan on Blue Dog insurance co. shills

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Karl Rove is back in the news.

Mr. Rove, who on Thursday completed two days of testimony in a closed session with investigators from the House Judiciary Committee, said he could not answer one of the lingering questions that the panel had hoped to resolve: whether it was the White House that came up with the idea of firing the prosecutors.

The Washington Post fills in some of the missing details:

Political adviser Karl Rove and other high-ranking figures in the Bush White House played a greater role than previously understood in the firing of federal prosecutors almost three years ago, according to newly obtained e-mails that shed light on a scandal that led to mass Justice Department resignations and an ongoing criminal probe.

The e-mails and new interviews with key participants reflect contacts among Rove, aides in the Bush political affairs office and White House lawyers about the dismissal of three of the nine U.S. attorneys fired in 2006: New Mexico’s David C. Iglesias, the focus of ire from GOP lawmakers; Missouri’s Todd Graves, who had clashed with one of Rove’s former clients; and Arkansas’s Bud Cummins, who was pushed out to make way for a Rove protege.

Oopsie. Read the whole thing. Rove is finally toast. emptywheel has more.

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A new memo from Iraq says it’s time to go home.

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I’m starting to like Jeff Flake, even if he is appropriately surnamed.

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Secretary of State Clinton intervened in UK affairs to keep Binyam Mohamed’s torture at Gitmo a secret. Scott Horton explains. Rabid Clintonista Big Tent Democrat wonders why the American media was so slow to pick up on this story.

Bill Clinton let Bush I off the hook. Why is Obama doing the same for Bush II?

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Injustice in Mississippi. Is there any other kind down there? Or in Florida?

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Birthers:

Sara Robinson with the definitive summary of everything you need to know to deal with one of these crazy fucking birthers

Hunter has a shorter script

Neiwert on O’Reilly on Dobbs

McClatchy: Birther claims are just plain nuts

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Neiwert on Malkin’s new “book.”

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American racism and the beer thing. (click the image for a story about the meeting)

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James Ridgeway on our prisons for seniors.

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What I’ve been saying since 2003 finally makes it to Romenesko.

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What Michael Kimball’s doing sounds very familiar to this former resume writer.

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Sixteen outstanding human beings will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Some are dead and not all are Americans, and most of them wouldn’t have been picked by the last president.

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Oh, and you won’t find any of these stories in the Strib or PiPress.

Maybe tomorrow.

Maybe you’ll still care.

MPR, WNBA, DOJ and other lamers

Lamar Alexander is voting for Sotomayor. That makes six Republicans plus Joe Lieberman. Obama really is a fool if his next pick isn’t someone well to Sotomayor’s left.

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Minnesota Public Radio’s MinnEcon blog decided to do a little newspaper baiting. Open Discussion: Would you miss the morning paper?

A question I love to answer in the negative, not having bought a newspaper in this century (except when on vacation and living la vita senza internet). I was even ready to register with them (odd that since you don’t have to register to comment at the other MPR blogs I read) but then I saw that I’d have to register with Gather®™©∂.

Fuck that, and fuck the weasels at MPR who sued local internet pioneer Chris Dykstra and forced him to rename his Gatheroo social networking software as Zanby. I utterly despise and loathe that kind of corporate thuggery, and find it even more reprehensible when it comes from a so-called nonprofit.

Oh, and if you’re not familiar with the ∂ symbol, I just invented it. It stands for DOUCHE, as in the stealthily overcompensated Bill Kling and Minnesota Gimme More Money Radio.

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WNBA being as lame as they can be. Their consistently terrified response to all things lesbian is truly disheartening. Given their microscopic viewership, it would behoove them to embrace the GLBT community.

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Arts ‘n’ craftiness:

Lawnmower art

Recovering the missing 18 minutes using Jim Rockford style technology

BlogHer for SwagWhores?

Wheel of Fortune FAIL

Wheel of Mississippi Justice

Beauty is in the eye of The Hill’s staff watchers (and I’m sure every political staffer yearns to have their ass publicly rated by professional asses)

Another book cover race fail

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Nearly three years after surviving the last of a series of explosions in Iraq, Retired Army Reserve Lt. Col. Raymond Trejo Rivas, 53, of New Braunfels, Texas, was buried at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery. Rivas committed suicide after struggling with multiple traumatic brain injuries (TBI) that had been repeatedly misdiagnosed.

