From The Oklahoman:

WASHINGTON — Vice President Joe Biden’s office tried to enlist Rep. Dan Boren in a public relations fight against Sen. Tom Coburn after Coburn released a report criticizing some projects funded by the $787 billion economic stimulus package.

Boren, D-Muskogee, said last week he rejected the request because of an “unspoken rule” among the Oklahoma congressional delegation that members refrain from criticizing each other.

“We just don’t do that,” Boren said. “It’s just not my style to critique fellow members of the delegation. We’re too small a state to get into those kinds of internal battles.”

We’ve already discussed Dan Boren’s keen political mind when he chose not to endorse his party's nominee for the Presidency last year, his priorities that put low cigarette taxes ahead of health care for poor children, and his belief that it’s fine to torture American citizens without letting them have access to courts to challenge their detention. Earlier this year, he said that the stimulus bill was “not an American bill” because it didn’t include Republican ideas. Because when the GOP controlled Congress, they always included Democratic ideas in their controversial bills?

Boren infamously wrote how proud he was to be a Democrat while not telling his readers that he voted against the “undemocratic” Bush bills he had later decided to criticize. But I guess that’s part for the course when you’re the only Democratic representative from a state and choose to vote with the GOP 41% of the time.

At that time, I said:

Markos would say we need Democrats like Boren because he’ll vote for Speaker Pelosi, and that’s true - but while we’re in opposition, he’s pretty damn useless.

Now we’re not in the opposition, and Boren is still pretty damn useless. He’s one of the 44 Democrats who voted against the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which wasn’t even worth noting because it was absolutely unsurprising.

If Boren could get elected in his district with an (R) after his name on the ballot, he’d do it in a heartbeat. But he decided to run in the only majority-D district in the state, with a famous name, so the (D) was a requirement. It’s such a shame political realities force him into an identification that clearly does not match his heart or actions.

…when prominent Democratic politician John Edwards from North Carolina admitted that he had an affair, it was the lead story on the KFOR news (Oklahoma City channel 4, NBC affiliate) at 4:30 PM, or at least covered in the top section. At the time, Edwards neither held political office nor was a candidate for political office.

I mention this because today, prominent Republican politician Mark Sanford of South Carolina admitted that he has been having an affair with a woman from (and in) Argentina, capping a six-day period where he was “missing” and out of contact with his staff. That’s important because he is currently the governor of South Carolina, where he had made a name for himself in conservative circles by fighting to keep his state from receiving federal stimulus money because it might go to poor people who didn’t vote for him. He’s also, until today, been mentioned as a serious presidential candidate in 2012.

I also mention this because on today’s 4:30 PM news, KFOR didn’t see fit to mention the story at all, with the exception of asking people to call in and opine about it for “The Rant,” a segment they air each night with random local opinions because they’re lazy and it’s cheaper than accurately measuring local opinion (with a poll) or going out and finding actual news.

So…Democrat who’s not in office admitting to an affair? Top story. Prominent Republican governor having an international affair while touted as presidential candidate after being missing for nearly a week? No big whoop.

This is how people like Inhofe and Coburn get elected here.

(They are going to cover it at 5:00, and my memory may be faulty, but bad news about Republicans gets nowhere near the same attention from the Oklahoma media as bad news about Democrats does.)

…and all too typical for today’s GOP. Normally, Frank Lucas doesn’t show up in the news, but here he is:

Leaders of a new GOP group, the “Rural American Solutions Group,” are distributing a document attacking climate change legislation as an economic burden to most of the country. As it turns out, the information in the press release was provided to the Republican congressmen by Peabody Energy, a juggernaut of the coal industry. Staffers for GOP Reps. Frank Lucas (R-OK), Sam Graves (R-MO), and Doc Hastings (R-WA) are emailing around a map that purports to detail “how the Democrats’ National Energy Tax unfairly targets rural Americans.”

