• Will be bad for the Democrats or very bad?
• Wah! My employer won’t let me be a bigot!
• Least surprising headline of the day.
• Krugman: it was too small.
• Teabaggers: still not at all bigoted.
• Will Rubio ask his parents to leave?

Politics as billionaires playpen.

Waylon Jennings-Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way What’s on your mind tonite…?

LGBT Americans need support for our goals in both parties — but we don’t need advocates who give in just when victory is at hand. Viewing Patrick Murphy’s actions that way doesn’t require a partisan lens, but it does require removing the rose-colored glasses Jonathan Capehart wears as he types up another screed against people who embarrassed Team Obama.

Yep, in New York State, everyone’s so pissed, their eyes have turned yellow, but when you can’t even get your hometown newspaper’s endorsement, it’s time to pack up the shopping bags and go back to Buffalo. We may be mad, Carl, but we’re not insane.

Tonight is Episode 6 of Boardwalk Empire, “Family Limitation.”

We’ll hold the chat tonight on MyFDL, so stop by in the comments (now nested) and let us know how you’re liking it.

Will someone please explain to me why neocon nutjob Fred Hiatt thinks letting disgraced racist liar and failed scientist Charles “Bell Curve” Murray defecate all over the editorial section of Kaplan Test Prep’s Washington Post arm is a good idea?

After weeks of news dumps from anonymous sources that Afghan-Taliban talks were proceeding at high levels, facilitated by NATO forces providing escorts for Taliban leaders into Kabul, Landay and Strobel talk to some other sources for McClatchy, and find that the whole thing is just a bunch of PR.

As a cartoonist, columnist, radio host, TV guest and graphic novelist, Ted Rall has always been hard to categorize. Rall is liberal and an environmentalist, to be sure, but he’s a peculiar brand of both. He’s not scared of guns or all gun owners and he’s got a strong law-and-order streak. He seems to dismiss popular “peak oil” theories that anticipate a rapid and disastrous fall-off in petroleum production. He’s equally critical of Democrats and Republicans.

Rall is most notorious for his U.S. political commentary. A 2004 cartoon criticizing football player-turned-soldier Pat Tillman, who was killed by “friendly” fire in Afghanistan, is easily Rall’s most famous work. But arguably Rall’s most unique and important work has grown out of his infrequent jaunts through foreign conflict zones, particularly in Central Asia. A trip to Afghanistan in 2001 produced the graphic novel To Afghanistan and Back, one of the best and most prescient books on the now decade-old war. For all that, Rall’s most eloquent work isn’t political at all. His memoir The Year of Loving Dangerously recounts his turbulent but passionate youth.

Really good New York Times piece on WikiLeaked accounts of private security contractors. And while it’s not the main thrust of the piece, the following section shows how the murky legal rules and chain-of-command situation in Iraq worked to the contractors’ detriment as well as their benefit: The threats were not limited to insurgents, the [...]