Rivas was sent back to the battlefield after each bomb blast until doctors realized that his brain was slowly being destroyed. After a 2006 mortar blast during a tour of duty in Iraq, he was sent home for good. At Walter Reed Medical Center, the full extent of his brain injuries seemed to elude doctors.

Rivas couldn’t do simple things like get dressed and feed himself. In written testimony to Congress, Rivas said even when he was sent to Brooke Army Medical Center he was pretty much on his own for two to three months. When the military finally assigned a case worker, Rivas received massive amounts of therapy. Although he seemed to be improving, he was found dead in his car on April 15th, of an apparent suicide.

Raw Story

I really don’t understand why George Bush can’t be bothered to ever attend funerals. I would have thought more of him had he been at Rivas’.

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Shit you should be mad about:

DOJ still footdragging on Siegelman

Scott Horton on Obama continuing the proud tradition of selling ambassadorships

Jeralyn’s put together an informational drug czar history

Cell phones/texting and driving (I know I have friends who do this, and I hope they know that I disapprove vehemently)

Another ridiculously bogus patent, this one allegedly taking credit for podcasting (I think that if you apply for a patent and are rejected on the grounds of bogosity, you should have to chop off a finger to show you’re sorry and won’t do it again)

Growing pot indoors in Florida just seems so wrong (and Time gets so much of their story so wrong)

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Bankerfuckers:

Bank subsidies

Dodd v Conrad (Conrad being dirtier doesn’t excuse Dodd who may be clean on this but who is a whore for Wall Street all the same)

Federal Pension Guarantor and blatant corruption

Feends

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I didn’t link to the NYTimes story on hunches, but I keep finding blogs that cite it admiringly.

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Tech:

Common sense and GPS

TechDirt crushing the life out of AP’s idiotic plans

Guinness World Records Limited (intelligence)

How to keep Gmail from putting ads in your email

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Honduras.

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Politics:

Demko on Collin Peterson

When it comes to punishing Republicans, the law can be very forgiving

Charlieq on how financial disclosure underreports biz donations

Women dying in Nicaragua to make the Pope happy

Specter consistently a whore, but he’s our whore now so drop it

Bachmann’s latest opponent

TBogg on Diaper Dave Vitter

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Chiroquacktic.

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I hate that I didn’t get my first webpage up until 1997. A year earlier and I could have been one of the first 100,000 websites.

And it doesn’t really seem like 12 years ago. It feels more like half a lifetime. Hmm. Actually, for some of you, I guess it has been.

Lying liars clogging the media with their lying lies

Are Birthers part of the anti-healthcare insurance reform strategy? Bill Sher thinks so. Maha is incensed (don’tcha just love angry Buddhists?). mcjoan discusses bipartisanship (didn’t someone once call it “date rape”?), while Religion Dispatches calls out the lie about “mandatory” euthanasia.

And lets not forget how the Americans for Prosperity lynched a Democratic member of Congress in effigy for supporting healthcare reform.

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I have to ding the leftysphere today. David Waldman’s a big boy so I’ll tag him on this one. Yes, Jeff Flake the reliably hard right Arizona Congressman has filed 533 amendments to the defense appropriations bill.

What Waldman and other lefty bloggers aren’t mentioning, however, is that is the garbage bill that includes the F-22 fighter-jet-POS program, among other bullshit the military doesn’t want. In the name of jobs (jobs that cost far too much) Democrats like Jack Murtha have created a very shitty defense appropriations bill.

This one’s begging for a veto and Obama should do just that if the F-22′s still in this bill when it hits his desk.

Flake is a pain in the ass, but whatever his motives he’s right to slow down this bill. With any luck Murtha will be indicted before this session is out, and the military-industrial complex will lose one of their most reliable stooges.

