Google Goggles is seriously cool

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Dora the Explorer gets arrested

The alleged crime? Illegal border crossing. It's only as ridiculous as the Arizona law.

In her police mug shot, the doe-eyed cartoon heroine with the bowl haircut has a black eye, battered lip and bloody nose.

Dora the Explorer's alleged crime? "Illegal Border Crossing Resisting Arrest."

The doctored picture, one of several circulating widely in the aftermath of Arizona's controversial new immigration law, may seem harmless, ridiculous or even tasteless.

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Arizona businesses miss their illegal workers

Racism is a bitch.

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Google debating releasing facial recognition technology

Take a photo of a stranger, upload it to Google, and find out everything about the person. That's what we're talking about. It's incredibly cool, and incredibly creepy. But even if Google holds off, others are already working on the same thing. The only thing that could truly stop such technology from going public would be national laws against privacy, like they have in Europe - and like we do NOT have in the United States. Read the rest of this post...

Carville: Obama risking everything with 'go along with BP' strategy

It's a dangerous strategy. Chris Mathews is also lowering the boom on the sloppy performance of the Obama administration. This is quite a change from the Chris Mathews of 2008. Is it him or is it Obama? Read the rest of this post...

Racism, homophobia and the history of the Rand/Ron Paul family

Joe Conason in Salon:

The last time that anyone examined the details of the Paul family's gamy history was back in 2008, when the New Republic dug up copies of newsletters sent out under Ron's name to raise money, and found that they were replete with ugly references to blacks, Martin Luther King, homosexuals and other targets of the racist far right. At the time, Reason magazine, a libertarian magazine that opposed the "paleo" deviation, gave the most revealing account of its movement's degenerate element in a long article by Julian Sanchez and David Weigel.

According to Sanchez and Weigel, the tone of Paul's newsletters shifted to reflect his political circumstances. Between his first presidential campaign and his return to Congress in 1996 as a Republican, they were filled with slurs against blacks generally and Martin Luther King Jr. in particular, including the accusation that the civil rights leader "seduced underage girls and boys." Rothbard hated King deeply, describing him in November 1994 as "a socialist, egalitarian, coercive integrationist, and vicious opponent of private-property rights ... who was long under close Communist Party control," and concluding that "there is one excellent litmus test which can set up a clear dividing line between genuine conservatives and neoconservatives, and between paleolibertarians and what we can now call 'left-libertarians.' And that test is where one stands on 'Doctor' King." (Then again, he hated Lincoln too, whom he disparaged in the same essay as "one of the major despots of American history.")

No wonder Sanchez and Weigel concluded with a forthright condemnation of Ron Paul's dishonesty on race. "Ron Paul may not be a racist," they wrote, "but he became complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists." The same polite formulation could be applied to the hard-line activists behind the Goldwater campaign in 1964, or the "Southern strategists" of the Nixon White House, or the "populist conservatives" of the George Wallace campaign, many of whom still remain active on the right today.

Despite the persistent efforts of Buchanan, Rockwell and many others on the far right, their deranged "dream" of political advancement through racial conflict never developed into a full-scale national nightmare. Instead, King's dream has since drawn closer to fulfillment with the election of Barack Obama. But the profound resentment of the first black president symbolized by Rand Paul and his Tea Party supporters arose from an old political fever swamp that has never been drained.

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Oil leak commission being formed

Yawn. Let me guess. It's going to be as well worth it as the 9/11 commission or the Wall Street recession commission. These commissions are more and more of a waste of time and are all about insiders protecting insiders. What would be nice to come out of this would be to eliminate the interchangeable jobs that flow between Big Oil and the government who is supposed to be regulating Big Oil. We're all familiar with this common practice in other industries (Wall Street comes to mind immediately) and it's really time for Washington to get serious about it. But we can probably count on them to give it a pass again. CYA, here we go!

Two political veterans are expected to head a US commission investigating a huge oil spill, amid criticism of the government's response.

Reports say former Democratic Senator Bob Graham and William Reilly, who once served as environment chief for the Republicans, will lead the inquiry.

President Barack Obama's administration has been forced to defend its record in dealing with the spill.

UPDATE from Joe: Here's the link to the weekly address where Obama makes the big announcement that he's forming an oil spill commission. That sure makes me feel a lot better. Also, Ustream has a live feed of the oil gushing into the gulf. Read the rest of this post...

Janis Joplin - Me & Bobby McGee

I didn't know that Kris Kristofferson wrote this great song. Huh. This is one of the songs that Janis Joplin sang that I really enjoyed.

We're looking at perfect weekend weather with sunshine and warming into the high '70s. Even better, it's a long weekend with the Whit Monday holiday on well, Monday. This should be ideal cycling weather so I'm hoping to crank out the kilometers and move past my pasty winter white. Read the rest of this post...

UN report: saving species even more important than climate change

Too extreme or fair warning? The Guardian:

The UN's biodiversity report – dubbed the Stern for Nature – is expected to say that the value of saving "natural goods and services", such as pollination, medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher – between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them.

To mark the UN's International Day for Biological Diversity tomorrow, hundreds of British companies, charities and other organisations have backed an open letter from the Natural History Museum's director Michael Dixon warning that "the diversity of life, so crucial to our security, health, wealth and wellbeing is being eroded".

The UN report's authors go further with their warning on biodiversity, by saying if the goods and services provided by the natural world are not valued and factored into the global economic system, the environment will become more fragile and less resilient to shocks, risking human lives, livelihoods and the global economy.

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