Every Night, Alone Beneath the Hellmouth that Lights His Vast Spaces...

Mr. Brooks rubs one out over this clip from Fail Safe --

-- and weeps for how things might have been.

How bad was Mr. Brooks' column today?.

So bad that other people actually noticed.

For example, The New Republic was confused by how goofily off Mr. Brooks is today.

David Brooks Is Not Making Sense

Reason Magazine has nothing kind to say:

Americans Are Less Enthusiastic About War and "Leaders," and This Makes David Brooks Sad

It was a long, sad jag about how awful it is that Americans -- especially young Americans -- have figured out after a decade of catastrophic Republican military failures that the United States is not omnipotent.  Mr, Brooks believes that this is a bad thing, because the Neocon mind believes the United States can only exist in one of two states:  constant, glorious military expansion...or decadent, flaccid Hippie chaos.

Of course, David Brooks (being David Brooks) does not blame this healthy skepticism on hangover from the long, bloody, disastrous and ultimately useless wars that he personally championed so energetically just a few years ago.  Instead, everyone and everything is to blame, because culture (hint: When Mr. Brooks talks about deep cultural issues, it's a tell.  Like Newt Gingrich's "fundamentally basically" or Rudy Giuliani's "9/11".  It means grab your wallet because the nice man is now going to try to distract you away from something he does not want you to look at):

These shifts are not just a result of post-Iraq disillusionment, or anything the Obama administration has done. The shift in foreign policy values is a byproduct of a deeper and broader cultural shift. 

Such is the thrall in which Mr. Brooks' holds the Beltway Hive Mind that even as Conor Friedersdorf cuts Mr. Brooks' column into paper dolls, he cannot break through the mesmerism long enough to understand why Daddy would even write such piffle in the first place.

Because -- damn it! -- David Brooks is better than that!

...

Americans who want the U.S. less engaged in world affairs are saying no more than what Brooks, for reasons I can't fathom, finds "amazing": that there are limits to the changes that American politicians and soldiers can bring about, and that those limits ought to be obvious to anyone looking at Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Ukraine.

This point is being made with increasing insistence by the American public because they perceive, correctly, that there is a cadre of Washington, D.C. insiders–bureaucrats, military contractors, think tank fellows, editors like Bill Kristol, writers like Max Boot–so oblivious to America's limits that they can't even see the last military intervention that they successfully advocated as a mistake, even though, in that case, the catastrophic results have already played out.

Brooks is a much more subtle thinker and insightful writer than any of these people. On matters of foreign policy and what he would call "national greatness," he is still unduly influenced by them, despite the fact that, more than any other actors in American life, they've destroyed the trust in leadership that Brooks himself values. Leaders that blunder into wars and subsequently lose them, at great cost in lives and treasure, forfeit their ability to lead. Their ideas lose esteem.

...

What Young Conor cannot comprehend -- and what the Beltway Hive Mind can never admit -- is that Mr. Brooks is not a "much more subtle thinker and insightful writer than any of these people."  Never had been. He has been every bit as routinely and horribly wrong as Bill Kristol.  Has crowed as loudly. Has dodged accountability as successfully.

No, where Mr. Brooks excels is at being ingratiating,   Obsequious.  At sucking his way up the organization, which is a skill that someone like Bill Kristol never had to master.

The son of Irving Kristol. Bill Kristol is a second-generation neocon douchebag.  As a legacy, he gets a free pass to be the biggest, wrongest asshole in Christendom adn never miss a meal.  As such he has never needed to hide his disdain for human beings or to wipe that hideous, deaths'-head smirk off his face.

David Brooks, on the other hand, had to develop a vocabulary and demeanor which would let him pass among the PBS/NPR Liberals at parties without someone spitting in his Rob Roy or socking him in the throat with a tote bag full of Car Talk CDs.

When the opportunity arose, both men gleefully saddled up with the Bush Regime and rode that pony for all it was worth.  Both men made their professional bones ballyhooing Operation Endless Clusterfuck and giddily curb-stomping us poor, stupid, hateful, surrender-monkey Liberals in print. And when it all went tits up, both men did what they needed to do to preserve their respective careers with in their respective professional niches:  Bill Kristol kept doubling and redoubling down and down again on pouring ever more American blood and treasure down an infinite number of neocon ratholes, while David Brooks pursued the much more audacious path of simply denying he'd ever written any of the things he had most definitely written.

