Blago on tape, considering taking Obama’s Senate seat himself: “Now is the time to put my fucking children and my wife first for a change… I fucking busted my ass … I gave your fucking baby health care… What do I get for that? Only 13 percent of you think I’m doing a good job, so fuck all of you.” [Chicago Sun-Times, via Political Wire]

“San Francisco could soon have what is believed to be the country’s first ban on the sale of all pets except fish. That includes dogs, cats, hamsters, mice, rats, chinchillas, guinea pigs, birds, snakes, lizards and nearly every other critter, or, as the commission calls them, companion animals.” [SFGate]

“Look out, Washington, because there’s a whole stampede of Pink Elephants crossing the line.”

Your United States Geek Squad Cyber Command has unveiled a new logo, and embedded in one of its golden rings is a tired Gandalf reference secret code you’re invited to decipher:

9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a

This is usually the moment where we sit back and, between earthquakes that annoy the shit out of us when we’re trying to master embedding a WebView in a navigation-bar iPhone app so we can display styled text in the damn window, let our mind roam over the universe of whimsically amusing responses, selecting ten candidates to keep you company until we wake up and discover what crazy shit Michael Steele said today.

Only Wired’s commenters already grabbed all the good ones. So we’ll just steal theirs.

Read more »

While we’re all having fun with Sharron Angle pretending that she doesn’t endorse Social Security privatization, let’s see what the grownups are thinking:

Is there a new, bipartisan consensus forming on Capitol Hill about whether (and how) to scale back Social Security benefits? A surprising number of signs point to “yes” — and that has many progressives looking ahead a few months to what they believe could become a serious fight.

And who’s sharpening their knives?

Read more »

“More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one — not industry, not government — is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows. The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing.” [AP]

“Another thing we can do for jobs is make toys of me, especially for the holidays. Little dolls. Me. Like maybe little action dolls. Me in an army uniform, air force uniform, and me in my suit. They can make toys of me and my vehicle, especially for the holidays and Christmas for the kids. That’s something that would create jobs. So you see I think out of the box like that. It’s not something a typical person would bring up. That’s something that could happen, that makes sense. It’s not a joke.” [Guardian UK, via Political Wire]