Needlenose

A dispatch from the Department of Unintended Benefits, via TPM:

California Tea Party groups are calling San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s boycott and raising him a … boycott.

The mayor raised the ire of California Tea Partiers this week when, in response to Arizona’s passage of a controversial immigration law, he announced a boycott of the state, barring San Francisco city employees from entering Arizona and threatening to cut off economic ties. Local Tea Partiers who support the Arizona legislation answered his actions with a boycott of their own — on the city of San Francisco.

“We are just tired of our representatives not representing our wishes,” said Bridget Melson, president of the group Pleasanton/NorCal TEA Party, which called for the boycott on Wednesday. . . .

The group has encouraged its members not to patronize local businesses. . . . “Spend your money anywhere else…vacation elsewhere, dine elsewhere — if you protest here, bring your own food, coffee and water,” Melson writes in the boycott’s official call to arms.

As it happens, I live in the Bay Area.  I know San Francisco quite well, and have been to Pleasanton more than a few times.  Suffice it to say that Pleasanton is, um, not San Francisco — it’s more than 45 minutes’ driving time away across a bridge and through hills and valleys (not counting traffic), and in cultural terms the distance is probably measured in light years.

So I think I can say with some confidence that a threat by a Pleasanton-based group to stop spending their money in San Francisco most likely isn’t causing The City’s businesses to tremble with fear.  Especially given the propensity by members of this particular movement to be less than flush with cash and not exactly swift to embrace the diversity for which S.F. is famous.

In fact, for folks like me, the news that a bunch of intolerant, obstreperous suburbanites are doing their best to steer clear of San Francisco makes it seem that much more appealing as a place to spend my liberal, big-government-loving money.  Heck, if you ask me, whoever’s in charge of tourism for San Francisco should make an ad to make sure everybody knows about the boycott.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

The cost of oil.  The cost of coal.  The cost of wind power.

*Update* Tip of the  ’Nose to MIT Buddy: On Faux News they are saying that Obama and the Liberals sabotaged the oil rig.  DrudgeIdiot is calling the spill Obama’s Katrina.  Those fuckers are evil and stupid:

Just how stoopid are Fox viewers?

The hate talk is flying, online now.  The reactionaries stalk armed around Town Hall meetings, lurk with their guns in parking lots outside airports when AF1 is in town and strut with their weapons down the National Mall.  Now they are taking their UnAmerican hate online – over 1 million asshole reactionaries are now praying for Obama’s demise.  Am I the only one who hears the assassination time bomb ticking?

There is one silver lining to Teddy Kennedy’s demise – the Cape Cod Wind Farm project will now go forward.  The Kennedy family, if you remember, were opposed on the ground that the distant rotors might spoil their privileged view.

There they go again, the Greedy Old Pigs fighting for the right to protect their Sugar Daddies with back room deals.  Reid should accept their conditions, then secretly tape the proceedings and release the results via a leak during the election cycle.  Can you imagine what juicy nuggets these evil dimwits would let slip?  Could keep the Dems from losing some seats.

…and weirdly, goes by the sound-alike name McVey.  It’s only a matter of time before one of these loonies, hopped up on wrong-wing hate radio, takes a shot at the Prez….

There’s a major profile in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine of veteran Washington, D.C. reporter Mike Allen of Politico:

Allen’s e-mail tipsheet, Playbook, has become the principal early-morning document for an elite set of political and news-media thrivers and strivers. Playbook is an insider’s hodgepodge of predawn news, talking-point previews, scooplets, birthday greetings to people you’ve never heard of, random sightings (“spotted”) around town and inside jokes. It is, in essence, Allen’s morning distillation of the Nation’s Business in the form of a summer-camp newsletter.

Like many in Washington, [White House communications director Dan] Pfeiffer describes Allen with some variation on “the most powerful” or “important” journalist in the capital. The two men exchange e-mail messages about six or eight times a day.

Now, I could weigh in on all the alternately snark-worthy and/or unsettling anecdotes in the NYT’s mammoth profile of Allen, but Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post has already done so in rather devastating fashion (noting that even leaving aside the celebration of Politico’s self-conscious and self-promoting shallowness, portions of the Times piece are “like reading a David Lynch screenplay.”)