And it worked!

Sure Bill Kristol had to leave a sweet gig at Fox when his brand of crazy started to stink up the house brand of crazy, but ABC News snapped him right up.  And thanks to the mutual agreement among all of his colleagues to Not Mention The War -- 

-- David Brooks was able to get away clean and set up a very lucrative business as as America's leading salesman of a Conservative Accountability Avoidance scheme known as "Both Sides Do It".

Breaking News: Lies Work

(Advertisement precedes video)

Exposing misinformation does squat. 

-- Christopher Hayes.

It's a weird and painful sentiment coming from someone who has chosen a career in journalism, but it's true. It's true because, as every writer knows we understand, explain and predict our world through narrative.  As tribal creatures, we tend to share and adapt the narratives of those around us.  And as tribal creatures living in a mass media culture, "those around us" includes entities like Hate Radio and Fox News.

All of which means that once someone has accepted Roger Ailes or Rush Limbaugh as trusted sources on knowledge of the world around them, and once they have woven Conservative lies deep into their personal Bayeux Tapestry, they will hang onto those beloved lies like grim death.

THE TRIUMPH OF ARRANT BULLSHIT ON THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

By Charles P. Pierce on March 11, 2014
This may be the saddest quote I have ever seen in a newspaper.

When advised of the details of her Blues' plan, Boonstra said the idea that it would be cheaper "can't be true." "I personally do not believe that," Boonstra said.

Even granting that the administration did a rotten job selling and/or explaining the Affordable Care Act -- Get Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick started on that sometime -- this quote is immeasurably tragic. It represents a kind of final victory for mean-spirited and uncharitable propaganda over reality, a triumph for misinformation, sabotage, and arrant bullshit in the service of a cruel ideology and faceless oligarchy. It is a measure of the failure of all of our institutions, which definitely includes my own, which allowed charlatans and frauds to hijack too much of the public debate. I pray for this woman's recovery...

Lies work.

And Big Lies -- repeated over and over again -- work best.

So, what is the Biggest Big Lie of all?

"Both Sides Do It".  Hands down.  Not even close.

This is the trap-door through which the Pig People escape accountability for the lies upon which they build their world, and that continue to blow up in their faces, every time, over and over again.

And until this line of retreat -- this lie of retreat -- is destroyed and Conservatives are forced to fight for their horrible ideas on their merits and not on the basis that they are less horrible than the antics of imaginary hippies, we will continue to lose.

Benghaaazi!

Last Stop For The Lost!

(h/t to Blue Gal for noticing that this was playing on AMC today.)

Now They're Just Trolling Me

From the Manhattan Institute:

THE LEADING EDGE:
BIG-THINK POLICY IDEAS FOR AMERICA'S FUTURE

What is the future of conservatism? Which ideas should it champion? What policies should it embrace? Since the 2012 election, a number of young, leading-edge journalists, scholars, and authors have been engaged in a rich conversation about these questions. Deeply versed in the nuances of policy, they have offered and debated big-think suggestions and ideas in response to the challenges facing our nation. Please join the Manhattan Institute on March 11, 2014, for a roundtable discussion, moderated by David Brooks of The New York Times.

PANELISTS Josh Barro, National Correspondent, The New York Times Yuval Levin, Founding Editor, National Affairs Megan McArdle, Columnist, Bloomberg View Avik Roy, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute; Opinion Editor, Forbes Reihan Salam, Contributing Editor, National Review MODERATOR: David Brooks, Columnist, The New York Times

The punchline?

Stay tuned. We are experiencing technical difficulties.

Boy howdy.

Short, Shameless Fan Boy Review of True Detective

Boy howdy.

If I were to compare it to William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler building a raft from timbers stolen from the House of Usher, with Conan Doyle stitching the sails, so they could sail away up Joseph Conrad's river in search of monsters...well that would be exaggerating.

But it was awfully good.

