As the story of the arrest of Professor Henry Gates has unfolded, this was bound to happen. Apparently, the Boston Police Department now has their own Mark Fuhrman:

A Boston police officer allegedly sent a mass e-mail using a disgraceful racial slur in referring to Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., prompting the commissioner to move immediately to fire the cop, the Herald has learned.

Officer Justin Barrett, 36, a two-year veteran assigned to District B-3, was placed on administrative leave pending a termination hearing yesterday afternoon. When a supervisor confronted Barrett about the e-mail - in which he called Gates a “jungle monkey” - he admitted to being the author, according to officials.

Police Commissioner Edward Davis immediately stripped the cop of his gun and badge, according to officials. Barrett, who could not immediately be reached, has no prior disciplinary history. Read on...

I've tried to understand the minds of scum like this, but it only ends in excruciating pain -- every time. With all the racist hate being spewed on right wing radio and television, it's no wonder guys like Barrett are worked up to the point where they can no longer control their hatred. I guess this would be another one of those "teachable moments?"

Marco Rubio, the ultra Limbaugh conservative who's running for the Senate against the very popular Charlie Crist doesn't like my idea of postponing the August recess if a health-care bill is stalled. He tweeted that he hopes for just the opposite.

marcorubio: Has a congressional recess ever been more needed than now? Every day hoping time runs out on bad policy in D.C.

Thanks for the endorsement Marco. The country needs help and you want Congress to play in a sandbox for August. He's a Club for Growth republican who is having problems raising money. Howie Klein called him the anti-Amato in an email to me and he has more info on Marco "Ricky" Rubio.

I am so glad I don't live in California, where propositions rule, an action hero pretends to be a governor and "no new taxes" is not a guideline but a fundamentalist state religion.

Reporting from Sacramento -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday signed a budget plan sent to him by lawmakers to close the state's monumental deficit, using his veto pen to impose nearly $500 million in additional cuts.

The new reductions will affect child welfare and children's healthcare, the elderly, state parks and AIDS treatment and prevention, going beyond the dramatic cuts that were part of the deal Schwarzenegger negotiated with legislative leaders.

Democratic leaders in the Assembly and Senate reacted angrily to his use of the line-item veto, disputing the Republican governor's authority to wield that power in this situation and portraying him as callous.

Schwarzenegger's aides said the cuts were proper, and the governor said they were necessary.

"This has been a very tough budget, probably the toughest since I have been in office here in Sacramento," Schwarzenegger said. "This budget is kind of like the good, the bad and the ugly."

The good, the governor said, is that the plan does not raise taxes and includes changes he says will make government more efficient, such as reorganizing and abolishing some boards and commissions.

The bad are the deep cuts to state programs that will touch millions of Californians, particularly its most vulnerable citizens, he said.

The ugly, Schwarzenegger added, are the new reductions he made because lawmakers left town after failing to fully close the state's deficit.

The Assembly on Friday capped a 20-hour session by rejecting provisions worth $1.1 billion that had been agreed to by the governor and legislative leaders.

The extra cuts the governor made Tuesday -- $489 million -- took nearly $80 million that pays for workers who help abused and neglected children; $50 million from Healthy Families, which provides healthcare to children in low-income families; $50 million from services for developmentally delayed children under age 3; $16 million from domestic-violence programs; and $6.3 million from services for the elderly. Among other reductions was $6.2 million more from parks, which could result in the closure of 100, rather than 50, of California's 279 state parks.

In addition, Schwarzenegger effectively gutted a program that provides local governments with funding to encourage property owners to preserve open space and to use land for agriculture.

Ted Lempert, president of Children Now, an advocacy group, called the cut to Healthy Families "particularly galling." He said a coalition, including his group, is spearheading a campaign to put a universal children's healthcare measure on the fall 2010 ballot.

"A struggling family puts their kids first," Lempert said. "What the governor and what the state has done is the opposite."

