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Michelle was great. Hillary was excellent. Bill was terrific.

Kerry just knocked it out of the park.

p.s. new music coming soon …

Bruce is on board.

TBogg has a sly, funny angle here.

Update: And a sad, fond farewell to Danny Federici.

I hope you and yours are well.

These folks are having a tough go of it.

Who’s responsible for their hardships?

Who are the people in positions of access, leadership and power making decisions that are furthering these humanitarian disasters with little to no relief in sight?

Who want to expand the chaos in the Middle East outward?

Take a look here.

Murray’s a fraud and a crook and needs to spend some time in a hole himself.

Okay, she didn’t say that but I am.

Her post and Arianna Huffington’s takedown sum up everything I was thinking as soon as I heard/saw this charlatan getting in front of the disaster and controlling the story.

Update:  Digby piles on:

Tragically, a whole bunch of people have died and others are injured but so far, we’ve heard almost nothing about this “star’s” background in pushing unsafe mining techniques and anti-union policies and neither have we heard anything about the fact that the man Bush named to be the “mine safety czar” was such a bad choice for the job that he had to give him a recess appointment with a Republican congress. It’s difficult to know if that being public knowledge would have led to a more prudent rescue attempt. But it certainly would have spared the miners’ families having to put up with the “face of the rescue” being the same man whose anti-regulatory, anti-labor policies may very well have led to their loved ones’ deaths.

Here’s another mining movie recommendation: Harlan County USA. It’s a film conservative exploiters like Murray don’t want anybody to see. It might make working men and women in this country realize that voting for Republican jackasses who answer to pricks like him, might not be the best idea in the world.

that when your voice of intuition grips you and affirms what your eyes see is true but some Authoritative Voice In Media or Extremely Serious Foreign Policy Expert tells you otherwise, you will not fold and accept their lies views without some thorough fact-checking and bullshit scooping.

Wonderful Digby leads us to David Rees at Huffington Post. It’s just too chock full of snarky goodness to quote snippets of .. ya gotta read the whole broadside to appreciate it.

Trust yourself. They are incompetent. They are liars. They did get it all wrong.

So, as Atrios likes to muse, why are they still on our teevees?

Go away!  Get off my lawn!

You should be reading this, and this, and this.

And make sure you run all the daily news you get through a solid, sensible bullshit filter.

Why can’t Sheldon Whitehouse be in the White House?

He shined a bright light on the Department Of Justice today.

Glenn Greenwald:

At its core, the history of the Iraq War has been authored by an indescribably deceitful and very intellectually limited political and media elite, perfectly symbolized by Kit Bond. These are people who spent four years hailing the Great Progress the Leader was making in Iraq, claiming we were “clearing and holding” neighborhoods of all the Terrorists, that Freedom was on the March, that anyone who questioned any of this was either brainwashed by the war-hating media or a Friend of The Terrorists.

And now, four years later, with the War plainly having been a failure, and their assurances all exposed as false, what are they doing? Hailing the Great Progress the Leader is making in Iraq, claiming we are “clearing and holding” neighborhoods of all the Terrorists, that Freedom is on the March, that anyone who questions any of this is either brainwashed by the war-hating media or a Friend of The Terrorists. Nothing ever changes. It just plods along with the same idiot slogans and the same people spouting them. And they do it with no shame, no acknowledgment of their own past behavior, and no loss of credibility.

Commenter El Cid explains how it all works:

You see, the earlier plan was the wrong plan even though it was successful and working, just not successfully and workingly enough.

The new plan, which just seems like the old plan with some more people, is the right plan and is working and is successful, but we don’t yet know if it will be sucessful and working enough.

So the new plan which is the right plan and which is successful and working may soon itself too become the wrong plan, which although correct and successful and working needs to be replaced by the right plan, which will be successful and working even more.

Exactly.  Now shut up and let the Leaders take care of everything.

but not until you’ve sucked in your gut and and reviewed some feature on your face you can’t stand or surveyed the area of your thigh fat and on and on and on.

I’m all for individuals taking care of themselves. Understand your own body and how it works. Learn how to eat healthy and find exercise that you enjoy and can do regularly. But please don’t beat yourself up over this impossible manufactured image or that unrealistic, sadistic ideal.

Love your body.  Love your self.  Fuck the advertising and societal pressure that tries to bend and break you.

I’m riffing on this post by Melissa McEwan. The before and after is pretty ridiculous.

I’m digging lots of posts over at Shakesville lately. A good hang.