And yes, I applauded Murtha when he came to speak on Coleen Rowley’s behalf. It was useful to have him speak out against Bush-Cheney’s optional war of aggression, but that wasn’t enough to redeem the billions he’s poured down defense ratholes over the years.

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While Truth-O-Meter stumbles when they try to make sense of numbers, they do their best work when they address specific claims that have no basis in fact. Glenn Beck is saying the director of the White House  Office of Science and Technology Policy “has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.”

That’s an absolute lie and Truth-O-Meter calls it “Pants on Fire” false. John Holdren co-authored a book on population growth with Paul and Annie Ehrlich back in the early ’70s. In that book they outlined some of the really bad shit that could happen if population growth spiraled out of control. Saying “this might happen” is something experts do all the time, but our wingnutterati love to dishonestly “quote” these scenarios and then misrepresent them. That’s how you use accurate quotes to lie, and old books not on the Internet are hard to factcheck.

Truth-O-Meter also gives a “Pants on Fire” grade to one of the right’s hoarier chain emails, the one that lies and says the Senate voted to give Social Security benefits to illegal aliens. This one has obviously never happened, but it should. Citizenship shouldn’t make a difference when it comes to collecting what you’ve paid in. Undocumented workers pay in but don’t get any pay back. Every serious study finds that undocumented workers get shafted royally but it’s hard to argue with folks who get their information from liars and bigots.

The real whopper of the day comes from Jon Chait. The WaPost gave op-ed space to Harvard’s Martin Feldstein who grossly misexplained single payer by using Britain’s socialistic healthcare system as an example. Wrong on every conceivable count. The UK employs all the doctors and healthcare workers directly. Single payer means you see whoever you like, and then they get paid by the government. All single payer does is simplify the billing end of things while leaving the delivery of health care in the hands of the private sector. The outrage being voiced by bloggers today is that the WaPost hasn’t corrected this massive whopper.

And Rush Limbaugh deserves special mention for reminding his listeners that Andrea Dworkin could be a poster child for the obese. I was never a fan of Dworkin’s, but you’d think the fact she’s been dead for over four years would remove her from Limbaugh’s spite list.

Nuh uh. Thanks to the hate sliming from the right, our new generation of feminist spokespersons are for the most part of above average attractiveness (not that that’s relevant). I suspect that’s why Rush keeps digging up Dworkin. (Rush’s employers, btw, just said thanks but no thanks to Sarah Palin. I can’t imagine why they would think she couldn’t gab coherently for three hours at a time.)

Obligatory Glenn Beck link, although this one’s really about Fox News.

One last bit on corrections. After I left a boneheaded comment at Eschaton in which I totally misunderstood Atrios’ complaint about Connie Schultz, the story keeps turning up in my RSS feeds. Now it’s TechDirt and they shred Schultz for not having done any factchecking.

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I think the previous item speaks directly to why Obama’s having trouble with his agenda. The media is jampacked with disinformation lately. Adding to the mess, Rasmussen has invented a new way of polling that grossly inflates presidential disapproval ratings.

Needless to say this system won’t be adopted by anyone else, and will vanish the moment the Roberts Court installs a new Republican president. But in the meantime that won’t stop the corporate media from repeating Rasmussen’s bogus numbers.

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Steve Outing explains in delicious detail why newspapers simply cannot get away with locking up content behind paywalls. Not only will this idiocy not work, it cannot work.

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I don’t feel like I owe Al Franken any apologies, but I was remiss in not linking to his Sotomayor speech.

It was a very good speech. If he keeps making speeches like this one, I might actually become a fan again.

Another link, one I’d rather not have seen. Brian Falldin, who I don’t know, Aaron Landry, who I like, and Dusty Trice, who is Dusty Trice, have filed an ethics complaint against Michele Bachmann.

I hate when my side Brodkorbs someone. They have a point, but if you’ve followed Bachmann’s career you know that the scariest thing about her is her rabid sincerity. She’s being accused of plugging a business in one of her franked mailings, but I really doubt that was her point.

Petty complaints never won over a faint heart. I expect Bachmann to get re-elected, and then I expect the DFL to redistrict her into John Kline’s CD. End of Bachmann. She can’t win statewide office and she’s too whacko to do anything but preach to the faithful, a group that gets smaller every day.

