A final thought on Memorial Day (& links, of course)

Too much posting I know, but I had to upload another one so I could share today’s Mr. Fish in real time.

Best Memorial Day cartoon ever. Smedley Butler would have approved.

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More on Israel’s murderous attack on the humanitarian aid ships from :

Glenn Greenwald (heavily updated including Turkey’s decision to send armed escorts with their next ship to Gaza)(beating up Egypt’s one thing but Turkey is not a country you want to fuck with, not to mention their NATO status)

U.S. activist blinded by direct hit from a tear gas canister

Debka with “pro-Israel” analysis

Mick asks if BP’s dragging its feet trying to save the well

Siun

Yglesias

TBogg

The civilized world is turning their back on Israel, just as they did with Apartheid era South Africa. And, as with South Africa, the United States stands tall for countries that deny others their freedoms.

The Confederacy won the Civil War but no one ever got around to telling the rest of us.

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BP says cleanup workers not sick, just suffering from food poisoning

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Other news:

Pizzigati on Congress caving at crunch time

Truth (sometimes) has consequences: Germany fires their President

Saturday’s anti-SB1070 protest in Phoenix drew 50,000 marchers (I sure didn’t hear that number bandied around)

PZ on BP

Gov. BridgeFail’s economic track record

By the time the Mississippi gets to Louisiana, sewage is the polite word for it

Minnesotans brave enough to brag about their DADT vote (politically, it’s a slam dunk — the anti-gay right needs to stfu very quickly or they’ll lose 3/4s of the independent vote this fall)(and yes, it will rain horses in hell before Amy Klobuchar gets out front on this issue)

More on how Inouye kicked the DCCC’s and Ed Case’s asses

BridgeFail’s MTP appearance panned by the Washington Monthly

Sarah plagiarizes a poem written by a veteran/poet

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Etc.:

Roy Edroso reviews Sex and the City 2

Shirky and Pink on cognitive surplus

I’m no Tild, but my graphics do have some fans

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness

Vatican trying to recruit atheists (they don’t seem to like the ones we’ve got now)

Like the Vatican, the Boy Scouts didn’t go bad until the conservatives took over

Publishers seem to have skipped by several stages of grieving and are now trying to find an e-format not owned by Amazon, Apple or Google

Sleep tips (includes cute picture of gray cat)

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That’s it until tomorrow, even if Turkey nukes Israel before then.

And don’t think I won’t be checking the stats tomorrow to see how many of you clicked to see the cat.

Never again: stop Zionism now!

Today, everything that’s not Gaza is beside the point.

Q. What do you get when Nazis fuck the spread-legged hatred of Apartheid?

A. ISRAEL.

Only two nations on earth send money to Israel. Germany sends reparations, the United States sends encouragement.

Fuck the Zionist lobby in Congress. The same members of Congress who vote to shovel money and weapons to Israel are the same unconscionable fucks who aid and enable Wall Street greed, the shipping of jobs overseas, and the transformation of our democracy into a prison nation.

Greed and hatred are inextricably interwined. New York is the capitol of Israel, the source of their funding and a breeding ground for Zionists and other heretics.

Never again is code for shoot first and stonewall the investigations that come later.

The time has come for the United States to curb their dog and put an end to the one true source of Middle Eastern terrorism: Israel.

Citizenship must be given all who live within Israel’s boundaries.

Set Gaza free, or give Gazans the vote.

Three consecutive generations growing up in hatred-induced poverty is enough. End this occupation, or end Israel.

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According readers BDM and Rob Levine the Strib is censoring comments. Given how the votes on comments are running, I’d say Israel’s being routed today on every front except the one where they shoot unarmed civilians.

That comment was only half an hour old when I took that screenshot. This is one of the first comments left.

I think we need more people voting on these comments. And, so far, my comment hasn’t been deleted.

A few more votes for that comment certainly wouldn’t hurt the cause. The comments are flying, 17 pages worth as of this moment (and this post is still in progress so expect to see a lot more comments than that when you click).

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The Israeli response? The commandos are accusing the flotilla crews of trying to lynch them.

Seriously. Here’s their case in their own words:

The commandos, who intercepted the Turkish ferry Mavi Marmara after it ignored orders to turn back, said they encountered violent resistance from activists armed with sticks and knives. According to the commandos, the activists threw one of the soldiers from the upper deck to the lower after they boarded.

An Israeli military spokesman said some of the commandos were equipped with paintball guns but the non-lethal weapons were not enough against activists who charged in with batons.

“They had pistols with live ammunition as back-up, to defend themselves,” he said. The IDF said it had confiscated two pistols from the boat.

One of the commandos told reporters he descended by rope from a helicopter onto one of the six ships in the convoy and was immediately attacked by a group of people waiting for them.

“They beat us with metal sticks and knives,” he said. “There was live fire at some point against us.”

A Reuters cameraman on the Israeli navy ship Kidon close to the six-vessel aid convoy said commanders monitoring the operation were surprised by the strong resistance put up by the pro-Palestinian activists.

One of the commandos said some of the soldiers were stripped of their helmets and equipment and a number were tossed from the top deck to a lower deck and had been forced to jump into the sea to escape.

Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid is a war crime. What’s next? U-boats torpedoing hospital ships? I took this story and “edited” it slightly to emphasize the real story. [links to .pdf]

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News/opinions:

Krugman on Obama’s jobless recovery (there will never be enough jobs until we redistribute wealth from the parasitical rich to the people who actually grow, manufacture and distribute real products and services, incentivizing producers instead of banksters)

Remember the 9/11 Commission? As tame as their report was, the feds have yet to implement many major recommended reforms in our national security (hint: mostly the ones that impact the corporate sector)

Over 1,000 slaves freed in Florida since the ’90s

Raw Story publishes the names of all Americans to have died in Afghanistan to date

The National Priorities Project says the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq now exceeds ONE TRILLION DOLLARS

Obama altered war crimes rules to protect CIA drone operators

Clusterfuck Nation: Welcome Home to Slum Nation

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Government’s failure is the failure to properly regulate

Boycotting BP gas stations punishes all the wrong people (funny true story: on my recent trip to Canada my Fox watching parents didn’t want to pull into a BP station because they thought it was owned by Hugo Chavez!)

Should corporate polluters get the death penalty?

Spillville cluelessness

Cops kicking BP protesters

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All the factoids fit to shovel:

Fox News v Joe McGinniss

If you own a cell phone, you can’t be poor

Cleavage again threatens our way of life

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Etc.:

The Knuckle Princess retires 7 out of 10 batters and gets an rbi in her debut with the Chico Outlaws

Spuds in China

ChiTrib on William Mitchell law prof Peter Erlinder’s Rwandan incarceration

George Souliotes’ life sentence for arson begins to unravel, just like Todd Willingham’s did (the difference? California didn’t murder Souliotes)(Todd Willingham’s unexpurgated last words here)

The Gospel of Ka-Ching

Thurgood

Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli and Cream of Wheat (seriously, I have no clue what this is about — for the real viral video of the long weekend, check out Iron Baby or better yet, check out this obnoxious PR flack video)

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I was ripe to read an article trashing Apple, but this hackjob by Reihan Salam makes me wonder if Apple’s stock isn’t actually undervalued. Seriously, this article is a classic example of smears by association. Salam says:

Wal-Mart is more worthy than Apple because their prices are affordable for the American underclasses

Apple is about Plutonomics

Apple further burdens the middle class with debt

AT&T murders innocents, some by stoning

Apps = crack

Apple = the Branch Davidian cult

A selfless Microsoft rescued Apple in the ’90s (note: this was part of MS’s strategy to avoid being dismembered by the DOJ’s anti-trust suit)

Apple owners have platinum busts of Dennis Hopper

Overkill much?

Quality products and durable goods are the most ecologically sound investments you make. Since 1990 I have burned through four Macs, and the last one is still a good computer that could use a new home. My fifth, a “mini,” is approximately a gajillion times more powerful than the computers NASA used to put a man on the moon.

We need to salvage and recycle old computers. Until every last person on the planet has easy access to a computer, they’re all still good, and they all still have value. Even my old Mac Plus.

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TBogg on Dennis Hopper and the right’s pathological need to turn every hero into a Randian icon for freedom loving fascism.

Fuck Israel

Fuck Israel. Fuck their racist, Arab-hating, religiously encrusted asses for yet another unprovoked terrorist attack on people trying to provide humanitarian aid.

ISRAEL IS THE SOUTH AFRICA OF THIS GENERATION.

What are you doing to fight their racism and hatred?

Judaism is one of the world’s great religions. Zionism is Hitler’s red-headed bastard.

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If Tom Clancy wrote about Wall Street

The clear and present danger:

Who wins the war between states and corporations?

Despite insane copyright/patent laws, we still face a general glut

Time elapsed war casualties

China still unencumbered by the mega-rich

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Never mind what we should try, who knew that the Soviet Union nuked five underground oil leaks?!!!

Weapons labs in the former Soviet Union developed special nukes for use to help pinch off the gas wells. They believed that the force from a nuclear explosion could squeeze shut any hole within 82 to 164 feet (25 to 50 meters), depending on the explosion’s power. That required drilling holes to place the nuclear device close to the target wells.

A first test in the fall of 1966 proved successful in sealing up an underground gas well in southern Uzbekistan, and so the Russians used nukes four more times for capping runaway wells.

It’s not so much the usual fake crowd crap, it’s that the wingnuts are blaming Obama for BP’s Potemkin Village (at least when Obama left they didn’t cut power to the area)

Did anyone not see this disaster coming? (other than senior BP execs and government regulators?)

Actually, Matt Simmons saw it coming and is an advocate for using the Russian nuke solution

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The continued and unabated threat:

Coleen Rowley and Tom Devine on the failure of intelligence

Terrance Heath on The Jobs Deficit and the Breaking Point [part 2]

The history of textbook revisionism in the U.S.

By Corporations For Corporations

While the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank

Cultural establishmentarianism doesn’t care whose daughter got raped

Slavery

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Assbiters and weenies:

Frank Rich on the week that was

Greta Van Susteren polls viewers whether she’s smarter than one of her online critics . . . and loses

Jessica Valenti on Sarah Palin’s feminism

Edward Teller has lunch with Joe McGinniss to discuss you know who

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William Mitchell College of Law’s C. Peter Erlinder is under arrest in Rwanda where he was to have represented Victoire Ingabire who had been arrested earlier for allegedly diminishing the Tutsi genocide.

