“Rand Paul has reshuffled staff and replaced campaign manager David Adams in the wake of last week’s Civil Rights Act blow-up. The new campaign manager: Jesse Benton, the communications director for Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-Tex.) 2008 presidential bid… Benton, who married one of Ron Paul’s granddaughters in 2008…” [Dave Weigel/WaPo]

Art Linkletter dies at 97 [Entertainment Weekly]

Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association presents a novel argument against repealing DADT: Gays are too butch.

So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn’t the Germans, didn’t the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals.

But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after.

So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.

Mr. Black? The audience is demanding an encore.

Top Social Conservative: Hitler Used Gay Soldiers Because They Had ‘No Limits’ [TPM]

If we told you any more, we’d have to shoot you.

Zombo.com [via 27b/6]

Back before America went batshit crazy, there was an organization on the University of Oregon campus called (if memory serves) the “Drug Information Center” — which was exactly that: You could drop off a sample of drugs at their door in the dead of night, and a week later they’d publish a report of what it contained.

The idea was genius: No need to scold you about your nasty, illegal habit — just coldly inform you that the acid you scored was really Borax.

Of course it didn’t last. It made too much sense. We can’t handle the truth.

Sometime in the following decade, we knew a guy who was involved in Eugene’s recycling community. (Eugene had one of those; Eugene was one of those towns.) He showed us around a giant warehouse with mountains of plastic milk jugs. The jugs were destined for a ship, which was destined for China. The energy cost in transporting the jugs, he told us, pretty much eliminated any recycling value. You can’t really recycle Dirty Plastic, but at least you can pretend you’re doing your part for the Earth.

That, like the DIC, was very Eugene: Cynical utopianism. We’ll do what we can, but let’s not kid ourselves.

We appreciate that. Facts are wonderful things. They help tether you to reality, if you’re into that. Most Americans, as we all know, aren’t.

So it caught our attention that there was a curious consequence of the recent Hot Volcano Action in Iceland — England almost starved to death:

Read more »

President Obama came to Ess Eff tonight to raise a shitload of money for Barbara Boxer at an event at the Fairmont Hotel. On a freakishly cold and rainy late May day, everyone turned out to stand on Mason Street to welcome Barry.

While the predictable tea-bagger/ “Obama is a Mooslem Hitler Man”/ Hands-off-my-Medicare crowd managed to get through bridges and tunnels to protest in Baghdad by the Bay, the protest brought out some of my favorites, including the only-in-SF (or perhaps Eugene/Portland/Seattle) protesters, including, I shit thee not, the cliched save the whales crowd.

Courtesy of Shaky Hand Productions, three minutes of a walk down Mason Street.

First truthful public statement she’s ever made …

[ Media Matters Flash video not available. ]