Also (he said, trying very hard to avoid spoilers) the suffocating, hallucinogenic atmosphere of a drug house infused with the sense that Lovecraftian horrors are flitting around just out of sight reminded me very agreeably of Harlan Ellison's "Shattered Like A Glass Goblin".

It was a hero's journey down various rivers, both literal and metaphoric.

It was Holmes and Watson.

It was Gothic and southern and horrifying.

It was one of the most effective uses of the length and depth of the miniseries format I have ever seen.

It was one of the most effective uses of landscape and local culture you will see on teevee, each worked tight around the plot like the copper windings of a motor.

It was a terrific acting class.

And it set a very high bar.

Maybe more later.

Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd

Sorry for a double-Sully in one day, but really:

But the hysteria and self-pity among those who, for centuries, enjoyed widespread endorsement for the horrible mistreatment of gay people really is too much. The victimology that was born on the left is now alive and whining on the right. It’s a self-defeating position and a thoroughly unattractive one.

-- Andrew Sullivan, 03.10.14

In the Conservative arsenal there exists no greater insult that telling someone that their behavior has become as bad as the imaginary excesses of The Dirty Hippies.

Mr. Sullivan flings it because he is weak and lazy.

Gliding Over All -- UPDATE

(NSFW due to violence)

As long as you live in the Beltway Bubble, and have no real stake in anything going on outside the Bubble, and believe in faeries, the Little Folk and True Conservatism you can do very well.

For example, Andrew Sullivan:

I find myself wanting Paul to go the distance in the 2016 primaries. No, that’s not because I want Clinton to win (if she’s the Democratic nominee). It’s because Paul would facilitate a younger demographic for Republicans, and that can only be good – for the GOP and the rest of us.

Perhaps the most crippling disadvantage the GOP now has is its dependence on seniors for political clout. ...

No, the most crippling disadvantage the GOP now has is its dependence on crackpot economic theories and a Hobbsean Randite ideology tarted up to look like Christianity. But please, go on. And to save time,   Let me summarize the next few paragraphs:

Something something gay marriage, pot and the surveillance state. 

And then:

... Unless the GOP manages to find a way to re-brand itself with the next generation, it is facing an existence on life-support – and each pandering message to the Fox News demo will only serve to alienate Millennials.

Rand Paul is one answer to this. If he were to run against the archetypal boomer, Hillary Clinton, around the themes of individual liberty at home and non-interventionism abroad, he could immediately put the GOP on the Millennial side of this generational struggle. Even if he were crushed by Clinton, the GOP’s image would be re-made in a way much more attractive to the under-30s.

His main problem, it seems to me, is racial.

The libertarian position on the Civil Rights Act, while bracing as an intellectual critique of expansive government, is nonetheless toxic to the next generation. Ditto the Republican base’s view on immigration.

Someone who has Mr. Sullivan on speed-dial please remind him for the 1,000th time that racism is not a GOP bug: it's a feature. That it was baked onto the Republican motherboard -- on purpose -- way back when Mr. Sullivan was still in diapers.

If he is suggesting that the GOP abandon its Southern/Christopath Strategy, well, Liberals would certainly approve. Just as we would have approved of jettisoning this ancient evil as an electoral Ring of Power back in the 2000s when Karl Rove was using it to run the table, or back in the Jesse Helms 90s, or back in the 1980s when Reagan was strapping jet engines onto Nixon's original 1960s plan to turn the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Jefferson Davis.

In other words, to get where Mr. Sullivan wants them to go, all the GOP will have to do is what Liberals have been telling them to do for two generations: drive their bigots and their anti-science goons into the sea. Which means losing -- and losing big -- in both in general elections everywhere for years to come, and in the primaries, where the NeoConfederates you just kicked to the curb will no doubt come roaring back, animated with all the money and media muscle that Koch brothers and Roger Ailes can give them.

UPDATE: And the idea that Rand Paul is the man for the job? Are you shitting me? (h/t jomike):

...

In other words, thirty years after Goldwater opposed a federal ban on job discrimination on constitutional grounds, he became one of the leading proponents of a federal ban on job discrimination. Even Barry Goldwater eventually rejected Barry Goldwater’s rationale for opposing the Civil Rights Act.

