The most depressing part of this McClatchy article on the corrupt USAID contracting in Afghanistan by the construction company, Louis Berger, are six-year old quotes calling for an alternative to Berger. Either we’ve become a banana republic sooner than most people realized (perhaps with the FL county in 2000? Or before that?). Or all those attempts to blame Afghan culture for the corruption there are just lame excuses invented to help us overlook our own apparently intractable tolerance for corruption.

• Maybe instead they could do something about jobs?
• The new GOP: just like the Bush/Cheney/Bush/Reagan GOP.
• Turd Blossom vs. the Teabaggers.
• Now’s the time to cut Social Security benefits.
• The angry rich.
• Newt, still running the same playbook.

Any war another atrocity, another group of xenophobes all geared up to do it all over again someplace else.

A Pirate Looks At Forty – Jimmy Buffett

Of course the guy wanted to give you a rug, Mike. You were there with Blackhawk helicopters, having closed the market to all but your security detail, and were accompanied by the man who might (possibly) be the next President of the United States.

The U.S. is a signatory to the U.N. Human Rights Resolution, which establishes precedent for treating all of us with dignity. The extension of rights to good lives to all of us would give more stability to the society as a whole.

Welcome to Episode 1 of Boardwalk Empire, or “how they f&#&ed the country with prohibition the first time.” The watch parties for the Martin Scorsese HBO series, which premieres tonight at 9pm ET, are being sponsored by the Just Say Now campaign.  In the upcoming weeks, we’ll be having hosts like Aaron Houston of Students [...]

Once upon a time, there really was a “tea party movement” that was an independent grass-roots entity. But the GOP co-opted the movement before it could catch fire nationwide, and stripped out the independent parts of it while boosting the socially conservative portions and other parts more congenial to the GOP’s own base. But this didn’t exactly work out as planned.

The lesson of Christine O’Donnell’s primary win in Delaware may be this: In politics you don’t elected officials to agree with you, just too afraid to vote against you.

Douglas Bevington’s The Rebirth of Environmentalism comes at a very important moment. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the largest in U.S. history. Then another in Michigan. Heat waves and record temperatures across the South and along the East Coast. Massive fires in Russia, that ripped into wheat supplies and sent prices soaring. Floods in Pakistan that have displaced at least 20 million people, one-fifth of that country’s population.