In case you missed the news over the weekend, Maru is alive and well, and taking appropriate civil-defense measures. (Well, technically hiding from a toothbrush. “No! The prevention is important.”) Maru’s pet humans thank you for your concern, and for praying for Japan.

Since we’re looking at a number of hours between writing this post and its appearance Tuesday morning, we’ll forego an easily superseded news roundup, and declare that despite the inevitable design failures, cost overruns, construction shortcuts, operation scandals, disposal issues, mining contamination, water disruption, environmental risks, socialized losses, proliferation concerns, and occasional uninhabitable hellscape, nuclear power remains the solution to America’s energy future.

I Am Maru

We’re going to presume that Arthur S. Brisbane is 60. We’re presuming that Arthur S. Brisbane is 60 because Arthur S. Brisbane was 59 when Arthur S. Brisbane was announced as the new “Public Editor” of the New York Times last June. If you’re not familiar with a Public Editor, his job is to write letters to the editors of the New York Times. Only unlike yours, his get published.

Like this one, published Sunday:

A Cocktail Party With Readers

A cocktail party! How very New York Times of Arthur S. Brisbane! Not a beer, mind you. Nor a bong hit, for that matter. No, a cocktail party. Something we haven’t seen since Woody Allen’s early, funny films.

Only it’s not a real cocktail party. Arthur S. Brisbane is being fanciful. Arthur S. Brisbane is being fanciful because Arthur S. Brisbane is searching for words to describe a novel experience in Arthur S. Brisbane’s rarefied life. For you see, Arthur S. Brisbane has discovered Twitter:

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Wow! What an exciting week! After incorporating an independent MySQL database within a WordPress display framework, we devised a barebones AJAX widget to handle refresh-free logins with dynamic error messages, adapted a jQuery Javascript plugin to display clickable and auto-loading overlays, deployed another jQuery plugin with CSS rollovers to replace form radio buttons with clickable highlighting images, pulled off a CSS3 gradient to create easily resized backgrounds that default to flat colors in older browsers, handcrafted cookies with salted-hash sha1 session IDs, and… and…

Hello?

Fine. Be that way. Here’s some bestiality. We have work to do.

[via Ezra]

Because the now-famous Wisconsin Quorum Rule only applies to budget bills, Cheesehead Republicans have always had the power to bust public unions without the participation of their vacationing Democratic brethren. The only reason they didn’t was the pretense that union-busting was a financial requirement to further enfilth the already filthy-rich Koch Brothers.

So last night’s Stealthcare Bill wasn’t flat-out illegal — the technical dispute is whether under Wisconsin’s open-meeting law, repackaging it required a cooling-off period before taking a vote.

But never mind that. Enjoy instead this delightful example of how America is the Beacon of Democracy to the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVhuGCVIf3g

So we’re reading a backgrounder on Tosh.0, a program we happen to enjoy, only to discover we’re fucking up the demo:

“There are a million videos where someone gets kicked in the groin; this is the type of comedy that resonates well with young men,” said Brent Poer, managing director of ad-buying agency MediaVest.

Honestly, Tosh doesn’t run that many crotch shots — last night’s main segment featured the Screaming Candidate for Ohio county treasurer, whose junk remained blessedly unviolated.

Even during our own High-Testosterone Years, our taste in comedy ran more along the lines of Manhattan, Network, Airplane — but definitely not Animal House. Whacking Material, sure, but no crotch shots in the bunch.

But mainly it’s yet another Dreadfully Slow News Day, and we only need the slightest excuse to run the best kicked-in-the-groin video ever.

‘Tosh.0’ turns Internet videos into laughs, cash for Comedy Central [LAT]

It’s not that we care about the Estevez Spawn who didn’t star in Repo Man (okay, fine — or The Breakfast Club), it’s that we keep stumbling across shrapnel we just can’t ignore:

“The fact is, during Mr. Sheen’s recent criminal case in Aspen, Colo., the studio was willing to have him plead to a felony and still take him back while charges were pending against him,” says [lawyer Marty] Singer. “Yet in this case, all my client did was make alleged disparaging remarks about [producer] Chuck Lorre.”

The fact is, Marty’s right: Sheen was charged with felony menacing after a Christmas 2009 fight with his wife, Brooke Mueller. He eventually cut a deal and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault.

But to get the full flavor of that episode, let’s revisit the original account:

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In composing Sunday’s Stinque Book Club entry, we were faced with a quandary: What is there to say about professional cretin Dick Morris that hasn’t been said already?

We chose a reader review about Mom listening to an audiobook version filling the presumably lonely rooms of a presumably large house as inspiration: What kind of world do you have to live in for that kind of fetid monologue to fill the air? How thoroughly divorced from reality do you have to be to accept that as anything approaching fact?

We toyed with declaring a significant proportion of Americans to be clinically psychotic, before settling on the observation that the Wingnut Establishment does a much more professional job of turning its audience into cultists than Charles Manson.

And then, Sunday evening, we read this in the Paper of Record:

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