Hey liberals, hey progressives, when President Obama says, “Social Security is not the huge contributor to the deficit,” he’s not backing you, he’s frontin’ you.

Al Jazeera English is broadcasting a call from a Dr. Ghassan of the Salmaniya hospital who calls desperately for help saying the hospital is full and overwhelmed, “almost impossible to cope,” that the number of casualties is “uncountable” and that it is “as if we are in a war.” A second doctor reported that ambulances are blocked from entering the area to help the wounded and that there are many, many there.

I do wonder whether there’s a correlation between those telecommunication companies that try to buy political favors and those that offer federal law enforcement favors in return.

It turns out that the average public pension for a Wisconsin public employee is around $24,500 a year, according to tax expert David Cay Johnston. In addition, the state pension plan gives 15% of its money every year to Wall Street money managers, which Johnston described as “a really huge high percentage.” But the pension battle, which has been totally distorted, is almost secondary to the attempted stripping of worker rights.

Secretary Clinton is deeply concerned – but not concerned enough to take similar actions to guarantee that US weapons and tax dollars are not spent on the bullets and batons that ravaged the Bahraini people last night.

Good for the President. “President Obama thrust himself and his political operation this week into Wisconsin’s broiling budget battle, mobilizing opposition Thursday to a Republican bill that would curb public-worker benefits while planning similar action in other state capitals.”

I guess we know now as goes Tunisia so goes Wisconsin.

Yankees stars Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Bill Skowron, and songwriter Jack Norworth — Take Me Out To The Ball Game on The Ed Sullivan Show on April 13, 1958.

We had a massive solar flare this week, starting on Tuesday — the biggest since December 2006 — and the chart you see here indicates the possibility that some auroral activity may be visible tonight as far south as Indianapolis, Indiana. You might not get a spectacular light show, maybe just a shimmer you can’t define, but it will be more than I can see under this cloud cover.

Hunton & Williams, the law firm that solicited HBGary and two other security firms to spy on Chamber of Commerce opponents, has remained silent so far about its efforts.

But it hasn’t covered its tracks. The SEIU reports that people from Hunton & Williams spent 20 hours last November–at the time when Themis was pitching H&W to use a JSOC approach to go after Chamber opponents–on the SEIU sites.