If you’re a U.S. citizen then you have obligations.

You need to keep yourself well-informed. You need to know what your government is doing in your name, with your tax dollars.

You need to review the civics courses you took in school. You need to review the Constitution.

You need to make time for well-produced public affairs programs like this past Friday’s episode of Bill Moyers Journal.

Watch it here.

Following a little Saturday night hedonism and rock ‘n roll.

Great post and comments Friday at Shakesville to get you thinking of your own Saturday night/Sunday morning dynamic.

Growing up I often spent Sunday morning in a Lutheran church. The closest I get there anymore is sharing the stage with my Lutheran Pastor bass player. Amazing human being, he is.

These days I’m much more comfortable embracing my inner atheist. I’m certainly open to evidence, should it be presented to me convincingly. Open ears should new shit come to light. More accurately, it’s just the openness of agnosticism I’ve felt for most of my life. Fairness and justice and logic and reason and sunshine and truth flow easier through that lens. It actually gives me more of a sense of awe and wonder and respect for the world we live in.

When it’s over .. who knows? Maybe you become a cardinal, dropping by occasionally to keep an eye on your loved ones.

Time for a musical interlude? Here ya go ..

No fried chicken for me but I am off to see some friends and eat some tacos.

Heavenly.

Another must-read post:

The cure is quite simple. Make sure this radical right wing experiment is thoroughly and finally discredited in the public’s mind and replaced with something very simple — a normal western democracy that has a decent safety net for all its citizens, a commitment to making the middle class accessible to those on the bottom and a sense of responsibility among those who have thrived and become wealthy. It’s not that complicated and it doesn’t require a wholesale reworking of our society. It simply requires a return to the …ahem … traditional American values that undergirded the New Deal, and a healthy respect for that old truism, “there but for the grace of God go I.”

The other side will shriek and hold their breath until they turn blue, but this is the weakest they’ve been in a quarter century. The time is now to make the argument. (Here’s another good place to start: Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class)

The evidence just keeps piling up. The conservative movement is a grotesque new form of aristocracy cloaked in the mantle of radical free market religion. They are playing all of us for suckers and getting away with it.

This follows a clear-eyed account of insidious Catch-22 corporate conformity. I look back with mildly disgusted amusement at my post-college years temping in downtown Chicago through a revolving door of big business blandness. I’ve been fortunate to avoid that environment for a decade-plus and am even more determined to keep it that way, and it means making do with less and making the most of what I have.

Which is getting easier every day as I reassess my needs and footprint without getting all ascetic and monk-like. Little changes, everyday. Just wondering about the carrying capacity of this planet and realizing how little billions of people live without everyday is enough to make me slow down my consumption and marvel at the gifts in front of me.

I’m not convinced the cure is going to be simple, as Digby states, but I agree with the summary and that this can be a start towards corrective action in the national political arena and compelling wealthy corporations and elites to change. Prepare for a hellacious resistance, though.

Meanwhile, there’s much to fix in our own backyards.

It’s time to roll our sleeves up, folks.

Today’s post by Glenn Greenwald, further clarifying his analysis from the previous day, is well worth reading. As are all his posts. As are the rigorous, (mostly) thoughtful comment threads that follow each one.

I’ve thought a lot about notions of ‘American exceptionalism’ in recent years. Glenn sums things up well in these paragraphs:

So much of the intensity and anger driving the criticisms of the Bush presidency — certainly my own, and much of what I read (as exemplified above) — is grounded in a fervent belief in American political values, its political principles and its constitutional framework. The anger comes not from a belief that the U.S. is an evil and corrupt entity, but from the opposite view. It comes from witnessing the all-out assault on these vaunted political principles and values and the complete corruption, close to the destruction, of our country’s national character that has made the U.S. such an important and admired presence in the world for so long.

To believe in America’s political values and to observe the importance of its role in the world is not “American exceptionalism.” Like all countries, America has erred many times and has been capable of evil. Other countries have critically important virtues that America lacks. As I detail in my book, America has been far too quick to use war as a foreign policy option and has become increasingly imperialistic in precisely the way the Founders so stridently warned against.

It’s sadness and anger I feel for how this country has squandered its ideals and principles. Not fatalism or defeatism or surrender or other mistaken notions that chest-beating ‘patriots’ attempt to hang on those who point out our failings and short-sighted, misguided policies. We may disagree on solutions, but we all need to get back to some ground rules on what we all have in common and what’s at stake.