[Politico]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV1JDW43kUE

We can’t possibly improve upon the video title, so we’re not even going to try.

(Stinque viewing suggestion: Run the video on your iPad and send it to your flatscreen/stereo via Apple TV. Crank up the music loud enough so your neighbor can’t hear you cackling like a hyena. Trust us.)

[via Know Your Meme]

“She’s a vulgar singer who wears only panties and a bra when she sings and she stated she is the envoy of the devil’s child and that she will spread satanic teaching. This is dangerous.” —Salim Alatas, the Jakarta head of hardline Islamic Defender Front (FPI), explaining why Indonesia should ban a performance by Lady Gaga. [Reuters, via ThinkProgress]

Okay, fine, so it doesn’t work as a palindrome. But you’d be thrown off too if you were just minding your own business when you were viciously attacked by a Raging Honker.

“Rhode Island’s governor on Monday declared that the state will recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, giving gay couples the same rights as heterosexual ones when it comes to health insurance and a slew of other benefits.” [WaPo, via TPM]

Thomas Friedman reads somebody else’s book about creeping commercialism in everyday life — “I had no idea”, he repeats each time he learns something like ShopRite “sponsoring” a public-school gym — and comes to this stunning conclusion:

Throughout our society, we are losing the places and institutions that used to bring people together from different walks of life. Sandel calls this the “skyboxification of American life,” and it is troubling. Unless the rich and poor encounter one another in everyday life, it is hard to think of ourselves as engaged in a common project.

This is where Thomas Friedman lives. We had no idea.

This Column Is Not Sponsored by Anyone [NYT]

Title: “Screwed! How Foreign Countries Are Ripping America Off and Plundering Our Economy — and How Our Leaders Help Them Do It”

Authors: Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

Rank: 38

Blurb: “In this eye-opening new book, Morris contends that Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state in George W Bush’s second cabinet, is the only Republican on the national scene with the credentials, credibility, and popularity to lead the Republican Party in 2008. And he outlines how the Democratic Party, fresh from its narrow yet crushing defeat in 2004, is likely to return to its one source of political power in the last several decades — the Clinton family.”

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