Finally, a perfect use for the vuvuzela

What better way to express your appreciation for the Pope? The world needs to thank South Africa for popularizing the delightful horn.

Although himself an avid football fan, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, is worried that the forthcoming Papal visit could be marred by vuvuzelas.

"I have had enough of them already," says the Archbishop of Westminster. "I hope they stay in South Africa. Personally, I think the football would be more enjoyable without this constant cacophony."

He is concerned that some people have got into the habit of using the plastic horns during the World Cup in South Africa and might not be able to resist using them when Pope Benedict XVI, pictured, addresses crowds in Britain. The Pope is due to arrive in September for a state visit when he will meet the Queen and beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman.

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Colorado village of 100 people bans bikes

Because traffic can be so heavy in Black Hawk, Colorado. Somehow cities with millions of inhabitants can manage but not this village that sounds barely larger than a hamlet.

A town in the US has banned cyclists on most of its streets, punishing anyone who gets caught with a $68 (£46) fine. Black Hawk in Colorado, which has a population of just above 100, is thought to be the first town in the US to make cycling illegal after a change in civic law.

The curious decree has been introduced for "health and safety" reasons, said administrators of the former goldmining town, which in the 1990s decided to develop gambling to prevent the place vanishing altogether.

Michael Copp, Black Hawk's city manager, the equivalent of chief executive of a local council in the UK, admitted there had not been any accidents to prompt the ban, just concern over potential collisions between motor vehicles and bicycles on 19th-century streets that were designed for horses and carriages.

If the streets are so narrow and dangerous, maybe it's the cars who should be banned and the streets should be limited to bikes or even only pedestrians. Or is the local Boss Hogg unable to imagine life outside of a car? Read the rest of this post...

More reaction to Limbaugh's child hunger joke

As if Limbaugh would have any idea about poverty or hunger. Of course he's saying these comments to provoke reaction but it doesn't mean he shouldn't be called out for it. Better still, his vocal supporters in Congress and beyond ought to be asked if they agree with his remarks.

More from James Weill, President of the Food Research and Action Center on the HuffingtonPost.com:

When schools close their doors for the summer, millions of low-income children lose access to school meals. Hunger spikes in the summer months, and so does childhood obesity when kids don't get healthy school breakfast and lunch. It's likely that this summer will even be worse for families still reeling from the recession. Fortunately, there are programs that exist that help many -- but not enough low-income children get healthy lunches when school is out.

In his comments, Rush Limbaugh suggests that children instead should seek cheap fast food or dumpster-dive to stave off hunger in the summer. Limbaugh's strained efforts to be provocative and over-the-top are neither insightful nor humorous. When the great satirist and cleric Jonathan Swift suggested in A Modest Proposal that starving Irish parents should sell their children as food to the rich, he did so with a moral purpose and moral clarity that has resonated down through the ages. When Limbaugh suggests children dumpster-dive, belittling the situation of hungry kids in America, he positions himself at the opposite end of the human spectrum from Swift. Swift's satire closes by mock-condemning such solutions as "taxing... introducing prudence and temperance... learning to love our country ... [and] quitting our animosities." Limbaugh's stance, in contrast, is to actually belittle human decency.

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BP well could leak for 2-4 years

This is assuming the latest leak numbers are correct and that the relief well solution fails. The Guardian:

BP's out-of-control well will go on spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico for the next two years or more if all attempts to contain or plug the gusher fail, oil industry experts said today.

The estimates, based on new figures supplied by BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, during seven contentious hours of testimony to Congress on Thursday, suggest the potential environmental and economic devastation would far outstrip the damage done so far by the ruptured well, which has been spewing for 60 days.

Hayward told a Congressional committee on Thursday the reservoir still held 50m barrels, providing fresh urgency to efforts to contain the oil, or seal off the gusher completely with a relief well.

Using the government's present flow estimates of up to 60,000 barrels a day, BP's well could go on gushing for two to four years, unless it is stopped.

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Snowe and Collins side with McConnell over Mainers -- again

Yesterday, the Portland Press Herald had an editorial calling on Senators Snowe and Collins to support critical legislation on unemployment and Medicaid funding:

A scaled-down version of the jobs bill will resurface in the U.S. Senate as soon as today, and despite concerns about growing long-term deficits, Maine's senators should get on board.