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Shit, where did the time go? This writing instead of just linking eats up the clock like a motherfucker.

More in a bit (tons o’links still open in the browser).

Toons and mutterings

Grabbed a bunch of cartoons and then forgot to use them. I liked this one best:

You wouldn’t know it from a lot of things I say/write, but I like most cops. I also like most doctors and even some business moguls. I have to admit that I can’t think of any bankers I’m particularly enamored of, but cops are usually really decent guys whose main failing is not publicly calling out their racist brothers in blue. (Female cops I can’t stereotype because there just aren’t enough of them, at least not in my world.)

I would appreciate it if someone could explain these two cartoons to me:

I think I see what the first one’s getting at (badly), but for the life of me I cannot imagine what kind or how many filthy talk radio lies you would need to assimilate before the pickpocket cartoon would begin to make sense. The kind of people who would laugh at the expense of minimum wage earners must crack up every time someone quips “let them eat cake.” Is the ridiculously phony talking point that minimum wage kills jobs really that pervasive on the right?

Lisa is Lisa Benson, and she’s a favorite over at Townhall. In all honesty she “gets” cartooning and is a good artist, but just like Cox & Forkum her humor falls flat because she makes the poor and downtrodden the butt of her humor. That is soooo not funny. And yes, I really do work hard at “getting” wingnut humor. Conservatives have an enviable history of being funny motherfuckers from Jonathan Swift to a big chunk of the old Harvard/National Lampoon crowd. That, however, speaks to the fact that wingnuts are not conservatives, just a pack of racist radicals willing to maim democracy if it will make the rich richer. (I have yet to figure out why trailer trash find the rich getting richer to be such an appealing concept, but then I don’t buy lottery tickets, and I don’t get mocking Michael J. Fox for having Parkinson’s.)

To wrap up the ‘toon portion of this post, here is possibly the best cartoon of Sarah Palin ever:

If there’s anything more to her than this, I certainly haven’t seen it.

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Turned on public radio here at home for the first time in weeks, if not months. Yes, they’re giving way too much attention to the Microhoo partnership.

If you trust your searches to to a corporate whore/monopolist like Microsoft, you’re an idiot.

Period.

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Long Digby post that made me feel slightly better because it suggests the Baucus-Grassley compromise may not go anywhere.

And the more I dig, the more I’m convinced that Grassley’s knuckling under to the Steve King/NRA wing of the Iowa Republican party. He should retire for pretty much the same reasons as Jim Bunning.

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If you’re not a reader of dead tree newspapers, chances are you don’t go to a newspaper site when you go online to check movie listings.

AMC is pulling their daily ads from the Washington Post, and that sounds smart to me.

Newspapers are still great places to promote new movies, but listings? I don’t think so. Not after all the effort newspapers went to making their sites user unfriendly and ad sticky. Case in point: the Star Tribune.

It only takes two clicks to get that information but that means being exposed to three ads on the front page while you figure out that what you’re looking for is the Entertainment drop down menu. Click. Welcome to the Movies page and four more ads. What you’re looking for is hidden in the right sidebar, and it’s called the Entertainment Finder.

Did you know that there are 113 movies showing in the Twin Cities? Some multiple listings for variations on the same movies, but the scam here is that they include every freaking little showing of everything. Raiders of the Lost Ark?

Here’s where things get really weird. It’s not showing anywhere. That’s not surprising, the movie came out in 1981. No theater is listed but they tricked me into clicking on a showtime. That took me to the page I was already on.

Click scams within click scams, and while there’s only one ad on the Raider’s page, well, if you’re an advertiser and you’re not getting my point . . . you deserve to get hosed.

The TV listings are just like any TV site. You have to give them information so they can figure them out. The catch here is that you can’t hotlink to your listings but instead have to start at a selection page each time so there’s no direct link. It takes two clicks to get your listings regardless. And, unlike my usual TV listings page (Zap2it) I’m stuck with only two hours of listings at a time. Zap2it lets me customize their page so it works for me.

The music option? You’d better already know who you want to see or where you want to go. Yes, it’s that worthless but in this case I think they’re trying to drive you to Vita.mn. Dining, art and theater likewise.