A closer look at the source of the image reveals the document’s origins:

Two employees of Peabody Energy are listed in the metadata of the map document: Chairman and CEO Greg Boyce and Communications Manager Chris Taylor. The congressmen opposing climate change legislation — Reps. Lucas, Graves, and Hastings — are simply copying-and-pasting information that has been directly fed to them by Peabody Energy.

It’s somewhat charming to realize these guys still think they can let the industries they’re supposed to be regulating literally write the laws and press releases and think no one will notice it. They’ll have to do a small amout of actual work to avoid that, and that’s certainly not what we’ve come to expect from our modern GOP.

You have to love the conservative mass-forwarded E-mails because they just never ever stop. You can Google any series of several consecutive words in any one of them and you’ll get hundreds and hundreds of hits from where they just took the same text and pasted it, over and over, every place they could find.

I think this ties in with the fact that most big-money conservative blogs have no comment sections and why conservatives have no real “grass roots” movements. The tea parties, of course, were all astroturf: funded and organized by really big conservative organizations (that were, in turn, funded by people who think that the top marginal tax rate of the Clinton administration, a time of massive economic growth, was unconscionably high) pretending to be “grass roots.”

What passes for modern conservatism is very much a top-down movement. The message comes from the top and everyone repeats it until it’s accepted as true. Discussion is not conducive to this model and is therefore discouraged.

E-mail forwarding sends the message to hundreds of people whom you believe to be like-minded, usually your extended family and friends. Those who don’t agree are socially pressured to be quiet and not speak up for fear of offending the family, causing tension at family get-togethers, pissing off the wealthy aunt who controls everyone’s inheritance, and so on.

It looks like a discussion forum, but progressive dissent gets suppressed. Look at how difficult it was for this Daily Kos diarist to finally respond to a forwarded conservative talking-point E-mail after dozens and dozens of them had simply pushed her to her breaking point. The sender there didn’t want to give up, but in another recent case, the sender apologized—not realizing it was angry conservative propaganda, she’d just passed it along as “interesting.”

Of course, some E-mail forwards are hardly political at all (awwww), but many of them are conservative agitprop pretending to be humor or news or whatever. That’s the case with the one obliquely referenced above, that a friend of mine got through two family members in forwarded E-mail today:

A friend got this in E-mail today, forwarded through two of his family members:

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad cow epidemic our government could track a single cow, born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she slept in the state of Washington? And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give each of them a cow…

A moment or two on Google showed me was already being forwarded in early 2004. But worse than that, it just doesn’t make any sense outside of a late-night monologue.

First, “our government” could track sick Canadian cattle because Canada has a strong mandatory animal identification system for just such a purpose. When the first BSE case hit Canada in 2003, the US had no such system. Six years later, the US has no such system, largely because the cattle and animal feed industries spent millions of dollars lobbying the Bush Administration to prevent it from happening. We have only a voluntary system in which most industrial suppliers do not participate.

It’s very similar to the problem of salmonella in chicken and eggs. We know how to cure this, and it only raises the cost of chicken by less than two cents per pound, but industry is against the idea of washing the shit out of the chicken coop more than once every two years, so we get salmonella in the poultry instead. So here, oddly, the conservative E-mail is praising an animal identification program that conservatives in the US strongly oppose.

Second, is the author of this E-mail suggesting that we would be able to track cows in the USA if they had freedom of movement? Or if they smuggled themselves into the country undetected in search of a better life? “Give them a cow” bypasses the horribly racist idea that Mexicans be fitted with mandatory ear tags with GPS receivers, but the idea that immigrants all want a cow isn’t that much better.

(Let’s be honest: the “illegal alien” debate isn’t about illegal white immigrants. It’s about the brown-skinned folks who speak Spanish. Some of those “Minutemen” have some serious racial issues.)

