Kanellos the Greek Protest Dog

Kanellos the Protest Dog (pictured above) has been making frequent appearances at Athens demonstrations over the past two years. Head over to the Guardian for a bunch of photos.

Clicking through the images, I find it interesting that Kanellos seems at times actively engaged in the protests, whereas in other instances he simply sits and watches the show. Thus, it's hard to guess at his politics.

Given this information, I have no reason not to believe that Kanellos is the earthly incarnation of Eris, the Greek goddess of strife, discord, contention and rivalry. Prove me wrong.

Timing is Everything

Machete has a message... for Arizona.

Cheap Blogging Crutch - 5.6.10

Welcome back, my fiends. I hope you're not still reeling from another exciting day at the dog track. It's times like these when I fail to understand why you investment-minded folk out there don't just bet your paycheck on Papa's Moustache in the 3rd. I suspect the ROI is about the same. Warning: Here Be Linkage.

After some legwork, The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan confirmed that in Britain, you can, in fact, vote drunk. At long last, this explains how that country ever found Margaret Thatcher an attractive option.

Today on Don Imus' show, Glenn Beck refused to endorse Arizona batshit insane Republican senate candidate, J.D. Hayworth, agreeing with Imus that Hayworth is a "fat, undisciplined maggot." All this after arguing the other day that the NYPD was right to mirandize Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. Can we please get Beck off of whatever medication he is on? I don't want to live in a world where he even comes close to making sense.

A police officer in the 81st precinct of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant surreptitiously recorded fellow officers and superiors between June 2008 and October 2009. The tapes showed a systematic manipulation of crime statistics and civil liberties at the behest of commanding officers that makes The Wire's Baltimore look like Mayberry. Naturally, the NYPD responded by detaining the whistleblowing officer and whisking him off for psychiatric evaluation.

For the past 18 months, the meeting room in Nebraska's Adams County courthouse has been adorned, as is traditional, with portraits of both Gov. Dave Heineman and President Barack Obama. The catch? Obama's portrait was not an official one but this notorious fake. County Supervisor Eldon Orthmann, who is responsible for the photo, has relented and will replace it with one featuring the president in full Kenyan Chieftain garb, drinking heartily from the severed throat of a white Christian infant.

And finally, our intrepid research staff has uncovered a photo of the male prostitute hired by heavy luggage-toting anti-gay zealot George Alan Rekers. It seems Rev. Rekers specifically requested the Mythical Creature Package. (Mythical Creature's Package?)

Picture of the day

Via Wired Science and the NASA Terra satellite comes a sattelite's eye view of the Gulf slowly turning from a blue mass of water into a brown sludge of oil.

From the start of the disaster on the 21st:


To the 29th:

WBWJR

Following up a story from yesterday's Crutch, Stephen Colbert asks "What Boy Would Jesus Rent?"

You misheard them

Hey, remember when all those Republican politicians were all like "Drill, Baby, Drill", were openly advocating for offshore drilling as basically being our sole energy policy, held entire rallies, speeches, and interviews advocating for offshore drilling, made offshore drilling the central pillar of their energy policy and environmental negotiations, and were all like "drink a glass of offshore oil with every breakfast"? No? That right, because it never happened. You hear me? IT NEVER HAPPENED!!!!

In the wake of the massive BP oil spill, Senate Republicans are disowning the catchphrase “Drill, Baby, Drill,” claiming that Republicans never endorsed it. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) attempted to distance themselves and their party from the phrase yesterday, pretending not to know who popularized it, and dismissing the slogan

“That was not a Senate Republican phrase,” Kyl said. “I think there was a candidate that used that. I think our phrase was ‘drill here, drill now,’ meaning here in the United States and as quickly as oil and gas leases are going.”

Roberts said Republicans were always uneasy with the catchphrase.

“I don’t know about the slogan. The slogan was what, two, three years ago and basically we had a lot of opposition to it anyway.”

......Right. Who could possibly ever remember the Presidential candidate and the woman VP candidate who would shout it almost as much as they shouted "Maverick" (another phrase which we recently learned had never actually been uttered)? Who could remember the swaths of supporters chanting it or the GOP lawmakers who also adopted the slogan and made the policy behind that slogan a pillar of their ideology?