The most immediate problem facing Maine and the nation is that the economy is growing slowly and producing too few new jobs. The failure to pass this bill now could result in public-sector layoffs that would add to our economic woes, not solve them. Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe should find a way to vote "yes" on this legislation.

The bill would, among other things, provide aid to state Medicaid programs and take some pressure off budgets, including Maine's. The current state budget assumed that $84 million would be coming from Washington, as was approved in an earlier version of the bill passed by the Senate.

Too late. Before the paper with this editorial hit front doors around Portland, Snowe and Collins ditched the people of Maine to side with their obstructionist colleagues. Those two are the reason the Senate failed to invoke cloture on a bill that would deal with the issues identified in the editorial as affecting Maine.

Yep, on Thursday night, the fake moderates threw Mainers under the bus -- again. And, what's worse is that the duo had made a commitment to support cloture on that critically important jobs bill -- until Mitch McConnell intervened. Joan McCarter at DailyKos got the story on the nefarious and duplicitous actions of Snowe and Collins:

The states are waiting on $24 billion in federal aid to help supplement health costs, the loss of which could mean the loss of 900,000 more jobs. Why? Because of Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Joe Lieberman, and Ben Nelson. Nelson wants to see more offsets. Collins wants to cut out more state aid. Snowe is attached at the hip to Collins, and Lieberman is just an asshole.

A source close to the Hill tells me that as a compromise was being negotiated yesterday to finally pass the full bill, Collins and Snowe agreed to support cloture on the package. But McConnell met with the two of them before the vote and evidently whipped them back in line, possibly playing on Snowe's fear of getting a primary challenge from the Right. Lieberman would likely have voted with Snowe and Collins, making Nelson's opposition irrelevant.

Got that, Mainers? Apparently, Snowe and Collins don't care about the dire economic situation in Maine. Nope. They're more concerned about fealty to their GOP leader. And, what's clear is that Mitch McConnell now controls their votes.

Over the years, Snowe and Collins have built up a myth that they're independent voices in DC. That's BS. They're GOP hacks under the thumb of Mitch McConnell. When these two had the chance to help Mainers -- after it was well known that they had committed to vote for cloture -- they caved.

So, any Mainer who loses a public-sector job or loses unemployment benefits should hold Snowe and Collins responsible. It is their fault.

And, Mainers should also realize that the votes of their two Senators are now controlled by the Minority Leader from Kentucky. Now, of course, Mainers didn't vote cast their for McConnell, but he might as well be their Senator because Snowe and Collins let him dictate their votes. Snowe and Collins sided with McConnell and the insurance companies on health care reform, despite the serious problems with the insurance market in Maine. And, last week, the duo, as the dutiful GOPers they are, voted for Lisa Murkowski's Big Oil resolution despite the importance of the environment to Mainers.

What Snowe and Collins did this week would be pathetic if the real-life economic consequences weren't so dire. Instead, their actions are reprehensible. Read the rest of this post...

Here's a real soccer star

What a beauty. Read the rest of this post...

Insufficiently stimulated

I wonder if Ezra will get yelled at too. Somehow I doubt it.

Ezra Klein:

[F]or stimulus, a dollar that's spent, say, building a museum about Woodstock is as good as a dollar spent building a bridge to get people to a museum about Woodstock. From a stimulus perspective, waste happens when a dollar is saved rather than spent, as that dollar doesn't immediately stimulate the economy. That's why tax cuts are often ineffective: If you give a middle-class worker a tax break at a time when he's not unable to pay the bills but is trying to replenish his gutted 401(k), he'll save it. And that, from the stimulus's perspective, is waste.

One of the failures of the stimulus was that it included an enormous amount of tax breaks. Roughly a third of the total, in fact. And some of those breaks, like the $70 billion AMT patch, were not effective stimulus under any definition of the term. But they were there to get votes, and to show Obama was being bipartisan in his construction (though in Jon Alter's book "The Promise," Obama says that giving these breaks up-front rather than negotiating with the Republicans for them was a massive mistake). The problem is that they made the stimulus less effective than it could've been, and that made it easier for Republicans to attack down the road.

As we've written before, the stimulus wasn't big enough, the President knew it, but for some unknown reason he caved out the gate and agreed to a much less stimulating bill than was necessary.

