Cheap shot: Soon they'll be demanding reparations

Prominent young right winger says conservatives are the new blacks, Colbert skit amounts to 'political blackface' http://t.co/BMBbgRMdcl
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 12, 2014

So true. Everywhere they go, conservatives face heartrending discrimination simply because of who they are.

Herded into segregated schools.

"Conservatives only" drinking fountains.

Wasn't Rosa Parks ordered to the back of the taxi?

Flag dance

Flag dance choreographed by the Ming dynasty imperial prince, mathematician, astronomer, and music theorist Zhu Zaiyu (1536-1611), famous for his discovery of  a precise method of calculating equal temperament in 1585, ahead of Europeans. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

The image of mastery and omniscience

Nine seconds of trades as seen by HFT algorithms, visualized by Nanex, via TheFutureReset.

David Brooks writes:

Most of us have been seized at one time or another by what I call the explanatory drive, by which I mean a biological urge to explain things at some length, if not to others then at least to oneself; when you are confronted by a puzzle, riddle, or enigma and cannot rest through your long, haunted nights until you have wrestled that sucker to the ground, figured it out, and shouted, "Eureka!" or words to that effect.

We're all familiar with the explanatory drive, but I never realized I could incorporate it into my narrative of how traditional Tory morality makes [jump]

Confirmation bias has a conservative bias

Via.

Yuval Levin on the hot topic of confirmation bias at the National Review:

Without (it seems) a hint of irony, Paul Krugman argued on Monday that everyone is subject to confirmation bias except for people who agree with him. He was responding to this essay Ezra Klein wrote for his newly launched site, Vox.com, which took up the question of confirmation bias and the challenges it poses to democratic politics. Krugman acknowledged the research that Klein cites but then insisted that his own experience suggests it is actually mostly people he disagrees with who tend to ignore evidence and research that contradicts what they want to believe, while people who share his own views are more open-minded, skeptical, and evidence driven. I don’t know when I’ve seen a neater real-world example of an argument that disproves itself.

With the implication that I'm rubber, you're glue, and neener neener neener. Or as Jennifer Rubin calls it,

From the noise machine

Image via Examiner.com.

Another one of those rightwing firestorms, starting with a story in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and almost instantly spreading to all the usual venues, is the story that the New York State Department of Health has been failing to inspect abortion clinics (as every single one of the stories notes, in that remarkable unison in which they always [jump]

Suffering succotash! Holy cow!

Photo from It's a Vertical Life.

David Brooks generally writes from a a kind of extra-terrestrial standpoint, judging but not participating, but there's been some evidence lately that beneath that sternly objective exterior there beats a human heart, as when he returned from his so-called "book leave" in December with a column about arguments for or against suicide, or when he suddenly launched into a lengthy discussion of the "painfully hip" boutique hotel in January (what, he's doing travel writing now?) and it turned out he must be staying in one, in the wake of the breakup of his marriage; serious Brooksologists such as the esteemed Driftglass have asked themselves if he isn't really trying to tell us something, issuing a cry for help.

The good news today is that he may have gotten some:

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself in a bunch of conversations in which the unspoken assumption was that the main goal of life is to maximize happiness. That’s normal. 

Because I do not think it is normal to have a large number of conversations devoted to this unless you are seeing a therapist.

The bad news is that he has decided at the moment that he sort of likes suffering as a thought process, a kind of alternative to economics:

the big thing that suffering does is it takes you outside of precisely that logic that the happiness mentality encourages. Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefits.

Thus it makes you more empathetic, like Franklin Roosevelt (had polio), or more likely to write something like the Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln (conducted the Civil War). Or more, um, spiritual?

even when tranquillity begins to come back, or in those moments when grief eases, it is not clear where the relief comes from. The healing process, too, feels as though it’s part of some natural or divine process beyond individual control.... The right response to this sort of pain is not pleasure. It’s holiness. I don’t even mean that in a purely religious sense.

The right response to this kind of babbling is to draw the curtain, put your finger over your lips, and whisper, "I think he's feeling a little better."

[Driftglass analyzes the column, in contrast, as a kind of fortune cookie. But he's got a marvelous bonus, a parody of "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof.]

