I tell you what, those Republicans may not have squat for rational ideas, but they sure have some humor. Heck, it was less than two days ago we were watching Steele and Boner in “DC Vice”. Fear not intrepid viewers, these jokers are bringin da funny all over.

As Deborah Nelson makes clear in passages like the above, (from her new book The War Behind Me,) chronicling a seemingly endless accumulation of war crimes can become monotonous. The evil can come to seem, in Hannah Arendt’s term, “banal”, and one is reminded of Stalin’s cynical observation that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

Empathy and blame unequally divided.

The blogosphere began during the early months of the Bush Administration with opposition and criticism being the dominant modes for online progressives. With a new administration in the White House, how will the role of the netroots change? How do leaders of online opinion see their responsibilities with respect to the new President?

As part of his hunt for line item vetoes to actually balance the budget deal, the Kindergarten Cop Governator cut the budgets for other constitutional officers allegedly to compensate for their refusal to participate in his state employee furlough.

A chilling piece by Sam Quinones in Foreign Policy on the drug smuggling violence that has escalated to a total state of war rivaling levels in Iraq. it is easy to forget what is going on just across the border. Easy, at least, until you take in Sam Quinones’ tale. . . .

The Powers that Be at NBC/Universal are pleased with their executive minions at NBC News and MSNBC over their handling of the Rick Santelli video clip. They’re happy to see that NBC and MSNBC are finally getting with the program to boost the ratings of CNBC.

Over at my home blog of Mercury Rising, one of my co-bloggers, MEC, noticed something a wee bit interesting about Blackwater’s name change (and, they apparently hoped, reputation change) to “Xe” — namely, that there’s already an “XE” out there and they care about their copyright.

Socks, the cat who won international fame during his years in the Clinton White House, was euthanized Friday after months of treatment for cancer. Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has vowed an investigation into the death.

Yesterday evening, I posted a quote from George Washington’s first inaugural address. It struck me as supremely relevant in the current whirlwind, given the current economic and political whirlwind in which we find ourselves, and the aftermath of courage, chaos and hardship that led to that address from Gen. Washington. In response to the quote, Millineryman profoundly said: After reading the quote and detaching myself from this mess, I realize that the people who started this experiment must’ve have been faced with a lot of the uncertainty that we have now.