It’s not easy to find out what’s going on in Rwanda but there’s some very good background at MRzine. Essentially the criminals in charge are very good at charging others for the crimes of the Kagame regime. More about Paul Kagame.

Rwanda sounds very much like the former Yugoslavia of Africa, imho.

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Etc.:

Very cool lights/effects but maybe the worst cover of the Doctor Who theme song ever

Online research (if you attend a Bible College)

Comedian’s political party wins Icelandic vote

Caffeinavia

Wolcott reviews Sex and the City 2

Garrison Keillor bums out the Authors Guild by speaking truth to the powerless

Seven minutes of video proof that Airplane! was a backhanded tribute to Arthur Hailey’s 1957 B&W Zero Hour (Wikipedia says the makers of Airplane! actually bought the rights to Zero Hour)

Bits

Bitches Brew fest in NYC this weekend (I have yet to meet any of the other people who, like me, had that seminal album on 8-track which, unbeknownst to me, was probably the highest quality version of that album until just recently)

Joe Konrath on the joys of being pirated

$100 Apple cloud TV?

iPad + Vecro = WIN!

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Dennis Hopper, R.I.P.

I saw Easy Rider in a movie theater. As a direct result of that movie I waited almost ten years before getting around to trying acid.

Click to watch that scene on YouTube.

Not a lot of Dennis Hopper but the Nola cemetery trip scene faithfully portrays the impact Dennis Hopper had on the movies he was in.

Not a world you’d want to live in, but a pretty accurate snapshot of the long, crazy trip my generation’s been on.

The friends of Sarah Palin

Mea culpa. Apparently Sarah Palin never had an opportunity to buy that crib next door where Joe McGinnis is busily spying on the Palin wimminfolk. Turns out the owner hates Sarah Palin. Something to do with that other people’s kids went to juvie court while Willow skanked off scot free after doing tens of thousands in damage to an empty home last winter thing.

I have lived in and near small towns. It’s not a good experience if everyone in town dislikes you, and in the case of the Palins, that seems to be more true with each and every passing day.

I’m really looking forward to McGinness’s book.

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A long and brilliant article by Matt Taibbi in the June Rolling Stone outlines how Wall Street fought back and stopped finance reform just as it was poised to fix everything. [For a quick primer on derivatives, jump to L.A. Times tribute to Margaret Hamilton.

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It’s wearisome, sorting through all the lies and bullshit, but new numbers are out that show that 99% of the debate over abortion is driven with numbers from lying liars.

Only 15% of Americans agree with the pro-life policies of Sarah Palin’s Republican party

59% of Americans want Elena Kagan to uphold Roe v Wade

And given that there are exactly zero “abortion yay!” ads out there, those are significant numbers.

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It’s not just our religious pukes. Israel has its share of them too.

The chief rabbi of a West Bank settlement has prohibited women from standing in a local community election.

Rabbi Elyakim Levanon of the Elon Moreh settlement, near Nablus, said women lacked the authority to stand for the post of local secretary.

He wrote in a community newspaper that women must only be heard through their husbands.

Americans subsidize this sexist bullshit to the tunes of billions annually. Why?

And Israeli treatment of women is only occasionally insane, unlike their daily treatment of Palestinians.

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Feds finally weighing criminal probe of BP

Bob Herbert and Charles Blow both pan Obama’s sincerity regarding getting tough on oil companies

Gulf fishermen helping with clean up still puking and acting like hypochondriac sissy boys over a few chemicals all of which are completely benign (sez BP) (more on Corexit)

Unsurprisingly, it appears that the leak is not capped. Funny how it still was when everyone took off for their three-day weekend.

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None of which means that the establishment is slacking off on their persecution of copyright violators, homeowners or other normal citizens:

Masnick on innocent infringement (the SCOTUS won’t hear this case because everything about current copyright law violates the Constitution)

ComicBooksFree.com shut down

Iraq vet’s $300k home sold for $3,500 and it appears that deal will stand because in the United States of Banksters, financial maneuvers trump patriotism every time

How a Baptist church covered up the rape of a 15-year-old girl

Recalling Motrin the old-fashioned way (as quietly as possible)

Houston shock jock calls for proposed NY mosque to be blown up (more on rightwing religious intolerance)

Teacher at Catholic school fired for her response to an online poll she participated in before being hired

State Farm cares like a neighbor from hell

DOJ decideds mandatory minimums cool, will continue to stick it to all defendants who are not wealthy white collar criminals

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Reprieves:

Malawi’s president pardons the twenty-something couple sentenced to death for being gay

Predator drone operators get wrists slapped after ignoring evidence of civilians so they could blow the shit out of a three-truck convoy, killing 23 Afghans

Obama’s granting of sovereign immunity to the pederasts in the Vatican

Republicans (mostly veterans) defy party and vote to repeal DADT (Mn votes)

Wall Street owned Congress refusing to regulate payday lenders turns out to be massive screw up as the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Agency will now instead have complete say so over regulating these unscrupulous lenders (which is cool except Obama will undoubtedly name a former Chamber of Commerce hack to head the CFPA)

Another Gitmo kid goes free, no thanks to Obama (Mick wonders what kind of country we’ve become but sadly I think we all know the answer to that)

Vermont is now officially a single-payer state

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The friends of Sarah Palin:

Gryphen on what Todd really said when went calling on Joe and what Joe has to say about Sarah now:

“By being here I have learned things, and I’ve gotten an insight into her character, into her ability to incite hatred, that before I only knew about in the abstract.”

