Daily Mail:

Serving and former US Navy SEALs have slammed President Barack Obama for taking the credit for killing Osama bin Laden and accused him of using Special Forces operators as ‘ammunition’ for his re-election campaign.

BuzzFeed:

The frustration — or, even anger — within the SEAL community is real, and has been brewing for months, particularly among a politically conservative core of operators.

The Daily Mail story was promoted by Drudge. The BuzzFeed writer suspects a Swiftboating a-comin’. The 2012 General Election has begun.

Our guest plaintiff is Henry Wolf, who accuses the defendants of “Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress”.

Plaintiff was riding his 1993 BMW motorcycle equipped with a Corbin-Pacific seat. The ride lasted approximately two hours each way to Plaintiff’s destination, after which Plaintiff developed a severe case of priapism (a persistent lasting erection). Plaintiff alleges that this condition was caused by the ridge-like seat on his motorcycle, negligently designed, manufactured and/or installed by defendants.

Plaintiff now suffers from priapism (a long lasting erection), and has been experiencing continuing problems since his motorcycle ride. He is now unable to engage in sexual activity, which is causing him substantial emotional and mental anguish. Plaintiff is distraught and distressed because of this. Defendants, and each of them, are liable to Plaintiff due the their negligent design, manufacture and/or installation of the seat on Plaintiff’s motorcycle.

Wolf v. BMW [PDF]

Uneasy Rider Sues BMW [Courthouse News Service, via Yahoo]

Read more »

[The Verge]

Remember the scandalous government bailout of the auto industry that saved General Motors from bankruptcy and liquidation, saw the storied carmaker restructured and restored to profitability, and saved well over a million U.S. jobs? The Right threw a shit fit, derided GM as “government motors” and Mitt Romney proclaimed it “crony capitalism on a grand scale.”

Well apparently the American people aren’t buying the Right’s critique of President Obama’s handling of the auto industry, and so now the Mitt Romney campaign has a new strategy for dealing with it. Said strategy can basically be summed up: “well duh, of course the auto bailout worked. It was Mitt Romney’s idea in the first place.” Read more »

Lewis Lapham, “the famed former editor of Harper’s Magazine” — we much preferred the previous proto-Spy Michael Kinsley version — asks what we think is supposed to be a profoundly impertinent question:

Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect — from Google, YouTube, and Facebook — the less likely we are to know what it means?

Personally, we don’t recall collecting any data from Google, YouTube, and Facebook, although we tend to visit all three in the course of our blogging and professional day. (What was that damn PHP lowercase function? Ah. Right.) We do collect data from — wait for it — databases, but that tends to be data we had a hand in storing to begin with. And, mirabile dictu, we do know what it means. It means the database is functioning.

But this, of course, is not what Famed Former Editor Lewis Lapham is getting at. After all, Famed Former Editor Lewis Lapham would not blow 3,318 words just to confirm that our programming works the way we intend it to. No, Famed Former Editor Lewis Lapham is making a point.

And God help us if we can’t figure out what it is.

Read more »

This is eye-0pening: “TO achieve unexceptionalism, the political ideal that would render the United States indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world, do the following:”