Wow. Here I thought Mitt Romney's cruel streak was in that he likes to fire people. Five of Romney's former classmates from a prestigious all-boys college prep school recall a "vicious" attack on a new student who Romney and others believed to be gay.

The Washington Post reports:

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

Romney never received any punishment for his actions.

Lauber was expelled from the school after being caught smoking on school grounds. He "came out" to family and close friends. Among other jobs, he later worked as a civilian contractor in Bosnia and Iraq. He died of liver cancer in 2004, according to his sisters.

DownWithTyranny!: McCain's latest stunt backfires...badly. Some observers believe the real motive for the Psychogeezer's latest gimmick is to keep Sarah Palin from spending another moment of unscripted time in public. But count on McCain - if he shows up for the debate - to try and work his surge-centric attack on Obama's judgment into every answer, no matter what the question. Some of us remember a time when McCain always called for withdrawal of troops.

Bob Geiger:Bush asleep while Iraqi fraud funnels millions to al-Qaeda

David E's Fablog: Albert Brooks explains it all for you

The Satirical Political Report: Cheney asserts a link between Saddam and Mortgages of Mass Destruction

LAist: Michael Moore is giving away his new movie

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Minnesota Independent, Youtude, Women's Lens, Just a Moment of Miscellany,

Economist's View: Bankruptcy for Lehman, Merrill Lynch sells to BofA, AIG in serious trouble. It looks almost certain that this week will be the one where we see the financial implosion in U.S. banking and brokerage that many have been expecting for some time.

distributorcap NY: The irresponsible, shoddy and pedestrian way the pundits and media use the results of polls to represent news, directly affects the tenor of the campaign.

No Rest For the Awake: A Native Alaskan perspective on Palin

Pruning Shears: This Week In Tyranny

The Mahablog: Teh Stupid, It Runs Our Country. More atrocities below...

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: MSNBC's Brewer aired McCain attack ad without mentioning it was full of lies...Rachel's first exclusive...Frameshop's, Jeffrey Feldman on Bill Moyers...Try and put lipstick on these losers...Old habits die hard...Balz in the tank for the Psychogeezer, but a couple other WaPo reporters noticed the lies...More NYT false equivalence...Even Hactacular Howie is fed up with their lying...George Will attacks firefighters on 9/11, yesterday pretended that, like Palin, he doesn't know what the Bush Doctrine is...FUAX scrapes bottom...Lou Dobbs just loves to spread a little hate...NPR cannot find any pessimistic economists but push the GOP agenda on oil drilling...I thought James Carville was supposed to be a Democrat...It helps when you've got your own network

Jake Tapper at ABC:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin sent out a fundraising solicitation today that charged that "the Obama/Biden Democrats have been vicious in their attacks directed toward me, my family and John McCain."

I asked spokespeople of the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee just which "Obama/Biden Democrats" they're referring to.

The response I got was that Obama spokesman Mark Bubriski erroneously attacked Palin as a supporter of Pat Buchanan.

That's it. That's the evidence.

An attack on Palin herself.

In other words, they can't name one person affiliated with the Obama-Biden campaign who attacked the Palin family.

This whole Culture of Victimization of the Republican Party makes me ill. As Tapper points out, McCain said heartless things about the adolescent Chelsea Clinton but any little scrutinization on them has them crying like WATBs.

I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities.

One of the overriding themes of last night's sneerfest was the trumping and dismissal of Barack Obama's qualifications as a community organizer for years in Chicago. I understand the need for Republicans to tout their own expertise -- though the snideness put me in mind of the movie "Heathers" personally --but this line of attack just seems to fly in the face of the larger Republican narrative that it shouldn't be the government doing everything for you. If you believe that, it would seem that community organizers would be something to laud. Especially since Sarah Palin's own foray into politics was being the President of the PTA in order to have a voice in the educational standards of her children. Or am I being just too logical for Republican minds?

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AP:

Parts of the Endangered Species Act may soon be extinct. The Bush administration wants federal agencies to decide for themselves whether highways, dams, mines and other construction projects might harm endangered animals and plants.

New regulations, which don't require the approval of Congress, would reduce the mandatory, independent reviews government scientists have been performing for 35 years, according to a draft first obtained by The Associated Press.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said late Monday the changes were needed to ensure that the Endangered Species Act would not be used as a "back door" to regulate the gases blamed for global warming. In May, the polar bear became the first species declared as threatened because of climate change. Warming temperatures are expected to melt the sea ice the bear depends on for survival.

"We need to focus our efforts where they will do the most good," Kempthorne said in a news conference organized quickly after AP reported details of the proposal. "It is important to use our time and resources to protect the most vulnerable species. It is not possible to draw a link between greenhouse gas emissions and distant observations of impacts on species." Read on...