Here’s Vita.mn. See if you find it useful, or just more of the same click scamming.

Seriously, major kudos to AMC for finally figuring out they were getting ripped off. Whatever advertising they’re doing at the Strib, they should pull as well.

When your motivation is to increase clicks to drive revenue, your business model can’t help but suck. First you make the product/service great, and then the traffic will follow. The Strib’s microsoftian approach will kill them faster than their debt.

And no, I never saw this coming. As recently as 2005 I was still assuming the newspapers would get their acts together and they’d kick all the upstart internet asses.

Intead they went the all caps FAIL route.

UPDATE: New Phronesisaical contributor Cheryl Rofer catches the NYTimes in an advertising fail.

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Ginger, tofu, straw mushrooms stir fry with rice and a couple of Maharajahs.

It feels good to cheat.

UPDATE: I did the math. A bottle of this beer is only equal to 2.5 oz. of Everclear.

Sigh. It’s sad to get old and find your buzz is more psychological than biology-based.

Curse this drought!

UPDATE: I am so fucking pissed I didn’t buy a third bottle, even if $27 is a ridiculous amount to pay for getting drunk at home.

No alternative in this liquor stores close at 8 pm on weekday nights state. Now I have to start mixing the cheap rum in the back of the refrigerator with stale orange juice.

Serves me right for drinking good beer in a Leinenkugel glass. (no fucking clue how I ended up with one, but it was clean and the other ones weren’t)

UPDATE: Goddamnit, the second bottle of Maharajah is still empty. That’s just wrong on so many levels.

UPDATE: Interesting. I caught a glimpse of some leftover Gatorade in the back of the fridge and added that to the mix. Rum + OJ + Gatorade pretty much sucks just like Rum + OJ, but the added electrolytes are proving beneficial.

OK, I’m not kidding anyone and I know it. It’s the salt in the Gatorade that’s piquing my thirst and helping me to swallow this frelling abomination.

Still, it beats sobering up while still awake. Not widely known but that’s the source of almost all zombie legends. 6P. Proper planning prevents piss poor performance. Performance in this case being the ability to maintain a drunk until an appropriate passing out time.

UPDATE: It’s pop pap like this that keeps me going when real music would serrate my frayed ends. That and Wichita Lineman riff-stealing electro pop.

Fertilizer from the linkspreader

So much to fulminate about, so little time.

Politifacts to start with, I think. Two Truth-O-Meter posts that amply demonstrate the inherent dishonesty involved in assessing truthiness. Arianna Huffington says 15% of drug users are African-American, 74% of druggies in prison are black. Truth-O-Meter says that’s half true because:

On a percentage basis, this means that 29 percent of inmates for drug offenses were white, 20 percent were Hispanic and 45 percent were black – well under the 74 percent level asserted by Huffington….

Ultimately, Huffington was right about one number and quite a bit off with the other. However, even at the much lower rates of incarceration we found, black Americans – who account for about 13 percent of the U.S. population – are still imprisoned for drug offenses at wildly disproportionate rates. So we rate this statement HALF TRUE.

No, Huffington was 100% correct, but partially inaccurate. The inaccuracy of one number does not in any way, shape or form negate her point: our drug laws are racist, if not by design, by implementation.

Only an establishmentarian racist would see it any other way, but Truth-O-Meter uses hypercorrection to undermine the central truth of Huffington’s assertion.

Truth-O-Meter then goes deep into the red overclocked end of distortion by saying Bill Bennet was mostly telling the truth when he asserted that four percent of American citizens are black males, but they are 35% of murder victims.

This is a meaningless statistic, and the validity/invalidity of the numbers cited is irrelevant to the greater truth: poor people kill each other in far greater numbers than any other economic class, and poor Americans are disproportionately black.

Using Truth-O-Meter’s passively aggressive focus on numbers and not conclusions, I think it would be fair to say that they believe that the rich are the most moral of all human beings because they almost never kill anyone, or get killed themselves.

