Headlines - Tuesday June 29

Pensacola Beach, Florida before British Petroleum:

 

This is what it looks like now.

 

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But squirrels and cops are terrorists

ROGER EBERT ON 5-4 OVERTURNING OF CHICAGO HANDGUN BAN: "Supreme Court sides with squirrel hunters and drug gangs against cops and innocent bystanders." @ebertchicago/Reuters/Sun Times

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Some new heart wrenching video footage of the oil gusher: http://www.americablog.com/2010/06/some-new-heart-wrenching-video-footage.html

 

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h/t Andy: Funny, positive, informative and very entertaining newsletter you can subscribe to here.

 

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Betty Bowers:

 

Not one tightly spooled tornado or sizzling bolt of lightning has decimated even an inch of crepe paper during this year's tawdry Gay Pride parades. Clearly, the Lord is too preoccupied with despoiling Florida's lovely, white sand beaches with unwanted, brown oil. And, honestly, it doesn't take someone with an almost-high-school education to see a divine anti-immigration metaphor at work! His eye is on the sparrow -- even if it now looks like a blackbird.

 

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GOP invites rebuked religious right general, who says he speaks with the holy spirit, to testify at the Kagan confirmation hearings.

 

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Bob Herbert is the latest to weigh in on the opportunity squandered by the Obama Administration as a result of its mad love affair with the Pentagon and Wall Street, forsaking all others.

 

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Dispatch from the "Holy Shit!" file.

 

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Citing SB-1070 and the fact that they are above the law, Latinos withdraw applications for top University of Arizona position.

 

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After Obama eats hamburgers with Medvedev, Russian spies caught all over America

Just days after Barack Obama took his "solid and reliable partner" Dmitry Medvedev out for hamburgers in Arlington, the Justice Department announced the breakup of a major Russian spy ring operating right there in Northern Virginia — as well as in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts. The spies were so deeply embedded in the United States (and each other) that many of them were paired off to have children and live as yuppie families. They even did their information exchanges using wirelessly networked laptops at coffee houses. If only the 11 spies had grown fat and covered themselves in tattoos and constantly threatened to kill the president and blow up Congress, nobody would've ever noticed them. MORE »

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Steve Forbes craps on Robert Byrd's fresh grave

Robot-dweeb asswipe Steve Forbes was such a great Republican Presidential Candidate that absolutely no-one can remember that Steve Forbes did this, not so long ago. Has he vanished up the anus of his inherited wealth? No, of course not. He's a fake Teabagger. He's got a Twitter. And he's so happy Robert Byrd is dead. The only thing that would be better, for banks, is if every other Democrat in the Senate died … and Scott Brown, too, if Scott Brown's thinking about voting for financial reform. [Twitter via Wonkette Op "Angie D."]

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Exxon Valdez Cleanup Crew Dead Link
But Obama says it's safe to clean the Gulf?
Didn't we fault Bush for pulling this at Ground Zero?

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Wisco: Climategate dies, but no one will run the obit

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SUPREME COURT: The Vatican Is Not Immune To U.S. Pedophilia Lawsuits

Wow. The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from the Vatican, which was attempting to shield itself from child molestation lawsuits in the United States.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused on Monday to consider whether the Vatican has legal immunity over the sexual abuse of minors by priests in the United States, allowing a lawsuit filed in 2002 to go forward. The nation's highest court, asked to rule on a U.S. appeals court decision that cleared the way for the lawsuit to proceed, rejected the Vatican's immunity appeal without comment. The lawsuit, filed by a plaintiff identified only as John Doe, claimed he was sexually abused on several occasions in the mid-1960s when he was 15 or 16 by a Roman Catholic priest named Father Andrew Ronan. According to court documents, Ronan molested boys in the mid-1950s as a priest in Ireland and then in Chicago before his transfer to a church in Portland, Oregon, where he allegedly abused the victim who filed the lawsuit. Ronan died in 1992. The Vatican claimed immunity under a U.S. law, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976, that allows foreign states to avoid being sued in court. But the law contains exceptions. The appeals court cited one of those, ruling the lawsuit has sufficiently alleged that Ronan was an employee of the Vatican acting within the scope of his employment under Oregon law.

The lawyer for the above-cited Oregon case says he plans to depose Pope Benedict. "I won't start with him; I'm going to work my way up. But this ruling gives me the ability to depose anybody within the organization who has knowledge about the events."

Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) reacts: "The Supreme Court's decision gives hope to hundreds of thousands of clergy sex abuse victims across the globe who know lies remain under wraps at the Vatican and will only be unearthed through persistent action by secular justice officials and systems."

 

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SINGAPORE: World's Most Expensive Hotel Opens With World's Largest Outdoor Pool

The $6B Marina Sands Hotel opened in Singapore this weekend with a 650-foot infinity pool on the 55th floor. More cool/scary photos here. What global recession?

 

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So we've reached the everybody-knows-we've-lost-but-we're-still-wasting-lives-and-treasure stage of the Afghanistan clusterfuck.

Derrick Crowe at FireDogLake:

One of the gems buried in Michael Hastings' now ubiquitous Rolling Stone article is a senior adviser to General McChrystal thanking his lucky stars for public ignorance of the state of the war:

Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn't begin to reflect how deeply fucked up things are in Afghanistan. "If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular," a senior adviser to McChrystal says.

Well, mission accomplished, gentlemen. Your little frat party managed to get everyone's attention and, combined with a never-ending stream of gruesome milestones, it caused the bottom to drop out of public support for the Afghanistan War.

Read the whole thing.

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For more than year now, only one person has gotten the ugly truth about murdering, criminal military contractor Blackwater: Jeremy Scahill at The Nation. Now he reveals the real reason Blackwater is still sucking up millions of taxpayer dollars in new government contracts:

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Japanese whale burgers in the name of research

Japan is actively pursuing to end the ban on hunting for specific whale species.  Their argument is that whale meat is an integral part of Japanese culture.

Asking Japan to abandon this part of its culture would compare to Australians being asked to stop eating meat pies, Americans being asked to stop eating hamburgers and the English being asked to go without fish and chips.

In truth, whale meat is more of a delicacy and not a staple food in Japan so the above statement is little more than BS.  As a means to get around the whaling ban, Japan hunts whales under the pretext that it is doing research as a means to actually save the animal from extinction.  A whistleblower's account of the truth…

He once wielded a knife on the deck of a Japanese whaling ship, slicing apart the behemoths of the ocean in the name of "scientific research", while much of the rest of the world looked on in horror.

Now, as Japan pushes to overturn the 24-year ban on commercial whaling, the former whaler has come forward with allegations of widespread criminality among the men with whom he spent months in the freezing waters of the Antarctic.

Sent every winter to slaughter the mammals for research that Japan says is vital to our understanding of whale populations, the crewmen are instead seizing and selling prized cuts of meat to earn extra cash and, in at least one case, earn many more times their annual salary, says the whaler-turned-whistleblower.

The Japanese are fooling no one but the killing continues while the International Whaling Commission looks on.  Sick.