So, shorter wingnut joke: “If we had a mandatory animal tracking system that I oppose, we could give all those Mexicans a cow, because they’re all dirt poor farmhands, and then we could track them like the animals they are since the stupid courts won’t let us implant ID chips in them.”

Ha ha. Hilarious! I can see why conservatives have forwarded this joke to each other for more than half a decade, and why they support groups who post articles titled “Subhuman Mexicans (God’s Children?) Prey on Countrymen.” It’s hard to see why they don’t post these things in places where people might disagree with bulletproof logic like this!

At least, until you get to the very end, where you see this message:

© MMVIX
Television Food Network, G.P.
All rights reserved

Apparently including the right to redefine Roman numerals.

Depressed.

I suppose I should have anticipated this, like the Democrats capitulating or the Spanish Inquisition, but it just kind of came out of nowhere about a month ago, and it hit pretty hard.

The infamous "they" say that people who've gone through major illness can experience depression, even if they come through it relatively OK, as I did (not counting the meds and the low-sodium diet and the whole "your heart doesn't like you" thing). And I'd gone through some small bouts of this in the past few years, but nothing like this—and especially not when everything had been going so well right up to the moment I just couldn't get anything done.

You have to understand that my parents are…different. Because their DNA has actually unwound and formed the letters "STUBBORN" at the molecular level, I am, as of this writing, unable to imagine myself not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. I know that depression does this to others, even to people I love, and I fully understand this, but I can't imagine it for me. My back hurts when I lie down too much; I don't like being in the dark unless I'm sleeping, etc., etc., etc.

No, when I'm depressed, I get out of bed. I get to the office, I cook, I eat, I keep the kitchen clean. I run errands when necessary (but not otherwise). I even shower every now and then. But I don't get anything productive done. If you interacted with me, you probably wouldn't know anything was different at all, but either I sit at work for hours without typing a word, or I'm resting in the nearby recliner because my back hurts, in absolutely no hurry to get back to work.

My version of "stay in bed all day" is "don't read E-mail or news." I skipped both on several days in the past month.

Historically, I can't wait to explain things once I've figured them out. For the past month, I've figured things out and thought, "Oh, that's nice." And then I see what's on TV. (Normally, I only watch a few TV shows and otherwise keep it on programs I've seen dozens of times so it's just office-level background. For the past month, I've been scouring the guide looking for things to watch. A few are winners, but not many.)

It's been going on for some time, but it's been a background-level thing that's only been an impediment, not a disability. For the past month, it's been the other way around. Here's a simple example: when I get this way, I'll sometimes wear the same shirt and pants for a few days in a row, mostly because I don't do anything to get them dirty or smelly. So I go through clothes very slowly.

Now that I'm snapping out of it, I have at least ten loads of laundry to do. Think about how many shirts are in one washer load, and then think about each of them representing 2-4 days worth of use, and…yeah, I haven't done laundry in a long time.

It should go without saying that working less is possibly the single least useful course of action (or inaction) I could have taken, but I guess that's what makes it "depression." It seems to be lifting, as evidenced by previous mention of loads and loads of laundry being done (some of these things haven't been clean since the last time we were in Daylight Savings Time), and I can even see some writing going on later in the week. I think. I don't really know what triggered this last bout, the worst I can remember (still not "painful," just extremely, extremely unhelpful), and therefore I don't know if another one might be coming.

I hope to get on a roll and, once again, have no time to be depressed. It works that way, right?

Now that American Idol has aired on the West Coast, I removed the "spoiler" tag in the subject, but you are hereby duly warned that this post reveals the winner. There's more new stuff at the end, too.

Michael Slezak of Entertainment Weekly bet that Adam Lambert would win American Idol. Now that he's lost his bed, he's going to have to dye his hair red. Here's what one commenter to the EW liveblog had to say about it:

Jill G Wed, May 20, 2009 at 10:33 PM EST
Enjoy your red hair Slezak. You and your cronies at EW made this travesty happen as much as Simon and the rest of the media. Well, you people want to know "what difference does it make if he's gay?" Well, this is the difference that it makes.

