Thousand word ‘Media Notes’ column to follow with many links to right-wing bloggers clutching their pearl necklaces.

A little Summer fun with Los Paranoias, and a little beauty with a new video from Sara Petite and The Tiger Mountain Boys.

Where have you gone, George Carlin and Lenny Bruce?

Don’t say that EO 12333 has been violated. . . .

I was on a panel in 2007 with Joe Lockhart and Todd Purdam to talk about political news. We talked a lot about how the press’ insistence on covering the Lewinsky scandal–when the bulk of the country was pretty happy with the President regardless of who had given him a blow job–led to the crisis of legitimacy that let blogs arise.

Wingnut fringe radio host Alex Jones got a little bit more fame late last month when appropriately named celebrity dolts, the Pratts–aka Speidi, Spencer and Heidi from the reality show The Hills–came out in favor of Jones’ New World Order/One World Government panic and assorted conspiratorial other fears seen on the far edges of the flat earth where the Right and Left meet in fear of loosing control.

Alex Jones is a central figure in ViceTV’s 2nd Revolutionary War, one whose rants about how the Democrats and Republicans are just the same party and puppets with strings pulled by one man–or really a group of Eeeevil Elites.

I understand the term used often by our hero Ted Kennedy, that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”. However, in this case, I’d like to turn that spin around and say that, in the instance of the public option, half-assed and inadequate is the enemy of the necessary and the acceptable. — Steve Steffens

As the health reform fight moves forward, the issues people are talking about change. While it once seemed like our biggest battle was over whether we are going to get a strong public health insurance option as part of reform, that question has now joined a host of others in the debate. Predictably, these new arguments come with their fair share of myths that need to be pushed back on. So here we go…

The Obama Administration stance on an investigation of the Rashid Dostum massacre and cover-up seems to have as much to do with who is speaking as whether such an investigation will happen in the first place.