Today in poetically synchronous modern fables

Mural by Bansky; Canal Street, NYC

The New York Times:

Replying to Report, Halliburton Says BP Is to Blame in Gulf

WASHINGTON — Halliburton, whose failed cement job on the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico was identified as a contributing factor to the deadly blowout by a presidential investigative panel on Thursday, is defending its work and assigning the blame for the accident to BP.

In a six-page statement issued late Thursday night, Halliburton questioned tests that showed its cement to be unstable and incapable of holding back the oil and gas in the well, saying they were conducted on different formulas than what was eventually used on BP’s doomed Macondo well. It said that a sample of the cement it planned to use on the well, tested shortly before pumping began on April 19, had produced a positive result.

But Halliburton admitted that no stability test was conducted on the actual recipe for the cement used on the well. The company said that BP had ordered a change in Halliburton’s customary formula for cement by adding a higher proportion of a chemical that slows the hardening of the mixture.

The well blew out on April 20, killing 11 workers and eventually releasing nearly five million barrels of oil into the gulf. Since then, BP, Halliburton, Transocean and other partners in the well have traded accusations of blame as civil and criminal investigations proceed.

Meanwhile. Having been lovingly retrieved from the abandoned moorlands of archived digitalia where they usually float, some reanimated anonymous pixels once again have a question for Y! Answers:

Why did my rats eat each other?

I had a cage of male dumbo eared rats. They always got along and were very tame. They were not starving. They were overweight. To my horror while i was cleaning their cage i noticed the skeletal remains of their father and the smallest male half eaten in the corner. It was disgusting! Why would they turn on each other like that?? ewwww!!!

There was a restrainer below and a stomper above; see--two sides!

In a statement sent to the Associated Press, [Tim] Profitt (with Rand Paul, above) has admitted placing his shoe firmly on the face of a Lauren Valle outside a Senate debate on Monday night, but insisted that the camera angle of the footage that captured the alteration made the scuffle look worse than it was. The fact that Profitt is an official coordinator of the Rand Paul campaign opens Paul to potential civil liabilities.--SFGate

The kudzu-like proliferation of Both-Sides-ism that has all but choked off any hope of redemption, via committing real journalism (ha!), for just about every pundit, pretty face, and "reporter" these days is why I had to stop watching Morning Joe altogether. Joe Scar and Mica are, I believe, contractually obligated to say "...and we hear rhetoric like this on both sides" or "...this is a problem with both parties" or "extremists on the far right AND the far left", and so on, after any and every story in which wingnuts might conceivably look bad (which is to say, virtually all stories in which the powerful hurt the less-so, and you have to pity the poor Villagers because there's really no way to temper the sheer viciousness and lawlessness of these people other than to make vague allusions to George Soros and the incivility of lefty blogs while counting the hours until your next Georgetown cocktail party).

It matters not how uncompromisingly godawful the wingnuts' behavior might be. It matters not that both the First Amendment and American criminal law--hell, the human brain--can and do recognize a world of difference between the sticks and stones that break bones and the words that never harmed.

Because whenever an episode of violence and thuggery erupts--like the one in Alaska, when security secessionists militia military members hired goons armed with semi-automatic penis-extenders handcuffed and illegally detained a journalist at a public event for daring to do his job and ask questions of Senate hopeful Joe Miller (R-Kochsuckerville), or the one this week at a Kentucky rally, during which a Dickensian villain/Rand Paul campaign coordinator named Tim Profitt quite literally joined forces with other Randians and engaged in a little brownshirt-style aggravated assault and battery (video here, if you can stomach it) against Lauren Valle, a relatively small-framed and pixie-haired protester who had apparently donned a blonde wig, á la the FOX News bots, in order to express her opinion via the deeply threatening vehicle of satirical theatre--in which Conservatives come off as ever more dangerously unhinged and violent, you can be certain our Barbecue Media will dutifully dig through its memory banks and recall a shocking story about some member of the Professional Left who--back in...oh, 2004 it must have been--didn't like the salad dressing choices at a fundraiser dinner and registered his gustatory protest by using a napkin and water glass to moisten the corner of every place-card at the table.

Then there are all those bloggers who say fuck too much. They're so uncivilized, those hippies!

See? Both sides, people. Both sides.

Now hold still and stop getting styling gel all over my new jackboots.

(H/T Barefoot Progressive, via Prup)

Muslims wearing things: A post in which I ease back into blogging

Greetings and salutations to anyone still reading here at my little corner. I've been dealing with a rather enormous body of...stuff, I suppose I should call it. Personal stuff, work stuff, health stuff. I'll spare you the gory details.

But I'm still here, a bit better rested, and I'm very excited about matters small (the impending put-the-clocks-back-to-normal event, hooray for morning sunlight!) and momentous (the midterms, news of which has me alternately deathly worried and tentatively hopeful).

Via Amanda, check out this Tumblr, Muslims Wearing Things.


As I noted on Facebook:

Oh my goodness, who knew--Muslims wear suits and dresses and army uniforms and surgical scrubs and gowns and tiaras and track suits and swimsuits and jeans and sneakers...how will we ever know when to be afraid? *eyeroll*

What are you up to on this gorgeous fall weekend?