Egg

Who says Easter eggs have no religious significance? At Citarella's Gourmet Market on the Upper Left Side a Jewish egg celebrating the Creation? An aesthete egg celebrating Michelangelo? It's two or three feet high not counting its lotus pedestal and appears to be covered in real chocolate. The buildings are Broadway reflected in window glass. It's years since I've felt myself able to afford anything there other than squid ink,  which I can't find anywhere else, but an astonishing place.

What the elephant left in the room

@blakehounshell I am attempting to explain how this question can be answered, accurately, in different ways.
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) April 7, 2014

Perhaps, though, it would be better to start off with a better question. Shorter Jonathan Chait:

Via.

Spoilers, alerted: Postscript

Nima Shirazi's account of the case, which makes me feel now that I've read it that I shouldn't even have bothered because it is truly comprehensive and informed (so please read it), has been updated to advert to an also indispensable account by Robert Mackey in the New York Times's Lede blog, which points out that there are plenty of former members of the Students Following the Imam's Line engaging in successful diplomatic careers without incident. One fascinating detail that I just have to put on my own record here: seems that the narrative of how ambassador-designate Aboutalebi is a terrorist has been pushed in particular by none other than the Muhajedin-e-Khalq, an organization we have discussed before, an actual terrorist organization, Israel's known partner in the murders of Iranian physicists a couple of years back.

MEK, of course, has since become a non-terrorist organization by means of the magic of the United States State Department de-listing it under monumental pressure from a lot of people (I'm looking at you, Howard Dean) who had plenty of opportunities to know better. It is obvious that their aim, or that of their secret masters/funders, is to derail the Vienna talks that started on Thursday. This is very bad, and it needs to stop.

Hamid Abutalebi looking a little like a Truffaut character, not too terrorizing. Via Al-Monitor.

[Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog]

Spoilers, alerted

Once again, a Jennifer Rubin of a different choler. Via IMDB.

Here's young Jennifer Rubin on the subject of the nomination by Iran's President Rouhani of Hamid Aboutalebi to serve as Iran's ambassador to the United Nations:

If you believe that President Obama’s Iran policy is correct, then you must assume Iran is a normal state like other states, that its leaders want their country to prosper and that it wants to function as a nation-state in the “international community.” For it is only such a state that would willingly give up its illegal nuclear program in order to reintegrate back into the “international community.” Only a run-of-the-mill regime would put the welfare of its own people over the retention of an unusual weapon system, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and blackmail neighbors.

You know, I really don't want to talk about the character of a regime that would retain an unusual weapon system, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and blackmail neighbors, but I swear I will if you make me.

I do want it noted that Iran cannot be accused of "retaining" a weapons system that doesn't exist. Or of conducting an "illegal nuclear program" when it has been found repeatedly [jump]

Two Afghanistan pictures

From an exhibition, "Anja Niedringhaus—At War" held at The Cube, Eschborn (Hessen), February-March 2012, via fokussiert.com.

Salavat, Afghanistan, September 2010 © Anja Niedringhaus/AP

Kabul, Afghanistan, September 2009 © Anja Niedringhaus/AP

The photographer, Anja Niedringhaus, was killed yesterday by an Afghan police commander in Khost province, where she was covering the ongoing election with the reporter Kathy Gannon (who was badly hurt). A tribute by Carlotta Gall appeared in today's Times.

Speech Impediments

Dave Whitlam, The Kindness of Strangers (DeviantArt, 2014).

It's a little bit fun watching the Republicans in the wake of the McCutcheon decision basically trying to think of ways to say how much they approve of it without just running out in the street like kids in a summer rain in their bathing suits, to dance in the gentle Kochfall.

To the editors of the National Review, it's all about demonstrating that money really is speech:

There's something I've got to tell you

I'm not like other guys.

Large-format (32" by 40") oil by Russ Docken, undated (it's not on Docken's website, which hasn't been updated since 2009, so it's after that), depicting the famous scene where the 19-year-old Jesus declines a marriage proposal from an upper-class Nazareth girl, [jump]

Cheap shot: Selling out is now for sale

A really splendid comment from Ed Kilgore on George Washington U's new MA program in International Lobbying, allowing you to prepare yourself for a lobbying career without ever having spent any time on the other side of that revolving door, compares his feelings about it to

the disdain I felt when I discovered, after years of low-paid anonymous work as a speechwriter, that this whole academic field called Political Communications had sprung up since I left college. But to the aspiring lobbyist, this is even worse: how can you sell out when you haven’t even bought in? 

