Another Poppyseed Banana Nut Bread, or "The Death Star Has Cleared the Planet."

So while Star Wars is happening in the background (I forgot Saturday) and the scent of fresh banana nut bread is in the air, I thought I'd gather all those loose tabs and put them in one post.  This is that post.

• Arthur Silber quote, because very true:

  I say, laugh at the fuckers. They must hate being laughed at. They work so hard at being serious and earnest, and well-meaning. They desperately want you to believe they're good people, and that they think very, very carefully about those measures the times call for. I just look at them and listen to what they say, and I think: What a colossal crock of shit. Politics is only and always about power, which only and always means power over other human beings. Anyone who devotes a substantial amount of time -- or his entire life, God forbid -- to achieving power is a shit-eating buffoon. The desire for power over others is the most profoundly deforming desire of all: it corrupts everything it touches. To put it very briefly: politics is the shit end of life.

  [Added emphasis mine.]
• Via Mercury Rising and Shakesville, from Salon:  The judge pushes back against the Obama Administration's attempt to restrict Plan B (no, that doesn't make sense to me either, but maybe the evil twin has the body this week).  [ETA:  Why conservatives fear Plan B.  Which doesn't explain the Obama Administration.]
• Spocko on the dearth of justice:

  People who read me know that I’m a big science fiction fan (my name is a clue!) but I’m also a fan of what I call “comeuppance stories” ones where a person or group of people work together to ensure the bad guys get their comeuppance. I don’t like violent revenge stories, but stories of justice. I like seeing a show of karma in this lifetime. In the olden days journalists used to work on stories that lead to someone getting their comeuppance. You know, “afflict the comfortable.” But now these kind of stories are almost entirely seen in fiction.
  
  These days people who SHOULD be getting their comeuppance have insulated themselves from the traditional sources of comeupatude–the press, the prosecutor, the politicians, the people.
  
  Instead of the press creating stories that might lead to someone’s comeuppance they wait for someone else to do the heavy living and jump in to report on “both sides.”

• Republic of T on who's waging class warfare against whom.

  When Republicans start touting “flexibility” working Americans and their families should make haste to their battle-stations, because it’s an attack. If Republicans are offering your “flexibility” with one hand, they are usually taking away a lot more with the other hand. (For example giving state’s more “flexibility” in administering Medicaid actually means slashing Medicaid’s federal funding, and block-granting the remains t to the states to administer as they please.)

• In the Make Us Sickby Department:  Coronavirus in Saudi Arabia.  From Wired.  Nod of the hat to Mad Magazine.  ETA:  Ahem.  1 Similarity to SARS.