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Crossover
So there was recently a crossover between Sally Forth and Pearls Before Swine, where Ted Forth sneaks away from his wife at a hotel to find a prostitute.

Apparently this was an out of the blue idea from the PBS guy and the Sally Forth guy was so amused he tied his comic into what was otherwise solely a gag strip making fun of it.

Nifty.

Sources: Francesco Explains It All
The Comics Curmudgeon

Art Show
A series of photos from an art show featuring reimagined Saturday Morning cartoon characters. I liked this Blip from Space Ghost a lot, but there are some awesome Herculoids in there too.

Source: Flickr

Annoy the Cops
Not the smartest game, but they do have it coming.

WAUSAU, Wis. (AP) -- Cars lining the street. A house full of young people. A keg and drinking games inside. Police thought they had an underage boozing party on their hands.

But though they made dozens of teens take breath tests, none tested positive for alcohol. That's because the keg contained root beer.

The party was held by a high school student who wanted to show that teens don't always drink alcohol at their parties. It has gained fame on YouTube.com.

Dustin Zebro, 18, said he staged the party after friends at D.C. Everest High School got suspended from sports because of pictures showing them drinking from red cups.

The root-beer kegger was "to kind of make fun of the school," he said. "They assumed there was beer in the cups. We just wanted to have some root beer in red cups and just make it look like a party, but there actually wasn't any alcohol."

Zebro purchased a quarter-barrel of 1919 Classic American Draft Root Beer, and by 10 p.m. Saturday, the scene outside his rural Wausau home had all the makings of a teen drinking party - cars, noise and kids.

Kronenwetter Police Chief Daniel Joling said an officer was dispatched to the home March 1 on a complaint of cars blocking the road.

Juveniles began coming out of the house after the officer used his squad car's loudspeaker to warn that cars would soon be towed, Officer Jason Rasmussen wrote in his report.

Nearly 90 breath tests were done, and officers even searched locked rooms for hiding teens.

"It was a tremendous waste of time and manpower, but we still had a job to do, and our officers did it," Joling said. "If one kid had come there, even hadn't drank there, but had come there and had been drinking and had left and crashed and burned, then what would the sentiment be? Why didn't the police check everybody out?"

Dangerous, and I don't approve of the noisy party part, but still. Cops do have it coming. Ever since the Fourth Amendment went out the window and we lost our right to privacy, I think it's been an Us vs. Them thing. This is a good legal way to fight back against overzealous enforcement practices; flood the enforcers with false positives.

Source: Raw Story

Snicker
Right-wingers are just terrible at art of any sort. I can't reach any other conclusion.

Anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders, whose controversial film Fitna finally hit the web yesterday, has made himself even more unpopular - it appears he forgot to secure copyright on footage used in the movie.

Danish newspaper cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, whose depiction of the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban sparked violent protests in 2006, complained on Dutch TV that Wilders used his work without permission, "so it is simply a case of violation of copyright rules".

Earlier this month Westergaard defended Wilders and argued that the Dutch MP should show his film despite government warnings. On behalf of Westergaard, the Danish Union of Journalists says it will now sue Wilders for copyright infringement.

Also, Dutch director Rob Muntz was also surprised to see a clip of an interview he conducted with Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who was stabbed and shot dead in Amsterdam. Muntz says he never gave permission, and will seek legal advice too.

Wilders also mistakenly used a photo of Dutch-Moroccan rapper Salah Edin instead of Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo van Gogh’s murderer. Edin, perhaps unsurprisingly, is also suing.

Hilarious!

Seriously though, this is why you didn't need to ban the movie, Dutch authorities. In the marketplace of ideas, conservative thought always ends up in the bargain bin.

Source: The Register

Comcasticness
So Comcast has been, it turns out, scamming its viewers on HD broadcasts by secretly pruning the signals. You get the resolution, but it's all distorted and blocky and ugly.

This so they can add more HD channels at a lower cost. Sort of counterproductive, to my mind, if the ones you have suck ass.

This is the way Comcast operates though. And now, I don't say that just because our cable is out at the moment.

Source: AVS Forum

Speaking of Terrible Service
Best Buy!

