Twenty Bucks, Same as in Town

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Blogwhoring. You do it, I do it, we all do it. What have you been up to?

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By now, I'm sure many of of us have read Prof. Juan Cole's well-researched articles on both his own website and Salon.com about the suspicious results of the travesty of an election in Iran. Yet Andrew Sullivan, through his Farsi-speaking contacts in the BBC, gives us a brief but chilling message from reformer Mr. Mir-Hosein Mousavi, Iran's answer to Al Gore.

Critics have been detained, text messages and websites have been blocked, including Mousavi's own campaign website, TV signals are jammed, protesters are threatened, beaten and even killed and the winner was declared two hours after the polls closed instead of the usual three days. This is a free and fair democracy? Are we watching this, Kate Harris and Ken Blackwell?

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Last weekend Sara Robinson at Orcinus completely laid out the right wing bile spigots in a post to which I've already linked but yesterday she made an amazing over-the-shoulder catch. It's a Youtube video of sing-along time at Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church. Like Sara says, at first it sounds like satire, since the congregation, which would've scared the shit out of Jonathan Edwards, is singing a bastardized version of "We Are the World." But once you're about a half a minute into it, you realize as your blood freezes that they're serious when they joyfully sing about how much God hates all of us.

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Matt Taibbi passes along a disgusting story of the son of Hank Paulson, who's bilking the taxpayers of Portland Oregon out of $80 million for, of all things and in this day and age, a soccer stadium. Yes, you got that right, a stadium devoted to a boring sport that was ideally designed for paraplegics.

Somehow, it doesn't surprise me that the spawn of Bullet Head Hank would have the chutzpah to strongarm the city of Portland for enough money to provide annual health care, even at today's bloated rates, for nearly 24,000 families.

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In case you hadn't already seen it, John Aravosis, himself an attorney, delivered a takedown of the Obama adminsitration's and Justice Department's endorsement and defense of DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act). What makes this rationalization so despicable, which could've been written by the religious far right, is that Obama had picked to co-write the brief one W. Scott Simpson, a Bush-era appointee who's also a Mormon zealot who'd previously defended the Bush administration against those missing emails and Bush's attempt to ban late-term abortions.

What makes Obama's current stance on same sex marriage even more despicable is that while on the campaign trail, he'd described DOMA as "abhorrent." And yet, gun-luvin' right wing zealots are still stocking up on firearms.

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