More on her next door neighbor (the woman who rented her house to McGinniss)

Sarah makes it into Assbook

Alabama’s 3-ring circus

GA Chamber of Commerce closes off GOoPernatorial debate to the press (seems like the MN Chamber did the same thing a few years back?….)

Deputies detonate nine pipe bombs in Mower County

Going Galt, cont.

Jane Harman running scared in CA-36

Ruth Marcus (who knew?)

Joe Lieberman (yeah, we knew)

Ron Johnson (cheeseheads are just now waking up to the fact that their new GOoPer candidate running against Russ Feingold is a Randian idiot)

ICE guard raped women awaiting deportation

Nevadan rapist defenders/bribers

Rand Paul skips Meet the Press and talks to Russian TV instead

Rand Paul on fuck your rights

Nikki Folks, cont., and cont. again

Turns out O’Keefe could have been charged with a felony after all

Glenn fucking Beck

Glenn fucking Beck mocking an eleven-year-old girl

Glenn fucking Jew bashing Beck

TBogg and more TBogg and still more TBogg

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Glenn Greenwald on the real crazies in America.

It’s not a defense of Ron Paul, just a reminder that he’s not half as wicked as our establishment’s best and brightest.

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Etc.:

Unionizing pot workers (via Bonedog)

Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed to do concert for Aussie dogs (not a benefit, but for an audience of actual dogs) (hat tip to Denny in CR)

Videogamers can control their dreams

David Brooks and plagiarism

More on how Apple has become Microsoft in all the really important ways (but give ‘em credit for better toys)

Bankster-gangsters and murder

New PolitiFact editor named, hopefully he’s less of a he said/she saidist

Dead trees don’t make news

If you build a fence….

I was just starting to wonder if Los Suns had another big run left in them when the power went out last night. I only spent forty minutes sitting in the dark listening to my iPod before the juice came back but that was just long enough for me to miss Los Suns’ rally and Ron Artest’s game-winning last shot.

Fifth time in the last twelve months we’ve lost power, and maybe the tenth time since I moved here into this building in the mid-90′s.

I think someone’s infrastructure is getting old.

Not my infrastructure. I’m still working out and getting healthier by the minute and I haven’t begun to reform myself yet. I’ve planned out my vices carefully and by the time I get done following doctor’s orders to clean up my act, I should be much, much older than I ever thought I’d live to be.

And yes, after writing that I’ll probably get run over by a cement truck tomorrow.

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Thailand is showing us the way. Fresh off weeks of Red Shirts rioting in Bangkok, the Royal government is freezing the assets of the wealthy fucks who were financing this media-fueled insurrection.

Victorious over rice farmers in flip-flops and riffraff with slingshots, molotov cocktails and a few guns, the commander in chief of the Royal Thai Army has moved swiftly to contain another menace: a golf-loving steel tycoon and maker of Nestle instant coffee….

[Multimillionaire businessman Prayudh Mahagitsiri] along with 151 other businessmen, politicians, lawyers and other alleged financiers of “red shirt” protests, has seen his bank accounts frozen and been ordered to report details of all financial transactions since September to authorities. The aim, said an emergency decree signed by Gen. Anupong Paochinda, is to root out threats to “national security and the safety of citizens” and “get rid of this problem effectively and immediately.”

I hope Obama’s taking notes. Democracy will never really return to this country until folks like the Koch brothers feel a financial pinch. Ex-PM in exile Thaksin Shinawatra was an Asian Rupert Murdoch, and his media empire fueled the unrest that seized Thailand.

Granted, Thailand has been economically rotting for some time now, just like the U.S. And just as in the U.S., the looters were driving the media that stirred up the unrest.

This isn’t about democracy. It’s about the rich fomenting unrest so they can become even richer. Thailand ≠ USA and USA ≠ Thailand, but I think we can learn a lot from how other governments treat sedition.

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Blanche Lincoln hasn’t picked up a single new supporter since “winning” the primary, and is looking to get clobbered in the run-off.

Progs are having their revenge but it will all turn out badly if the secret turns out to be the “Netroots” and a national network of busybodies sticking their noses into other people’s statewide races.

Everyone does it differently. In Minnesota, the DFL has its endorsement system. City Pages’ Andy Mannix explains how that works.

In a race that began so saturated with wide-eyed DFL candidates that no one could take the lead for months, Kelliher punched her way to the front. She won powerful endorsements from former Vice President Walter Mondale, a deep bench of vanquished opponents, and the Minnesota DFL Party.

But those victories came at a cost. After months on the campaign trail, she’s like an arm-weary prizefighter heading into the late rounds.

“She’s tapped out,” says Larry Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political science professor. “Her resources have been depleted. She’s exhausted and her supporters are exhausted. The kicker is she hasn’t won anything at this point.”