A Best Buy store in New Jersey foiled one man's treasonous plot to subvert a troubled US economy by discouraging the purchase of an overpriced headset.

According to a report from The Consumerist, the prominent electronics merchant summoned police on a shopper identified as "Alex" because he shared an unfavorable impression of a Jawbone headset to customer considering the product.

Alex told the man browsing Best Buy's mobile section about his personal dissatisfaction with the quality of the Bluetooth headset and noted the retailer marked up the price by $30 compared to his local Verizon store.

A savvy sales associate reportedly overheard Alex's attempted disruption of commerce and promptly informed the nearest authority figure, store's manager, Tom.

Alex was approached by the manager and asked to leave the store. He steadfastly refused — unaware or even perhaps unconcerned that his words wounded Lady Liberty and the national economy she depends upon.

According to Alex, the manager rebutted his insistence that he did nothing wrong by claiming his requested evacuation was "policy." Tom then walked away and instructed an associate to summon the police.

Startled by the rapidly intensifying predicament, Alex attempted to call Best Buy's customer support phone number. He was put on hold.

Two police officers arrived on the scene, accompanied by four Best Buy security clerks to send the subversive customer on his way. Alex was escorted out before he could reach a customer service rep on his phone.

Best Buy of course claims this isn't their policy. But hiring morons apparently is.

Source: The Register

Tower of Babel
A crazy Saudi billionaire is planning to make the world's tallest building.

Tallest by a LOT.

On a clear day, the view from the top will take in the Middle East, North Africa and the Indian Ocean - providing you've a head for heights.

Plans for a mile-high tower in the Saudi Arabian desert have been unveiled by the billionaire owner of London's Savoy Hotel.

At 5,250ft, the £5billion project, masterminded by two British engineering consultancies, will be twice as high as its nearest rivals, skyscrapers under construction in Dubai and Kuwait, and almost seven times as high as the Canary Wharf tower in London's Docklands.

...

It is being planned for a new city near the Red Sea port of Jeddah. Behind the scheme is 51-year-old Prince al-Walid bin Talal, who bought the Savoy for £1.25billion in 2005.

The plan gives the Middle East a clear lead over Asian countries and the U.S., who have vied in the past to construct the world's tallest buildings.

None of the other skyscrapers under construction, including New York's Freedom Tower on the World Trade Centre site, will exceed 2,296ft.

The whole scheme is insane. The plan is for it to be so tall that helicopters have to be used to take workers up and down for the day and haul supplies. The temperature extremes at the top will apparently be crazy.

Still, gutsy. Nice to see Saudi money being used for something constructive, no pun intended.

Source: The Daily Mail

St. John McCain and Letterman
So St. John McCain appeared on Letterman to counter the jokes about how old he is.

Some of his digs, no doubt written by Letterman's talented staff, were pretty funny, but this last one...

Then the Arizona Senator gets in the final zinger: "And you look like the guy who enjoys getting into a hot tub and watching his swim trunks inflate."

What the hell is THAT supposed to mean?

Source: Raw Story

Catalog of Unfit Toys
Hilarious.

Source: Catalog of Unfit Toys

Not a Joke
T-Mobile sent a nastygram to the tech website engadget demanding that they stop using the color magenta, as T-Mobile does in their own logo.

They think they can own a color now.

This has of course led to a number of websites going magenta in response.

Source: Engadget

Government

Done To, Rather than By, For

Blown
A page of what happens if you speak out about government incompetence and corruption.

Typically? Nothing good.

Source: Mother Jones

Coppers

Cops charged in Halloween prank on teen

Associated Press
Mar. 4, 2008 07:44 PM
NEW YORK - Two police officers pleaded not guilty Tuesday to handcuffing a 14-year-old boy, kicking and hitting him, and abandoning him in his boxer shorts on isolated road as payback for a Halloween prank.

Officers Thomas Elliassen, 28, and Richard Danese, 29, were indicted on 33 counts Monday, some of them felonies. They were released without bail.

The officers were arrested last fall on charges of unlawful imprisonment and endangering the welfare of Rayshawn Moreno.

