Baby Jesus.

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Five Days in this Motherfucking Attic.

Quote of the Day

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.

Albert Einstein

Musha ring dumma do damma da

Life on Mars?

Go Shorty, Itsyo Berfday

Brat mir ein Pracht-Steak, Peter kocht jetzt feinstes Fleisch!

Spit Take.

Watching the Republican Party implode is pretty entertaining. From Jindal falling flat on his face the moment he makes big time, to the kowtowing to Limbaugh, to FBI investigations of the head of the RNC; this is all hilarity.

And so coming across this comparison, right now, really hit me as the funniest thing I've read today.

In a letter released yesterday, all 41 Senate Republicans threatened to filibuster President Obama's judicial nominees unless they were given veto power over judges from their states. The letter also demanded that President Obama renominate Bush nominees like Peter Keisler, Glen Conrad and Paul Diamond.

"The Republicans are doing everything in their power to cement their reputation as the 'Party of No,'" said People For the American Way President Kathryn Kolbert. "Voters gave President Obama a mandate to appoint judges who understand that the Constitution and the laws provide for equal justice for all. Now, before a single nomination has been announced, Republicans are threatening to block every single one of Obama's nominees. That's chutzpah."

Kolbert pointed out that over the last eight years, the vast majority of President Bush's judges were confirmed by the Senate, despite the fact that President Bush refused to include Senators in the process. President Obama's counsel Gregory Craig has already reached out to Senators about potential nominees.

"The Senate has an important role in the confirmation process, and in extreme cases when the President has refused to consult with the Senate, the minority has tools to obstruct nominees who are obviously unfit for the bench. Obama looks to be clearing that standard easily," said Kolbert. "But it was only a few years ago that the GOP was willing to blow up the Senate in order to eliminate the filibuster entirely. They told anyone who would listen that every judicial nominee deserved an up-or-down vote without exception. Apparently, the Senate Republicans have the collective memory of a goldfish."

Coming out of the stimulus debacle, this is so, so apt.

I was born in Lil' Rock, Had a childhood sweetheart,

I Will Not Forgive You, if You Will Not Take the Chance.

Intermittent Picture

Any suggestions on a name? It's a girl.

And He takes, and He takes, and He takes.

CEFCU: Having a finger on the pulse of my economic life.

Just like me, except I don't wear flannel.

This really would not surprise me in the least, if true.

But was Santelli’s rant really so spontaneous? How did a minor-league TV figure, whose contract with CNBC is due this summer, get so quickly launched into a nationwide rightwing blog sensation? Why were there so many sites and organizations online and live within minutes or hours after his rant, leading to a nationwide protest just a week after his rant?

What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that's because it was.

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.

Diary on Big Orange on topic here.

Let the eagle sour!