[And we do mean MIKE...welcome home, Mr. Finnigan, Sir. -- C&L staff and sitemonitors]

Twelve weeks and twelve great bloggers later, I'm back from my marathon, fifteen-nation, European jaunt. As the poet said, "I'm tired but I'm clean." Gonna spend the next couple days tipping my hat to the talented people who guested while I was away.

Political satire has become nearly impossible in the Age of Bush, but not for the ingenious Jon Swift.

Get off the cross we need the wood, Dept....Over at The Opinion Mill, Steve notes that ignoring wingnuts sometimes just exacerbates their pathological delusions.

Paging Merle Haggard: Alex believes the bottle has let us all down.

I'm always enlightened by The Reactions of Canadian, Michael J. W. Stickings and cohort...

TS at Instaputz illuminates one of the chronic failings in wingnuttia; the notion that good intentions relieve them of any responsibility for the disastrous results of their actions.

Simply Left Behind:Renewable energy? I think not...

No, not your attitude. She really thinks you need to bathe more. I'm completely serious.

AFL-CIOblog:

High school gym, where listening to lectures on personal hygiene was part of the package. It's one thing for a gym teacher to tell a bunch of sweaty teenagers to hit the showers. But it's something quite different when the U.S. secretary of labor tells Parade magazine-a national weekly read by millions of Americans-the nation's workers need a bath if they want to keep their jobs.[..]

Chao told Parade it's not just the low-cost of foreign labor that is enticing many U.S. employers to ship jobs overseas-overseas workers dress and bathe better.

Beyond the cheaper cost of labor, U.S. employers say that many workers abroad simply have a better attitude toward work. "American employees must be punctual, dress appropriately and have good personal hygiene," says Chao.

Alex Bastani, AFGE Local 12 president,[..] noted that in 2004, Chao's Labor Department changed the rules on who qualifies for overtime pay and millions of workers were robbed of their rights to overtime pay. Just this year, she tried to outsource some 250 Department of Labor jobs but was unsuccessful.

Members of the AFGE Local 12 chapter will be at Department of Labor headquarters passing out the above-pictured bars of soap. And I would be remiss to not remind you who is Chao's (presumably clean-smelling) husband...

Alex Koppelman reports the encouraging news.

Somewhere, Keith Olbermann is sticking pins in a Bill O'Reilly voodoo doll: Fox News' ratings, TVNewser reports, are down since August of last year. Like, way down. Like down 28 percent in primetime among all viewers, down 20 percent in primetime in the "money demo" (viewers aged 25-54) and down 7 percent in daytime viewership overall. In fact, the only place Fox is up is during the day, when they managed a ratings increase of just 2 percent, and even then only in the money demo.

And lest you think this is an industry-wide trend, consider this: over the same time period, CNN and MSNBC are up. CNN's up 35 percent during the day -- 46 percent in the money demo -- and up 21 percent in primetime overall, 25 percent in the money demo. MSNBC's ratings increases aren't quite as impressive -- up 6 percent in primetime overall, 8 percent in the money demo, and up 36 percent in the money demo during the day, 26 percent overall.

-- Guest Post by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report

Attytood: How did our beleaguered Pentagon find the time to write a 74-page briefing book for the sole purpose of trashing Democrats?

Talk To Action: The Left Behind video game will come with built-in spyware,
tracking the playing and ad viewing habits of evangelical Christian children and young people. To many of us, the only thing "Left Behind" is the criticism they so justly deserve for spreading hate and conspiracism as well as promoting religious violence as a heroic duty.

Martini Republic: Alex has more on Santorum's phony WMD grandstanding...and O'Lielly says he would run Iraq "just like Saddam ran it"

Stop Big Media: The Federal Communications Commission Wednesday launched its latest attempt to change longstanding rules on local media ownership.

AGITPROP: Whoa! Ann Coulter guest blogging for Blogenfreude...a helluva post

George Says... We've been having big fun with this site

Mike's Blog Round Up

The Reaction: A brilliant dissection of the "meltdown" of the Bush presidency. Unsurprisingly, if his presidency ended now, Republican George W. Bush would go down in history as a failure, according to a majority of college history and political science professors surveyed nationwide.

Martini Republic: Alex looks at the White house website and concludes that we've reached a lot of "turning points" in Iraq. Here's another one.

Crooked Timber: Journalists vs Bloggers

Union of Concened Scientists: Animation scientifically explaining the lunacy of nuking Iran

A la Gauche: Harry Taylor is straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Greg Palast: Why Rumsfeld should NOT resign...and Alex contemplates the The Rumsfeld Doctrine

Copeland Institute for Lower Learning:Edward has his own roundup...

Talk To Action: Christian Coalition of Alabama attacks trial lawyers...and tells a Whopper!

Off the Beaten Path: Speak Speak News...Vox Verax...The War In Context...RuminateThis

Alex Koppelman takes a look at Brady's new man.

Alex Koppleman takes a look at Malkin's embrace of the Aztlan and reconquista theme.

tbogg has more: "Another American Flag Down"

"Yes. Because if there is one thing that the people of this great nation need it's important breaking news involving a Florida condo association."

Lassiter Space: Thanks to the BBC, this Jersey blogger had a chance to chat on the air with the Danish Imam who's at the heart of this cartoon controversy and the deputy editor of France Soir.

Sans-culotte: G-Dub and them is fixin' to smite more evildoers. They ain't worth a sh*t at actually doin' war, but they shore do like 'em!

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Stupidest Man Alive--Special "Truthiness" Edition
(hat tip to )

Petrelis Files: No need to page George Orwell, this Pentagon 'news' story epitomizes the "war is peace, slavery is freedom" perversion of language that BUSHCO loves so well

Morning Martini: A new blog from an old friend...

FAIR: a cornerstone of the media reform movement, celebrates it's twentieth anniversary

Alex)

Petrelis Files: No need to page George Orwell, this Pentagon 'news' story epitomizes the "war is peace, slavery is freedom" perversion of language that BUSHCO loves so well

Morning Martini: A new blog from an old friend...

FAIR: a cornerstone of the media reform movement, celebrates it's twentieth anniversary

Alex