Prosecutors say the officers were trying to teach the boy a lesson after he supposedly threw eggs at a car near their Staten Island precinct. But Moreno's attorney said the boy was throwing eggs at a friend.

The officers handcuffed Moreno and drove him to a remote area, then kicked and hit him while he lay facedown on a road, stripped to his boxer shorts, the indictment said. The officers then left the boy to find his way back, it said.

That's not a prank, lazy writers. Don't conflate the egg-throwing with the cops.

What the cops (allegedly) did was assault and battery on a child. Disgusting.

Source: AZ Central

Lapdogs
It's been bad enough watching Jon Stewart pull his punches on McCain, or fawn over him to Democratic guests, but this is a whole other level of bad.

Brian Williams: You know what I thought was unsaid ---they took their position Chris, we're seeing the replay --- they end up in this spot and the sun is coming is just from the side and there in the shadow is John McCain's buckled, concave shoulder. It's a part of his body the suit doesn't fill out because of his war injuries. Again you wouldn't spot it unless you knew to look for it. He doesn't give the same full chested profile as the president standing next to him. Talk about a warrior...

Chris Matthews: You know, when he was a prisoner all those years, as you know, in isolation from his fellows, I do believe, uhm, and machiavelli had this right --- it's not sentimental, it's factual --- the more you give to something, the more you become committed to it. That's true of marriage and children and everything we've committed to in our lives. He committed to his country over there. He made an investment in America, alone in that cell, when he was being tortured and afraid of being put to death at any moment -- and turning down a chance to come home.

Those are non-political facts which I think do work for him. When it gets close this November, which I do believe, and you likely agree, will be a very close contest between him and whoever wins the Democratic fight. And I think people will look at that fact, that here's a man who has invested deeply, and physically and personally in his country.

Williams: Absolutely, Couldn't agree more. Of course the son of a Navy Admiral, a product of Annapolis who couldn't wait to become a Navy aviator...

He's a Warrior. He's the most committed American alive -- the FACTS say so!

Yeesh. Gimme a goddamned break. Get these guys a cold shower already.

Source: Hullabaloo (Digby)

Olbermann'ed
Alternately, we could just let Keith deal with his colleagues whenever they get all weepy. He seems to hold them in thinly-veiled contempt much of the time to begin with.

Check out his backhand to Chris Matthews, famed hater of all things Hillary.

Summary: During MSNBC's coverage of the Democratic presidential primaries, referring to Tina Fey's statement on the February 23 edition of Saturday Night Live that " 'bitch' is the new black," Chris Matthews asked: "Dare we repeat what Tina Fey said was the new black?" Keith Olbermann responded: "There's another word that begins with the same letter as 'black' does. Let's distance ourselves -- especially you. Distance yourself as far as you can from that."

Burn.

Source: Media Matters

Goverment: Injuns Don't Need Money!
That seems to be the argument.

Well, that, and 'Math is Hard'

A federal judge said Wednesday he wants to resolve a 12-year lawsuit over government mismanagement of American Indian lands this June.

In a January decision, U.S. District Judge James Robertson said Interior Department accounting for billions of dollars owed to American Indian landholders has been "unreasonably delayed" and is ultimately impossible.

...

Lawyers for the government disagreed with Robertson at the hearing, saying the Interior Department's complicated methods of accounting are not impossible. Those efforts have already cost the government $127 million

We didn't intentionally hide money! It's just that math is hard!

So very hard. Much like piles of gold.

Source: Raw Story

Whiny Ass Titty Babies
Boeing's various flunkies are not happy that they lost out to those filthy Eurocommies on the new fuel tanker plane.

Nonetheless, the uproar continued. Boeing supporters and union officials criticized the decision and Boeing said its interpretation of the bidding criteria was different from the Air Force's.

Jim Albaugh, head of Boeing's Integrated Defense Systems unit, said Boeing offered its 767 aircraft because the company thought that plane offered the size and flexibility the Air Force wanted.

"We didn't think they wanted a bigger plane," Albaugh said at a conference of defense analysts in New York. "We were discouraged from offering the 777," a larger model.

...

Air Force officials have said the larger size of the KC-30 tanker offered by EADS and Northrop Grumman helped tip the balance in its favor because the tanker's larger size will enable it to carry more fuel, cargo or personnel.