This woman, and perhaps others like her, are boasting that they were able to defeat the most talented person in a talent competition solely because he might be gay. "This is the difference that it makes."

I'm pretty sure this is one of those arguments they don't want to make in public, but flush with triumph, some of the true bigotry is coming through.

This is not about people who preferred Kris Allen to Adam Lambert or vice-versa; this is about people who either use this kind of blunt language, or use coded language ("Kris Allen is a good Christian family man," implying that all of those adjectives are equally good and none of them apply to Lambert), to "explain" why Allen won the competition. It only needs "explaining" if you believe that Allen was not the more talented performer of the two finalists, and if you believe that, you're admitting that he shouldn't have won.

In a smaller way, this could become like the revelations of who donated to Proposition 8 in California: if you say things like this, you can't then come back and say you have "no problem with gay people." If you're arguing, much less boasting, that people who think like you got the more talented competitor defeated because he might be gay, then you are, by definition, a bigot.

If you just like Kris Allen better, that's up to you. I didn't watch the final competition and didn't vote for either party. I'm just giving you the preview of the culture warriors prematurely bragging that they defeated the "gay" guy, until they realize how that looks, to be immediately followed by their instant backtracking and insistence that they didn't say what everyone has record of them saying.

Update: At Gawker, they caught evidence that the right-wing was planning to play victim if Lambert won, too:

UPDATE: Someone sent in this Daily Beast post that earlier today, as evidenced in the URL of the post, was titled "Why Adam Lambert Will Win Tonight." Shortly after the broadcast, the title was changed to "Why Adam Lambert's Loss Is a Red State Victory." [Daily Beast]

So some elements on the right-wing were planning on making Lambert into a wedge issue either way—they just expected him to win. The unexpected victory of Kris Allen just provided a short window where the true ugly feelings came out in unguarded celebration.

Amanda Marcotte went to Paris and wrote up some of her experiences. Commenter Keith made my day:

You always hear idiot Americans, especially of the right wing variety, wank about how cowardly the French are…

The irony being that the French government was cowardly, not the French people. The French people formed the resistance (headed by a bunch of wussy artists and writers, no less) and kicked Nazi ass, while saving not just their homeland, but their culture as well. The French did what every Right Wing jackass dreams of doing in their Galt/Wolverines! macho fantasy, and they did it without bragging or complaining about how hard it was. Which is the long way of saying, when the revolution comes, I’d rather have JP Sarte and a bottle of red wine on my side over any gun nut with a stockpile of warmed over cold war fantasies.

Amen.

Overly Salty Restaurant Meals Present Long-Term Health Risks for All, and Immediate Danger for Some

WASHINGTON—Unsafe levels of sodium chloride, or salt, in chain restaurant meals increase one’s chance of developing hypertension, heart attacks, strokes, and kidney disease according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The nonprofit food safety and nutrition watchdog group today is exposing chain restaurant meals with dangerously high levels of sodium and is renewing its call on industry and government to lower sodium levels in foods.

I love CSPI and have been a member for more than 20 years, and this calls out stuff from both Chili’s and Red Lobster, but I wish they’d moderated it slightly: Red Lobster’s food is included because the company just published real nutritional information for the first time ever. Less than a month later, they’re being nationally blasted for having too much salt and calories in the food.

And, in fairness, it is too much salt and too many calories, but the standard restaurant industry practice has been “don’t publish the nutritional info because shit like this will happen.” Without that info, I can’t eat at those chains at all due to my low sodium dietary requirements. The Red Lobster nutritional information shows that there are plenty of fresh fish dishes I can have with perfectly normal sodium levels. Until they published this, I didn’t know that. I had to assume that everything on the menu was 2500mg or more of sodium, and as it turns out, some things are much higher. (North Pacific King Crab Legs: 300 calories, no saturated fat, 3570mg of sodium. What do they do, boil it in liquid salt?)

