Where's Jack McCoy When You Need Him?

Bloomberg discusses the possibility of RICO charges against Tony Heyward and BP.

Much as I'd love to see it, that sounds more like the plot of an unused Law & Order script than something that has much chance of happening in real life.

What a Coincidence

Harper spends a billion dollars turning Toronto into Torontonamo Bay for the G20, and a few days later Canada gets a home grown terrorist attack.

I'm sure there's no correlation.

George Orwell Says Hi

The New York Times thinks accurate language is political:

When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves.


In other words, the Senile Old Lady is willing to let the definitions of words be dictated from the White House. All they have to do is dispute a word's use and, poof! That word disappears from the NYT's lexicon.

This is how an industry dies. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

(h/t Sully, natch)

Pot On Stove!

The pot is still on the stove, and still dirty. That's five-plus days now.

I really should start taking pictures, or setting up a webcam feed or something.

June's Travesties

32 different songs. Sang #1 Crush an awful lot this month, looking back at it.

I'm now up to 360 different songs sung in 15 months since I started the blog, for a neat and tidy average of 24 different songs per month on average.

#1 Crush - Garbage
All Apologies - Nirvana
All Those Years Ago - George Harrison
Band On the Run - Paul McCartney & Wings
Because the Night - Patti Smith
Birdhouse In Your Soul - They Might Be Giants
Conquistador - Procol Harum
Electric Avenue - Eddy Grant
Freedom - George Michael
I Can Dream About You - Dan Hartman
I Can See Clearly Now - Johnny Nash
I Got You - Split Enz
In a Big Country - Big Country
Just Like Heaven - Cure
Kid Charlamagne - Steely Dan
Mac the Knife - Bobby Darin
Message In a Bottle - Police
Miss You - Rolling Stones
My Life - Billy Joel
No One Knows - Queens of the Stone Age
Pop Life - Prince
Rebel Rebel - David Bowie
Ride Like the Wind - Christopher Cross
Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) - Bruce Springsteen
Sunglasses At Night - Corey Hart
Train In Vain - Clash
Twistin' the Night Away - Sam Cooke
Vaseline - Stone Temple Pilots
When Doves Cry - Prince
Whistle For the Choir - Fratellis
With a Little Help From My Friends - Joe Cocker
Young Americans - David Bowie

Beware My +3 Stick of Anti-Authoritarianism!

Toronto police chief Bill Blair includes some poor guy's LARPing kit in his display of 'weapons' confiscated during the G20 protests.

It's an understandable mistake. All the coolest anarchists are wearing scale mail this year.

There Has To Be a Reckoning

A Harvard study outlined the complicity of the corporate media (specifically, the New York Times, LA Times, WSJ and USA Today) in the Bush-Cheney torture... gaaah, I hate calling it a regime, but I can't think of a better word for it.

Sully eviscerates those responsible with his usual gusto:

The editors who insisted on these changes remain liars and cowards and a disgrace to journalism and a free society. They should quit for this kind of open deception and craven cowardice in putting power before truth. They remind you that if you really want to understand what is going on in the world, the New York Times will only publish what the government deems is fit to print - even in its choice of words.


And again, I feel that sick churning in my stomach telling me I need to do something to move the country forward towards a place where these crimes can be faced, and dealt with.

This cannot be swept under the rug. And this will not be forgotten. Whatever his other accomplishments as president, if Obama does not do something to bring those responsible to justice, his time in office will be remembered with regret and the sense of a missed opportunity. At best.

Can't Say I Blame Him

Despite the fact that it's bad form to be shirking his Very Important Duties on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I probably would have dozed off or doodled during Sessions' anti-Thurgood Marshall bullshit too.

I'm just amazed Franken didn't draw Sessions wearing a peaked hood, or with a burning cross in the background. That kind of restraint speaks well for him.

Tales of Epic Laziness

I've been really reluctant to do this, since reading about other people's roommate issues is tedious at best, and there's always the tiny chance my roomie or someone she knows might read this, but this one is just too damn funny not to blog about.