And the attack on science and reality continues. There is strong scientific evidence that global warming is affecting thousands of species of animals and plants, (not to mention humans and many things we take for granted) but in Bushworld, you can't acknowledge it or even talk about it. George Bush only has a few months left in office, and he's hell bent on ruining anything and everything he can get his grubby little mitts on.

Rachel Maddow appeared on"Countdown" last night to talk about John McCain's joke(?) about entering his wife in a topless beauty contest, and hit on an important point: in order to compete with Barack Obama's rock star appeal, the McCain camp has decided to find places where large people gather for other reasons and bask in the unwarranted limelight.

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OLBERMANN: Also, maybe a somewhat serious point contained in all this malarkey; on stage at Sturgis, he referred to the—preferring the roar of the 50,000 Harleys to 200,000 Germans cheering in Berlin. But in doing that, did he not underscore the fact that those 200,000 Germans in Berlin actually showed up to hear Barack Obama speak, but the 50,000 bikers on the roar of their Harleys, they had shown up at Sturgis not to see John McCain, but to see Kid Rock, Kelly Pickler and a bunch of female wrestlers and other women not wearing tops?

MADDOW: This is a critical and basic difference between the John McCain campaign for president and the Barack Obama campaign. Barack Obama creates large crowds when he gives speeches. John McCain‘s campaign has just figured out to find out where there‘s going to be a large crowd for another reason and to hope to slip their candidate in between other acts.

I guess you can't really blame McCain. When your opponent draws tens of thousands of people who genuinely want to hear him speak, and you have trouble filling the dining room of a Sausage restaurant, you have to find ways to compensate. It's just ironic that they attack Obama's celebrity appeal yet try to emulate it any way they can.

Most of the time, the conservative culture-war efforts are simply annoying. Some far-right activists will try some stunt, it’ll fail in the courts, and the rest of us can focus our attention on real problems.

But it’s much harder to tolerate conservative intolerance when national security is at stake.

This morning’s Christian Science Monitor reports that the Army is preparing to offer a staggering $150,000 retention bonus to service members who are proficient in Arabic, “in reflection of how critical it has become for the US military to retain native language and cultural know-how in its ranks.” Indeed, as the war in Iraq goes on, and the military subsequently finds fewer and fewer people anxious for extended stays in the desert, retaining trained troops is becoming a critical centerpiece of many commanders’ strategies. The supply of Arabic speakers just isn’t keeping up with the demand created by ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The military’s conventional language training program, the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., could not churn out enough American soldiers proficient in Arabic, Kurdish, Dari, Pashtu, and Farsi, and the military quickly turned to private contractors to fill the gap,” reporter Gordon Lubold writes. “Numerous programs have sprouted up, including one at Fort Lewis, Wash., where soldiers are given a 10-month immersion program in language and culture.”

The Army is taking almost every step imaginable — from six-figure bonuses to civilian interpreters in the warzone to recruitment campaigns targeting Arab-American communities — to beef up its language capability.

Well, almost every step imaginable. While the military is searching desperately, and willing to pay enormous sums for those proficient in Arabic, the exact same military, at the exact same time, has driven 60 linguists who specialize in Arabic or Farsi out of the military because of their sexual orientation.

Republicans, including John McCain, think this makes sense. I have no idea why.

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Sadly, No!

The McCain campaign has apparently decided to spread the notion among Evangelicals that Barack Obama is the Antichrist.

Michael Froomkin: New Low For McCain Campaign: Obama == The Anti-Christ

SoonerG says: McCain's Left Behind Attack

Snoopes has more: Obama as Anti-Christ

This is typical for the McCain campaign. Dog-whistle politics is a common tactic by Rove and Lee Atwater. It's in play now right before your eyes and this time it's targeted at evangelicals.

The Dog-Whistle:

Dog-whistle politics, also known as the use of code words, is a type of political campaigning or speechmaking employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience. The term is usually used pejoratively by those that do not approve of the tactics.

CNN:

Water with trace amounts of radioactivity may have been leaking for months from a U.S. Navy nuclear-powered submarine as it traveled around the Pacific to ports in Guam, Japan and Hawaii, Navy officials told CNN Friday.

The leak was found on the USS Houston, a Los Angeles class fast attack submarine, after it came to Hawaii for routine maintenance last month, Navy officials said.

Navy officials believe the amount of radiation leaked was virtually undetectable. But the Navy alerted the Japanese government because the submarine had been docked in Japan.

I'm sure it's no big deal. Pay no attention to that three-eyed fish, that's what they're supposed to look like.