In case you missed it

Keith Olbermann, obviously a regular reader of the Brain, expands on Fixer's post.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Us lefties have been busy...

David Corn at Politics Daily:

Meanwhile, Limbaugh and other right-wingers also went cuckoo over the failed car-bombing in New York City. "I wonder if [the] SUV had an Obama sticker on it?" Limbaugh said. "Notice how quickly they got it out of Times Square before anybody could hop and maybe see an Obama 2012 bumper sticker on the damn car." Referring to suspect Faisal Shahzad, he added, "Of course, he's a Democrat. Who knows how many times he voted and where." Anything to tie the president to terrorists, right? And before Shahzad's arrest was announced, several conservative bloggers suggested the NYC plot was the work of leftists looking for a big May Day blast, with one writing, "So, we have the suspicious explosion of an oil rig in the gulf that happened the day before Lenin's birthday (Earth Day) and now we have an attempted attack on May Day, another day celebrated by left wing communists." What a busy week for the left: destroying the Gulf and attacking New York City.

Five minutes. I want five minutes naked in a steel cage with Limpbaugh. I need five minutes because I'll be laughing at his weenie for four. I'll use the fifth to turn him into a physically spineless jellyfish, though I'm afraid it's beyond me to make him as smart as one.

You vill comply ...

You little retard, or ve vill zap you again! Late for work but this is truly disturbing:

Some may say this is the result of poor training but the reality is that the Judge Rotenberg Center and places like it, are not there to help the kids, they are warehouses. Places the families can leave their problem kids when they no longer want them. Titticut Follies for kids.

Quote of the Day

John Cole via Res Ipsa:

... You would think that someone who spent half a decade in a cage with no rights whatsoever in the defense of this nation and our laws and legal tradition and way of life, would have the slightest bit of respect for the rule of law. You would, of course, be wrong.

Update:

And my pal Creature's QotD is related.

Shit ...

Being I've looked across the DMZ more times than I can remember, I hope cooler heads prevail:

...

It is not too off the mark to state that the North Koreans are batshit crazy. I also suspect that in any sort of military exchange, North Korea has less to lose. A conflict won't do any good to the South's economy, while the North is about as poor as they can get. The North Korean Army could fire off a bunch of shells from their emplaced artillery and wreak havoc in Seoul, which is within artillery range.

...

Nothing can be gained from another war on the Korean Peninsula. If the South wants to retaliate for the sinking of their ship, they should put pressure on the Chinese, who are the North's sole life support at this point. Our pal Misfit is right, the North has nothing to lose anymore. Our 7th Cav and 51st Wing, along with any Marine Corps units we have there would be nothing but a speed bump to North Korean infantry and artillery, hopefully able to be stopped before they reached Pusan (read the history of the Korean War). The civilian casualties would be horrendous.

Quote of the Day

Digby:

... If these ... are the smartest people in the world and the only ones who can save us, we are in much deeper trouble than we know.

The stench of hypocrisy ... Part Eleventy Billion

I'll post this little quote and you can guess the rest:

The pictures on the Rentboy.com profile show a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin. The profile touts his "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)" and explains he is "sensual," "wild," and "up for anything"—as long you ask first. And as long as you pay ...

Great thanks to Mr. No Parking for the link.

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Will Wreck Your Pathetic Ideology

Click to embiggen

From Slate.

The Rude One:

Tell you what, motherfuckers, when dead people are left to rot in the sun because of the incompetence of the federal government, when corpses are floating in the streets, when the President passively ignores the pleas of the governors of Gulf Coast states, when entire neighborhoods have been physically destroyed, when the federal government strands tens of thousands of people without food or water, when the federal government starts to blame the local governments, when the President praises the work of a failed, incompetent bureaucrat while a major city rots, then you can say that this is Barack Obama's "Katrina."

But until this happens, good, sweet conservative bags of fuck who need so desperately to drag this president down, the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a corporate-created disaster, and it actually serves to demonstrate, starkly, and with a semen-like sheen, as if the ocean floor is in the midst of a prolonged sweet crude ejaculation, the utter failure of deregulation and the bullshit notion that capitalistic enterprises can police themselves when it comes to safety and environmental standards, whether it was, in this case, BP or Transocean or whoever. In other words, once again, as with so many things, this is about your ideology belly-flopping, much like, you know, when Katrina showed how years of neglect of the levees would lead to a nightmare.

