Before the deep freeze starts here in the East-
A brief summary of another bummer of a summer…

Who will look in the mirror honestly and admit the false equivalencies, the ginning-up, the “it’s out there” level of danger growing within? Beck? O’Reilly? Ailes? Murdoch? Armey? McConnell? Bachmann? Angle? Palin? Erickson? The numbers are legion.

Once again, an Obama supporter defends the indefensible.

Rachel Maddow performed another fine public service last night by connecting the dots on the various Fox News stories designed to convince white people to be afraid of blacks and minorities.

Update: White House Press Secretary Gibbs just apologized to Shirley Sherrod. From TPM:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs today offered an apology to Shirley Sherrod on behalf of the Obama administration.

He said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is trying to reach Sherrod as well, to offer his own apology and to "talk about their next steps."

"I think without a doubt Ms. Sherrod is owed an apology. I would do so, certainly, on behalf of this administration," Gibbs said.

"Members of this administration, members of the media, members of different political factions on both sides of this have all made determinations and judgments without a full set of facts," he said.

We’re still waiting for an explanation for how the Administration (and who) made such a bad decision and why it wasn’t obvious to them in the first place. In the meantime, I hope someone takes the shovel away from Jim Messina, permanently. Via Alex Pareene at Salon:

Gentle Readers, tell me now, which is worse — swearing up a storm, or creating a cuss-free cartoon that invokes the old “we must protect our white wimmen!” racist/sexist nastiness that gave us, among other things, the tragedy of the Scottsboro Boys?

Another edition of smacking down the Reich Wing echo chamber…

Just as the Tea Party itself is a faux populist movement, subsidized behind the scenes by a combination of hidden corporations, represented publicly by discredited figures like Dick Armey, or greedy bastards, exemplified by the organizers of many of their most highly touted events, so the news organizations now covering their first annual convention in Nashville, are combinations of various bizarre business models that pretend to represent some new paradigm.