Being able to hire people to kill for you, and to protect you from others, by the logic of Truth-O-Meter and Bill Bennett, makes you a morally superior person.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are spoken of in our newspapers. And no, I don’t think Gossip Cop is going to change my life.

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The corrupt Pennsylvania judge case speaks to this point. A federal (Republican?) judge move to protect the minors fucked over by corrupt judges Mark Ciavearella and Michael Conahan by ruling that all the juveniles’ court records should be destroyed.

Coincidentally, destroying those records would make it impossible to find out if any other judges were involved.

Any Pennsylvania newspaper that missed that salient point is a newspaper not worth reading.

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Birther madness, and no, I’m not linking to Colbert’s interview of Orly Taitz because it’s beyond meta and made my head hurt:

9/11 truthers vs birthers

Dave Neiwert

Lou Dobbs saying “tea bagging queen” didn’t bother me until I learned he was talking about Rachel “the lesbian” Maddow (gets my vote for worst insult of the week)

Truth-O-Meter does OK when they stick to little things

Clarence Page

Birth of the Birther Nation

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Healthcare, and yes, I got madder than hell just typing that fucking word:

Howard Dean interviews Wendell Potter [7 minute-video]

More Dean

Scarecrow critiques Ezra Klein whose widely applauded remarks were in fact too quick to throw the public option out with the bathwater

Attaturk

Chamber of Commerce approved

Neiwert on the Foxies scaring seniors with their euthanasia bs

Kyl’s latest over the topper

Big Tent Democrat joins the growing chorus of Public Option or Nothing At All

James Rainey on media fail

Even USA Today is calling out healthcare opponents as corrupt

mcjoan on billions

John Amato on Baucus

Paid protesters hang member of Congress in effigy

Taibbi (same link as in yesterday’s comments)

Andy Birkey

Digby

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The DOJ is going after Ted Stevens’ incompetent on purpose prosecutors, which is something, I guess. But it depresses me enormously that Leura Canary is still at large.

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Outrages:

Alan Dershowitz

Wisconsin Innocence Project gets their 12th inmate freed

TBogg on the call for conservative reparations

Why the HuffPo has so little real credibility

Why Politico has so little real credibility

Zionist extremists telling IDF draftees to cover up atrocities

Honduras (ongoing, and with each passing day Obama’s punking out a little more)

Honduras II

emptywheel on DICK Cheney

Justice for Tony Alama is not justice for the women he victimized

Even when Milbank is right, he misses the point

Rove’s sweetheart deal

Palin’s free pass

Gore-Palin, the new talking points and yes, let’s beat this one to death GOoPer style

Twifamation

A case so fucked up I think I side with the Christian proselytizer

Counting the voters for a change

Taser nation

Invasion of privacy, high school style

False equivalency reminder

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Just a quick generic comment. Tim (Gov. BridgeFail) Pawlenty declined an opportunity to speak to the National Council of La Raza’s annual conference. Lindsey Graham wouldn’t have been that stupid, but then again Lindsey Graham wouldn’t run for president without a game plan for actually winning the presidency, and not just the nomination from the unhinged kids’ party. Not that Pawlenty’s nomination strategy is working out any too well….

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Too funny:

Charlie Manson is reaching out to Phil Spector

TBogg on Paul Stanley

Lileks trying to be funny (a self-parody is a terrible thing to waste)

Fauxrage over Biden saying “Jesus Christ” (context is everything)

Palin fail

O’Reilly refuted to the nth degree

John Adams’ radicalism

Hal Turner, FBI rat (now proven)

Voinovich rips Dixie for destroying the GOP (now says he thought he was off the record)

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Taibbi. (And not the link Mr. Alaska slipped into the comments last night.)

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Other stuff:

Oshkosh pix

Iraq (remember Iraq?)

New world post-mortem exploitation record

Blue M&Ms cure some forms of paralysis

Mixed feelings, but mostly I’m kind of inspired (all good but the bottom line is we don’t need more lawyers)

I can’t wait for the movie

Baby bites Franken

An actual movie I can’t wait to see

Corporate fail

Oliver Sacks

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And let’s not forget Leonard Peltier.

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Pang Kamlai, R.I.P.

Workers deserve respect.