Yes, some day soon, a man with his Gulf Shores timeshare, probably a proud and loyal teabagger, will look out over his balcony during the two weeks a year he takes his family on vacation and see the bits of black that are rolling up onto the shore. And he'll wonder, even if they do everything they can, why the feds couldn't clean it up sooner. Then he'll go inside and watch Hannity or listen to Limbaugh tell him that his taxes are too high and that business, not Washington, can solve all his problems.

Not to mention that Libruls caused this spill to make a point.

That was from Part 1 of an RP trilogy on this deal. Part 2 is here.

And BP? Those fuckers (and the oil rig operator, Transocean) benefited like corrupt cops at a whorehouse in the way they abused the ludicrous, worthless self-regulation system. Does the phrase "police themselves" actually have any meaning? Because, see, if the Rude Pundit were to police himself, he'd say, "Well, gee, RP, as long as you only have just a little pot, coke, and ecstasy on hand and the goat you sacrificed for the blood orgy didn't suffer much, we can overlook it all. Don't kill any people, and we're good."

Part 3 will no doubt be along when the pot, coke, and Ecstasy kick in. Or the goat.

Nat E. Pickles

Jenna Bush Outs Her Mom as 'Secret Rastafarian'

Which brought up a truly awful visual of Pickles in the kitchen as seen in the video below

How do I get rid of dis awful ting in my head, mon? De overproof rum? No, no, no, no. De heroin? No, no, no, no. Ahhhh, GANJA! Ya, ya, ya, ya!

Thanks to earthweek.

Headline and Quote of the Day

'Going to Church No More Makes You a Christian Than Sleeping in Your Garage Makes You a Car.'

Crawling ...

Got my belated post and pics up from Bermuda.

I wish I'd been wrong ...

Me, last year:

Having been on the PTSD rollercoaster for 5 years of my life, I can spot the signs. It's time to get Michael Ware out of Iraq and find him some help. I love the guy and the job he's done over there, but for the last few months it's been obvious (to me anyway) he's losing his grip. I'd hate to see such a capable, talented journalist (there are so few of them as it is) completely come apart at the seams.

This week:

We won't be seeing any more of Michael on CNN...

In addition to having taken a break recently in order to work on his book, it is no secret that he has been grappling with PTSD, brought on from the hellish years he worked in Baghdad. I was told that, unfortunately, when he needed more time off in order to deal with things, his request was denied. So he will not be returning.

...

I wish him all the best.

Thanks to Jill for the link.

It's time ...

For a "Jackie Robinson Moment":

The draconian Arizona law SB 1070 is finally reaching the players of MLB. San Diego's slugging starter Adrian Gonzalez has come out publicly and said that he will not play the 2011 All Star game if the law goes into effect. The outrage that we've felt over this barbaric law has filtered down to into The Sports Villagers now, because on ESPN's Mike & Mike in the Morning radio show they spent a lot of time discussing this topic, and it is raging.

The time is a-coming for Bud Selig to take a stand on this issue. Baseball has already proven that it can be a leader in advancing civil rights in America, so this should be right up their alley. The MLB have a hugely profitable Cactus League in Arizona where 15 teams us their facilities for Spring Training games, and they also host Arizona fall-league games. It's a yearlong operation. Studies have shown that the MLB is comprised of as much as 27 percent Latino players, and the league's 9 percent African Americans could be targeted by the new law as well. [my em]

...

Cmsr. Selig, it's time to make Jackie proud.

Pic from here.

War is Gaga

Good article at Slate on military humor in the electronic age. Many links.

A brief history of soldiers posting ridiculous dance routines on the Internet.

We've posted lots of 'em.

It's also safe to say that soldiers in drag dancing to Lady Gaga wasn't what the Pentagon expected when it recently revised its social media policies. [...]

The Pentagon has never had a clue what goes on in the 'other ranks'. On the one hand, I kinda wish we'da had the internet and video cameras in my service days. On the other hand, I'm damn glad we didn't. Heh. I have no idea what went on in the other services although I've heard rumors, but we didn't dance much, so all there would have been on YouTube was thousands of videos of us lighting farts. Hint: wear skivvies or apply lots of anti-flashback cream.

[...] But a humorous guide on "How To Prepare for a Deployment to Iraq" offers the best insight into the psyche of troops there. Tip No. 24 helpfully suggests:

Wash only 15 items of laundry per week. Roll up the semi-wet clean clothes in a ball. Place them in a cloth sack in the corner of the garage where the cat pees. After a week, unroll them and without ironing or removing the mildew, proudly wear them to professional meetings and family gatherings. Pretend you don't know what you look or smell like. Enthusiastically repeat the process for another week.