And yet, Rand Paul does not. Nor does Paul share Goldwater’s views on abortion. Indeed, Paul introduced legislation that would “extend the Constitutional protection of life to the unborn from the time of conception.”

The man CPAC favored to be the next President of the United States, in other words, makes the Godfather of conservatism look like Martin Luther King. Three decades after his own presidential race, Goldwater himself understood that the views he once championed were wrong. Yet Tea Party conservatives would foist these views upon the nation regardless.

Yes, driving bigots and anti-science goons out of our electoral politics is noble project, but to accomplish any of it, you must first do a very hard thing:  you must actually identify the Republican Party and American Conservatism as the pressing problem, and then you must do (as Teddy Roosevelt said) "what you can, with what you have, where you are" to burn them to the ground.

Or, if you dwell in the Bubble and the problems of little people do not affect you in any way, you can instead make like Mr. Sulliivan and float dirigibly above all human concerns, moving people and ideologies around on paper like so many variable in your own, private political fantasy league.

Mr. Sullivan continues in a "Ctd" post:

If [Rand Paul] wins the nomination, of course, all this would be moot, and we’d finally be able to see what might happen in a genuine libertarian were to become president. But even if Paul loses, he will surely open the debate in the primaries on this subject, and as Klein notes, be a thorn in the side of any future surveillance state enthusiasm in a Republican administration.

And indications of a genuine libertarian resurgence in the GOP are increasing...

Which would come as a helluva shock to David Brooks --

The Reemerging Republican Majority
Will Bush's popularity transform his party?
FEB 11, 2002, VOL. 7, NO. 21 • BY DAVID BROOKS

...
Nonetheless, the events of September 11 have shaken the political landscape and so made it possible for the Bushian lion to lie down with the McCainiac lamb (or vice versa)--at least on a policy level, if not on a personal level.

President Bush has broken the libertarian grip on the GOP. (Not only did he call for a grand foreign policy mission, he called for expanding Head Start and liberalizing welfare benefits for immigrants.) But there is still some way to go if he is to win over the independent voters from Purple America (the ones who are halfway between Red and Blue). The final McCainiac initiatives that Bush has not yet co-opted have to do with reform.

Bush has already indicated he will sign the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill if it should come to his desk. But an idea that would have a much more positive effect on the country is capital market reform. Enron has the Bush administration acting defensively, but it could spur a great conservative reform agenda that draws on both McCainiac and Bushian impulses. This would involve pushing through accounting and financial disclosure regulations that would make it possible for small stockholders and entrepreneurs to have faith that they can compete fairly in the financial markets. Such reforms, starting with the ones Arthur Levitt has proposed, would give the markets the credibility that is a prerequisite if Social Security privatization is ever to see the light of day.

If the Bush administration ever wends its way to a reform agenda, if it champions a national service initiative that has both military and faith-based components, if, most important, it prosecutes the war against the axis of evil, then President Bush and his aides will not only have done great things for America, they will have laid the groundwork for a governing Republican majority. And George Bush will have established himself, with FDR and Reagan, as one of the great transformational presidents of the age.

-- if anyone ever troubled Mr. Brooks to look back at all the absolute nonsense he has written over the years.

Zachariah!

Yes, this exists.

I saw at a late-night screening in some flyspeck theater in Chicago Heights.

Or so I am told.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

(Not safe for work and possible spoilers)

"We left something undone", edition.

America's own Yellow King still walks the Earth.

Our nation's most famous living monster, torturer and war profiteer whose political and family connections allow him to operate in plain sight deigned to permit Charlie Rose to "interview" him on the teevee machine this week.

And as is the custom of our Beltway Media, he was fed yummy marshmallows on a silver platter by a toady before heading back, unmolested, to his Carcosa.

From Brother Charlie Pierce:

That Dick Cheney blames the president for staying out of what 56 percent of the American people said they wanted no part of is no surprise because Dick Cheney is essentially a toddler playing Army Men with other people's children. But, of course, the truly remarkable thing is that Charlie Rose sat there like a dog waiting for a treat -- Roll over, Charlie. Good boy. -- and did not do so much as comment on the pure bloodstained irony of Dick Fking Cheney talking tough about how countries shouldn't invade other countries, and the danger to American credibility if we are insufficiently bellicose in response.

