Oakland Police and Alameda County prosecutors have confirmed the fears of some of us that a big disaster was averted when California Highway Patrol officers pulled over Byron Williams on 580 in Oakland on Saturday night after he was weaving and speeding in traffic.

Williams, who was wearing body armor and carrying an arsenal of handguns and rifles, proceeded to get a lengthy gun battle with the police because of his hatred of people of the “left wing agenda.” 

OPD and the DA announced today that Williams was headed to Ess Eff to try to kill staff of the ACLU of Northern California and the nonprofit Tides Foundation, which funds environmental and social justice groups in California and across the country.

What did these two groups do that was so bad?

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Glenn Beck today criticizes the Obama Administration — just like us! — for throwing Shirley Sherrod under the bus after a heavily abridged tape of her “surfaced” yesterday.

On Drudge Jr.’s website. And promptly picked up by Fox News. Before the story crashed today, leading even Erick the Red to disown it.

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Last March, Shirley Sherrod told an American tale of hope and redemption.

The year was 1986, and she was working for the Georgia field office for the Federation of Southern Cooperative/Land Assistance Fund. Sherrod, who is black, met a white farmer seeking help with a pending bankruptcy. But the farmer’s attitude was, shall we say, offputting.

“What he didn’t know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me was, I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him,” Sherrod said. “I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”

Sherrod did more than enough — she “kept us out of bankruptcy,” says the farmer’s wife, Eloise Spooner. “Her husband told her, ‘You’re spending more time with the Spooners than you are with me’… She took probably two or three trips with us to Albany just to help us out.”

The experience was a revelation for Sherrod. “I went on to work with many more white farmers,” she says. “The story helped me realize that race is not the issue, it’s about the people who have and the people who don’t. When I speak to groups, I try to speak about getting beyond the issue of race.”

Shirley Sherrod is now the USDA rural development director for Georgia. Or was.

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What’s better than fear-mongering about illegal immigrants from Mexico?

Why, it’s fear-mongering about illegal immigrants from Mexico harboring scary Mooslems from Afghanistan.

Don’t forget to throw in a dash of misogyny and ethnic stereotypes, too!

Presenting Fox News’ EXCLUSIVE story from San Antonio and their general asshattery of the day:

“BMWs [Big Mexican Women] are helping Afghans go AWOL from a Texas air base”

Yes, that is the headline. Surprisingly, there’s no mention as to whether the women are making tortillas or playing in a mariachi band while they’re at it.

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Above: BP engineers hard at work Friday in the Houston Command Center, gravely accepting their responsibility to monitor and control the deep-sea oil gusher.

Only the photo appears to have been taken in 2001. With new monitor images pasted in. And not very well.

BP has replaced the photo with what it says is the original. Although the photographer might want to check the settings on his Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III, since the camera still records the shot being taken “3/6/2001 – 3:16 PM”.

In any event, we prefer the “original” provided to AmericaBlog by someone with better Photoshop skillz:

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The judges also would have accepted The Matrix, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Usual Suspects, An American Werewolf in London, Citizen Kane, and Singin’ in the Rain.

The amazing Edroso (audio NSFW):