Mann in Drehtür, Waldemar Otto, 1986. Wikimedia Commons.

Cheap shots and Dinge-an-sich

$34K puts you in the worldwide one percent. Image via Bossip.

I meant to offer a cogent critique of the WSJ op-ed by Charles Koch, but everybody else and in particular Steve M and NTodd already did, while I was getting blindsided by one minor detail early in the piece that was too bizarre for anybody more steady-minded than me to take the trouble to notice, where he was Kochsplaining collectivism:

Neoliberal watch: This is going to be a bumpy ride

Moloch. From the Oedipus Aegyptiacus of Athanasius Kircher, 1652. Wikimedia.

Remember Kenneth G. Langone, the Home Depot founder warning that it was Kristallnacht time for our beleaguered billionaires?

“I hope [the supposed ongoing shift to populism is] not working,” Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot and major GOP donor, said of populist political appeals. “Because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.” (Slate, March 2014)

Or proposing to shut down Pope Francis with all this inequality talk with a bribe of an unspecified number of millions (somewhere between one and nine)?

Annals of derp: Outlaws of Gender Gap

From Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute a chart showing (at least to his satisfaction) that according to the latest (2012) numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics

Once you impose the ‘ceteris paribus’ condition, the alleged 23% gender pay gap starts to quickly evaporate

You see? It's just an artifact of your family status! If you've never been married and you're a woman, you get to earn almost 96% of what a man who has never been married earns, and if you're a woman who is not married at the moment but with grown-up kids about the [jump]

L'égalité majestueuse des lois...

Sleeping sarariman, Tokyo 2011. Photo by Pawel Jawszszuk via DesignTaxi.

...qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain...

The majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal bread, by the same token permits the poor, [jump]

Brooks Announces Job Search

In a shocking development, New York Times columnist David Brooks today served notice on international panditry that he is looking for a job, by publishing his résumé cover letter in lieu of his usual Tuesday op-ed piece:

Dear Employers,

Would you like to have a powerful impact on the culture and moral ecology of our era? Would you be interested in correcting some of the perversities at the upper levels of our meritocracy? Would it give you any satisfaction to help cultivate deeper, fuller human beings? If you answer "strongly agree", "somewhat agree", or "neither agree nor disagree" to any of these questions, or if you're not very sure what a moral ecology is, you need to get your HR staff to shake themselves up by adopting the following principles:

Marxism: So great before it went mainstream

Supermarx. Via Inciclopedia.

Well, glory be, the Revolution must have been and triumphed without anybody noticing it, because here's the New York Times seriously running a debate as to whether the theories of the noted economist Karl Marx could have some contemporary relevance—

White House fool report: I channel Maureen Dowd

Normal Chelovechik.

Apologies to President Obama, who was as it turns out not trolling me at all. Actually he was trolling National Review's Andrew Stuttaford-Stuttaford of That Ilk, I think:

(I’m sorry Mr. President, Russia is rather more than the “regional power” that you were — ludicrously — claiming the other day)

And Dr. Krauthammer:

No law of capitalism?

Image via GulfCoastProgressive, 2006.

Sorry, But There’s No ‘Law Of Capitalism’ That You Have To Pay Employees As Little As Possible - Business Insider http://t.co/ThJukP5Zo3
— Pierre Omidyar (@pierre) March 29, 2014

Wanted to reply, but didn't,

Cheap shots and objets trouvés

Classic

White House fool report:

Image from Mi Ex es una Meme.

Hey Mr. P,

You're trolling me, right? At the Palais des Beaux-Arts? As quoted in Slate?

Russia has pointed to America’s decision to go into Iraq as an example of Western hypocrisy. Now, it is true that the Iraq war was a subject of vigorous debate, not just around the world but in the United States, as well. I participated in that debate, and I opposed our military intervention there.

Poem

There once were some bold employees
Who wanted to use IUDs;
But the boss, with his hobby
Of rushing the lobby,
Just wanted them all on their knees.

