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Bill "Be independent, LIKE ME." O'Reilly can't keep the facade up very well:

(h.t. AlterNet)

Come to think of it, these scans of celebrities will make it out onto the net. There's no way a Scarlett Johansson's "nude" pic wouldn't make it around the 'net.

So this is what the images from the new airport scanners look like:

I don't think most people could use this as a substitute for porn - but it's definitely going to turn at least a few people away from flying.

It turns out the day I recommended Break Room Live, the show had Dick Gregory being generally entertaining but somewhat . . . wonky. Consider this clip celebrating the fifth anniversary of Air America a better idea of the "humor" in this mostly political show:

"Racial Bias Seen in Hiring of Waiters" from the NY Times:

Expensive restaurants in New York discriminate based on race when hiring waiters, a new study has concluded. The study was based on experiments in which pairs of applicants with similar résumés were sent to ask about jobs. The pairs were matched for gender and appearance, said Marc Bendick Jr., the economist who conducted the study. The only difference was race, he said.

White job applicants were more likely to receive followup interviews at the restaurants, be offered jobs, and given information about jobs, and their work histories were less likely to be investigated in detail, he said Tuesday. He spoke at a news conference releasing the report in a Manhattan restaurant.

First it was names on resumes, then advertising, then firefighting and now this.

With as much as I've written about Obama recently - almost all of it defending him - you'd get the idea I like/love the guy more than I do.

I think Obama has the capacity to be one of our best Presidents ever, but I still think he's in a position where he needs to prove himself.

My reticence to pronounce my love for his administration doesn't mean I like it when people take pot shots at him just to take pot shots at him.

Is anybody on the left ever that hypocritical?

Thomas Sowell is on my go away list.

Witness "A Rookie President" from Townhall.com:

Barack Obama is a rookie in a sense that few other Presidents in American history have ever been. It is not just that he has never been President before. He has never had any position of major executive responsibility in any kind of organization where he was personally responsible for the outcome.

Here's a newsflash dude: Obama won the election. You really need to stop campaigning against him now. And get your facts straight, every campaign he ran from the Illinois state legislature to the presidency was an "organization where he was personally responsible for the outcome" where he had "major executive responsibility."

What is even worse than making mistakes is having sycophants telling you that you are doing fine when you are not. In addition to all the usual hangers-on and supplicants for government favors that every President has, Barack Obama has a media that will see no evil, hear no evil and certainly speak no evil.

They will cheer him on, no matter what he does, short of first-degree murder-- and they would make excuses for that. Even former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan has gushed over President Obama and even crusty Bill O'Reilly has been impressed by Obama's demeanor.

And here's where we enter la-la land. Has he picked up a newspaper? Hell, has he ever watched FOX News?

I can't get excited about sequels anymore - Hollywood churns the damn things out and the vast majority of them are utter failures. Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Robocop, Superman, Batman, The Matrix, Beverly Hills Cop, Friday, X-Men, First Blood, The Terminator, Toy Story, The Hunt for Red October, The Karate Kid, Planet of the Apes, Psycho, Dirty Harry, Highlander, Rocky, The Howling, Smokey and the Bandit, Halloween, Universal Soldier and even The Godfather all started off awesome and eventually spawned sequels that sucked.

However, I'm unabashedly a Spider-Man fan, and after liking Spider-Man and loving Spider-Man 2, I was - like most Spidey fans - disappointed by the scatter-shot Spider-Man 3.

Sam Raimi acknowledges the problems I had with 3 and is promising fixes:

"The best way for me to move forward on films, I realise... and this was a lesson I had to learn for myself... is that I've gotta be the singular voice that makes the creative choices on the film."

"I love Spider-Man so much that I'd like to continue telling Spider-Man stories but only under those circumstances where I think I can honour him. I don't think I can honour him any other way."

The NY Times "Banks Starting to Walk Away on Foreclosures" starts of with a bad economic story on a personal level:

Mercy James thought she had lost her rental property here to foreclosure. A date for a sheriff’s sale had been set, and notices about the foreclosure process were piling up in her mailbox.

Ms. James had the tenants move out, and soon her white house at the corner of Thomas and Maple Streets fell into the hands of looters and vandals, and then, into disrepair. Dejected and broke, Ms. James said she salvaged but a lesson from her loss.

So imagine her surprise when the City of South Bend contacted her recently, demanding that she resume maintenance on the property. The sheriff’s sale had been canceled at the last minute, leaving the property title — and a world of trouble — in her name.

. . . and progresses to a bad economics story on a national level:

The so-called bank walkaways rarely mean relief for the property owners, caught unaware months after the fact, and often mean additional financial burdens and bureaucratic headaches. Technically, they still owe on the mortgage, but as a practicality, rarely would a mortgage holder receive any more payments on the loan. The way mortgages are bundled and resold, it can be enormously time-consuming just trying to determine what company holds the loan on a property thought to be in foreclosure.

In Ms. James’s case, the company that was most recently servicing her loan is now defunct. Its parent company filed for bankruptcy and dissolved. And the original bank that sold her the loan said it could not find a record of it.

“It is what some of us think is the next wave of the crisis,” said Kermit Lind, a clinical professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and an expert on foreclosure law.