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It's come full circle now:

Here we go again. Another phony pro-life or should I say, anti-choice republican gets exposed in dirty dealings. He's not so much against the idea of sex as wanting the young ones for himself.

We have lift off. The lying liar Rep. Paul Stanley has resigned from his seat after having and affair with an intern and then being blackmailed.

Sen. Paul Stanley, R-Germantown sent a letter of resignation to Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey this afternoon after allegations that a Clarksville man had tried to blackmail the senator with nude photos of an intern taken in Stanley’s Nashville apartment.

Earlier today, Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris told a Memphis TV station that Stanley should “do the right thing for his family’s sake and for the sake of his constituents” and step down so a new election for his seat can be held.Norris said in a statement released Tuesday that Republican leaders have been working behind the scenes for about a week to get Stanley to step down. Stanley told agents from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation that he had a sexual relationship with the intern, McKensie Morrison, a 22-year-old Austin Peay student from Dickson, but has declined to speak publicly about the matter. He may be doing an interview with a Memphis radio station within the hour.

Just another right wing family values creep gets exposed. Sex for him but not for thee. How long will it be until he starts quoting the Bible? Maybe he should email Mark Sanford for some spiritual advice. Unfortunately for him, Sanford already took the ever popular "God is on my side," line. I'm sure he'll find another.

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(Monochrome Set - another in a long line of unpredictable bands, for which we are forever grateful)

1979. The wave of Post-punk/pre-New Wave bands were starting to make their presences known over here in the States - eroding what was a pretty stodgy business during the mid-1970's. One of those bands were The Monochrome Set. Probably less commercially known than XTC, but no less interesting. They've enjoyed a pretty lengthy career, going from 1978 to 1985 and then picking up in 1990 to 1998. There was a one-off gig last year. So whether or not they will surface and regroup in the future is anyone's guess.

But for now - here's their second single "Eine Symphonie des Grauens".

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We've already seen evidence, particularly from the last round on July 4, that the "Tea Party" movement was attracting a significant bloc of extremists of various stripes: conspiracy theorists (particularly Birthers), xenophobes, anti-government radicals, gun nuts. And they're not just filling the ranks -- they're taking leadership roles, particularly in speaking at their events.

When this bloc starts taking over, you have to start wondering where all this is going. Because you know it's not going to be a healthy direction.

Greta Van Susteren last night featured a segment on an incident in St. Louis in which the local teabaggers came out in force to "hijack" a public forum on health care hosted by Sen. Claire McCaskill's office. She and her guest, Dana Loesch, were eager to applaud the "hijacjking," but the whole thing was actually pretty disturbing.

A couple of things stood out: First, the pretense that "this isn't about political parties" is manifest nonsense. These events are about stopping Barack Obama, the newly elected president, from enacting the very policies he campaigned for and was indeed elected to enact.

Trying to pretend that it's anything else simply doesn't wash any longer. Anyone who can say with a straight face that they voted for Obama but oppose what he's doing with health care -- when in fact he openly and significantly campaigned on promises he would enact just this kind of program -- is a pretty good liar, but a liar nonetheless.

More disturbing, I thought, was the way the teabaggers used their numbers to shout down their opposition and generally intimidate the town-hall nature of the forum. What was supposed to have been an open discussion of the issues instead became a pushy shoutfest. That's not how democracy works. It's ugly when the left does it, and it's ugly when the right does it too.

Is this what the Tea Parties are morphing into? Street theater for the right, becoming increasingly extremist in nature, and increasingly prone to disruptive tactics? The disenfranchised right is getting desperate, and this sure looks to be the direction they're heading.

Part 2 of Mike Stark's attempt to get these crazy birther Congressmen and Congresswomen to admit that President Barack Obama is a natural born American citizen.

From The Colbert Report:

Stephen thanks Orly Taitz for being one of the few people willing to compare the Obama administration to Nazi Germany.

