It’s quite a week when the entire MSM suddenly gets sufficient oxygen into its hairspray-addled brain to be shocked, shocked, I tell you, at the fact that the Obama administration has been, well, behaving like Loyal Bushies on meth for the last four years. Mainly, because team Obama was just a tiny bit nicer about how they icily disdained several parts of the Bill of Rights, not least that first one, the punitive prosecutions could continue. the wiretapping comfortably privatized, and the illegality and cronyism of the Bush era would be magically transformed into cuddly bipartisan consensus.

Trouble is, that sort of thing only works until it doesn’t.

A member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Supervisor David Campos, has spoken out on the ongoing scandal involving San Francisco Pride’s decision to not honor Pfc. Bradley Manning as a Grand Marshal of the Pride parade. He has urged Pride to hold a public meeting before this year’s parade and celebration on June 30 instead of after. Pride Chief Operating Officer Earl Plante is also outright lying or, at best, deliberately misrepresenting Pride’s actions in interviews with media.

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) reiterated his longstanding support for passage of the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) on Wednesday with a personal note.

“My niece is a lesbian,” Reid told reporters. “She’s a school teacher. Her employment shouldn’t be affected with that. We should have a law that says that, not just the good graces of wherever you work.”

With a workforce of more than one million, the electronics giant Foxconn has enough workers in its Chinese factories to fill a small country. So it’s fitting that the company has vowed to make its manufacturing kingdom a bit more democratic by encouraging union elections.

Canada’s right-wing Prime Minister is in New York today trying to convince lawmakers that the tar sands are okay, and that the Keystone XL pipeline should go ahead.

At the same time, Canada’s environment minister is in London trying to convince politicians there that tar sands crude is the same as regular sweet crude, and should not be subject to a polluter tax.

“There goes the neighborhood” is a phrase I grew up hearing from racist neighbors in the white, middle-class suburbia of my 1960s and 1970s childhood. The phrase — or better said, epithet — packed a lot of meaning. It expressed the opinion that when a black family moved into an all-white neighborhood, expectations were that the place was destined for hell and decay, taking property values down with it. “White flight” was the prescribed remedy.

Our elected and unelected officials tell us that drone strikes target top level enemies of the United States who are imminent threats to us, and that killing innocent people is avoided altogether or minimized.

Congressional hearings, with a couple of excellent exceptions, question outside academics about the legality of this purported strategy. The Obama administration declines to send any witnesses.

But drone pilots have begun talking to the media. And they describe policies that bear a lot closer resemblance to reporting from the areas where the missiles strike. These pilots should be brought before Congress.

There has been a slow steady drip of indicators that President Obama will approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Recently there was Obama’s statements at a fundraiser and Biden claiming that he is “in the minority” in the administration who opposes the pipeline. Now the Huffington Post is reporting that Obama campaign spin-off Organizing for Action is refusing to do anything about the pipeline despite pleas from its members.

During a press briefing on Tuesday, White House spokesperson Jay Carney mechanically repeated a line when asked about the Justice Department’s seizure of the Associated Press’ phone records, suggesting President Barack Obama supports a “balance” between freedom of the press and national security.

“The president feels strongly that we need a—the press to be able to be unfettered in its pursuit of investigative journalism, and you saw, when he was a senator, the president co-sponsor legislation that would have provided further protections for journalists in this regard,” Carney said. “And he is also mindful of the need for secret and classified information to remain secret and classified in order to protect our national security interests. So there are — there is a careful balance here that must be attained.”

BP and Shell have been raided by agents of the European Commission on suspicion of rigging oil prices for over a decade. Rigging petroleum prices could prove to be even more lucrative than rigging LIBOR.