The Rest Of The Week In Review

OK, here it is for your reading pleasure:

• So I guess there's nothing you can do that will make the State Department stop payment on the checks; Blackwater has been re-hired to sully the good name of America for another year. Damn it feels good to be a mercenary.

• When I went to Ireland a couple years back, I remember remarking on the resurgent Irish economy to a man in a pub and he replied basically that it was all a mirage and Prime Minister Bertie Ahern was crooked. I guess he was right, as Ahern stepped down this week due to a finance scandal.

• Tim Kaine has been a far better governor for Virginia than I expected, and his moratorium on the death penalty is another good deed. Of course, most of the states who have done this are merely waiting for a Supreme Court ruling on lethal injections, so we'll he how long this lasts.

• This hit piece on Howard Dean was certainly planted by the forces in the Democratic Party who don't like him, and is another case of the traditional media, particularly Adam Nagourney, trying to sow discord among Democrats (which sadly has taken hold during this primary fight). Dean has done a good job with a bad hand; it's the system which is at fault, not his stewardship.

• When wingnut front groups attack - the current Freedom's Watch was sued by another group who previously called themselves Freedom Watch. The suit was tossed out, which is a shame, because it would have been the best "you named your group our name" trial since miniKiss versus Tiny Kiss.

• Apparently this Don Cazayoux is a pretty conservative Democrat and wouldn't be much of a friend to most progressive causes, but for the Republicans to lose another open seat would be deeply embarrassing, especially one as deep red as LA-06, so I can't wait to see the NRCC blow some more cash trying to hold on to this one.

• When editorial boards in Bakersfield understand how crazy it is to resist closing a tax loophole that lets absurdly rich people avoid sales tax on yachts and private planes, you know that it's an inexcusable vote. The Republicans in California are playing a terrible game of politics and it's bound to finally bite them in the ass this year.

• I wasn't really a regular reader of the Fafblog back in its heyday, but it returned to the world of blog on April 1, and this post a couple days later was sheer genius. The topic was a list of why we fight. Here are a few:

Nothing less will stop the monster in the closet from allying with the boogeyman under the bed to form a sinister new Axis of Spooky

To gently massage foreign dictatorships into stable liberal democracies through the subtle and delicate eastern art of acubombing

All the older presidents an senators were all hangin out in the boys room an lookin cool an smokin cigarettes an passin around faulty pre-war intelligence an we just hadda invade

• Here are a couple great articles: Generation Squeeb by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone, about the narrowness and idiocy of our political debate, and The Liberal Media really is liberal and that's why it's such a problem for Liberals by Lance Mannion, about the traditional media's refusal to accept and report reality instead of striving for "balance" by contrasting the sober man's analysis with the crazy uncle in the basement (I'll leave it to you, gentle reader, to decide who is who).

• Doug Feith is apparently still the stupidest fucking man on the planet. Watch here as says about Iraq "Our main goal was not merely retaliation for the 9/11 attack," meaning that it was part of it, just not the whole thing, which should make us all feel comforted in light of the fact that Iraq has NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11.

• As far as I know, I have yet to drop dead from blogging, although last week my grandmother had a silent heart attack and didn't know it, so maybe I am actually dead and blogging from the MOTHAFUCKIN' GRAVE!!!

• Finally, I hate that a federal judge tossed out this lawsuit brought against Borat by a man who was accosted and "touched" by him, simply for the reason that I assume Sacha Baron Cohen would have brought the Kazakh character out of retirement to testify in the trial.