Lord's Prayer Pillar Candle from Hobby Lobby, $17.99. Wonder if it feels weird to be melting the Word of the Lord.

Everybody baits Chris

Jennifer Stefano in 2010, via Robert Stacy McCain.

“Throw out the mandate, throw out the exchange,” Hayes then told her. “Bumping up Medicaid eligibility from 100 percent of poverty line to 133 percent of poverty line so that some working poor people can get some health insurance — what is the objection to that? Why does every conservative Republican governor oppose that? Explain that to me.”

The only thing we have to fear is looking too brave

Ratchet Deadlocked Campfire, by weslouie at DeviantArt.

The trial of Sulaiman Abu Gaith on conspiracy to kill Americans, and providing support to Al Qa'eda was held in New York City and came to a successful conclusion, like the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed before it, in spite of fears that—well—something...

In a letter to Obama, Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggested that holding a trial in New York was dangerous. “New York City has been a high-priority target since at least the first World Trade Center bombing,” she wrote. “The trial of the most significant terrorist in custody would add to the threat....”

No, you can't. It's classified.

Image via FoodJobsBlog.

The great filmmaker Errol Morris has a new film, to be released April 4, The Unknown Known, on former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, contrasting I guess his sublime psychopathy with the confused guilt of Robert McNamara captured in The Fog of War. His series of articles on Rumsfeld and the film, "The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld", is just starting in the Times, and I wanted to single out this bit from an interview with NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, the reporter who asked Rumsfeld the question that led to the famous "unknown unknowns" remark:

JIM MIKLASZEWSKI: Well, not just [Rumsfeld] but the entire building was in denial. Doug Feith — don’t get me started on Doug Feith — told me that they had a Marshall Plan all set to go in terms of rebuilding Iraq. And he pointed to this stack of huge three-ringed binders, all of them black. There must have been about 10 of them stacked up on top of a cabinet. And I asked to see them, and he said, “No, you can’t. It’s classified.” And I said, “Well, O.K., I understand that, I guess.” But I raised it to somebody else within the next couple of weeks. I said, “Well, Doug Feith showed me the Marshall Plan for Iraq.” And this person laughed, and he said, “Mik, that was the Marshall Plan.” It was a copy of the original Marshall Plan, not a plan for Iraq.

"Dumbest fucking guy on the planet" according to General Tommy Franks (no slouch in the dumb department himself). But as with Rumsfeld—and George W. Bush himself—the stupidity is a kind of act, masking the operative feature of total pathological irresponsibility.Via HuffingtonPost.

Fellow dirt miner Driftglass has been visiting the same places as me again, and has more to say, essential as usual.

Let them eat policemen

Shorter David Brooks, "The Republic of Fear", New York Times, March 25 2014:

Several horrifying anecdotes prove that the entire developing world is locked in the grip of fear because the United States spends more money on eradicating poverty than on creating better justice systems in these unhappy countries. Startlingly, it seems that instead of having too much government, they don't have enough. Forget being the world's policeman, we need to be the world's personal organizer.

Kirsten Dunst in the 2006 film by Sophie Coppola.

The message Brooks is cribbing today is from a quite new book by Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros, The Locust Effect, whose authors and publisher will no doubt be too [jump]

Secret policy department

Photo via MobShield.

One of the most gratuitously bad policies anywhere in the Bloomberg administration was the one relating to students' use of cell phones in public schools, and I'm glad to hear that it is being revised under the Soviet dictatorship of Bill De Blasio and his educational minion Chancellor Fariña. But the message I've just received from Young Harry's school is not very encouraging, nor does it suggest the Most Transparent Administration in History:

Cookie Wookiee

Image via TorWars.

In a fairly astonishing tour de Cooke or Cooke's tour, as we call them in English, Master Charles C.W. (Chemical Weapons) Cooke (Oxon.) takes on President Obama's unseemly witticisms:

Or maybe you should just stay where you are and eat a madeleine

Shorter David Brooks, "Going Home Again", New York Times, March 21 2014:

Sting got over a decades-long writing block by going back home to north England, where he got in touch with his childhood and exploded with new songs. Coincidentally, I went to Canada, I mean not Toronto, where I was born, but Vancouver, where they were having the TED conference, but that must be pretty much the same thing, right? I wonder when the ideas will start to flow.