Another e-mail forward gives a good idea of how troops in Afghanistan perceive their Islamist foes. A sample: "You maybe Taliban if … You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to beer" or "You have more wives than teeth." [...]

Taliban, shit. Sounds like fundies with a meth lab and Mormons.

Enjoy. I've got things to do today. There's a shipping container on my front lawn that mysteriously appeared overnight and I must investigate...

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA): Deport Children of Illegal Aliens
Including his good friend, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Yeesh. Talk about a day late and a dollar short...

Point Man Named to Fight Oil Spill
Sober, experienced Joe Hazelwood will coordinate cleanup.

Noah's Ark Found on Top of Mt. Ararat in Turkey
Inside, bones from two of every species.

Are ya kiddin' me?

There are very few times I'm rendered speechless. This is one of them:

School districts in Arizona are under orders from the state's Department of Education to remove from classrooms teachers who speak English with a very heavy accent or whose speech is ungrammatical.

Officials say they want students who don’t know much English to have teachers who can best model how to speak the language, but, according to The Wall Street Journal, some principals and administrators are concerned that the standards for removal are arbitrary.

...

Link stolen from HuffPo.

Couple things ...

Before I gotta do all the things I couldn't yesterday (like paying the ransom picking up my dog, for instance).

I knew Rush was a lowlife, slime mold of a person. I'm very cynical about conservatives in general, always expecting lies, hypocrisy, and false equivalency, but this takes the cake:

One of the more idiotic memes floating around of late is that the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is somehow “Obama’s Katrina.” Liberal NY Times columnist Paul Krugman first raised the specter as a joke, after which right-wing loon Rush Limbaugh followed suit…albeit without the sense of irony.

...

You know, if Lintball would listen to Dr. Krugman when it mattered, we wouldn't be in half the shit we are right now.

And just a question or two:

Shouldn't this show us, after the obvious effects of burning things (especially oil) on the climate, that drilling for oil in our offshore waters is a recipe for environmental disaster?

Shouldn't it also show us, after the banking scandal that nearly brought down the economy, that we should never trust corporations who are accountable to their bottom line to police themselves?

Home ...

Satellite bandwidth sucked aboard and time got away from me and we're home. Unpacking, grabbing a pizza (a real, genuine NY pizza, not the cheap imitation aboard ship) and I'll be back to join the fray. I'll have pics of the pub crawl and around the ship.

An aside: I read the NYC attempted bombing the same way Gord does. Dumbass, not terrorist.

On the bomb in NYC

My first impressions late last night were these:

The bomb actually tried to go off but the chain of events malfunctioned, which leads me to believe that this was an effort by a RWNJ or someone who is angry at Bank Of America, probably with good reason.

If a real terrorist outfit, whether foreign or homegrown, had been behind this, Times Square would be a smoking ruin. They know how to build bombs that work.

We will see, but it looks like ignorance saved New York this time.

Update:

Pakistani group claims NYC car bomb responsibility

Goat humpin' Muslim fundies. Dumbass ones, like Fixer said above. The difference between them and our dumbass fundies is ours fuck chickens.

If Only Arizona Were the Real Problem

A 'must read' by Daddy Frank.

DON’T blame it all on Arizona. The Grand Canyon State simply happened to be in the right place at the right time to tilt over to the dark side. Its hysteria is but another symptom of a political virus that can’t be quarantined and whose cure is as yet unknown.

The crowd that wants Latinos to show their papers if there’s a “reasonable suspicion” of illegality is often the same crowd still demanding that the president produce a document proving his own citizenship. [...]
...

To the “Take Back America” right, the illegitimate Obama is Illegal Alien No. 1. [...]

McCain, like Arizona, shouldn’t be singled out for censure: He is far from alone in cowering before his party’s extremists.
...

There are few profiles in courage among the leaders in this G.O.P. — only a lot of guys hiding under their desks.

The one group of Republicans that has been forthright in criticizing the Arizona law is the Bush circle: Jeb Bush, the former speechwriter Michael Gerson, the Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, the adviser Mark McKinnon and, with somewhat more equivocal language, Karl Rove. McKinnon and Rove know well that Latino-bashing will ultimately prove political suicide in a century when Hispanic Americans are well on their way to becoming the largest minority in the country and are already the swing voters in many critical states.

The Bushies, however, have no power and no juice in the new conservative order. The former president is nearly as reviled in some Tea Party circles as Obama is. [...]

Well, at least they got that part right. Where were they when they could have done some good? Oh, that's right - the southern white racist party was in control. That was fine with them.

Do not miss the rest of Pop's column.