Oh, I'm sorry, their slogan was "Drill here, drill now". That's completely different than "Drill, baby, drill". I don't even think "Drill here, drill now" even references offshore oil drilling. I think it has something to do with support for Dentistry.

So please, don't try to tie this around the necks of the GOP like a giant albatross. I mean who can remember, in all this confusion, who advocated for drilling where and when? I mean that whole "Drill, baby, drill" thing was so 15 minutes ago. Literally, 15 minutes ago. Who can remember back to mid-morning? What's important to remember is that no one ever heard of or spoke of offshore drilling in any way that could be construed as support before this disaster happened. In fact, what's offshore drilling? What's oil? Where am I? Who are you?

Stay classy, BP

With oil quickly replacing water as the main liquid in the Gulf of Mexico, of course you expect failed rig proprietors BP to take extensive steps... to mitigate the damage to their asses from a legal and financial standpoint. Actually stopping that leak? That's in God's hands now. After all, this whole mess was an Act of God. If He wanted the dinosaur blood to stop seeping from the earth, He would have stopped it. Not to mention the fact that if He didn't want it to happen, He wouldn't have exploded the rig or lobbied against stiffer safety regulations. God... what a scamp He is.

No, the time is right for BP to make sure that all the people about to see any body of water or shoreline consumed by murky blackness have already ceded their legal rights to hold BP responsible for the actions for which they are completely responsible.

BP has been offering $5000 payments to residents of coastal Alabama areas, in exchange for essentially giving up their right to sue the oil giant over its deadly Gulf Coast spill, according to the state's attorney general.

AG Troy King last night urged BP to stop the effort, and told Alabamians to be wary. "People need to proceed with caution and understand the ramifications before signing something like that," King said, according to the Alabama press.

A spokesman for BP told a reporter that the waiver clause had now been removed from the contracts, and that the company won't enforce it in contracts that were previously signed.

Sure. You know whenever a large multinational corporation from a powerful industrial concern gets people to sign carefully constructed legal documents in an attempt to protect their corporate asses from any molecule of justice, they always freely say they won't ever try to get people to abide by them in a court and volunteer to make the legally binding agreements weaker. That's standard practice. Especially when your CEO is out there trying to claim that

"It wasn't our accident," he told the Today Show on Monday. Pressed by anchor Meredith Vieira, Hayward claimed: "the drilling rig was a Transocean drilling rig. It was their rig and their equipment that failed, run by their people, their processes."

Yeah, I'm sure BP will live up to their legal and financial obligations. Especially when they openly balk at paying for everything they've done... in front of sitting US Senators.

So thanks to BP for keeping their priorities in line here. Cover your asses first, attempt to weasel out of responsibility and culpability second, worry about stopping that massive oil slick your shoddy practices caused... who knows when, the future is such a far off place.

Guns for terrorists

With the recent Times Square bombing plot foiled and capture of the alleged perpetrator, we are again bombarded with suggestions from our political betters on what to do with such haters of freedom.

They want the terrorists interrogated to the exacting dramatical standards of our top terrorism related TV shows. Gitmo! Under no circumstances are they to be Mirandized or afforded any sort of minor legal protections... even if it helps out intelligence gathering and legal efforts. If they are in fact American citizens, just strip them of that citizenship so we can torture and imprison them easier. Double Gitmo! Smoke them for hours over mesquite chips, thinly slice them, pile them up on rye bread with brown mustard, and eat them... for liberty's sake. It doesn't matter, just make sure these people aren't afforded any discernible legal protection or allow them to be within shouting distance of anything that could be called a Constitutional right.

Well, unless....

New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's appeal to what he called "common sense" at a congressional hearing Wednesday morning failed to sway two Republican senators who said that giving the government the ability to block the purchase of guns by suspected terrorists would undermine the Second Amendment's right to bear arms.
...
Admitting that "at first blush" the bill "seems to be an obvious step that we should take," Collins said that many people on the FBI's watchlist don't belong there. "None of us wants a terrorist to be able to purchase a gun, but neither should we want to infringe upon a Constitutional right of law-abiding Americans," she said.