Except that this kind of craven media feting of brazenly evil men is no longer remarkable at all.

Cleaning out the grievous wounds and breaking the infectious fevers created by our country's menagerie of smirking, millionaire monsters and their blustering media enablers is our most important piece of undone business.

This country can never heal properly until that is done.  

Vox Is Not a Journey

Because every journey ends.

But they go on.

At least that's sorta what I go out of this long blipvert for Ezra Klein's new media venture, where no holds are barred, except looking directly into the camera.

Also the future of online journalism is apparently going to be really good writing astride some kinda monster Harley of technological .  Roaring into the future.

So if you know any really good writers who are gaunt with hunger for work, let them know that the world turns.

And Vox turns with it.

Or something.

The New Reagan

Please, Sir. 

I don't want any more.

Because Freedumb!

The NeoConfederate Feudalist Party has always loved and needed it's Poverty Porn. Their tiny brains requir constant steeping in an open sewer of paranoia and rage at various imaginary Sekrit Commie Gummint plots to steal their stuff and hand it over to uppity Negroes, sneaky Mexicans and the ubiquitous Undeserving Poor.  They need to believe The Poors are poor because of moral defect:  it's the only way they can gleefully cheer on policies that kick the shit out of the poor Monday through Friday and still pretend to be Christian on Sunday.

Of course, by building an entire ideology on a foundation of fraud and fairy tales, then have made themselves hostage to every grifter and demagogue who promises to keep the party going.

30 years ago they had Reagan, dog-whistling about "young bucks" and "states rights" with a twinkle in his eye:

Righting Reagan’s Wrongs?

By BOB HERBERT Published: November 13, 2007
...
The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day. 

That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”

Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”

Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.

Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.

He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.

And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.

Congress overrode the veto.

Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Congress overrode that veto, too.

Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record.
...

30 years later, Paul Ryan works the same meatheads with the same fairy tales around the same, lurid  Randite campfire:

Paul Ryan Lied About a Hungry Kid To Justify Killing School Lunch.

The Pig People will be with us always, so thirty years from now there'll be some other grifting wingnut goodhair shaking down another mob of inbred hill folk for their money or their votes.  But whether he is doing it in front of a global audience from the Oval Office or out of the back of a van in some God-forsaken jerkwater town depends entirely on how successful we are at burning down the Party of Jefferson Davis between now and then.

As The Project to Reform the FISA Courts

And instigate a great debate among the American public regarding domestic surveillance takes another step forward.

From The Intercept (emphasis added):

The NSA Has An Advice Columnist. Seriously.

By Peter Maass

7 Mar 2014, 9:06 AM EST

What if the National Security Agency had its own advice columnist? What would the eavesdroppers ask about?

You don’t need to guess. An NSA official, writing under the pen name “Zelda,” has actually served at the agency as a Dear Abby for spies. Her “Ask Zelda!” columns, distributed on the agency’s intranet and accessible only to those with the proper security clearance, are among the documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The columns are often amusing – topics include co-workers falling asleep on the job, sodas being stolen from shared fridges, supervisors not responding to emails, and office-mates who smell bad. But one of the most intriguing involves a letter from an NSA staffer who complains that his (or her) boss is spying on employees.

In the letter, which Zelda published in a column on September 9, 2011, the employee calls himself “Silenced in SID” – referring to the Signals Intelligence Directorate, the heart of the NSA’s surveillance operations. Zelda’s column, headlined “Watching Every Word in Snitch City,” offers an ironic insight into a spy agency where the spies apparently resent being spied upon.

...

So now, thanks to Edward Snowden and the greatest heist of American surveillance secrets in history, we know the NSA had an advice column.

I bet they had cookbooks too. And a barbecue. And signs on the office freezer warning people not put soda in the freezer because is 'splodes.

But wait! There's more.  We also have "Zelda"'s resume:

Who is Zelda? And who is “Silenced in SID”? The document provides no information about the identity of the letter’s author; he or she could be almost anybody at the agency. In a previous column, Zelda explains that Ask Zelda! was initially intended as a forum for supervisors in the Signals Intelligence Directorate, but that non-supervisory workers began submitting questions, too.

