So, we’ve done Zach, we’ve done Basil — who else in Tennessee would like some ink?

You, over there. You say you’re the lieutenant governor? Come on down!

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“On an audio tape obtained by The Denver Post, [GOP Senate candidate Ken] Buck was caught muttering ‘will you tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I’m on the camera?’ outside a June 11 event in Crowley… Buck has positioned himself as the Tea Party candidate.” [Denver Post]

Gleefully satirical Portland cartoonist John Callahan dies [Portland Tribune]

Our guest columnist this morning is Richard Hofstadter.

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country — that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

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We’re not sure what, if anything, to make of the WikiLeaks dump of umpteen-thousand classified documents — complete with coordinated publication by the Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel — detailing Pakistan ISI ties to Afghan insurgents (don’t act surprised), but it started burning up Twitter Sunday afternoon, and it was burning up Memeorandum by Sunday night. We’ll let Spencer Ackerman be your guide. [Wired]

And things will improve, of course! “Tony Hayward, the embattled chief executive of BP, has agreed to step down and be replaced by Robert Dudley, the company’s most senior American executive who is now in charge of BP’s operations in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a person close to the company’s board.” [NYT]