You know that guy who murdered those four police officers in cold blood up in Seattle? Well, guess what. Turns out the suspect was a prisoner in Arkansas, facing some 200 years of prison for various aggravated robberies and assaults until then Governor Mike Huckabee commuted his sentence after just 11 years. Let the finger pointing begin.

Now, given that Huckabee faced similar difficulties last time around with regards to sentence commutations gone wrong, prospects of a 2012 GOP presidential nomination look bleak for Huckabee.

I produced the above search results yesterday when researching the Lou Dobbs story. Left such a bad taste in my mouth I though it would be worth sharing in a post all its own. Don’t know why exactly, but it strikes me as somehow emblematic of the worst, dehumanizing tendencies of early 21st century, automated, digital Capitalism.

You’d be forgiven for thinking the END IS NIGH when you learned that Lou Dobbs doesn’t hate all Mexicans any more. In fact he loves them so much that the recently departed (from CNN) immigrant basher and birther conspiracy theorist has decided that rather than shipping all 12,000,000 of them back to Mexico, Dobbs now opines that, well heck, come to think of it: wouldn’t it just be a dandy ol’ thing to offer the good ones a path to legalization?

“Whatever you have thought of me in the past, I can tell you right now that I am one of your greatest friends and I mean for us to work together,” he said in a live interview with Telemundo’s Maria Celeste. “I hope that will begin with Maria and me and Telemundo and other media organizations and others in this national debate that we should turn into a solution rather than a continuing debate and factional contest.”

Mr. Dobbs twice mentioned a possible legalization plan for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., saying at one point that “we need the ability to legalize illegal immigrants under certain conditions.” Read more »

It is with not a little trepidation that we recommend today’s New York Times column by Maureen Dowd. She of the snarky tongue who adores celebrities so much she wholeheartedly endorsed Arnie for California Governor is often more fluffy than substantive, but in today’s ruminations, we feel, she does an admirable job of nailing the Obama administration’s current malaise right square on its thick head:

It couldn’t have been easy for Craig, a special counsel in the Clinton White House who directed the response on impeachment, to break away from the Clintons and help the insurgent Obama shatter Hillary’s dream of shattering the Oval glass ceiling….

I often wondered if Craig and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, the other former Clinton official who helped undermine Hillary’s foreign policy record, would have done so if they had known that after turning on Hillary they would once more end up working beside her; if they had known that Obama can often be more interested in wooing opponents than tending to those who put themselves on the line for him.

What’s most chilling is that, with Republicans biting the hand every time Obama extends it, the President keeps doing it, even as his loyalists and supporters feel ever more marginalized and ignored.

We’re coming seriously close to souring on this presidency. Where’s the change we were promised?

Serolf Divad wrote this post from a Panera coffee shop, sitting next to a window, watching as a steady rain drizzled from a gray and dispiriting sky.

Sarah Palin is angry… again. You see, for the thirteen-hundredth time in as many months, the morally bankrupt liberal media establishment has shown itself to be little more than a grungy, stinking, mud-puddle of squealing sexist pigs, as exemplified in their most recent uncharitable comments about… well, about Sarah Palin. And Sarah Palin, defender of women’s rights that she is, is not going to stand for this scurrilous slander of womankind as embodied by the unjustly maligned personage who she, herself, happens to be. No, indeed. If nothing else, Sarah Palin lives by the motto “an attack on me is an attack on all of us” and such an attack cannot possibly be left to stand, unanswered by all of womankind. Read more »

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Step aside Father, Son and Holy ghost. There’s a new Holy Trinity in town and their names are Palin, Bachmann and Prejean:

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While we here in the U.S. ponder the ramifications of the Congress passing health reform legislation, most Europeans are remembering a watershed event in modern history: the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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