rickman_cropped-phoenix.JPGFor the past few years, antibiotic-resistant staph cases have been on the rise, especially in hospitals and nursing homes but also in sports such as wrestling and football, and conservatives haven't made a fuss. But let staph infections rise in the gay community, and suddenly the wingnuts care about staph so much they want to stamp out all gay activities (and/or people) so it doesn't spread. (Memo to anti-gay activists: Misuse of antibiotics caused this problem, not gays. Sorry!)

Charles Pierce writes. You read. In a just world, this man would have Billy Kristol's job at the NYT and Kristol would be selling insurance in one of those bucolic right-wing hotbeds that he normally avoids in favor of towns like New York City. (h/t Dakine01)

Again, h/t Dakine01: See, raising taxes on hyper-rich individuals and corporations is bad because it limits their ability to hand out record levels of bonuses to each other even though three of these firms had their worst quarterly losses ever. Got it?

Wall Street's five biggest firms are paying a record $39 billion in bonuses for 2007, a year when three of them suffered the worst quarterly losses in their history and shareholders lost more than $80 billion.

Bonuses for 2007 will exceed the $36 billion distributed in 2006, when the industry reported record high profits.


In another sign of how George W. Bush's Iraq is shaking off the chains of Saddam's neo-Stalinist form of Islamofascism, capitalists everywhere in the land are forsaking food crops for the higher profits to be found growing opium. The Invisible Hand at work!

And just because, here's a photo of Alan Rickman that he sent to me. Mwrowr.