Kelliher faces stiff challenges from her two DFL opponents, former state Rep. Matt Entenza and former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton. Both claim a fortune in personal piggy banks. Entenza has told reporters he is willing to spend $6 million of his own money on the campaign. Dayton is a household name across the state, and early polls indicate that he already holds a commanding lead.

The dog and pony show that is the DFL endorsement system utterly drains candidates. So much so that they traditionally would go into hiding all summer, giving the ‘pugs a huge leg up going into the fall campaign.

The theory of endorsements is great, the reality is elitism cubed with the survivors getting to vote to see who wins the lottery process and gets to cast an actual vote. Arkansas is throwing out an incumbent U.S. Senator, and the party apparatus can’t stop the voters from doing it. Here in Minnesota the party is aligned behind their (and my) pick, but that endorsement doesn’t mean squat in August when the real primary is held.

How you do things makes a huge difference. How the DFL does things has kept them out of the governor’s mansion for 24 fucking years.

What’s it take to convince them that they’re doing it all wrong?

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[picture swiped from Schmelzer]

Now there are seven fishermen/clean up workers who are sick, and all say BP wouldn’t let them wear respirators

Head of MMS fired

Cousteau’s grandson dived into the plume and reports on the damage

Neiwert on the blame game

Trust

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Things like this really drive home for me how rock and heavy metal have become sort of a “big band” musical experience for today’s youth.

Slipknot wasn’t a rebellion against Des Moines so much as they were a celebration of that city and its insurance based values. (More on insurance-based values.)

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The usual suspects:

Congress defeats Bachmann amendment to staple military personnel to their seats while deranged hillbilly preachers yodel to them

By their tweets ye shall know them (and a very special FUCK YOU to Joe Basel for likening himself to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)

No Country for Straw Men

If  You Build a Fence, He Will Look Over It

Guest tells O’Reilly he looks like a cocaine user

Brauer on the Robyne Robinson loot guv thing (Mr. Lois Quam’s last ditch effort to get the attention of the voters)

Glenn Beck, Ph.D.

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Etc.:

Stinky foods? Really, it’s amazing some Americans can live on white bread and mayo and never once encounter food with actual flavor

There’s a new Ken Starr in town and he’s even more f’ed up than the last one

Welcome to our double dip recession

Bits

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Out and about now but more later, I’m sure.

Oil’s well now that well’s capped

The BP oil spill crisis has gone on so long that Sen. Amy Klobuchar has finally weighed in on it . . . just hours before BP finally stopped the leak . . . just in time to re-focus on the clean up.

One of their workers, a Gulf fisherman, fainted after working with BP’s clean up chemicals. Don’t read too much into that as deep sea fishermen are delicate and fragile creatures, easily given to vapors, swoons and incontinence, most likely from lacing up their corsets too tightly.

In Houston, BP is wangling to get an oil-friendly judge put in charge of their cases while in DC a BP official refused to testify before a federal panel instead claiming his 5th Amendment right to lead reasonable people to believe that BP is owned by La Cosa Nostra.

If only. The only good news on this front (other than the leak maybe being stopped) is that sharp-eyed researchers have found a clause in the U.S. Clean Water Act that may expose BP to fines not limited by any bogus cap. Based on this clause, BP’s fine could already be up to $13 billion.

Which is not enough to fix the Gulf of Mexico, but it is enough to make shareholders give thought to reining in future BP drill baby drillers.

More on BP from emptywheel.

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Congressman Anthony Weiner has redoubled his efforts to shut down Glenn Beck’s scare-his-viewers-to-death-then-run-ads-for-gold scam. O’Reilly’s been trying to help but as the video shows, Weiner has no problem shredding O’Reilly’s defense of Goldline.

Over at Fox Business News, a combative host tried to gotcha Weiner which is not easy to do when your accusation is based on things that never happened.

That whole newsy, factsy thing keeps tripping Fox up for some reason.

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A Cali woman has been shot dead for threatening a census worker. So far this month alone 113 census takers have been assaulted or attacked.

It’s impossible to believe that these numbers aren’t jacked up solely because of Michele Bachmann’s insanely irresponsible remarks about the census.

Meanwhile, Illinois tries to deport a Puerto Rican to Mexico.

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Palin:

Timothy Egan on the Palin Brand

Mark McKinnon on Mama Griz

The poetic genius of Sarah Palin

And Gryphen learns that the house Joe McGinniss is renting was formerly a halfway house occupied by recovering addicts just released from prison. None of whom ever ogled the Palin women, I’m sure.

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Etc.:

Klobuchar has disclosed that an anonymous Senator sent her a note asking her to pull up her shirt while presiding over the Senate (he/she must have thought Amy was wearing her Two Jugs O’Fun t-shirt under her blouse)

O’Keefe and Basel’s guilty pleas (the judge’s admonishment)

Mr. Lois Quam goes with the Arts and Grafts ticket

Vodka eyeballing: possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of

Kevin Drumm on Wall Street’s Temper Tantrum

Amnesty Intl accuses Israel of war crimes

Clay Shirky on Facebook

Who wants to elect a millionaire?