Graham described the bill as an instrument of those who would ban guns altogether. "We're talking about a constitutional right here," he said, explaining that he could not support a bill that would force "innocent Americans" to "pay the cost of going to court to get their gun rights back."

Graham wasn't nearly as concerned about rights when he launched into a disquisition on the treatment of American citizens accused of terrorism. "I am all into national security," he said. "I want them to stop reading these guys Miranda rights."

That's right, these terrorists are dangerous, America hating monsters and they should be treated as if they have no legal rights... but it'll be a cold, cold day in hell before you're allowed to infringe on a terrorist's right to by a gun in America. I mean you can sit back all day and listen to GOP lawmakers tell you all the ways in which terrorist suspects aren't really people and aren't covered by any facet of US law, international law, or the Constitution... except when it comes to the Second Amendment. No, the Second clearly has a specific clause about infringing the rights of terrorists.

So remember, no matter how much Mirandizing suspects and treating them as if they had legal rights helps us gain information, it is a practice we should stop. But if say there were a way to stop terrorist suspects from buying guns or at least identify that they were purchasing guns, like say... in March... in Connecticut... a month before they were to attempt to bomb Times Square... we should under no circumstances try to stop it. Because of the Constitutional protections that don't seem to apply when dealing with any other aspect of terrorists rights.

In case you wanted to know how completely owned our elected betters were by the gun lobby... that's how completely owned. They won't even oppose taking guns away from terrorists inside our country. Stay safe!

LBJ Wants a Little More Stride in the Crotch

"Mind the bunghole, son!"

Courtesy of an acquaintance who is planning an LBJ-themed Memorial Day barbecue (yeah, you heard me) and the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, we bring you the following audio gem.

The time is early August, 1964. Congress has just passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, granting President Johnson expanded powers to deal with the "threat" posed by North Vietnam. And what is foremost on the Commander-in-Chief's mind at the outset of the most controversial military conflict of the 20th century?

Fuckin' SLACKS, is what. Listen as LBJ orders custom pants from Haggar, making clear they take his "nuts" and "bunghole" into consideration. Seriously, listen all the way through. Johnson even lets a mighty belch rip without breaking conversational stride. Full audio and transcript here.

h/t Dibbes

Blitzkrieg Art

Last week a group of cyclists dumped a few gallons of paint at an intersection in Berlin's Rosenthaler Platz and let the car tires do the rest of the work. More details and video available here.

Cheap Blogging Crutch - 5.5.10

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Broken in Brief: Hundreds of Delicious Sea Turtles Wash up on Gulf Coast Shores

One of the suffering, poor, mouth-watering creatures

GALVESTON—As the Gulf Coast reels from one of the largest oil spills in US history, the ecological toll on this fragile region is beginning to show. In the last few days numerous dying, oil-slicked animals, most notably fish and sea turtles, have been washing up along the coast. But true to the caring spirit of local citizens, groups have been organized to help handle these beleaguered creatures.

“My God, the desolation of these poor sea turtles. These poor, delicious, delicious sea turtles,” said Harold Watkins, President of the local Galveston Gourmands Club and leader of the local rescue efforts.

“My heart goes out to the struggling animals,” he said, belching. “Pardon my manners, I’m not used to talking to the press. Those, poor… tender… succulent… Excuse me, I’ll be with you in a moment, the shallots were just delivered.”

As to what measures the group was taking to clean and help the animals, several participants noted that they were running them under the tap for a quick rinse, followed by a cleansing dip in a white wine and herb marinade, followed by a slow braising for two-to-three hours.

When pressed to explain how these unconventional methods might benefit the surviving turtles, a spokesperson for the group dabbed at her eyes and the corners of her mouth with a napkin before explaining that they had yet to find a surviving turtle.

With that sad reminder of the toll this spill is causing, Watkins vowed that his club would stay until every last turtle had been properly and humanely disposed of, or until they were full.

“Tragic though this might be, we will be there every time rare and endangered animals are menaced by environmental catastrophes that conveniently distract Fish and Wildlife oversight,” Watkins declared as he let his belt out a notch and patted his stomach. “I can only hope that one day our vital rescue services are required on a panda reserve.”