So what happens if people just stop paying their mortgages to see if they end up falling into this category? If you're jobless and going broke with worsening credit, what would you have to lose?

Here's the story so far:

1. Right wing nutball The New York Post claims Natasha Richardson 'may' have been killed by 'Canadacare'
2. Right wing echo chamber echoes the claim
3. Canadian doctors respond

Hey right wing nutballs? You know Canadians, with their "socialized health care" have a longer life expectancy than Americans, ski accidents or not, right?

The start of NewsBuster's "Greta Responds to Politico: 'I Have Never Given Gov. Palin Advice'" by Noel Sheppard is a killer:

Greta Van Susteren is clearly sick and tired of people accusing her of advising Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

The first sentence in and he's aiding and abetting Van Susteren lies and getting the controversy wrong.

Most people are accusing Greta's husband of giving her advice. NewsBusters wants to help her dodge the bullet by pretending the Politico's take on the story is the only controversy. Thus they avoid the real questions of whether she threw softball questions in her several Palin interviews last campaign season, or whether those interviews came about through her husband's association with Palin.

Oddly enough, (*cough*) Mrs. Van Susteren's response denies that her husband was helping Palin during the campaign, but doesn't link to the Politico article she's "rebutting."

Surely an oversight?

I thought they spent too much time on the Brian subplot, I kept wishing they'd go back to Stewie. However, I loved the ending to the Brian subplot, but the Star Trek story was . . . I dunno. I just didn't laugh.

"McCain: Public financing is 'dead'" from The Washington Times:

Sen. John McCain, an architect of sweeping campaign-finance reform who got walloped by a presidential candidate armed with more than $750 million, predicts that no one will ever again accept federal matching funds to run for the nation's highest office.

"No Republican in his or her right mind is going to agree to public financing. I mean, that's dead. That is over. The last candidate for president of the United States from a major party that will take public financing was me," the Arizona Republican told The Washington Times.

Newsflash: Maureen Dowd is vapid.

County Fair does a good job illustrating why "Ambitious agenda for first lady" from Politico is stupid, but I thought I'd highlight one thing about Michelle Obama:

But she clearly is breaking through and connecting on some level — polls show her favorability ratings in the mid-60s.

This is clearly proof that a large number of people are just pure haters. Michelle Obama has 40% of the populace who don't view her favorably, and not one of them has a good reason why. There's not one First Lady in the history of the United States who deserves a favorability rating less than, oh say 90% - they've all been far too innocuous for anything less.

"Sunrise man cleared after elevator video shows he did not batter Fort Lauderdale officers" from the Sun-Sentinel:

After a beat down in an elevator, Joshua Daniel Ortiz ended up with his nose broken and facing a charge of battering a Fort Lauderdale police officer.

The 22-year-old Sunrise man was surprised and delighted to learn Wednesday that Broward prosecutors were dropping the case against him after reviewing an elevator surveillance video showing three officers aggressively rush and beat Ortiz to the ground.

Once the Dec. 5 video surfaced, it altered the course of the case. It contradicted police reports that Ortiz provoked and attacked Officers Derek Lade, Stefan Silver and Steve Smith.

"They were just sitting there watching my life go down the drain with those charges," Ortiz said Wednesday. "I've been going crazy thinking my life is over. It's barely started and it's over."

"Obama Town Hall Questioners Were Campaign Backers" from the Washington Post:

President Obama has promised to change the way the government does business, but in at least one respect he is taking a page from the Bush playbook, stocking his town hall Thursday with supporters whose soft -- though far from planted -- questions provided openings to discuss his preferred message of the day.

What's this about you ask? They run down a list of supporters. Take this diabolical example:

5. Bonnee L. Breese: "Hi, Mr. President. Thank you so very much for having me, a public school teacher from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, here to be with you.

THE PRESIDENT: What's your name?

Q Bonnee Breese.

THE PRESIDENT: Good to see you, Bonnee.

Q Thank you. I'm from Overbrook High School. I have to say that, because I know all the children are watching. (Laughter.)"

Breese has not donated a reportable amount to Obama, according to the FEC. She is a member of the 11,626-person Pennsylvania for Obama page on Facebook.

A supporter of the president's -- "Of course!" she said -- Breese was invited to the meeting through the American Federation of Teachers union. She sits on the executive board of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, Local 3, she said, and is known in her area for being politically engaged.

See? Obama took a question from somebody in a union. Breese's such a partisan hack she signed up for an Obama Facebook page for God's sake! This is the Obama administrations equivalent of Jeff Gannon: you remember him right? The gay hooker operating under an alias originally unaffiliated with any news service who was ushered into the White House to lob softball questions to Bush despite not qualifying for a press pass?

Seriously, these are the the M.F.'s who refused to investigate whether Bush was lying about WMD. They sat idly by while Bush lied us into war and they bitch because Obama didn't ignore questions from the more than half of the electorate who supported his campaign?

UPDATE: Country Fair's take is recommended reading.

"Unemployment Far More Worrisome for Blacks Than Whites" from Gallup:

While the vast majority of both blacks and whites name at least one economic issue as the most important problem facing the country, they differ in the extent to which they specifically mention unemployment, with jobs a much greater concern among blacks (29%) than among whites (16%).