Tina Fey to be honored by Mark Twain Prize for American Humor despite being about twenty years younger than any previous recipient (I do like Tina Fey, I just don’t understand this FU to Carol Burnett, Tommy Chong, Garrison Keillor, Tim Conway, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, and, obviously, a very long list of the dearly departed including Redd Foxx, Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, Sam Kinison, Lenny Bruce, George Burns, etc., etc.)

Holder finally updates Ashcroft sentencing directive, prosecutors no longer required to be the biggest prick/assholes possible

Souder was gonna quit anyway and besides he didn’t do nuthin‘

Ten of the last fourteen off-duty/undercover cops to be shot by other cops were of non-European descent

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Did I mention that Antonin Scalia has praised Elena Kagan?

The harder the right looks, the more it looks like Obama tapped the wrong woman.

Following up

Pretty much everything in the link pile is a follow up to something I’ve written about or linked to in recent days, the America Speaking Out site being a major exception. That turd was one I was quite content to wait on, hoping someone else would polish it for me.

Well, ThinkProgress and PZ Myers have done all the polishing necessary, and I would encourage you to click on both to learn more about The Gang That Couldn’t Propagandize Straight. If you lack the will to click, the bottom line is simply this: the RNC created a user-driven site to solicit ideas, and it’s turned into a cesspool of racism, eliminationist rhetoric, and all around clueless wingnuttery.

How bad? So bad no one’s really sure which comments were left by trolls, and which were left by true believers.

And this is the party that’s going to kick Obama’s ass this fall? Digby has been moved to speculate that the conservative consensus is finally being challenged but that would require a free press not wholly owned by Wall Street controlled corporations so, yeah, I’ve got my doubts about that. Not that I don’t have a hopey changey day myself now and then.

On the plus side, the O Team just told Texas that since they refuse to comply with the Clean Air Act, the feds are going to step in and enforce it for them. I’m thinking about setting aside my cynicism and am assuming this was already in the works, and not just cobbled together in response to the O Team’s failure to regulate BP in any meaningful way.

Still, it’s hard to discount the need for cynicism given that the Coast Guard just arrested some Greenpeace activists for trespassing on an oil drilling ship while (as Paul Schmelzer notes) not one BP executive has even been questioned by law enforcement, let alone charged despite BP poisoning people they hired to help clean up this spill. More to the point, emptywheel summarizes what went wrong and so far ALL the evidence points to BP bulling ahead despite every preliminary test screaming STOP! STOP! STOP!!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD & SEAFOOD STOP!!!

And, again fueling my cynicism, Al Giordano just posted a nasty screed in which he snarks at Obama’s critics from the left for complaining about the federal government’s very slow response to the BP spill. Al, I’ve done my share of homering in my day, but only during election cycles and not in the off-season.

There is a case building against this administration and it includes their failure to shut down Gitmo, [hmm, kind of forgot to finish this list but Los Suns Boston tips off fairly soon so it'll have to wait]

Really, the only positive thing I can say about Obama today is to swipe this quote from Maha:

“The day has passed when I expected this to be a full partnership.” There is hardly any “room for cooperation” in the Republican Party, Obama said.

But you know, after 18 months of eating Republican shit, that’s a pretty gutless acknowledgement that you’ve been played by the same folks the American people sent packing in fall of ’08. Even more tame when you pause to realize that Ann Coulter just called GOoPer leaders “delusional” and “completely insane.” (Well, maybe that’s not an accurate quote, but it only seems appropriate to play by GOoPer rules for quoting folks.)

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Still sticking with the follow up angle, North Korea is gearing for war with South Korea. I am reminded of Leonard Wibberly’s The Mouse That Roared in which the Grand Duchy of Fenwick declares war on the United States so they can lose and then accept aid from us to rebuild their country.

Sadly, the Fenwickian invaders accidentally win that war lousing up the plan, but in real life I think North Korea’s generals are angling for a buttkicking so South Korea gets stuck with the tab for cleaning up the unholy mess you get when you confuse communism with monarchism.

None of which is to be confused with the pile of shit that is Nikki Haley’s life since she decided to bullshit her way past Will Folk’s admission of having adulterated her marriage.

Rand Paul, Rush Limbaugh, Scalia and Kagan’s favorite Israeli jurist, Joe Basel and James O’Keefe.

Not to mention:

Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin

Bristol Palin *

Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin’s fence

Did I mention preening whackjobs yet?

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Apple is quickly becoming the problem.

But I see no reason why I shouldn’t enjoy Microsoft’s long slog into oblivion.

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Ken Bensinger and Ralph Vartabedian have won the L.A. Times’ Publisher’s Prize for their Toyota: Road to Recall story. Still, the updates on Koua Fong Lee at Google News are few and far between. Knowing things still doesn’t fix anything in this tightly controlled society where the real control is all behind the scenes. If the people who tell me that the prosecutors involved are actually decent people, then why haven’t they admitted to over-zealousness? There’s no political damage from admitting to being tough, and it would let them set a grievous wrong right.

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Matt Taibbi’s left True/Slant and Romenesko has the reason why: Forbes bought True/Slant.

It’s easier to believe that they did it just so they could fire Taibbi than it is to believe that they wouldn’t have fired him. Taibbi published his long pieces in Rolling Stone, but put a lot of good stuff into his blog. This can’t help but be good news for Rolling Stone’s Politics page.

