Because the Supreme Court of the United States arbitrarily and incorrectly awarded the Presidency of the United States after the 2000 election, and because a significant portion of the U.S. population requires more than four years to see clearly what lies in front of their noses, the United States of America has been controlled for the last eight years by a blathering rich kid and his sociopath handler.  This abomination has now been corrected.  We regret the error.

I fully expected immigration and “immigration reform” to be one of the key issues of the 2008 presidential campaign.  The Republican candidate was going to emphasize policy proposals and use jingoistic euphemisms that told the white, black and Asian people, in coded language, that they’d better be afraid of Mexicans and that we should send as many of them as we can back to where they came from.  Regardless of who won the election, this would have caused a large number of obedient Republicans who otherwise might not have worried too much about Mexicans to see our latest wave of immigrants as a people to fear and hate.

But this didn’t happen.

For this, I must say–eh-hem–thank you, John McCain.

Something about some fundraiser raffle.

They usually don’t have much interesting or clever to say, but Gawker has this one just about nailed:

This is a sad and not-at-all entertaining story of broke-ass bored trashy people in a miserable unhealthy little sprawling town using and selling drugs to briefly escape the dull pain of their shitty lives, and it would not be news that the mother of a high school dropout who’s marrying some idiot girl he impregnated was arrested for using drugs except that at some point we were all instructed to admire these exalted Real Americans. The Republicans were sort of right, these people are representative of America’s small towns, and that is why as a whole we decided to elect the smart, educated, well-off urbanite aspirational black couple from Chicago instead of the angry Vietnam veteran and the scary PTA moron-bitch with the fucked-up family.

And I thought the Vilsack pick was bad.

Maybe I don’t want to watch it after all.

This will show if New York Governor David Paterson has any balls.

Now that Caroline Kennedy has officially gone public with her desire to be handed Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat, I’m going to double-down on my previously stated objections.  The fact that both Al Sharpton and Senator Milquetoast, Harry Reid, are supporting her anointment are sure signs that I’m in the right here.

Glad to see I’m in good company…

Atrios:

I find the whole unfolding Caroline Kennedy saga to be rather depressing. Not just that she’s being considered (in the press if not elsewhere), but that she’s running a public campaign which involves reaching out to elites. The whole thing is just weird and feeds into the politics as personality soap opera that the press loves to focus on.

Greg Saunders:

Seriously, this isn’t a joke. If Caroline Kennedy were a normal candidate for elected office, she’d have a website in which she presented herself to the people she’s trying to represent, but the closest I could find to that in five minutes of Googling was a Wikipedia bio and her entry at the IMDB.

Andrew Sullivan:

Kennedy is not as dumb, crass or as uneducated as Sarah Palin. But she is less qualified to be a Senator than Palin. I am so sick of this nepotism. What are we, some kind of neo-monarchy? Clinton got her seat because of nepotism and now Kennedy gets it be the same methods.

Well, at least Clinton’s nepotism was decided by the voters.

Want to read a not-too-long history of the financial crisis that even you can understand?

Try this piece by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Difficult to see where the political hubris ends and the stupidity begins.

Sorry, but being a Kennedy is not a qualification for elective office.  I agree with Jane Hamsher.  If she wants to serve, she should at least be elected.

Here’s an economic stimulus package for ya:  have the government invest a trillion dollar in the research and development of a bomb that doesn’t kill people, doesn’t harm physical structures or the environment, but that completely destroys religion wherever it’s dropped.  Then let’s lob one on India, one on Pakistan and another on Kashmir for good measure (we’ll hit the Middle East and the American Bible Belt later).

Juan Cole has a very thorogh summary of the history that lead to the recent mass murder in Mumbai.  Depressing, but worth reading if you can resist the temptation to renounce your humanity.  Money quote:

The cell that hit Mumbai was probably a rogue splinter group. They completely disregarded the old Lashkar-e Tayiba concentration on hitting only Indian troops in Kashmir, targeting civilians instead. It is very unlikely that anyone in the Pakistani military put them up specifically to this Mumbai operation. This attack was much more likely to be blowback, when a covert operation produces unexpected consequences or agents that were previously reliable go rogue.  The Mumbai attacks were not the first of this scale on an Indian target by the LeT.  If the Pakistani government does not give up this covert terrorist campaign in Kashmir and does not stop coddling the radical vigilantes who go off to fight there, South Asian terrorism will grow as a problem and very possibly provoke the world’s first nuclear war (possible death toll: 20 million).

Good times, good times.

Kashmir is a beautiful place, but this is all about religion.

Sarah Palin could get a $7 million book deal.

But she hasn’t yet, so perhaps I should not despair?

…gets to keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.  And I’m afraid that if I go to Daily Kos right now my computer will explode.

Nooooooooooo!!!