"The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York"

• Via Mercury Rising, "Republican IRS Witch Hunt Cost $14 Million and Counting" (at Politicus USA) has shall we say a familiar name attached:

  We only know because Representatives Sander Levin and Elijah Cummings, the Ranking Members of the House Ways and Means Committee and Oversight and Government Reform Committee, asked the IRS on February 7 in a letter. Today they released a letter from IRS Commissioner John Koskinen regarding the money and resources spent on the Republican witch hunt.
  
  The costs, which are explained as the “conservative approach”, detailed in Koskinen’s letter are $8 million in direct costs like salaries, benefits, and travel, plus an additional $6 million to $8 million to “add capacity to information technology systems to process materials to investigators.”
  
  All of this was spent when Darrell Issa knew from the beginning that there was nothing to see.

  Mmmmm-hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
• Mills River Progressive reposts from OpEd News an article by Alan Grayson on China and the Keystone XL pipeline.    

  There are plenty of reasons to be against the Keystone XL pipeline. Environmentalists recognize it as the ultimate "bonfire of the vanities" - planet-wide carbon bonfires. The pipeline passes through an active earthquake zone. One bad spill could permanently poison the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides drinking water to millions of people, and 30% of our irrigation.
  
  Here is another reason, perhaps the best reason of all: It doesn't do us any good. China, yes. The Koch Brothers (who own the refining capacity that would be used), yes. Us, no.

• Also via Mills River Progressive from OpEd News:  Roundup is not good for you or the food chain.  

Warning: Pop-up ads.

In Memoriam

Harold Ramis, director/writer/actor (see also Chicago Tribune's 's summary of his career [warning: video plays]).

Because I'm Avoiding Writing an Essay With Footnotes Links

Many "conservatives" are not frauds, but an awful lot seem to be.

Take Brent Bozell.  Please.  "Uncredited underling" = "ghostwriter."   Underpaid ghostwriter.

"Oh scribbler, change your ways today, or with us you'll engage,
A-tryin' to catch the devil's words across an endless page!
Yippee-ki-yay,
Yippee-ki-yo,
Ghost writers in the sky!"

Sorry.  Fortunately, baseball season is almost close enough to smell the grass.

In Memoriam

Jim Fregosi, ballplayer and manager and what the Mets got for Nolan Ryan.

In Memoriam

Shirley Temple Black, actress and diplomat.  (Link via Avedon)

ETA:  Sid Caesar, tower of comedy.  Via skippy, who includes a video.

Over at Sadly, No!, A Simple, Non-Desultory, Non-Verbal Philippic

With interpolated "Shorter" translations.

Cerberus on systemic oppressions in the United States. A short excerpt:

But more seriously. On the moocher point… the right wing is actually on to something. This nation has genuinely been hit by an epidemic of moochers, people who have stolen great big chunks out of the economy and production in order to serve no real purpose or make any real difference in their lives other than to compete in a game of randomly increasing numbers with other asshole moochers.

All over the country, the hard-work of millions of Americans is stolen and abused by fear of unemployment and death in order for all the production that it creates to go to a handful of assholes who sit in a chair and pretend like they fucking matter. And those same people are in turn are marks for a group of even bigger moochers who just convince everyone to put their money in a great big casino they have rigged in their favor, when they aren’t straight up bribing congresscritters to make them richer.

These moochers steal the bread out of the mouths of children and do not even remotely give back an equivalent amount of value.

Which is the real reason why the right-wing is so loud about various forms of moochers, including literally everyone else.

Read the whole thing.  It's well written and takes to task corporations, conservatives, and the system.

Hat tip to Simon & Garfunkel for the idea for the title.

In Memoriam

Ralph Kiner, ballplayer and broadcaster.

Radio and television games, from April to October, doubleheaders, really long games, losses and wins, there those three were, describing the game, weaving statistics with baseball lore.  George* Bob Murphy, Lindsay Nelson, and Ralph Kiner, the announcing team for the New York Mets for many years.

(His days with the Pirates were before I was born.)




* My mistake.  I blame old age and having missed the obituary.

In Case You Wondered

"Why Republicans Keep Calling Women Sluts." By Paul Waldman at The American Prospect, via The Slacktivist.

The simple answer is that they can't help themselves, but more specifically, it's a combination of ignorance, contempt, and Puritan morality that inevitably leads to these eruptions. And it's going to keep happening.

And

This seems to come up again and again: Republicans think they're talking to a nation of nuns, when in reality they're talking to actual women whose lives and experiences are different from what Republicans imagine them to be.

Apparently conservative Republican women don't slap Republican men silly correct them for getting basic biology wrong.

In Memoriam

I am now down to 6 articles in the NYTimes.  Fortunately February is a short month.

• Philip Seymour Hoffman, actor.  No, I didn't know any of that, but the details will come pouring out now.
• Maximilian Schell, actor.
• Leslie Lee, playwright.