Quick Hits

I've got a million things to let you, the heroes, in on:

• Very sad news in India, as close to 150 die in a series of coordinated bombings. This looks to be a continuation of Kashmiri militants terrorizing the Indian people.

• In more of the "good news" department, we've decided that we're going to defeat the Taliban, who we've been fighting for close to 5 years and who we've defeated twice before, if we are to believe Bush and Rumsfeld.

• Last week an Italian magistrate ordered a former President to stand trial for embezzlement, false accounting, tax fraud and money laundering. President... trial... why is this judge teasing me and my fellow citizens?

• Yesterday Christy at Firedoglake posted about the ethics-free zone of the Senate:

Say you have two United States Senators, who are not only officials elected to a high office in the legislative branch of our government who are sworn to uphold the Constitution in the performance of their duties, but both men are also attorneys, highly trained — one a former United States Attorney and one still a current JAG attorney.

Now imagine that both of these men have attempted to defraud the highest Court in our nation by staging a bogus colloquy on the floor of the United States Senate after hours so that it could be inserted into the Congressional Record as if others were around for a debate (which they were not). And that said colloquy was staged solely to provide cover for their argument on the legislative history of the particular law in question — in other words, such behavior was designed solely to shore up their argument and for no other reason whatsoever, and only after the fact when it was clear that their argument was headed for failure.

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina ought to be ashamed of themselves. But more than that, they should be facing state bar sanctions, and an ethics investigation in the Senate. Both Kyl and Graham issued a press release after the Hamdan decision came down but, not surprisingly, it has no mention that both of them were fraudulent liars who tried to skew the results in the Supreme Court.

Read more about this here. These guys staged a play to try and sway the opinion of the US Supreme Court. It didn't work, and they should be held accountable.

• I didn't get to this last week, but this story, about an online campaign that ended in running a Jewish family out of a small town in Delaware, is pretty significant. The Stop the ACLU group openly seeks to expose plaintiffs in ACLU cases, printing their personal information, leading to harrassment and threats. If you keep reading the link you'll find that the head of "Stop the ACLU" was "pleased" about the results of their pogrom.

We're living in a country where too many people think nothing of posting personal information which leads to this kind of verbal and in some cases physical violence. Online predators are a problem no matter who is targeted. We have laws about targeting children but none about this kind of behavior. It's sickening.

• Is it possible that Rick Santorum has become crazier?

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il "doesn't want to die," according to U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum. "He wants to watch NBA basketball."

Pennsylvania's junior Republican senator offered that assessment in explaining why he thinks Iran poses a graver threat than North Korea.

Rick Santorum doesn't want to lose his Senate seat. He just wants to watch all the episodes of "The Dog Whisperer" that he's missed.