Instead, I’m interested in the (perhaps even longer) untold story of how Allen arrived at this point in life.  After all, it was only six and a half years ago that he became a well-known journalist the old-fashioned way — co-writing a story for the Washington Post that was immediately hailed as “one of the most memorable pieces of White House journalism produced in the Bush era” and was substantially responsible for the conviction of a high-ranking government official on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.

Unless you’re a hardcore junkie regarding trivia of the Valerie Plame Wilson CIA leak case, however, you probably have a dim idea, at best, of what I’m talking about.  Perhaps these words will refresh your memory:

… a senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife. That was shortly after Wilson revealed in July that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge….

“Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” the senior official said of the alleged leak.

Granted, Mike Allen’s moment of celebrity for breaking this story faded in part because the proverbial other shoe never fell — the identity of the “senior administration official” was never revealed publicly, much less those of the leakers or the journalists involved.

But I suspect it’s not a coincidence that immediately after reading this article in September 2003, ex-Bushite press secretary Ari Fleischer sought high-priced legal help and refused to talk to FBI investigators without a promise of immunity.  Or that Fleischer would eventually admit speaking to the Post’s Walter Pincus on July 12, 2003, as part of a series of phone calls to (at least six?) Washington journalists he made with WH communications director Dan Bartlett from Air Force One during a flight back from Africa.

Pincus himself testified in Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s perjury trial that Fleischer had leaked to him about Plame in that conversation.  As it happens, on July 12, 2003, Pincus was working on an article for the Post untangling some of the lies the Bush administration had told about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, a piece on which he shared a byline with… Mike Allen.  (Not surprisingly, Pincus was also an unnamed source in the Post’s scandal-breaking story quoted above.)

I suppose that if you asked Allen about this now, he’d get a faraway look in his eyes and say, “Ah, but that was a long time ago.” If he remembered at all, that is, in the blur of his near-sleepless life collecting tidbits of gossip and false leads for Politico.

That the latter is what has made Mike Allen a truly powerful reporter in Washington says more about our politics than I care to imagine.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Just looking at this is clogging my arteries

Nobody is selling these as yet, but could this be the most unhealthy single meal item yet devised by humankind?

Remember the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?  It’s got a buddy in the Atlantic now.   Bad news for sea life:

Charles Moore, an ocean researcher credited with discovering the Pacific garbage patch in 1997, said the Atlantic undoubtedly has comparable amounts of plastic. The east coast of the United States has more people and more rivers to funnel garbage into the sea. But since the Atlantic is stormier, debris there likely is more diffuse, he said.

Whatever the difference between the two regions, plastics are devastating the environment across the world, said Moore, whose Algalita Marine Research Foundation based in Long Beach, California, was among the sponsors for Cummins and Eriksen.

“Humanity’s plastic footprint is probably more dangerous than its carbon footprint,” he said.

Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish: A paper cited by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says as many as 100,000 marine mammals could die trash-related deaths each year.

The plastic bits, which can be impossible for fish to distinguish from plankton, are dangerous in part because they sponge up potentially harmful chemicals that are also circulating in the ocean, said Jacqueline Savitz, a marine scientist at Oceana, an ocean conservation group based in Washington.

Reactionary losers looking for a fight

Armed protesters on the National Mall?  On the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing? 

Last summer I had remarked on how the complete repudiation of the GOP at the polls would spark a repeat of the wrong-wing wackiness and terror of the late ’90s.  I was really expecting more militia activity, abortion clinic terror and media hate talk, all of which has been delivered.

But this so-called Open Carry protest has a whole different quality.  The no-dick big-mouth gun nuts now strut into public,  family settings like National Parks and Starbucks, brazenly displaying their ability to target and kill us with a squeeze of the trigger.

Now they are marching on the Capitol, brandishing weapons?  Are these guys transforming into the Sinn Féin to the militia group’s IRA?

Seriously, it’s just a matter of time now before some wacko unloads on an elected leader or government official – or car bombs another Federal building.    Make no mistake, this is terror of the early Nazi brownshirt variety, and the target is you, me and the rule of law.