A bit more is known about Zelda. Her introductory column, in 2010, identifies her as serving for approximately 20 years as “a first-line and mid-level Agency supervisor.” At the time her column began, she was also an adjunct faculty member of the agency’s National Cryptologic School. Her column was part of a regular NSA bulletin called “SIDtoday” that is distributed on the agency’s classified NSAnet. According to traffic statistics, in fact, Ask Zelda! quickly proved to be among the bulletin’s most popular features.

Which is all very amusing and light and fluffy...until you consider the provenance of the trove of stolen secrets from which it comes.  

Until you consider that Mr. Snowden spent years stealing American surveillance secrets -- going so far as to change jobs for the expressed purpose of stealing stuff he could not access any other way --  in order to carefully amass a documentary arsenal.  And the purpose of creating that digital doomsday device, we have been assured over and over again, was that is was the only means Mr. Snowden had at his disposal to rouse the American public to action regarding the secret and probably illegal liberties the NSA was taking with regards to spying on American citizens, and the dangerous weakness of the oversight body -- the FISA court -- which was supposed to keep such activities within the bounds of the Constitutional protections every American has a right to expect.

Because only an enterprise of such deadly seriousness of purpose could possibly justify the greatest theft of American state secrets in history and the compilation of a trove of documents containing (according to Glenn Greenwald) “...enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States”.

This is the trove of stolen secrets which Mr. Snowden had with him when he fled his country.  This is the trove to which Mr. Snowden apparently still has access to even as he continues to enjoy the hospitality of the liberty loving Vladimir Putin and his Russian government.

"These nations, including Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador have my gratitude and respect for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless. By refusing to compromise their principles in the face of intimidation, they have earned the respect of the world."

-- Edward Snowden

And that is the trove through which  Peter Maass pawed in order to bring the readers of Pierre Omidyar's new online magazine the trivial news that the NSA has some mild lunch-theft and B.O. problems.

As a writer, the only clever back-story I can come up with to explain why Mr. Greenwald and the rest of the crew at First Look who have work so hard to establish a reputation for Utterly Humorless, Remorseless Jugular Ripping would go out of their way to use the only capital they have -- access to Mr. Snowden's  cache of stolen documents -- in such a utterly frivolous manner is that they are sending the NSA this message:  Fear us, because Mr. Snowden has stripped you so bare that we have everything, right down to your Post-It notes and three year's worth of NSA Jokes of the Day.

Of course, Mr. Omidyar remains perfectly free to use his resources -- both digital and financial, both earned and purloined -- as he chooses with fearing that he will hear jackboots kicking in his door and rushing up the stairs of his luxurious Hawaiian residence.  

After all, this isn't Russia.  

A Jim Thomson Novel

Just begging to be written.

From The Washington Post:

CEO of bitcoin exchange found dead in Singapore
By Associated Press, Published: March 5

SINGAPORE — The American CEO of a virtual currency exchange was found dead near her home in Singapore.

A police spokesman said Thursday that initial investigations indicated there was no suspicion of “foul play” in the Feb. 26 death of 28-year-old Autumn Radtke, meaning officers do not suspect murder.

The spokesman said police found Radtke lying motionless near the apartment tower where she lived.

Police have so far classified the death as “unnatural,” which can mean an accident, misadventure, or suicide.
...

“There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.”  -- Jim Thompson

From Senator Ted Cruz's CPAC 2014 Breakout Panel:

"A True Conservative's Guide To Venerating Fake Reagan".

Step One:  Firmly grasp Fake Reagan with both hands.

Step Two:  Open your mouth AS WIDE AS IT WILL GO.

...

Professional Left Podcast #222

"...the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” 

-- From William Faulkner's 1950 Nobel Prize speech

 Links:

• Glenn Greenwald vs. Glenn Greennwald
• David Brooks vs. David Brooks
• Bill Nye gives Creationists a helping-hand
• Dear Rachel Maddow:  Why bother asking scary questions when the answers are too frightening to mention?
• Whatever Ed Schultz is smoking, can we get enough for everybody?

Da' money goes here: