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Very sad and tragic news on Michael Hastings passing:

BuzzFeed is saddened to report that Michael Hastings died in a car accident early this morning in Los Angeles. He was 33.

Ben Smith, BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief, said in a statement:
We are shocked and devastated by the news that Michael Hastings is gone. Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered from wars to politicians. He wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold. Michael was also a wonderful, generous colleague, a joy to work with and a lover of corgis — especially his Bobby Sneakers. Our thoughts are with Elise and and the rest of his family and we are going to miss him.

Here's more from Rolling Stone: Michael Hastings, 'Rolling Stone' Contributor, Dead at 33:

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The tweet is fake, but still perfect.

Open thread below...

Bourbon In Kentucky
	Price: $1.29 (As of 06/18/13 03:46 pm details)

Dierks Bentley is readying the fall release of his next album, Riser, on Capitol Records Nashville. Here's the first release for its lead single, "Bourbon in Kentucky," which features country songstress Kacey Musgraves. She joins in on the chorus "There ain't enough bourbon in Kentucky to forget you," which serves as a tribute to Bentley's father's death. Riser was written and recorded in the year after he passed.

For information on tour dates, check out his website dierks.com.

Enjoy!

Via OccupyWallSt:

Liberate Space - July 4th - Cities Everywhere - Be Daring

In a few weeks, on July 4th we call on all individuals to blockade, disrupt and disobey the architecture of repression in their own cities. We act against the surveillance state not because it has overstepped an imaginary line, we rebel against it for the simple fact that it is designed to intimidate, imprison and demoralize us. We act against it because we know that politicians, corporations and the ruling class will never listen or change. We know that it is up to us to be disobedient, that direct action is the only road to freedom.

There is no better time than now to push forth an initiative which calls out the surveillance state for what it is; a web of police, prisons and politicians designed to protect the wealthy. At a time of upheaval and massive repression worldwide we don't ask for permission, we recognize that those who grant us permission are those that spy on us at the same time. The world we fight for is a world free from politicians, states and security agencies.

On July 4th we call on individuals and groups to gather in the busy thoroughfares, parks and squares in your town. We suggest an overnight occupation designed to call out and confront the means in which surveillance is carried out. This could simply be holding a sign in front of a camera, your tactics are only limited by creativity. It is important to not fall into the marching around in circles trap. We hold our space in a busy area on the 4th because this is where people, commerce and surveillance are.

Circulate Widely * Create Your Own Event * Write A Call To Action

-Valley Anarchist Circle
https://www.facebook.com/events/280921688720561/

Now we get the usual baloney argument over immigration reform. OH NOES, we'll have to have a national identification card!!! This time, it's coming from Democrats who have concerns about E-Verify.

New York Times:

Driver’s license photographs and biographic information of most Americans would be accessible through an expanded Department of Homeland Security nationwide computer network if the immigration legislation pending before the Senate becomes law.

The proposed expansion is part of an effort to crack down on illegal immigration by requiring all employers to confirm the identity and legal status of any new workers by tapping into a Homeland Security Department system called E-Verify, which is now used voluntarily by about 7 percent of employers in the United States.

But the proposal already faces objections from some civil liberties lawyers and certain members of Congress, who worry about the potential for another sprawling data network that could ultimately be the equivalent of a national ID system.

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Cornel Rasor, who chairs the Idaho Republican Party's resolutions committee, says that he pushed for a resolution to void all local ordinances banning discrimination against LGBT people because he wants to be able to fire any gay man who "comes into work in a tutu."

The Associated Press reported that a non-binding resolution passed Saturday at the party's Central Committee summer meeting in McCall calls for the state legislature to block anti-discrimination ordinances passed by at least five municipalities throughout the state.

For seven years, the Republican-controlled Legislature has refused to add sexual orientation to the Idaho Human Rights Act, which bans discrimination based on race, religion and disability. So local governments like Coeur d'Alene, Sandpoint, Ketchum, Moscow and Boise have responded by passing their own ordinances protecting LGBT people.

That's a trend that the Idaho Republican Party wants to stop before it spreads to more towns.

"I’d hire a gay guy if I thought he was a good worker," Rasor explained at the party's summer meeting, according to The Spokesman-Review. "But if he comes into work in a tutu … he’s not producing what I want in my office."

"If a guy has a particular predilection and keeps it to himself, that’s fine," he added. “But if he wants to use my business as a platform for his lifestyle, why should I have to subsidize that? And that’s what these anti-discrimination laws do.”

The Spokesman-Review reported that the central committee approved the resolution with "little debate."

The resolution states: "Resolved, that the Idaho Republican State Central Committee recommends that our legislators support Idaho’s current anti-discrimination laws and policies and enact a law that would make unenforceable any municipal ordinances that would seek to expand categories of prohibited discrimination beyond current state anti-discrimination laws and policies."

An estimated 100,000 demonstrators (The BBC reports 200,000) flooded the streets of eight different Brazilian cities Monday night, venting frustrations over poor public services, police violence and government corruption.

The marches began earlier this month in Sao Paulo, and soon gained momentum, escalating in violence last Thursday when 100 were injured by police. The protests have otherwise been peaceful, with frustrated citizens lamenting the billions spent on new soccer stadiums instead of social services like hospitals and education.

Via:

The marches, organized mostly through snowballing social media campaigns, blocked streets and halted traffic in more than a half-dozen cities, including Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Brasilia, where demonstrators swarmed past the Congress and Presidential Palace.

While peaceful, and unfolding mostly as a festive display of dissent, Monday's demonstrations were the latest in a flurry of protests over the past two weeks that have added to unease over Brazil's sluggish economy, high inflation and a spurt in violent crime.

The marches began this month with a small protest in Sao Paulo against a small increase in bus and subway fares. The demonstrations initially drew the scorn of many middle-class Brazilians after protesters vandalized storefronts, subway stations and buses on one of the city's main avenues.

But the movement quickly gained support and spread to other cities as police used heavy-handed tactics to try to quell the demonstrations. The biggest crackdown happened on Thursday in Sao Paulo when police fired rubber bullets and tear gas in clashes that injured more than 100 people, including 15 journalists, some of whom said they were deliberately targeted.

"This is a communal cry saying: 'We're not satisfied,'" Maria Claudia Cardoso said on a Sao Paulo avenue, taking turns waving a sign reading "#revolution" with her 16-year-old son, Fernando, as protesters streamed by.

"We're massacred by the government's taxes — yet when we leave home in the morning to go to work, we don't know if we'll make it home alive because of the violence," she added. "We don't have good schools for our kids. Our hospitals are in awful shape. Corruption is rife. These protests will make history and wake our politicians up to the fact that we're not taking it anymore!"

In two previous pieces (here and here), I discussed the phenomena of scandal narratives in American politics, first stressing how such narratives reflect a right/left divide—emphasizing mythos (the construction of meaning) on the conservative side and logos (the discovery of facts) on the liberal side—and then showing how even a symmetrical approach to understanding scandals over the past 30+ years still produces evidence of how asymmetrical they actually are.

I now want to conclude my discussion by looking at scandalmania in the larger context of left/right ideology in America over the past few decades.

But first, let's ground that discussion in the recent round of scandalmania, and it what it portends. What does all this mean going forward? Obviously, Obama scandalmania has served to distract attention from severe problems confronting the GOP.

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For anyone that doesn't monitor the kind of B.S. that gets spouted on Fox "News" on a regular basis, I'll just say right off that bat that if I've heard a segment like this one once, I've heard it at least a few dozen times if not more in recent weeks, and I don't spend all that much time watching Fox.

While doing their best to conflate all of the recent "scandals" from the Obama administration, the better part of which are not scandals at all, and that have been discussed at this blog ad nauseum, the panel on Neil Cavuto's show this Monday did their best to muddy the waters and claim that if President Obama just took some responsibility for all of these drummed up "scandals" all of his problems would be solved.

Or more likely, they'd be using it as an excuse to impeach him. Call me a cynic, but I don't think any amount of "owning up" to anything by President Obama is going to stop the scandal mongering at Fox any time soon.

Here's some of the sage advice President Obama got from these talking heads at on Cavuto's show:

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James O'Keefe has a book release coming up on Tuesday and so he's dropping new video wherever he can in anticipation of it, I guess. But this one had me laughing because of the title he chose for his book chapter and the way he let his hurt feelings flow all over the 'interview' with New Hampshire Assistant Attorney General Richard Head.

O'Keefe, you may recall, scammed some poll workers in New Hampshire and in the process, committed voter fraud in order to prove there might be voter fraud happening. That made officials angry, and an investigation was launched, which seems to have hurt O'Keefe's feelings.

Never one to forgive and forget, O'Keefe grills Mr. Head about law enforcement activities undertaken in furtherance of the state investigation of him, including a search of the property where he lived and interviews with his family.

But what really has O'Keefe steamed is that Mr. Head demanded the emails Nadia Naffe had in her possession showing that O'Keefe had conspired to frame Rep. Maxine Waters and run other operations. He's definitely not happy about that, and so he ambushes Mr. Richard Head in his office.

The video is just hilarious. Trust me, I wouldn't bother except that it really is funny. First, O'Keefe offers Mr. Head a copy of his book, which is refused because its value exceeds the limit on acceptable gifts to state officials. Then he turns to the chapter he has written about his adventures with Richard Head, which he has entitled "The Rise of Richard Head."

No lie, that's the title of the chapter. Maybe a cheap shot, a low blow, but I am having trouble writing this post with a straight face because really, I'm surprised he didn't entitle it "The Rise of Dick Head". That would be much more in line with Mr. Frat Boy's attitude toward officials who object to his games, right?

Watch the video. It's funny in a pathetic kind of way.