Midday open thread

The thread hopes your Chag Pesach was Sameach, your Friday was Good, and your Easter Sunday will be blessed. To the links!

• Fox News dumping Sarah Palin to line up behind the Donald? Couldn't have happened to a nicer grizzly.
• In honor of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day yesterday, here is a brief reading from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, set to video.
• Senator John Kyl (Patriarch-AZ), who infamously stated that abortion is "well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does") and whose office later retracted it as something "not intended to be a factual statement," has stricken his intended non-factual statement from the Congressional Record. Unfortunately for Kyl, the whole internet will not forget so quickly.
• Via Swing State Project, here's some more violent imagery from the right: Democratic Assemblymember Anthony Portantino, who is challenging David Dreier in California's 26th Congressional District, was depicted on an old West "Wanted" poster by a group supporting open carry. Classy.
• The relaunched Newsweek laments the decline of the white male executive. Really. No joke. Because after all: if the older white males are finally put into the same position as absolutely everyone else in this country (including younger white males, mind you), then I suppose the demise of society is at hand. Because, you know, anyone without the "big office" and "big bonus" is "washed up" by definition.
• And a final Earth Day note...the team at Media Matters has put together a compendium of some of the vilest things anti-environment conservatives said in mockery of Earth Day. Many of these comments are juvenile, petty, stupid and violent. G. Gordon Liddy, for instance, made a suggestion about grilling polar bears, while RedState.com advocated turning on all one's lights for Earth Hour.

  Now, there's absolutely no circumstance in which, say, using extra power that one absolutely does not need would be a good thing?whether for one's pocketbook or for the environment. But conservatives insist on writing crap like this because their main focus is not to advocate for anything in particular; it's simply to be spiteful and oppose whatever we're for, like some overgrown schoolyard bully with no answers in class, but plenty of insults and taunts on the playground. Hint to voters: they often govern the exact same way!

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/4ci_aAZcT4Q/-Midday-open-thread

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