Terrace Agenda

– Crooked cops in Odessa get slapped around. Hard. Figuratively speaking, of course. Awesome with a capital “Fuck yeah.”

– Sure, it’s lengthy, but you should probably revisit Zack’s last post, he uses a lot of big words and tries to ignite your inert derrière. And then go pick up a copy of David Sirota’s The Uprising for that someone special on your holiday gift list. Good companion pieces.

– And while you’re at it, if you haven’t helped us out by taking the Terrace Agenda surveys, take a few minutes to do that. We still need a few more responses to gain universal relevance. Don’t be selfish and keep us all to yourself… the Agenda wants to roam free. And it needs your help.

– It’s Blago’s birthday! Seriously, who doesn’t love this guy? This has got to be my favorite scandal since, shoot, I don’t even know… Jim Traficant, maybe? All the sex scandals we’ve had lately are BORing… I’ve been itching for some good ol’ corruption, especially when it’s perpetrated by a raving loon. And it’s even more fun watching the wingnuts writhe on the floor trying to pin this to Obama somehow (he said he talked to him, THEN HE SAID HE DIDN’T!!! OMG!!!). I’m wishing upon a star and hoping hoping HOPING that somehow, some way, Blago appoints himself to fill Obama’s empty Senate seat. What a glorious, glorious day that would be.

– The AP and Yahoo News are still terrible. I guess that’s not really a headline. But here are a couple of AP headlines dancing around on Yahoo today:

“Analysis: Scandal threatens to dog Obama” (um, no it doesn’t… I don’t know if the crack investigative team at the AP knows this, but Patrick Fitzgerald has Blago on tape cursing Obama’s name because Obama wasn’t even remotely interested in playing his little games. It’s tough to get much more proof that a guy is clean.)

“Obama to use full name at swearing in ceremony” (shocker, this headline has been changed to “Obama hopes to reboot US image among Muslims.” Maybe that’s because the first headline wasn’t news. Seriously, it’s the guy’s name. Of course he’s going to use it. It’s not like it’s a secret that his middle name is Hussein. And yes, as hard as it is to believe for the AP, we still voted him into office. Even some of us out here in flyover country. I know you guys in the media are bored, but don’t you have Blago reporting to do?)

– Obama will nominate Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as his Secretary of Energy. He runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he’s pushed hard for research into alternative energies to combat global warming. Wait, what? A scientist? Who actually knows something about his department? There’s no place for this in a real administration! There weren’t any Arabian Horse experts around who could do this job? I don’t believe that for a second. (At first glance, this looks like a freaking fantastic pick.)

– Five of the Blackwater “security guards” who opened fire on dozens of unarmed Iraqis last year were finally indicted. This made me a lot happier before Eugene Robinson reminded me that the people who put the guns in their hands– our administration and the corporate heads– will skate away without any recriminations whatsoever (and, yes, even profiting from the whole thing). Yet again, a willingness to ignore a systematic failure of leadership, accountability, and discipline (aren’t Republicans supposed to like those things?) in favor of blaming a few “bad apples.” Do these “guards” deserve punishment for what they did? ABSOLUTELY. I hope they rot in prison. But, just like with Abu Ghraib, this is symptomatic of a rot that has already infested the entire system, and to blame it on a few “rogues” and turn a blind eye to how they got there is… to be expected.