Video of the day

Bill Murray. Emily Dickinson. Members of America's trade unions. I do not need to list a fourth thing.

Los blowback

It's Cinco de Mayo today. What does that mean? More irritating ads for Corona beer. But it also means that Latino are really going to catch some shit from Arizona cops. Hell, some police might go into catatonic shock there will be so many people walking about that look suspicious and need to have their papers checked.

But the holiday is also a place for opponents of the state government's new found racism to make their own statement. And that includes the Phoenix Suns, currently embroiled in the NBA playoff contest against the Spurs. The team announced it would be wearing its "Los Suns" jerseys tonight and came out against the law.

The frustration with the federal government’s failure to deal with the issue of illegal immigration resulted in passage of a flawed state law. However intended, the result of passing this law is that our basic principles of equal rights and protection under the law are being called into question, and Arizona’s already struggling economy will suffer even further setbacks at a time when the state can ill-afford them.

Suns PG and all around decent human beingSteve Nash even came out with a statement:

"I think the law is very misguided. I think it is unfortunately to the detriment to our society and our civil liberties and I think it is very important for us to stand up for things we believe in," Nash said of the bill. "I think the law obviously can target opportunities for racial profiling. Things we don't want to see and don't need to see in 2010."

Well done, gentlemen. Though while I am no Spanish scholar, I do think the correct translation of "The Suns" into Mexicanese would be "Los Soles". The Spurs announced regretfully that they weren't informed in time to bring their own "Los Spurs" jerseys, so it will be a one team tribute. Again... "The Spurs" would be "Las Espuelas".

Poor translating aside, nice to see that large Arizona entities with important ties to the community are willing to take a stand. Unfortunately this will result in Canadian Nash, Argentinian Manu Ginobli, and Frenchman Tony Parker all being detained and deported before tip-off. Still, a stand must be made. Good luck, much success, and I hope the Suns can still run and gun with Nash being tossed over the Saskatchewan border with orders to never let his freewheeling passing, play-making, and clutch shot-making taint Arizona again. Fucking foreigners.

Suddenly I'm fond of the teabaggers

You know, for all their crazy backwoods behavior, low rent racism, misspelled signs, complete fundamental misunderstanding of the issues they claimed to care about, the complete co-opting by corporations and the mainstream GOP, and their tragic misappropriation of Colonial and revolutionary trappings, the teabaggers responded to the financial crisis in a rational way.

OK, they didn't. In comparison to Greece they responded to the crisis in a relatively normal way.

Three people were killed in an apparent firebomb attack on a bank in central Athens Wednesday as a massive protest against recent Greek austerity measures turned violent and angry youths rampaged through the city center torching several businesses, smashing shop windows and overturning garbage bins.
...
The violence Wednesday came as tens of thousands of protesters gathered to demonstrate against the government's recently announced austerity measures in one of the largest protests in recent years, and coincide with a nationwide general strike that has paralyzed the country.

The strike is seen as a key test of the government's ability to shepherd through tough austerity measures in exchange for an €110 billion ($143 billion) bailout loan from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Greece is on the precipice of complete financial collapse as a result of the crisis, had to be bailed out by the IMF, conspired with Goldman-Sachs to mask the extent of the problem, and the government took the rather drastic measure of cutting wages for public workers, putting a three-year freeze on pensions, and increasing taxes on fuel, alcohol, and tobacco in order to deal with the IMF loan that might just end up making things worse for Greece in the end.

Kind of makes things like a black President and Congressional Democrats engaging in their Constitutionally mandated duty to pass legislation, seem like kind of a ridiculous thing to get worked up about, doesn't it? On the other hand, the President is really, really black.

So congrats, Tea Party movement. When compared to a country facing much worse financial problems and protesters dealing with it in much more violent ways, you come out smelling like roses. Thanks for only advocating for the burning, shooting, and killing of things you don't like, not actually doing it.

Slap iron with the Lord

What's been our biggest fear ever since Obama was elected. Besides him stealing the white man's shit to give it to black people. Besides socialism. Besides him flaunting his Kenyan birth. Besides him letting Joe Biden use adult scissors.

That's right, Obama's jackbooted thugs kicking open the door to a church, dragging Jesus out in handcuffs, and tossing him in a jail cell to rot. Well, no more. You hear me Obama! NO MORE! Jesus will be protected!

Louisiana state Rep. Henry Burns (R) has introduced a bill in the Louisiana House that would allow churches to institute a "security plan" enabling congregants with concealed weapons permits to carry guns into churches and temples.

According to a Burns spokesperson, "we buy fire extinguishers in case there's a fire," and allowing churchgoers to carry concealed is just the "final stage of security" for places of worship.

House Bill 68 would allow a church or temple to authorize an unlimited number of congregation members to bring their guns into church, according to the individual church's own guidelines.

Glad to see there's not some pressing matter lapping at Louisiana's shores. Good to see that the elected betters of the state are able to move forward with this priority.

Let's just add church to the list of places where people feel that they are in danger of having someone goad them into an actual dick measuring contest and they feel the need to flash iron to avert a certain loss. That makes it Obama speeches, tea parties, bars and restaurants that serve alcohol, national parks, trains, schools, colleges, and... anywhere... without a permit to the myriad of news places where guns are viewed as needed. Why yes, that last example was from Arizona. Thanks for asking.

So now you concerns of "What if I'm reading Paul's letters to the Thessalonians and Gungans... and a pitched, John Woo style gun battle breaks out? Will the man finally let me legally whip out a glock and fire back?" have finally been addressed. Though only in Louisiana. Everywhere else the Lord is still in danger of taking a hollow point in the cross. We can't allow that to happen. He already used up His one resurrection.

Still, stay vigilant. I hear there's a plot that involves a man of Middle Eastern heritage showing up in flowing white robes and telling the faithful of how the end is nigh. That's when you're going to have to pull out the guns and tell him NOT ON OUR WATCH! Then it'll be safe for the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus to safely come take us all up to Heaven.

Dick Cheney and an Energy Sink. That's it.

Courtesy of The Infrastructurist comes this handy graph explaining which states should be unceremoniously expelled from our nation on the grounds that their absurdly decentralized populations and resulting per capita energy demands (I'm looking at you, Wyoming) make them a liability. As for Jersey, well, it's not like we really required more evidence.

As per usual, click to (drastically) embiggen.

Guh?

Hey, sorry I've been away. I parked my 1993 Nissan Pathfinder in Times Square and it seems to have gone missing. Been looking for it the past few days. Anyone seen it?

Oh.... Whoops.

Anyway, with all that behind us and a terrorist attack averted, now comes the most important part of any post-attack period: attacking the President for purely political reasons over a perceived lack of manliness and commitment to making America feel it's enemies have been sufficiently brutalized in the name of freedom. Obama's crime this time? He read the suspect his Miranda rights again and the suspect started freely giving up information again. When will he learn? That stuff might work in the real world, but in the fantasies of the right wing politicians of our country it doesn't and we would be better served by waterboarding these people 10 or 170 times. So let's listen to them bitch about it.

In a steady stream of indictments, top-ranking officials in the GOP said it didn't matter that the Obama Department of Justice was getting information from Faisal Shahzad, the now-detained the Pakistani-born American. The fact that the administration chose to read Miranda rights to the suspect shows a national security policy steeped in naivety and potentially dangerous.

"That is a stroke of good luck," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said of the news that Shahzad was cooperating even after getting his Miranda rights read to him. "What if he had not waived them and just quit talking, said 'I want my lawyer'?"

"Maybe we got lucky and [Shahzad] said I will go ahead and talk to you anyway," said Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). "But you didn't know that when you read [him] the rights. So I stand by what I said -- it is better in these kinds of cases to get the intelligence first and then, if you decide you want to proceed with an Article 3 prosecution, then read the Miranda rights."

Peter King and John McCain joined the din shrieking against Mirandizing and having a terrorism policy that made sense, but had to be rebuked by Glenn Beck.

"He is a citizen of the United States, so I say we uphold the laws and the Constitution on citizens… If you are a citizen, you obey the law and follow the Constitution. He has all the rights under the Constitution… We don't shred the Constitution when it is popular. We do the right thing."

Yes, that Glenn Beck.

Dizzy. World spinning. Must... find couch... to... faint on. What kind of world do we live in where Glenn Beck is making sense on terrorism policies and actions taken by the Obama Administration? Wasn't it more likely that Obama would grow a Lenin style goatee, unleash robot death panels, goose step down Pennsylvania Avenue with his Obama Youth squads, and turn into the fascist parody Beck had been painting him as, rather than Beck deciding to make actual sense on terrorism and the Constitution?

This is too much for my brain to process. I heroically overcome a bout of SuperAIDS and have to deal with this mindfuck? Still, score one for Beck doubling his meds and joining the fight to see our counter-intel and interrogation strategies get based on strategies that work instead of something you half remember as being completely awesome when Jack Bauer did them in Season 3 of 24 and would assuredly result in the man not getting convicted. Some other Fox commentator will have to worry about the stiffness of America's war boner, Glenn Beck is dabbling in rationality today. I'm sure we'll have to rescind this literally seconds from now, but... good job... Glenn Beck.

/tepidly golf claps
//belts scotch from a flask

Cheap Blogging Crutch - 5.4.10

Welcome to your semi-daily assortment of linkage, hastily cobbled together by yours truly as Matthew continues to recover from the nasty bout of Syphilis Super AIDS that has crippled him for close to a week now. In lieu of flowers, we ask that you send stacks of unmarked, non-sequential bills to my attention, c/o Jon & John's House of Starchy Living and Temperance Den, Brooklyn, NY.

An adaption of Hunter S. Thompson's "Prisoner of Denver," which he co-wrote with Vanity Fair contributing editor Mark Seal, has been picked up for treatment by Motion Picture Corporation of America. Given the pace at which The Rum Diary adaptation has moved, "Prisoner of Denver" is set for release in the summer of 2028.

Phoenix Suns Managing Partner Robert Sarver announced that in protest of the new Arizona immigration law, his team will wear their "Los Suns" jerseys for tomorrow's Cinco de Mayo game against the San Antonio Spurs. No word yet on when Sarver will learn that the Spanish word for sun is "sol."

What I Wore narcissism fashion blogger, Jessica Schroeder, has landed a book deal with Random House imprint Ballantine. The literary community rejoiced at the news that pretty, self-involved, materialistic New York women will finally be represented in contemporary media.

Soothsayer Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight updated his forecast for the upcoming UK election, predicting that Conservatives will win 308 seats. As an American, this means absolutely nothing to you. And they still haven't fixed Steve Coogan's mother's wall, the bastards.

Finally, on a happy note, Paul Rudd sweats funny.

13 seconds, 67 rounds

Forty years ago today, four unarmed students were murdered and another nine injured by National Guard troops at Kent State University. The students' crime? Protesting the expansion of an already unjust war into Cambodia by a president who campaigned on the promise to end that war. Do not forget this.

Broken News: Massive Cleanup Underway at Wind Farm

The horror, the horror...

TAYLOR COUNTY, TX--Recovery crews raced to the scene of potentially the largest environmental disaster in United States history, as an accident at America's largest wind farm has begun spewing thousands of cubic meters of air into the air.

The incident occurred at approximately 4:00 am local time yesterday at the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in central Texas. With 421 wind turbines and an estimated capacity of 735 megawatts, Horse Hollow is by far the largest such installation in the United States.

State officials were quick to call for federal aid. Texas governor Rick Perry convened an emergency press conference and described the wind farm spill as, "the most troubling man-made disaster to beset the Lone Star State since we got rid of all the Mexicans."

President Obama immediately dispatched teams from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the EPA to the site of the accident. While NOAA scientists have only just begun their analysis, initial testing suggests the foul gaseous mixture spilling into the atmosphere consists of approximately 78% Nitrogen and 20% Oxygen, with trace amounts of Argon, Carbon Dioxide, Neon, Helium, and Hydrogen.

"While we do not yet know the totality of the threat posed by this unfortunate accident, we are taking every step to ensure speedy identification of the substance so that proper countermeasures can be initiated," said NOAA spokesperson Elizabeth McDonald.

Early estimates have tracking an enormous amount of air spilling into roughly 60% of the Lone Star State, with dramatic gale-force squalls rolling into Oklahoma's notoriously un-wind-swept plains. Some analysts have predicted that soon the air leaking out from this environmental calamity will cover most of the Midwest. However, states as far north as Maine are already reporting trace gusts of air in the air.

Pundits were quick to pounce on the incident as proof of the dangers of alternative energy.

"This is just the latest failure of this administration's radical liberal environmentalist agenda. How much longer are we, as Americans, going to permit these immense radical international renewable energy conglomerates to defile our great country? This, my friends, is Obama's Katrina," said prominent conservative figure and noted animal lover, Glenn Beck, on his nationally syndicated radio show.

"Not that the previous administration did anything wrong during Katrina," Beck added. "Those people should have known better than to rely on the federal government."

Damage to flora and fauna has been minimal thus far, resulting in only a few toppled trees and uprooted shrubs, airborne prairie dogs, and several species of bird which had their feathers comically poofed out by the prevailing winds. Early reports of a nun careening through the skies remain unverified.

For its part, NextEra Energy Resources, which operates the Horse Hollow installation, has promised to pay the clean-up costs associated with this massive operation.

Rupert Evanston, the CEO of NextEra, announced at a hastily assembled press conference that his company will be heavily involved in the cleanup effort.

"It is indeed our responsibility to deal with this, and we are dealing with it," said Evans, yelling over the howling gusts. "We will absolutely be paying for the cleanup operation. There is no doubt about that. It's our responsibility -- we accept it fully."

Already NextEra has begun passing out large mason jars and balloons to collect all the extra air being spewed into the atmosphere, as well as free windbreakers to those victims nearest to the spill.

President Obama is expected to travel to Texas later this week to observe the damage personally. Additionally, he has ordered thorough inspections of all domestic hydropower and solar plants in order to prevent a similar incident that might release water into the mixture of oil and water we now call water, or light into the light.

It's Not so Much a Spill. More of a Giant Fucking Geyser...

For your edification (click to embiggen):

Broken in Brief: Local Cop Walks Away Slowly as Something Explodes Behind Him

CHICAGO—Earlier today, tormented outlaw cop Jack Murphy was seen walking away slowly as most of the warehouse district exploded behind him.

“Yeah, there was this huge shootout between him and like two dozen Colombians,” said Walter Fields, a bystander who hid behind a stack of boxes while the epic battle was occurring.

“Murphy shoots them all in a pitched gun battle --without reloading-- and then I see him talking to the one Colombian he had left remotely alive. I couldn’t hear what Murphy said, but I bet it was gritty and embittered. He then flicked a lit cigarette into a pool of gasoline that had appeared and walked away as the man screamed "You'll pay for this, Murphy" and the building exploded. From reports I've heard, Murphy has already paid. Dearly.”

Murphy, a rouge officer with the Chicago police, has been waging a long and bloody battle with area drug cartels for the past few months. Blaming them for the death of his family, he has engaged in outlaw tactics that local citizens have deemed “the coolest shit they have ever seen in their lives”, ranging from various shootouts that would be killer to see in slow-mo, several exciting car chases, an incident where he was hanging from a helicopter as it spun out of control over the Sears Tower, and several mano-e-mano gun duels which ended with Murphy snarling out a terse, vindictive one liner before coldly shooting his prone opponent to death.

“After the initial fire raged, Murphy turned around and asked ‘Hot enough for you, Mendoza?’ before the building exploded even bigger than before,” finished Fields.

“It was the coolest shit I had ever seen in my life.”

A Tale of Two Cities

I live in New York, where someone plants a bomb-type-thing in Times Square and residents go about their day pretty much as usual. After all, Times Square is populated predominantly by tourists, and we can always find more of those.

Matthew, however, resides in our hometown of Pittsburgh, where the annual marathon gets re-routed because of a broken microwave near the finish line:

Two-minute Jihad?

Picture of the Day - 5.3.10

The Amazing Jumping Crook

For six years in the 50s, Philippe Halsman ended his photo sessions by asking his sitters to jump. Luckily most of them, including Tricky Dick (above), Audrey Hepburn, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, obliged.

More photos and information HERE, courtesy of the lovely Rachel Hulin at The Photography Post.