Joni Mitchell – Sex Kills

But meet and shake hands with this Evil Bun? No thanks.

Video don’t lie. Ask ACORN. Ask Shirley Sherrod. Ask NPR.

Hi folks, Happy Easter! It has been a pretty frustrating week on a lot of the fronts we follow here. But that was the week that was, now it is Easter Sunday and it is time to relax, eat and have some fun, whether it is a religious holiday for you or just a good chance to chill.

Pot and Bradley Manning: That’s what fourth-generation Pittsburgh Plate Glass heiress Naomi Pitcairn went to the St Regis Hotel in San Francisco to talk about in what she calls the “extra special, rich people room.”

One of the tradeoffs made by the US administrations to gain support for entering into Free Trade Agreements is that these agreements impose certain standards on the parties – to protect the environment, human rights and union rights.

So what will the Obama administration do when the terms of one of those agreements are blatantly violated?

There is an ongoing Justice Department investigation into these wrongful military foreclosures, and JPMorgan is implicated in that probe, along with Saxon Mortgage, a division of Morgan Stanley. There are criminal penalties attached to violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, and legislation from Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) would double those fines.

All of this underlines the extreme measures JPMorgan is taking to rectify the situation with wrongful foreclosures of active duty military. And it also underlines the fact that next to nothing is being done with all the wrongful foreclosures on everyone BUT active duty military.

We keep seeing this spectacle of top US military officials going to Iraq for meetings with the political leadership, and saying loudly that if they want US troops to stay in the country beyond the December 2011 date, they’d better make up their minds soon. Mind you, no Iraqi official has said publicly – or, reading between the lines of all the statements, privately – that they want the US to stay.

For what it’s worth, I’m fairly certain that McDonalds goes through a hiring exercise of this nature most every spring; they just consolidated it all to one day this year and apparently received the hoped for public relations splash.

What makes Ha-Joon Chang’s new book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, such a joy to read, is not the challenge it poses to the bad economics that undergirds global finance, though it does precisely that. Just as Thomas did nearly 40 years ago, Chang’s book succeeds, fundamentally, because it challenges the dead language that is used to market as progress our growing political discontent.

One can only wonder what an intelligent, worldly woman like Christiane Amanpour must have thought as she interviewed the Rev. Franklin Graham. Whether it was cynicism or cluelessness about Christianity that convinced ABC’s This Week to feature Graham, I cannot say. What I will say is that Franklin Graham came across as one of the phoniest, stupidest “religious” hucksters I’ve ever listened to. Happy Easter to you too, ABC.