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MPR almost got their news aggregator launched today.

I’m pretty sure Bob Collins thinks I hate just about everything connected to MPR.

I’ve never accused Bob of being stupid. Brain damaged — once, privately, and I apologized for that — but not stupid. But if it would motivate Bob and the other Bob to build the greatest statewide news aggregator anyone’s ever seen, then maybe I should grudgingly mention that their accomplishing such a feat would reduce me to gnashing my teeth daily and weeping nightly because my longest standing whythefuckhasn’tsomeoneelsedonethisyet project was done by an organization I detest for reasons entirely unrelated to either Bob.

A really good statewide news aggregator would have a profound effect on how news is gathered in Minnesota. IF MPR’s includes online-only sources like MinnPost and Minnesota Independent, and news from remote rural corners of MN as well, then they’re going to really have something. Something that could easily kill dead tree news in this state.

I’ve put a lot of thought into aggregation. Some of my ideas have been used by others, but none of them in a comprehensive way. Statewide news aggregation is only valuable if it’s comprehensive. If it’s not, then it’s just another failed attempt at giving people what they really want: easy access to local news organized in a user friendly manner.

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A very special mention of Amy Klobuchar today. She’s one of the “Used” Senators who took money from auto dealers to screw over our troops. Literally.

Twenty-one Democratic Senators sided with all of the Republicans to back a measure from GOP Sen. Sam Brownback to direct Senate negotiators to exclude auto dealers from the consumer financial protection group that will be created in financial reform. The measure is nonbinding because the bill has already passed, but it increases the momentum for protecting auto dealers from oversight, which the House bill already does.

Klobuchar voted for this, Franken did not. The more industrious among you are welcome to check out their campaign donations.

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Etc.:

Since I mentioned PZ Myers above, I should probably also link to his new Uncylopedia page (warning: this page will make no sense to you if you don’t already know about PZ, his love for all things cephalopodular, and his anti-ignorance/pro-atheism crusade to save us all from Intelligent Design)

And here’s a link about a holy water fight at a Florida public high school that I stole from a recent PZ post

Is there anything less American than screwing with a church’s building permit?

All the free publicity those bacon quesadilla burgers got has triggered a growth industry in deliberately unhealthy food (but given the political suasions of them that knowingly and defiantly eat this crap, I say bon appetit!)

Pot

Zach Carter on Our Bloated Financial Sector

Digby on Wall Street Homies

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Art Linkletter, R.I.P.

He was an absolute asshole about drugs and he whored for horrible products in his old age, but he was an otherwise decent guy whose TV career overlapped with my formative years.

Watching TV in the ’50s and ’60s rarely challenged my then conservative beliefs but that was back when you didn’t have to be a racist to be a Republican.

Skip the rant, click the links

I usually save the copyright stuff for deep in the post, but this is some pretty sick shit. The government is going after Apple for their “tactics in the market for digital music.”

OK, I can live with that, but not with the reasoning behind this talk.

In March, Billboard magazine reported that Amazon was asking music labels to give it the exclusive right to sell certain forthcoming songs for one day before they went on sale more widely. In exchange, Amazon promised to include those songs in a promotion called the “MP3 Daily Deal” on its Web site.

The magazine reported that representatives of Apple’s iTunes music service were asking the labels not to participate in Amazon’s promotion, adding that Apple punished those that did by withdrawing marketing support for those songs on iTunes.

Apple’s in trouble for leveraging their clout to stop a competitor from negotiating a monopoly on first day sales of new releases. It’s as if AMC cut a deal to be able to show new movies a day before any other theater chain.

The only anti-trust investigations going on are at the behest of monopolists.

Burn that house down, and shoot anyone who tries to get out.

Less reported on but of vastly more significance, the administration is trying to keep Congress moving forward on making payments to black farmers who were screwed over by decades of USDA racism. If you don’t know about that, be sure to read this article for the background, but the real story is that the “winners” of the lawsuit are dying of old age and still Congress stalls.

Never let anyone tell you racism in America is dead, or restricted to just the teabaggers. Congress is a vehemently racist institution. If not, why isn’t anyone calling out the racist bastards who keep these payments from being made?

Enablers are worse than the diseased maggots who preach race hate. Without enablers, there would be no overt racism.

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Only 51% of college graduates under the age of 25 work in a job that requires a college degree.

Yeah, we’re winning the war alright, the war on keeping the yacht club safe from the nouveau riche.

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Warnings? Oh yeah, they had plenty of warnings

Obama? Yes, blame him too (or did he think a former GM for BP would clean up Bush’s next of MMS hacks?)