Sting as Feyd-Rautha in David Lynch's Dune (1984). The original source for this GIF seems to have abandoned it to the aether, or I'd credit it.

Cheap shots and dust storms

Worst thing about the NSA? They're all apparently 9 years old:

And cops and hookers, boobs and haboobs and much much more below the fold!

Dire Straights

From Sun Club Color Studio, of Mobile, via Action News 4 Pittsburgh.

Katrina Trinko in the DeMintia ward on St. Patrick's Day defending the parade organizers in New York and Boston for refusing to allow LGBTQ groups to march openly, and kind of disappointed in the beer companies that withdrew sponsorship:

Let’s just imagine the situation reversed. In Alabama, for instance, let’s say there was a Thanksgiving parade. Traditional marriage advocates wanted to march holding signs about marriage – [jump] 

Poem

Kuangshan in present-day Sichuan, where the poet Li Bai (701-62) is thought to have studied Chinese as a boy, in a Buddhist monastery. Painting by Lu Yanshao, 1979.

Du Fu on Li Bai

It's a long time since I saw my friend Li, feigning crazy, truly pitiful!
Everyone wanted him dead, I alone cherished his tender talent.
A thousand poems leapt in the air, a cup of wine dropped to the ground.
On Kuang Mountain he learned his letters; good if he could return, with his white hair.

不见李生久，佯狂真可哀！
世人皆欲杀，吾意独怜才。
敏捷诗千首，飘零酒一杯。
匡山读书处，头白好归来。

Cheap shots: Give me Linzertorte or give me death

Marble macarons by Unlimited Curiosity at DeviantArt.

Bloody tyranny reported by the Lonely Conservative:

FOOD, POLITICS

White House Pastry Chef Quits Thanks To Michelle Obama

by Lonely Conservative • March 19, 2014 • 1 Comment

White House pastry chef Bill Yosses has turned in his resignation because First Lady Michelle Obama changed his job duties. The openly gay chef was hired in 2007 by former First Lady Laura Bush to make cookies and sugar sculptures. (Wait, I thought all Republicans hate gay people? Oh, never mind.) Then Michelle came along.

David Brooks goes to Newark

Really. He was seen. And on the basis of his experience, he's written a little campaign piece on behalf of Newark mayoral candidate Shavar Jeffries.

Jeffries, son of an absent father, his mother murdered by an abusive boyfriend when he was only ten years old, raised chiefly by his grandmother and a community of watchful cooperative neighbors in the city's South Ward, with a big assist from scholarships to Seton Hall [jump]

Ryan through his teeth

Remember vice-presidential candidate Ryan pretending to wash the dishes because he didn't really have time to help but could make plenty of time for a photo op? There's a man who understands the value and the culture of work, eh? Via Hinterland Gazette.

The whole editorial staff of the National Review gathers to argue that "Paul Ryan is Right":

New York City manages to graduate barely half of its black male students from high school — and among high-school dropouts, two-thirds reach the age of 26 without ever having held a full-time job lasting at least one year. And perhaps most significant, the vast majority of blacks are born out of wedlock. You could not come up with a more effective system [jump]

Monday cheap shot: Crimea does not pay

Don't know if the typo in this email from Foreign Policy counts as Freudian or what:

We all know Russia is ruled by crooks, but I thought the crooks were fairly comfortable in Ukraine too.

Get real

US Army Specialist Simran Lamba, first American Sikh soldier to have his religious needs accommodated since 1984, and about time, too. AP.

Allen West (last seen in these parts trying to prove that slavery was the liberals' fault) at the CPAC conference:

Shorter David Brooks

Shorter David Brooks, "The Deepest Self", New York Times, March 14, 2014:

You know how your deepest inner self is down there in the old reptilian brain among the basal ganglia? And yet if you followed your nose and behaved according to the dictates of your nucleus accumbens, you'd be a pretty shallow person. Is that wack or what? Maybe I should write that book after all. Or find some weed. Anybody know how you buy weed nowadays? 

Static, by Kago Shintaro, via Fleurmach.

This column has not attracted a lot of attention from the usual sources, but there's a beyond masterful Shorter from the great Dr. Turk. I'll try to keep you posted.