And yeah, way too much of the food at Chili’s is too high in sodium, too. But I eat there regularly, because I can get the Guiltless Grill Salmon for 420mg of sodium, or with the honey-mustard glaze for a total of 605mg of sodium. I can’t have the Crispy Chicken Crisper Tacos (order of 3, 2020 calories, 104g fat, 25g saturated fat, and 6050mg sodium), but then again, few people should.

Bonus hint for low-sodium folks: there is way more salt in most flour tortillas than you’d think, about 323mg in each of Chili’s, and up to 400mg each in supermarket or other restaurant ones. Avoid dishes that use flour tortillas, or ask for corn tortillas instead (usually 10mg or so of sodium each) and save yourself a bunch of trouble.

(For my absolutely full of spoilers discussion of the movie, click here.)

I got to see the new Star Trek movie on Tuesday night, and have more than 12 hours to wreak havoc on Memory Alpha! Mwa ha ha ha ha!

Nah.

It's a fantastic movie, and if you have seen any Star Trek original series movie or original series episodes, you should go see this. If you're a serious Trekker, you should plan on seeing it this weekend, because people will be talking about it, and it will be all but impossible to avoid spoilers, even if everyone were as considerate as Memory Alpha. (Hint: they're not.)

I watch LOST, so I was prepared for J.J. Abrams to completely beclown the Star Trek franchise, but the movie does not do that. It's awesome from the very beginning, so get the soda and popcorn before the movie starts because you're staying in your seat until it's over. The actors are new (with a notable exception or two) but the characters are familiar. We know these people, and it's so much fun to see them again in the days "before we knew them."

I think people worry about "prequels" because of something like Enterprise: we know that at the end of the series, there's going to be a United Federation of Planets because we'd spent the previous 35 years watching what would be the distant future for the Enterprise crew. It was kind of fun to see, "Oh, that's how that happened," but not that much fun. In Star Trek: The Next Generation's famous season 3 cliffhanger, "The Best of Both Worlds," we didn't know if the Borg could destroy Earth or not. When Enterprise had a similar cliffhanger, there was no tension: we knew Earth wouldn't be destroyed.

This movie has none of those problems. Despite knowing these are characters you've seen later in their lives, you quickly understand that something is different here (and not just that Kirk looks a lot thinner). Does it destroy continuity? No, not at all. Is it predictable because you know how it will end? Don't be so sure you know how it ends.

This is J.J. Abrams we're talking about. As with LOST, you can both love to watch it and then, at certain points, want to punch it in the face until it stops doing that. You know those moments in LOST where you see something happen and your reaction is, "Did he just…they didn't…they couldn't have just…AAARRRGGGHHH! AAAAAABRAMS?"

There's a few of those in Star Trek. Certain aspects of the movie will be controversial, as in "add extra tubes to the Internet because otherwise it's going to melt after screenings start on Friday." J.J. Abrams has this weird capability of making a movie (or TV show) that's full of action and character development that you love to watch, and yet, when you stop to think about it, you realize what some of those things mean and you wonder what kind of evil demon birthed the man who would create these things.

I'm not talking about unintended consequences, either, where you realize something that's a plot hole or something. I'm talking about shocking things that go unsaid in the movie (or show) but that you realize had to have happened. If you watch LOST, the important encounter between Daniel Faraday and his mother in the 100th episode is a great example (and if you've seen it, you know what encounter I mean). When that happens, you think, "But that means his mother…and back when…and then she sent…AAAAAABRAMS!"

The arguments will continue for some time, and I'll post my spoiler-laden views after Friday when everyone's had a chance to see it. But no matter what your views after you see the movie, you'll want to see the movie, and as soon as possible.

I think this is going to make more money than any Star Trek movie ever, and with good reason. This isn't a ninth inning rally for the Star Trek franchise. This is a whole new ball game.