Now some say the leak can’t ever be stopped

BP’s police protection units

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Etc.:

Garrison Keillor on the perils of the publishing industry

It’s Wal-Mart’s world, you just shop in it

Gazan militants blow up donkey cart on their side of the border, Israel launches air strike that injures 22

Obama backs Vatican’s claims of immunity regarding any and all claims of priests undressing young boys and girls and forcing them fondle and suck their priestly penises because really, how could the Vatican have ever known? Besides, the Greeks did it first

Pawlenty cracks down on candy that looks like tobacco (the man is the worst politician ever: first he guts the MN budget to where the entire state is hovering on FAIL, then he spits in the eye of the people who run the Republican party while telling gays they can’t be with their dying partners without getting an actual relative’s permission first)

Your daily Palin fix (and more on Joe McGinniss)

OH Republican Congressman flays Fox News for grossly distorted coverage on a pension reform bill

Gingrich admits that Steele was chosen to head RNC because that would keep Dems from criticizing Republican racism (seriously, he said that)

The Guardian lays some heavy sarcasm on the culture of Wall Street

Bankrupt Tribune co. wants to shovel out another $15 million in bonuses to their execs (and I’m betting our Bush-appointed courts let them)

Rightwing journalism still not working out as planned

Heritage Foundation computers have nannygate system to stop scholars from visiting inappropriate websites

O’Reilly resorts to Better Business Bureau ratings to defend Goldline (note: you can literally purchase a BBB A+ rating — that’s how they make their money)

Nikki Haley goes full monte on the denial thing (if this is a dirty trick, it’s the kind of dirty trick that should blow the doors off South Carolina’s dirty politics scene)(but if Will Folks is telling the truth, look forward to reading about Haley’s oddly shaped clitoris….)

The teabagger the RNC desperately wants to make go away

Fox accidentally runs Black & Decker ad during Glenn Beck show, B&D immediately apologizes via Twitter

HI-o1: another blown call by the DCCC, the sworn enemies of progressive politics

Another census worker threatened by a gun-wielding teabagger

Annette Meeks’ distemperate Strib blogging rescued from memory hole after Brauer goes after Strib (more from Sparber)

Update on how Massey chose profits over miners’ lives

Emmer praises homophobic brat rant band

Bachmann opposes the Hispanicization of America (we’re still recovering from our culture of WASPbaggery)

Oily to rise

NYTimes:

Federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials several years ago to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil — and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency, according to an inspector general’s report to be released this week.

It was the perfect storm: a decade of deregulation coupled with thirty years of ever-increasing industry rapaciousness. How out of control? Government inspectors on crystal meth out of control. How fucked are we? A dead coastline from Texas to Florida fucked.

And still Lamar Alexander (R-TN) is the only politician talking about taking over BP even as BP clean up measures are visibly killing the clean up workers.

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No, not Christo.

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Stormfront donates to Rand Paul

In CT, the sane Republican (2 Bronze Stars worth) has dropped out, leaving a clear path to the nomination for Whacky World Wrestling empresario Linda McMahon

That didn’t take long: the IA Senate debate veered onto the topic of taxes, so the Des Moines Register IMMEDIATELY DREDGED UP ROXANNE CONLIN’S 28-YEAR-OLD TAX RETURNS just like they did day after day after day after day in 1982 (but if you read alllll the way to the end of the article, all is explained in classic he said/she said fashion)(and somehow the picture of the debate they ran showed Conlin in profile looking at one of her male opponents…the spirit of David Yepsen is alive and festering at the DM Register)

Clinton on birthers

New video from Max Blumenthal!

Neiwert on Nikki Haley (more from Lloyd Grove)

Unsurprisingly, death threats against members of Congress are way up

TBogg on Sarah’s new neighbor

TBogg on Will Folks

Taibbi leaves True Slant, will be at Rolling Stone exclusively

Karl Rove update (and culpability review)

Digby on anchor babies

Brendan Nyhan with eight pictures of Elena Kagan with her legs primly crossed

Brauer with some backstory on Robyne Robinson, Mr. Lois Quam’s lt. guv pick

Punk rockers on executing gays (and yes, they’ve endorsed both Bachmann and Emmer)

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Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini on the deep shit we’re in:

Bremmer: I don’t remember a time in the recent past when public analysis of political events has produced so many questions and so few satisfying answers.

Roubini:The fact is, in most advanced economies, aging populations—a serious problem in Europe and Japan—exacerbate the problem of fiscal sustainability, as falling population levels increase the burden of unfunded public-sector liabilities, particularly social-security and health-care systems. Low or negative population growth also implies lower potential economic growth and therefore worse debt-to-GDP dynamics and increasingly grave doubts about the sustainability of public-sector debt.

The United States so far is blessed with a less dire demographic prognosis—largely because of a wise embrace of immigration as a means of rejuvenating the national labor force and its society at large. But that, too, could change….

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I linked to some Ohio state corruption yesterday. That scandal has since grown.

A bank lobbyist who has personal ties to Treasurer Kevin Boyce’s top aide also has another link inside the treasury: his wife.

This shit only passes the smell test when no one ever sniffs around. Spouses should be disqualifying factors for public employment. That may not be fair, but it would be sane.

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Etc.:

Thailand issues warrant for billionaire ex-PM Thaksin Shinawatra who is hiding out in the UAE

Virginia begins NRA gun safety classes for kindergarteners

Googleism 101 (factcheck yourself at Wikipedia before giving your speech!)

Time Magazine listed 50 daily newspapers that could fold in the next eighteen months in March of 2009 . . . 18 months ago . . .

How software patents broke the system (note: the video is a snoozer)

Russia’s blue bucket brigades

How Rubashkin would hide the kids when the inspectors came around

A life sentence in Florida for the theft of $4 worth of socks

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Paul Gray, R.I.P.