(There's the argument that the President "knew" he couldn't get the votes by asking for a larger bill. Really? Did he try? The nation was on the verge of another Great Depression and there was one antidote, the stimulus bill. Did the President make an Oval Office address explaining this to the country, demanding that all 535 members of Congress join him in supporting the full legislation to stave off complete economic collapse? No he didn't. He simply did a vote count, saw that he didn't yet have the votes for the full stimulus that was needed, so he caved and didn't try to get them at all.)

Then he caved on the tax cuts, cutting the stimulative aspects of the bill even further, so that the bill ended up being about 25% of what it needed to be to make up the $2 trillion of GDP lost in the could-have-been-depression.

Let's not forget, this wasn't just another proposal. It was a proposal meant to stop another Great Depression. Who caves out the gate on how much you know will be needed to stave off that Depression? Calling it a mistake is putting it lightly. Every single Democrat is paying for that mistake, in terms of the higher unemployment rate they're having to defend going into re-election. Read the rest of this post...

Think Progress uncovers details of 'pro environment' Gulf of Mexico Foundation

And when they claim to be "pro-environment" they mean it in a BP drill, baby, drill kind of way. The group is funded by BP, Transocean, Shell, ConocoPhilips and other well known environmentalists. If that doesn't tip one off to the brand of environmentalism that they promote, here are some classic lines - extreme greeny lines, as Palin would say - from some recent interviews. Here are a few interesting quotes from the Executive Director, Quenton Dokken from Think Progress:

Dokken explaining why the “sky is not falling”: “Oil is not new in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s been entering the Gulf of Mexico for as long as the oil has existed.”

Dokken on how the spill has helped the local economy: “In Alabama, speaking on a sea grant program, the big problem he had was the spill response jobs were paying so much more than the normal jobs, everybody was leaving their normal jobs for spill response.”

Dokken on minimal impact of ExxonValdez: “And don’t forget, it was Governor Sarah Palin who championed the drill, baby, drill slogan, and that was after Exxon Valdez! So apparently, it didn’t scare Alaska away from the spill or the oil and gas industry, and you know I can, say after the smoke cleared and the headlines cleared or the headlines were cleared with another catastrophe, the true and financial impact was not the disaster that was predicted or portrayed.”

Dokken on how a hurricane will clean the oil: “I guarantee you there will be very little evidence that the Deepwater Horizon ever blew out, if its shut off by the time the hurricanes gets here. And it’s not magic, its just dilution. It mixes it up, spreads it out, breaks it down and it’s gone. We still shouldn’t be putting it in there, don’t get me wrong, but storms and nature is what keeps getting us out of these binds.”

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Neil Young sings a new song...in 1971

It takes a while for him to sort out everything in his pockets but it's well worth the wait.

So while Washington roasts with the hot weather, we're waiting for summer to arrive over this way. We've had some nice days for sure, but it seems like it's been unusually chilly. This week I was wearing my winter thermal shirt when out riding in the evening. Then again, I never wore a wool sweater in the summer months until I arrived in northern Europe. One day it's hot and the next it feels cold. At least my hydrangea bushes are enjoying the season. They're starting to bloom but we're still another few weeks out from peak season. Read the rest of this post...

New Zealand police investigating physical harassment of MP by Chinese security

Um, guys you're not in China where this behavior is rewarded. It's one of those little cultural differences that the guide books don't always explain. How's anyone supposed to know that in a foreign democracy, you can't harass a member of parliament including pushing and ripping the flag of Tibet out of their hands? Doing it to the leader of a political party makes it even stickier but let's hope it's a lesson learned and the friends at home will provide a "welcome home" gift.

Part of the investigation will include speaking with witnesses, viewing pictorial coverage and liaising with the Speaker of the House, who gives permission for lawful protests to take place in Parliament's grounds, police say.

Dr Norman is outraged that members of a Chinese delegation were able to push him, hit him with an umbrella and rip a Tibetan flag from his grasp.

He was protesting as Chinese Vice President Xi Jinpin arrived at Parliament greeted by a few dozen pro-China supporters.

Some of the group, believed to be Chinese security, took exception to Dr Norman waving a Tibetan flag and calling for democracy.

The MP brushed away attempts to have an umbrella placed in front of him, then clashed with security guards as they pulled the flag from his grasp and threw it on the ground.

He yelled they could suppress freedom of speech in China, but not in New Zealand.

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