We need people like Senator Jeff Merkley fighting for us. Blue America still has our act-blue page alive and well for health care reform. Please pitch in if you can.

It's so frustrating watching the Max Baucus coalition try and dictate health care reform for America.

Not to just keep flogging a dead horse endlessly, but it does strike me as worth noting that when you read a puff piece in The New York Times about the Gang of Six bipartisan dealmakers in the Senate that vast power is being wielded by people who, in a democratic system of government, would have almost no power. We’re talking, after all, about Max Baucus of Montana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Susan Collins of Maine, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Collectively those six states contain about 2.74 percent of the population, less than New Jersey, or about one fifth the population of California. The six largest states, by contrast, contain about 40 percent of Americans...read on

And Max Baucus was leaking out costs today to the media from the Holy CBO that he says gets their bill to cost under the magic 1 trillion mark. Of course the Holy Grail doesn't have all the figures yet, Max says, but he's trying to sell it to the media that way. If the plan doesn't cost anything then it won't do anything. Being obsessed by the Holy CBO has been a huge big mistake. Just to remind you, Max Baucus was instrumental in getting Bush's tax cuts passed back in 2001.

Baucus started his career as a relatively low-profile congressman from conservative Montana but, in recent years, has shown a willingness to stray from the Democratic lines, at times sparking intense fights with the congressional Democratic leadership. He supported President Bush’s trillion-dollar tax cut that mainly benefitted the wealthy in 2001, fought to add a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare (in language pushed by the Bush administration) and sought billions in aid for drought-plagued farmers in his home state.

And now he plans to kill health care.

Bill Clinton speaks up about the CBO:

Former President Bill Clinton, himself a victim of an errant Congressional Budget Office score or two, implied today that the agency wasn't connected enough to the real world to know whether programs would save money or not. Speaking a few days after the CBO estimated that the White House's latest "gamechanger," an independent Medicare Advisory Commission to set prices, would save little money over 10 years, Clinton urged policy-makers -- and here he means Democrats -- to not accept the CBO's scores without adding a dollop of common sense. " I recognize that if you're in that budget office, you've got to project the future," Clinton said. But certain programs would realize savings "regardless of whether the mathematical rules they are now up with will prove it or not." He said that those with a stake in changing the system "almost always get the short end of the stick" when it comes to budget projections.

And Digby explains:

n order to understand what this really means you you have to recall that there was no discussion, zero, when the last administration asserted without any debate that we were engaged in a war without end, for which costs could not be measured nor should they be. It was accepted by members of both parties as a simple imperative and no discussion of cost-benefit analyses were even on the table. But when it comes to directly benefiting Americans with a life and death threat of another sort, that's all we talk about. This is not an accident

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This whole health care debate has been played very badly. Not getting into the game publicly for so long allowed the right wingers and Evan Bayh Democrats to corrupt the health care messaging. Now we hear that the Blue Dogs have corrupted the EC&C committee also. We'll see what actually happens a little later. People are usually very reluctant to change anything in life, even if it's going to help so it's not a shock that America is split over health care reform in the polls. It's a big deal and in the end people will be more hesitant to actually back change. That's why we need a strong leader to communicate it. That just means the Democratic Party must keep pushing forward. The Republicans went forward with the lunacy of the Terri Schiavo matter even when 79% of Americans were against government intervention in a family matter. That''s their core values. They are birthers. We want real health care reform that will help us all. We believe in America.

Howie Klein has more on Max and the Blue Dogs.

Continue reading »

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Rachel Maddow on the GOP's latest conspiracy theory. Republicans are trying to rally their base by painting health care reform as a way to advance assisted suicide and to literally kill old people. It would be bad enough if this were only coming from fringe groups or right wing web sites, but as Rachel notes, it's coming straight from these politicians' mouths.

The Republicans continue to prove that Bill Maher was right about them with this kind of talk.

Maher: This is because we don't have a left and a right party in this country any more. We have a center right party, and a crazy party. And over the last thirty odd years, Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital.