Pluto, as the plaque on his neck says, looks for his owner through the streets following a violent earthquake two days ago in the Abruzzo capital L'Aquila on April 8, 2009. Hopes faded Wednesday of finding more survivors from the worst earthquake in Italy in 30 years as the death toll climbed to 260 and the country prepared to bury the victims. By Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images.
Von at Obsidian Wings seconds Clive Crook on Obama's apparent indifference to long-term deficits. After advocating means-testing Social Security, he writes:
President Bush was an irresponsible captain of our financial ship. That's one reason why I didn't vote for him in 2004. But it's no excuse for President Obama to be more irresponsible. Two wrongs still do not make a right, even under President Obama. Obama's budgets have consistent structural deficits and a growing debt that exceeds even Bush's excesses. They are not sustainable. If President Obama wants to lead on this issue — if he truly wants to be change worthy of belief — he needs to level with the American people: you cannot have a puppy and a pony and a showdog too unless you are going to pay for it.
"If we don't save marriage, we can't remain pro-life,"- Rep. Steve King, (R-IA). Massie says: huh?
Don't sell any of those herbs from your vegetable garden. Congress is on the war-path.
The fear-mongering ad by National Organization For Marriage is here. HRC's rebuttal is here. Good As You's response is here. There is not much I can do to rebut the lies that Maggie Gallagher is touting here in an ad designed to ignite culture war hatred of gays, replete with apocalyptic imagery, and ominous Beck-like invocations of pink-fascist doom. But I can note that as one of the first and longest campaigners for marriage equality, my own commitment to religious freedom in America is as ferocious and as impassioned as any Christianist's – and I'd be happy to compare my record with Gallagher's.
I've been prepared to back the Boy Scouts and the St Patrick's Day parade against my gay brothers and sisters on this score; I've opposed hate crime laws protecting gays; I've even defended the right of Christianists to fire employees because they are gay. I went through an extended form of ostracism in the gay world for a long time because of my refusal to countenance anti-religious bigotry, just as I refused to countenance anti-gay bigotry. This was not the easiest path but it remains for me the only principled one. In so far as intolerance of people of faith exists, I will join any movement to protect their rights and defend their dignity.
But if there's a social stigma attached to the public expression of homophobia, that is just a function of living in a free society.
So deal with it, guys. And take one small moment, if you can, to think how gay people have lived in a society that, until very recently, assumed that the very heart of our lives was evil and wrong and unmentionable. If we survived millennia of that, pounded into our minds and souls often by our own families, as early as our first consciousness, backed up in many places by the threat of violence, I have a feeling evangelicals can survive a little cultural disapproval. There was a time when Christians actually embraced such disapproval as a sign of their divine calling.
But that was when Christianity was a faith and not a means for one political party to grasp and maintain power.
Vanity Fair joins the recent wave of pot activism. Check out Obama's cabinet!
David Rosenberg, an economist for Merrill Lynch, is still bearish on stocks:
…on 4 of the 6 occasions that the equity market staged such a huge rally over such a short time period, it relapsed. So we are going to wait this out, acknowledging that we could be late to the party. We still feel the downside risks are too high to be involved.
Get your Michelle fashion crack here. (And no, this time it's not a Rick-Roll. Promise.)
Well, not quite, but my old friend, Peter Sagal, makes a point here.
The Dish 