• I’m busy today so notify me asap when NAACP renders verdict: are liberty-loving, equality-respecting patriots racist? Bated breath, waiting …
• Sarah Palin • Tweeting about the anticipated move by the NAACP to denounce the Modern Tea Party Movement* for “explicitly racist behavior.” Not often we say this, but … Palin’s right. Yo, NAACP, what happened to setting the example instead of playing angry reactionary? You guys are a pretty effective weapon in the war on racism, but if you’re using it to play politics, it will not work out for you. It seems as pathetic as boycotting a greeting card that sounds like something it obviously isn’t. source

* – After a little soul-searching and some feedback from fellow readers, we’ve chosen to revert back to referring to the Tea Party Movement as such, leaving “bizarro hippies” as a part of our past and adding the word “Modern” in front of “Tea Party,” which should get around the problem that the name creates – that it disregards and usurps the memory of the original Boston Tea Party. Let’s admit it. It was intended as a lighthearted joke but some readers didn’t take it that way.

• Officer Hardass seems to have missed the point of why he was working the G20 protests in Toronto recently. Note how the officer next to him tried to make cute conversation, but he wasn’t having any of that. About halfway through the video, they showed the officer arresting her. Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow made a good point here: “If the goal of the police at the G20 was to act pissy and escalate minor incidents into major ones in order to assert their authority, mission accomplished. If, on the other hand, their mission was to de-escalate, keep the peace, find rapport, and celebrate the democratic right to protest, this officer is an abject, total failure.” source

• Look Newt, we appreciate the dog and pony show you’ve run for years, giving people reason to speculate on why you might run for president, but come on, you’re not really going to do it. You may say you will, but let’s face facts: You haven’t been relevant since about 1998. And while the presidential talk makes you sound relevant, you’re really not. It gets you press, but we can’t imagine people voting for you over, say, Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. Are we wrong here? Is Newt really a force to be reckoned with? source

• 56 number of Democratic senators who will vote for the final financial reform bill for sure
• three number of Republican senators who will probably vote for the bill (including Scott Brown)
• one number of Democrats named Ben Nelson who (once again) will make things tough source

• Dear Daniel Hunt: Sorry we cut off your head. But seriously, folks, we’d like to congratulate our friend Charles Apple, who runs an awesome visual journalism blog, for his move to the American Copy Editors Society‘s site. Apple, a good friend of ours who’s offered tons of advice in the past, recently made a move from the warm confines of his VisualEditors.com home to a new home with ACES. It’s a meeting of the journalistic minds – the word people and the visual people are getting together for the first time ever. Ooh, scary. source

• First, it started with the Cold War. Then it went to this argument that the U.S. has the engine of capitalism. Then he noted that the Soviets were thrown off because Americans had color TVs. Then he made this whopper of an argument: “The poor in our country are enormously better off than the rest of the world. Doesn’t mean we can’t do better, but we have to acknowledge and be proud of our system of capitalism, be proud of our American way.” Uhhhhh … source

• What was Octavia Nasr thinking? The death of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a controversial cleric whose life and views are way more complex than this tweet gives them credit for, require more context than 140 characters. Considering her status as CNN’s Senior Editor of Mideast Affairs, it was perhaps too much of an oversight. And as a result, she was fired. “At this point,” said Parisa Khosravi, CNN’s Vice President of international newsgathering, “we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.” Oops. source

• As I and others have been arguing at length, penny-pinching in the midst of a severely depressed economy is no way to deal with our long-run budget problems. And penny-pinching at the expense of the unemployed is cruel as well as misguided.
• New York Times columnist (and “Get Him To the Greek” co-star) Paul Krugman • Discussing the bizarre situation which led to the lack of unemployment extensions. He’s pushes hard on the issue, saying that the solution is worse than the problem. “Cutting off benefits to the unemployed,” he writes, “will make them even more desperate for work — but they can’t take jobs that aren’t there.” source

• So, let’s get this straight: A bunch of conservatives are frustrated with being called racist because of their ideologies. So, what do they do? They create a shirt with the phrase, “Yup, I’m a racist” emblazoned on it. Because that’s not stupid or controversial. Look, this kind of rage-filled idiocy gets us nowhere. So why push it at all? source