"We Didn't Go ALL THE WAY Up the Appalachian Trail"

Mark Sanford pours some more fuel on the Comedy Gold fire.

The Supreme Court's Ricci Decision for Dummies

Myself included. Excerpt:

Like that decision or hate it, cheer Monday’s ruling or deplore it, one thing that is clear from reading the Supreme Court’s 89 pages of opinions in the case is that Judge Sotomayor and her colleagues played by the old rules, and the court changed them. Although “Sotomayor Reversed” was a frequent headline on the posts that spread quickly across the Web, it was actually the Supreme Court itself that shifted course.

Sotomayor is a Racist. And a Child Molester

Say something over and over and over and it magically becomes true.

Truths That Give You Hope

The majority of Americans think Bill O'Reilly is a buffoon, and an idiot to boot.

This has been another episode of Truths That Give You Hope.

"Stoned wallabies make crop circles"

Headlines like that just kinda jump out at you don't they? (Oh crap - I swear that pun was unintentional.) Back to our story:

Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said.

Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania, said the kangaroo-like marsupials were getting into poppy fields grown for medicine.

She was reporting to a parliamentary hearing on security for poppy crops.
Australia supplies about 50% of the world's legally-grown opium used to make morphine and other painkillers.

We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles. Then they crash
Lara Giddings, government official

"The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," Lara Giddings told the hearing.

"Then they crash," she added. "We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."

Photo of stoned wallaby from here.

O'Reilly and Beck Play With Barbie Dolls to Go After ACORN

They're still going on about ACORN? Holy crap.

Republicans: Please keep watching these people. Please. Please keep listening to Limbaugh and all the rest. I'm begging you. Because if you do, in 20 years we'll have Australian-style health care, less nukes in the world than any hippie every dreamed about, decades of peace and a much happier world all around.

Please. Watch O'Reilly. Watch Beck. We'll take care of the country.

If Someone Writes "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" One More Time...

It's not funny. Really, it's not. If Sanford had disappeared because he had gone to fight for a hapless Argentinian rebel group but had to be rescued by Navy SEALS because he twisted his ankle - then it'd be funny. Really funny. Barring that, it's just dumb.

Did Fox News Try to Cover Up Sen. Ensign's Affair? [updtd: Fox responds]

Or interfere in any way? The Las Vegas Sun asks the right questions in this article:

In a letter dated five days before Sen. John Ensign’s public confession of an extramarital affair, Doug Hampton pleaded to a national Fox News anchorwoman for help in exposing the senator’s “heinous conduct and pursuit” of Hampton’s wife.

[...]

The letter presented for the first time Doug Hampton’s view of what took place. It was addressed to Megyn Kelly at Fox News’ corporate office in New York. Kelly is the co-host of Fox News Channel’s “American Newsroom.” She also appears regularly on the “O’Reilly Factor with Bill O’Reilly,” according to the network’s Web site.

The questions:

— Did Fox News receive the letter, and if the network did, what did it do with the information?

— How did Ensign learn that Hampton had “approached a major television news channel”?

More questions:

• If they did in fact receive the letter, is Fox so entirely in the bag for the Republican Party that they would give Ensign time to come forward with an "apology" rather that break a story this big?

• Again, if Fox received the letter, why didn't they come forward when the charges that Hampton was blackmailing Ensign came out? The letter suggests that the charges aren't true.

• Why didn't they report that they got that letter after all the news came out? (That's perhaps the strangest thing about this.)

• If they got a letter about a Democratic senator having an affair - from the husband of the woman he was having the affair with, who happened to be the senator's aide - would they sit on that story, too?

That last questions too ridiculous to ask, isn't it?

Here's the full text of the letter.

Update: Fox is now saying that they never got the letter, but did get it as an email attachment about 24 hours before Ensign came forward:

"We never received any letter from Mr. Hampton," Lowell told the Huffington Post. "He might have sent it, but we never received it. He did reach out to us about 24 hours before the news conference, and he sent an e-mail to a booker on my staff."

Lowell said that a member of his editorial staff followed up with Hampton that day.

"We followed up with him, but he seemed evasive and not credible, thus we didn't pursue it," he said. "We certainly weren't going to rush to air with accusations against a sitting Senator without doing due diligence on the reputability of the claims.

And:

"I know there are people asking if we alerted the senator," Lowell said. "Definitely no one on our editorial team called anyone in Senator Ensign's office prior to our announcement. We just hadn't gotten to that point of confirming the story yet. Somehow, somebody told the Senator something and I don't know how that happened. But I categorically deny that we ever reached out to the senator in any way shape or form prior to him making his announcement."

Some question remains: Why didn't Fox report that they had talked to Hampton the day before Ensign came forward? And why didn't they report more details about the case (they said they got the letter as an attachment to an email from Hampton) after Ensign admitted the affair? Like the report from Hampton that Senator Tom Coburn knew about the affair? And why especially didn't they come forward about the blackmail charges, which are just about completely quashed with news of this letter out there? (What blackmailer goes to a news organization? Unless he did it to cover his ass...)

...

From Gawker:

Two things should be noted about Hampton's letter: 1) It is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. These people actually work in the Senate? And 2) it baldly contradicts a statement released by Hampton and his wife's lawyer two days ago, which said "it is unfortunate the senator chose to air this very personal matter, especially after the Hamptons did everything possible to keep this matter private." That's a transparent lie. The Hamptons are probably not blameless in this, but if anyone had the capacity to get to the bottom of it, it was Fox. We wonder why they didn't?

Weirder and weirder.

Cracked.com Reviews Glenn Beck's "Comedy" Show

The review comes with notes taken during the show, like the one pictured. Here's an excerpt:

Now, I’m no historian or anything, but I feel confident in saying that I am Cracked.com’s Senior Authority on Motherfucking Presidents, and I certainly know enough to realize that, when you’ve got your audience booing Theodore Fucking Bullet-taking Fucking judo-mastering Fucking Bull Moose Roosevelt, then there is something profoundly wrong. Wrong with you, your audience and your bastardized perversion of history.

Full review here.

Twittering From Iran

Via Attackerman, hair-raising twitter reporting from inside Iran. Just one report:

we are going offline to get a phone free for calling out. we are also moving location - too long here - is dangerous.

DHS: Location of Coal Ash Sites "Too Dangerous" To Reveal To Public

Updating this post about the December, 2008, coal ash slurry spill in Tennessee, we get this news today:

Just how bad has the coal ash situation gotten in the United States? So bad that the Department of Homeland Security has told Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) that her committee can't publicly disclose the location of coal ash dumps across the country.

The pollution is so toxic, so dangerous, that an enemy of the United States -- or a storm or some other disrupting event -- could easily cause them to spill out and lay waste to any area nearby.

There are 44 sites deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency to be high hazard, but Boxer said she isn't allowed to talk about them other than to senators in the states affected.

You know what else we shouldn't be told about? What's in cigarettes. It's too dangerous. You know what else? Torture. It's also too dangerous for us commoners to know about. Pandemics, too. And police brutality. And oil spills. And every murder by handgun...

World's Weirdest Internet Comment Found

Found here, in a forum titled "World's Toughest People":

The toughest man to me is Jesus Christ. He lived for 33 years and he still reigns as the King of Kings

Next is 2Pac

that's all!

Snicker.