A little sampler platter for you, my pretties …
First up, a brilliant post by Hunter on Daily Kos:
Things I have learned during this campaign season:
In a race that includes a former First Lady of the United States and a multimillionaire Republican senator rumored to share up to eight residences with his wife, the black guy […]

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I’m starting to worry that Ocelopotamus has become like that stock old-man character from sitcoms and things, who falls asleep for a while and then wakes up sputtering and tries to pick the conversation up wherever it was five minutes ago, as if no time has passed.
On the other hand, it’s heartening that I […]

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I can’t scrape together enough time at the moment to do OcPot’s usual painstakingly well-rounded roundup — I’m seeing The Waterboys at the Park West tonight, woo-hoo! — but I wanted to get some of these links up before they fossilized. So here’s a charmingly slapdash, quick-and-dirty roundup. In ripped fishnet and high heels.

The always-eloquent […]

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In order to keep these roundups fresh as a spring daisy, I usually discard any links I’ve been keeping around that are more than a week old. But since this is OcPot’s first roundup in more than six weeks, I’m extending the freshness window slightly to include a few things that were just too good […]

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Eric Alterman has an outstanding column in The Nation on how the media’s mean girls (of all genders) develop the narratives they use to bring down the presidential candidates they take a dislike to. With examples of what they did to Gore in 2000, and what they’re doing to Obama and Edwards right now.
Two of […]

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General Petraeus says that “victory” in Iraq will require 9-10 more years. I’m trying to imagine how ten more years of bloody occupation can possibly work out to a victory. More on that subject here.

A bill has been introduced in Venezuela to restrict baby names to a list of 100 approved choices. “The bill’s ambition, […]

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Scary stuff: There’s a lot of buzz and speculation that starting just after Labor Day, the Bush administration is going to be rolling out a major PR campaign to pave the way for war with Iran. See here and here for starters. Grand Moff Texan at DKos says the Bushies will be using the same […]

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Bush has suddenly decided that the Iraq occupation is kinda like Vietnam after all, but of course he’s careful to draw the wrong conclusions from the comparison. The article quotes American University historian Allan Lichtman as saying that Bush’s spin on the situation “is not revisionist history. It is fantasy history.”
On a related note, […]

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Out, damned spot! Fox News caught red-handed, laundering entries on Wikipedia. Keep on scrubbing, Lady MacFox, but those stains belong to you always.

The GOP’s California strategy: winning the 2008 election by undoing California’s winner-take-all electoral system. Once the state goes piecemeal, the Repubs gain at least 20 electoral votes from safe GOP districts.
Arianna Huffington looks […]

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This is brilliant. Peter Smith at the Huffington Post has a proposal for renaming the new I-35W bridge in Minneapolis that will replace the one that collapsed: “For a while there, back when the Republicans held the White House and both houses of Congress, they were naming things after Ronald Reagan everywhere. Airports. Aircraft carriers. […]

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“Iraq hasn’t even begun”: Writing in the LA Times, Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at Oxford University, examines the long-term consequences of the debacle in Iraq, and concludes, “Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.”
Digby on the […]

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John Conyers tells it like it T-I-Is: Conyers says Bush spared Libby from jail to keep him from singing. This is patently obvious to just about everyone, but of course the White House immediately called the charge “ridiculous and baseless.” Which allows it to join the distinguished list of other ideas the administration considers “ridiculous […]

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Nicole at Crooks and Liars puts it well: It’s ironic to be celebrating Independence Day during a time when we have a virtual King who defies the law with impunity, and is not held accountable to the people he governs. Revolution? What revolution?

Also at C&L, what a TV newscast looked like on July 4, 1972. […]

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POLITICS: The Washington Post brings us the fascinating story of how Cheney’s quest to undermine environmental science for political purposes led to a humongous pile of rotting dead fish. “… Because of Cheney’s intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was […]

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