Science, to some conservatives it’s all relative, as in reproducing with your relatives.

JJ Cale – Down in Hollywood

It’s still “uniquely American” to hold down three jobs, even when you’re a college student.

If we’re going to build infrastructure for a permanent empire in Afghanistan, then we ought to build in all the things empires bring, like real judicial systems.

Seriously. With all this building and trialing and whatnot, the DC Circuit now looks like a collection of chumps buying a transparent government lie about the ability to hold hearings. Isn’t it time to rethink habeas in Afghanistan?

Thirty percent of US Attorney spots are either still under Bush appointees or under “acting status” and well over 100 Federal judicial seats are empty with far less that half even having a pending nominee. Republicans have put the appointment of conservative judges at the top of their agenda; Democrats and Obama need to get with the program.

Bad Day is in many ways a revolutionary film and yet it is also one which stands the test of time. This 20 minute short, directed by Modi Frank, photographed by Exene Cervenka and written by these same two punk legends, crystallizes a point in American music history when roots rock and folk were emerging out of punk and combining with poetry. A silent film starring musicians and poets including John Doe, Dave Alvin, Julie Christensen, and Doug Knott, Bad Day features Kevin Costner as the town drunk and Dances With Wolves author/screenwriter Michael Blake, who dedicated the novel to Exene.

Rep. Towns, are we really supposed to believe that with the change of a single leadership role in Afghanistan, that these enormous problems with accountability and transparency in DOD contracting and the mission in Afghanistan have changed virtually overnight, that a culture in which lawlessness and corruption has been ingrained for decades has suddenly turned itself around?

House Republicans have decided to offer a privileged motion tomorrow in the emergency session called to pass the state fiscal aid bill, which would basically end this session of Congress by the end of September.

The right-wing is in overdrive attacking Judge Vaughn Walker’s bias, since they say he is ‘openly gay.’ Of course, Walker isn’t openly gay by any stretch of the imagination. But Michaelangelo Signorile perpetuates a dangerous stereotype, difficult to shed for men of my generation and Vaughn Walker’s, by calling these lies ‘smears’ in his otherwise excellent HuffPost article today. It’s not a smear to call someone openly gay, since there’s nothing wrong with being gay in the first place.

Maintaining the current marijuana policy is in fact an extreme minority position in the state. Only a third of voters supports strictly enforcing the current laws against marijuana or passing even tougher laws.