Plus, she's decided that one in the morning is a great time to begin learning how to play the fucking guitar, so fuck it.

Now, to really appreciate this story, you have to understand that neither one of us are particularly great at keeping up with the dishes. We've had a few spirited conversations on the matter, with the end result of each little chat being that both of us agree that we need to do dishes more often.

One of us makes an effort to actually do it. The other, not so much.

Case in point: for the last few days, she has left a dirty pot sitting on the stove. It was pretty ridiculously filthy too; she's cooked pasta in it, and dried spaghetti was draped over the edge like some Cthulhoid beastie trying to escape.

Our apartment is old, and has one of those long, thin, odd layouts you often see in old apartments above stores. In ours the kitchen is the first room you enter when you come into the apartment, and the stove is right by the door.

In other words, this disgustingly filthy pot is the first thing you see when you walk in, and it has sat there mocking me for three days.

During those three days I did dishes three times. I've inherited a decent set of dishes and bowls from friends who decided they were finally too good for Ikea and so, as a way to hopefully nudge my roomie towards maybe doing something about the Damnable Pot, I set to work washing the newish dishes and retiring all my old plates and such. That, plus some odds and ends (a different pot, glasses, silverware etc) accounted for three rack loads, done over the space of a couple of days.

No response from the roomie. As I left for work today I sighed quietly to myself, and wished the beastie good luck in its escape attempt.

When I got home, the pot had moved to a different burner, and the beastie was gone.

Oh, it was still dirty, mind you. But now instead of spaghetti remnants, it contained soup leftovers. My roomie, bless her incredibly slovenly and lazy heart, has washed the pot, re-used it, and left it back on the stove.

This was, needless to say, the only dish of any kind she had washed.

G20 Provocateur Caught On Camera?

Maybe so. There are actually two undercover cops who run by the camera at the marked interval who could have been in Black Bloc get-up.

I think it's pretty much a given that the authorities would have done everything possible to justify Harper's billion dollar tar babysecurity measures, but it'd be nice to have proof.

Great Days in Footie History

June 27, 2010

If video replay gets introduced into the game, it will be because of the two ridiculously blatant blown calls (on Lampard's goal, and on Tevez's offside non-goal) today.

EDIT: Mind you, it's looking like neither blown call will actually impact the game result...

I've Finally Got Glenn Beck Figured Out

Glenn Beck is a clown. Everyone knows it, even his supporters; deep in their hearts they know his shtick his just that, an act, and that he's not a True Believer. Which is why his inevitable fall will be epic.

But the thing that's been stumping me is exactly what act Beck is doing. It seemed kind of familiar, yet I could never quite put my finger on it.

Couldn't put my finger on it, that it, until I was flipping channels and caught the middle of a movie I hadn't seen in a dog's age.



Glenn Beck is channeling JT Walsh's Big Bob character from Pleasantville. Same hair. Same basic look, although Larry King had dibs on the suspenders. Same reactionary desire to hide in the past and never let things change from what they were before Things Went Bad.

Don't believe me? Then let's play, "Who Said It?":

"It's a question of values. It's a question of whether we're gonna hold onto the values that have made this place great. So the time has come to make a decision. Are we in this alone, or are we in it together?"

Now, is that from Beck's infamous "We Surround Them" bit, or from Big Bob's bowling alley speech in Pleasantville?

Last Night

Stephen Harper probably thinks he's died and gone to heaven. He's the only "winner" after last night's riots and general display of idiocy.

First, he gets to play host to all the foreign leaders he really, really wishes would be his BFFs. They just have to like him now!

Second, he gets to spend a billion dollars on a security tar baby so he can feel like a big tough guy.

Third, idiot anarchist wannabes are actually so stupid as to jump on the billion dollar security tar baby, thus 'justifying' Harper's stupid spending spree.

Fourth, all this happens in Toronto, which significantly reduces the political blowback on Harper since he wasn't going to get any votes in Toronto anyway, and most of his western base loves to get their schadenfreude on when bad things happen to the city.

For a typically gormless Canadian political hack, Harper is showing some signs of being a bit of an evil genius.