Cheap shots and pink helicopters

Authenticated photo of the unmanned aerial surveillance vehicle outside Senator Dianne Feinstein's house, June 15 2013. Image from Demotix.

We've previously noted how Senator Feinstein (R–Military-Industrial Complex) had a strange, not to say psychedelic, encounter, last summer, with an overly friendly airborne robot:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein says she once found a drone peeking into the window of her home — the kind of cautionary tale she wants lawmakers to consider as they look at allowing commercial drone use.... Feinstein said she encountered the flying robot while a demonstration was taking place outside her house. She said she went to the window to peek out — and “there was a drone right there at the window looking out at me.” (Politico)

It now seems, as Politico is (not exactly) reporting, that it was only the first blow in the Senator's war with the Central Intelligence Agency, and we have sourced some pictures of the incident here:

Annals of derp: Elective amenities

Heritage:

Report: U.S. Is One of Seven Countries That Allows Late-Term Abortion

The United States is one of only a handful of developed countries in which late-term abortions after 20 weeks—five months—are allowed, according to a new report from the Charlotte Lozier Institute. At that stage, the child is capable of feeling pain and women are at increased risk for the negative effects of abortion.

Except it's no truer than the last time the claim went around (when it was Mrs. Governor Anita Perry of Texas and former California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina who gave the number as 4 rather than 7. As Politifact Texas explained at the time,

Image via Crazy Uproar.

Führer(losigkeits)prinzip

Slightly updated at the end

Illustrations via ChinesePosters.net.

David Brooks writes:

We're in the middle of a frightening generational shift in the way people see government and its relation to the community in general. According to the most recent Pew Research Center survey Millennials, the cohort of adults aged 18 to 33, are less likely to regard themselves as religious or [jump]

Annals of derp: Is Obama after Ukraine?

Evidence of the crime: Senators Lugar and Obama inspecting a Donetsk arms dump, and I do mean dump, in August 2005. Photo by Reuters.

One of the odder bits of storyline floating around the World Wide Entertainment Web is that of young Senator Obama personally disarming the Ukrainian armed forces back in 2005, apparently so that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, when the time came, would be able to move in on those Ukrainians without meeting any resistance: it turned up in National Review, PJ Media, the Daily Mail, and so on, finally winding up yesterday at the digs of the dumbest man on the Internet, Jim Hoft:

Propaganda lesson

From KochCash.org. Check it out.

Master Charles C.W. (Constant Wanker) Cooke (Oxon.) informs us that Harry Reid treats the philanthopists Charles and David Koch exactly the way Stalin treated Leon Trotsky—or at least the way Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth treated Emmanuel Goldstein, with [jump]

Jihadi Jindal

So after Jindal accuses Attorney General Holder of trying to stand in the way of poor black children from getting to go to private schools just the way old George Wallace stopped the then Vivian Malone from going to the University of Alabama*, Holder sends Jindal a copy of John Lewis's Walking with the Wind with a bookmark at the page where Lewis notes that that Vivian Malone, later Vivian Malone Jones, who passed away in 2005, was Holder's sister-in-law, and Jindal responds with the following.

Dear AG Holder.Thx for your note. Watch this vid from parents who u r trying 2 block from having an equal opportunity http://t.co/dukN6O1kaW
— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) March 7, 2014

Cute video about more or less how God sent Jindal to Louisiana so these women could avoid sending their kids to the awful New Orleans public schools, but I've often wondered how many kids these programs rescue in this way, and so I put the question to Dr. Google. [jump]

*DOJ contends in an ongoing if not very active lawsuit that Jindal's private school voucher program tends to affect racial balance in some school districts under desegregation orders.

Cheap shots and literal butter

Wedding cake via Tracy "Dezzie" Rhodes at PinupLifestyle.

Bitch SLAPP

Rep. Steve King of Iowa worrying about whether wedding-cake buying couples might just be pretending to be gay in the interests of mounting a discrimination suit against the bakers:

KING: The one thing that I reference when I say “self-professed” is: how do you know who to discriminate against? They about have to tell you. And, you know, are they then setting up a case? Is this about bringing a grievance or is it actually about a service that they’d like to have?