Wynne, the Air Force secretary, told senators the planes were judged on nine key criteria and "across the spectrum, all evaluated, the Northrop Grumman airplane was clearly a better performer."

In addition, he said the Boeing proposal was judged to be more risky and more expensive.

Silly Americans. Size isn't the only way you lost out.

Though that's probably demeaning.

Seriously, Airbus is widely known to make better planes than Boeing. This only comes as a jolting surprise to Americans, Boeing (who surely thought they bought more goodwill with their bribes and so forth), and people who haven't paid attention to Europe's rising military star in the last decade.

Source: Raw Story

Torture Playlist

NEWS: Music has been used in American military prisons and on bases to induce sleep deprivation, "prolong capture shock," disorient detainees during interrogations—and also drown out screams. Based on a leaked interrogation log, news reports, and the accounts of soldiers and detainees, here are some of the songs that guards and interrogators chose.

Oddly, I don't see a lot of country on there.

Lead balloon. Ok.

In all seriousness, the musicians should sue. I'm fairly sure that their ASCAP licenses don't cover torture.

Source: Mother Jones

Overreach

Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government.

The sites, in English, French and Spanish, had been online since 1998. Some, like www.cuba-hemingway.com, were literary. Others, like www.cuba-havanacity.com, discussed Cuban history and culture. Still others — www.ciaocuba.com and www.bonjourcuba.com — were purely commercial sites aimed at Italian and French tourists.

“I came to work in the morning, and we had no reservations at all,” Mr. Marshall said on the phone from the Canary Islands. “We thought it was a technical problem.”

It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.

Either way, there is no dispute that eNom shut down Mr. Marshall’s sites without notifying him and has refused to release the domain names to him. In effect, Mr. Marshall said, eNom has taken his property and interfered with his business. He has slowly rebuilt his Web business over the last several months, and now many of the same sites operate with the suffix .net rather than .com, through a European registrar. His servers, he said, have been in the Bahamas all along.

Mr. Marshall said he did not understand “how Web sites owned by a British national operating via a Spanish travel agency can be affected by U.S. law.” Worse, he said, “these days not even a judge is required for the U.S. government to censor online materials.”

It's time for the US to stop meddling with the interwebs.

I'd say we should hand control over to the EU, but Germany and France have little love for free speech when it suits them.

Sigh.

Source: The New York Times

Lolz

WASHINGTON — Hundreds of thousands of dollars are missing and presumed stolen from the chief fund-raising arm of House Republicans, according to party officials who described the findings of emergency internal audits.

The financial records of the group, the National Republican Congressional Committee, may also have been falsified for several years, Republican officials said. The campaign committees of several Republican lawmakers may also have been victims of a scam that is now under criminal investigation by the F.B.I.

The audits were ordered after the abrupt departure several weeks ago of Christopher J. Ward, who had been treasurer of the committee. Lawmakers said that Mr. Ward, who served a similar role for dozens of individual members of Congress and their political committees, is the focus of the F.B.I.’s criminal investigation.

The committee has acknowledged publicly that it was aware of “irregularities in our financial audit process” and that it had called in the F.B.I. in February because “these irregularities may include fraud.”

But until now the committee has not acknowledged that any money was missing from its bank accounts or that the financial irregularities might extend beyond the national committee to the campaign funds of individual Republican lawmakers who also worked with Mr. Ward, a longtime party operative.

Republicans have such sticky fingers. Tsk, tsk.

Source: The New York Times

Comcast Owns Your Government

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Comcast Corp. on Tuesday acknowledged hiring people to fill seats before the start of a contentious federal hearing on how the company manages its broadband network, allowing its employees to take those seats when the filled-to-capacity hearing started.

Many people were turned away before Monday's Federal Communications Commission hearing at Harvard Law School, leading critics to accuse Comcast of stifling debate over the company's practice of favoring some forms of Internet traffic over others.

Comcast said it hired people to hold seats only after an advocacy group called Free Press urged its backers to attend.

That makes it all better, doesn't it! How dare people agitate against their Corporate Feudal Lords!

Source: Boston.com (Boston Globe)