Hating It on Twitter

By Brad Friedman

It’s a neat trick. Andrew Breitbart, the pathological liar, race-baiter, propagandist, and rabidly partisan dirty-trickster, posts a deceptively edited video (again), to which media and Democratic officials cowardly knee-jerk in reaction (again), before the video is ultimately discovered to have been a deceptively edited hoax. Then, rather than copping to having been a pathological liar, race-baiter, propagandist, and rabidly partisan dirty-trickster, Breitbart criticizes the media and those others who bought into the hoax that he himself perpetrated… (read full article)

More than 2,000 HuffPost citizen journalists signed up to report on their local tea parties, sending photos, videos, and written dispatches, and [they’ve] already received hundreds.

Why John McCain has become so painful to watch.

By Jacob Weisberg

I’ve stopped reading news about John McCain for the same reason I tune out the daily updates on Afghanistan and the BP oil spill: It’s just too damned depressing. Well into the 2008 primary season, McCain still showed glimmers of a gutsy, independent spirit, speaking out of turn and bucking his party on issues of conscience, like the use of torture. Since losing to Barack Obama, however, he’s turned into the kind of party hack he used to live to mess with.

In the last few months, McCain has flipped his position on dropping the military’s anti-gay “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, soft-pedaled his support for climate-change legislation, and dropped his support for humane, comprehensive immigration reform. In just the past week, he has come out against Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination on the lamest of grounds and defended Arizona’s ugly anti-immigrant law against challenge by the Justice Department.

It’s hard to believe that this is the same guy who, a decade ago, was denouncing Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance,” who reduced Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to a sputtering rage with his efforts to ban soft money, who opposed Bush’s tax cuts, and who stood up to Dick Cheney on the treatment of accused terrorists. When McCain told Newsweek earlier this year that he has never considered himself a “maverick,” it sounded like another confession under duress, with the Tea Party standing in for the Viet Cong….

To some extent, this is a matter of physical decline. As the inside account of his campaign in Game Change makes clear, fatigue brought out McCain’s cranky side. With his stiffness from war injuries and scars from cancer surgeries, McCain looks older than a lot of 73-year-olds—and apparently feels older, too. The other factor may be the reactivation of McCain’s powerful sense of dishonor. Bear with me here, because what follows is surmise based on long observation rather than hard evidence. But McCain looks to me these days like someone who bears an unacknowledged weight. If I had to guess, I’d say that weight is his shame over a barely competent presidential campaign and his awful choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate…(read full article)

with the help of their coroporate-whore robots in the Senate

A judge sentenced Lindsay Lohan Tuesday to three months in jail and to a rehabilitation program after finding the actress had violated the terms of her probation in a 2007 drug case.

Logan converses with Kip Conlon, comedian and author of “Adults’ Letters to God” on a wide range of topics…Show airs live Tuesday or Wednesday night around 8pm eastern.

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AP report:

ISLIP TERRACE, N.Y. – Police say a man lighting fireworks has blown off his arm at a party on New York’s Long Island.

Suffolk County police say 36-year-old Eric Smith was using a 3-foot long metal tube to shoot mortars from the street near his Islip (EYE’-slip) Terrace home around 5:45 p.m. Saturday.

Police believe he leaned over the device to ignite it and didn’t get out of the way before an explosive shot out of the launcher. His left arm was severed at the shoulder.

Smith was taken to Southside Hospital in serious condition while friends packed the lost limb in ice to try to save it. Police believe doctors will try to reattach his arm.

A hospital spokesman didn’t immediately return a call.

Police say another person at the party also was taken to a hospital, but it’s unclear why.

by Sheldon Richman

After President Obama announced he would fight the release of photographs showing American soldiers abusing “war on terror” detainees, Richard Haass, president of the quintessentially mainstream Council on Foreign Relations, said that Obama had learned the difference between campaigning and governing. He wasn’t being ironic.

It was said during the presidential campaign that one of the candidates was running for George W. Bush’s third term. Did you think it was Obama?

Obama has been doing a lot of “growing” in office. That’s the term the establishment uses when a candidate who apparently holds maverick views gets into office and abandons those views in favor of those more congenial to the permanent ruling elite.

The president campaigned against military tribunals as a substitute for regular criminal proceedings for terrorist suspects — a “legal black hole,” he called them. Now he embraces them. His promise of increased protections for defendants fails to impress even the military people charged with defending the suspects. The tribunals are regarded as kangaroo courts. Although Obama says evidence obtained by torture will not be admissible in the tribunals, he won’t let tortured detainees have their day in a real court….(read full article)