Donald Duck – The Flying Squirrel.  This 1954 Walt Disney cartoon was directed by Jack Hannah.  Animation by Bill Justice, Volus Jones, Al Coe, and Bob Carlson.  Effects animation by Dan MacManus.  Story by Nick George and Roy Williams.  Layout by Yale Gracey. Backgrounds by Ray Huffine.  Music by Oliver Wallace.

What’s on your mind tonight?

Straight white boy who likes God defies odds, powerful homosexuals, wins televised singing competition. See what you get when you mess with Jesus?

Today four Northern California animal rights activists await Federal criminal trial for ghastly crimes including passing out leaflets, chalking slogans on pavement, and chanting. Oh, and using the internet to locate the indivduals they were protesting. Yes, the world’s only superpower can’t be bothered to defend us against banksters’ ursury or death from want of health care, but when it comes to leaflets, chalked slogans, and Google searches, they’re here for us. To shut us up.

Yes, what we really need right now more than anything else is a larger, more powerful armed forces. $500B a year just isn’t cutting it.

Congressional Republican have a five percent approval rating among women.  You’d have to look up to see Dick Cheney from there.  Math wizardry isn’t required to figure out that if the Republican Party has a 78% disapproval rating among women, up from 64% at the beginning of the year, they are not on a good trajectory for winning national elections in the future.

Women don’t even have to like Nancy Pelosi to recoil from the people lobbing this kind of stuff at a 69 year-old grandmother.

Whether by Providence or a random swerve of the atoms, it happened that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin both were born on February 12, 1809. The bicentennial of this pregnant coincidence is the occasion for Adam Gopnik’s Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. The title alludes to a resonant ambiguity over just what Edwin Stanton said at the president’s deathbed in 1865. Did his secretary of war commend Lincoln “to the angels” or “to the ages”? To whatever remained of the old hierarchical cosmos, or to the record of great but strictly human endeavor?

In spite of the fact that it is becoming increasingly clear to the rest of the media that Porter Goss and Nancy Pelosi agree that they were not briefed that the CIA had already been torturing prisoners in September 2002, the WaPo has decided to double down on deliberately misreading events.

When we first endorsed him, no insiders thought he had even an outside chance to win the primary, let alone beat an entrenched, well-financed Republican incumbent. But almost immediately we realized that Alan was anything but a run of the mill Democrat. Tireless, brilliant, idealistic and down to earth, the more we got to know of Alan through the primary and general campaigns, the more we realized he could be a rare leader in Congress who could make an outsized difference.

Hedge fund manager George Schultze, one of the losers who bet Obama wouldn’t force Chrysler into bankruptcy, explains the horrors that will follow. It doesn’t make him less of a loser, and anyway, he’s wrong.

It’s becoming a trend: fireworks on July 4th have become a luxury for more and more communities, and money for luxuries is gone. What’s a poor city to do?