The obnoxious Tony Bliar has been speaking again, according to the Beeb:

Radical Islam is world's greatest threat - Tony Blair

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has described radical Islam as the greatest threat facing the world today.

It's alarming that someone who for so long was in charge of a moderately powerful country still doesn't know that the "greatest threat facing the world today" is in fact climate change.

Or perhaps he's erecting a smokescreen in the hopes that we'll not remember how at huge expense to the British taxpayer he abetted, against all international law, the invasion of a country that had no connection to "radical Islam" but did have inhabitants of appropriately dusky hue, while at the same time, despite much froth, he did absolutely fuck-all to help the world cope with man-exacerbated global warming.

What an embarrassment he is to us all. And how much more than that he's going to be to the unfortunates who're trying to stay alive on a hostile planet in a few decades' time.

Wanna know the breathless latest about Sarah Palin's interview with Glen Beck? Simon Maloy's got the poop, if you can swallow it, on the excellent Media Matters:

I'm watching the Glenn Beck interview of Sarah Palin, and it's really leaving me speechless that two people who are so woefully and determinedly uninformed have such an impact on the national discourse.

Beck just asked Palin if she'd heard about the Federal Reserve's record profits for last year, and then bemoaned that "nobody's having hearings on the Fed, nobody is looking for a windfall profit tax on the Fed, we can't even open the Fed's books." Palin responded by thanking Beck for "bringing this to light," adding: "I don't know anybody else who is."

There's a very simple reason why no one else is talking about taxing the Fed's profits or having hearings or even discussing this -- because people who care to know what they're talking about already know that 100 percent of the Fed's profits go to the Treasury. Every single cent. There is no talk of a windfall profits tax because it's already effectively at 100 percent.

Indeed, so wonderful are our rightwing media and punditocracy that FOX News is largely ignoring the earthquake disaster in Haiti, Pat Robertson is blaming the disaster on the Haitians themselves for incurring the wrath of God (they made a literal pact with the Devil, you see, in order to get rid of their French overlords), and Rush Limbaugh is advocating that none of us send any aid donations because ". . . we've already donated to Haiti. It's called the US income tax" -- part of perhaps the most disgusting piece of propaganda in billionaire Scumbaugh's long career of racist, neo-Nazi hatemongering.

I subscribe, for research reasons, to a bundle of faux-Christian rightwing organizations as well as a few more moderate ones. Today I've been bombarded with exhortations to donate funds by appallingly godless secular organizations (e.g., Alternet, MoveOn, Care2, Color of Change) and by out-and-out accursed rationalist/atheist ones (notably the Center for Inquiry, which has a subdivision, SHARE, precisely to funnel funds to Medecins sans Frontieres in emergencies like this). Moderate sites (e.g., Religion Dispatches) are at least putting links online to the aid charities.

Meanwhile, however, from the Christian rightists (e.g., the AFA, Focus on the Family, OneNewsNow) there's been an absolute bloody deafening silence. I find it impossible to reconcile this with their repeatedly bellowed claims that by definition atheists and agnostics -- indeed, anyone outside their own particular little cult -- lack the very possibility of a moral compass. Are they themselves so entirely devoid of moral values that they cannot recognize a correct course of action when it's standing there right in front of them?

By contrast, those disgusting secular degenerates at The Nation have mounted a useful resource page for those seeking the best way to send funds: it's here.

ETA: I'm not a huge Keith Olbermann fan, but sometimes -- as in this comment on the Robertson/Limbaugh obscenities -- he hits the nail right on the head.

moron corner

Radical Islam is world's greatest threat - Tony Blair

dumb and dumber -- no, dumber than that. a lot