The News at a Furtive Glance

For a Tuesday, it's been a pretty eventful news day. So, culled from all over the intertubes box comes these news items straight into Pottersville Central.

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Perhaps the biggest, and most welcome, news item today is the resignation of right wing evangelical hack Karen Handel, or as I prefer to call her, Messiah's Handel. Political Insider's Jim Galloway makes a superb over-the-shoulder catch by noting, "Note that Handel says she is declining the offer of a severance package from Komen — which might have required her to keep silent."

So, it looks as if money isn't the only thing on the minds of Republican reptiles. Sometimes the Almighty trumps even the Almighty Dollar. No doubt on some absurdly trafficked Twitter or Facebook account, we'll be hearing endless bitching about how Handel, who was too shrill and right wing for even Georgia goobernatorial voters, was railroaded and hounded out of Komen because of godless, heathen liberals. Which she was. Next stop, Fox Ne... Oh, wait. She already beat me to it.

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A few hours ago, the AP and other major media outlets reported that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Proposition H8 as "unconstitutional". As an open bisexual and lifelong liberal, this makes me happy but you know there's one more stop after the 9th and you also know these wingnuts who are trying to ban gay marriage in California will not hit the brakes, ever. I don't imagine the right wing SCOTUS will have the stomach to get involved in something that amounts to a state's rights issue but you never know: They may unpleasantly surprise you.

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I'm sad to report the passing of Janice Voss, a veteran of five shuttle missions, last night of cancer at the too-young age of 55. Human knowledge is immeasurably richer because of Voss and her courageous work in outer space. Says Space.com:

Voss launched on her first and final missions aboard the shuttle Endeavour. As a member of the STS-57 crew in June 1993, she helped conduct biomedical and material science experiments in the first commercially-developed Spacehab module, a pressurized laboratory mounted in the orbiter's payload bay that more than doubled the work area for astronaut-tended activities.

In February 2000 Voss again launched on Endeavour, this time for NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. After deploying a nearly 200-foot (60-meter) mast, Voss and her crewmates worked around the clock in two shifts to map more than 47 million square-miles (122 million square-kilometers) of the Earth's land surface.

Sympathies go out to her family and whoever else loved her.

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There was a football game on last Sunday. Another mediocre team won. Whatever. The team, the Giants, is occupying Wall Street and their ticker tape parade was today. Says Reeves Wiedeman of the New Yorker:

Commerce was still in full effect on Wall Street this morning, but mostly in the form of T-shirts, which people were putting on over their coats as they walked past confused European tourists heading in the opposite direction, and toward Broadway for the team’s Super Bowl victory parade.

I stationed myself across the street from Zuccotti Park, and I hate to break it to Occupy, but they never got a crowd like this. The message was clear, and unified, and it seems that our nation’s priorities have not been shifted all that much: we’d still rather cheer for millionaire athletes than for our own benefit.

Pretty surprising aside from a sportswriter. If he really ate his Wheaties this morning, he could've also added how absurd it is that we can arrange in mere hours ticker tape parades for world champion teams but not for veterans of a war that had lasted for nearly nine years.

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Maybe Rupert already learned from the FBI Director's cell phone but for the rest of us, we're now hearing that the FBI is ramping up its investigation of Rupert Murdoch's empire for possibly breaking the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (thank you, President Carter). Where, O where will poor little Rupert get the money to pay the fine to the DOJ to make it all go away?

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Less than a year and a half ago, Barack Obama was railing about the SCOTUS's Citizen's United ruling and even pissed and moaned about its effects during his State of the Union Address weeks later (making Sam Alito mouth the words, "Not true."). Well, that didn't last long.

Because it seems the cash-strapped "campaigner in chief" is now calling for SuperPAC donations, meaning he's essentially given up on public financing. It's our fault, I guess, for not being enterprising enough to have billions at our disposal to fund what's shaping up to be the first billion dollar presidential campaign. If only we weren't so damned lazy.

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Oh, and Karl Rove is "offended" about Clint Eastwood's "Halftime in America" Chrysler ad that was aired during the Super Bowl. Seems he didn't have nearly as a big a problem with another truck commercial ad set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland because he knows that's what America will look like after his man Romney's first day in office.

See you in the funny pages.