So there’s all sorts of weird stuff turning up about the background of Boston bomber guy Tamerlan Tsarnaev, like how Florida cops shot and killed a boxing friend of his the other day … after the friend implicated himself and Tsarnaev in a 2011 triple homicide and then pulled a knife on the cops. Oh, and that triple killing occurred on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and at least two of the victims were Jewish, so it was muslimterrorjihad and not “killing pot dealers”? Frankly, we will not have any idea what to think about all that until Amanda Palmer writes a shitty poem about it.

But it does at least seem clear that, as a DigBoston article suggests, the Boston Police Department’s anti-terrorism unit focused its attention on a whole bunch of things that had pretty much fuck-all to do with terrorism. And god knows, no one has ever suspected the BPD of being a hotbed of competence — this is the city that declared war on cartoon aliens in 2007, after all. On the other hand, if you’re an anti-terrorism squad, you probably should be investigating people who like bombs-n-stuff, rather than, say, “Veterans For Peace” or even Code Pink, no matter how loud and interrupty they might be.

The article, by self-alleged Breitbart-killa Chris Faraone, looks at the disturbingly civil-liberties-disregarding actions of the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC). And like plenty of other “anti-terrorism” efforts, the Boston crew found itself with maybe a shortage of actual terror cells, so it amused itself by going after people who were suspiciously non-mainstream. This is, again, not entirely new news; the ACLU reported on the BRIC’s overreach back in September 2012, for instance.

But boy, howdy, what a lot of wasted effort! Among other things, BRIC sent police investigators to film antiwar demonstrations, to follow environmental and peace activists, and to soberly write up reports on the activities of people like Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of The United States, described by some Boston cop as an “extremist.”

There’s a lot of other stuff in there about the many, many excesses of the BRIC, but we stopped being surprised by this shit a long time ago, and while the information is probably important, Yr Doktor Zoom is always a bit suspicious of claims that any given disaster coulda woulda shoulda been prevented. For instance, even if George W hadn’t been rolling his eyes, yawning, and making dick-shaking gestures during the “Bin Laden Determined to Strike” briefing, there’s no guarantee that the WTC would still be standing. Would have been better if GWB hadn’t been asleep at the switch, but too much indulgence in alternate timelines just leads to everyone wanting to go and Kill Hitler.

It must also be noted that DigBoston’s web design appears to have been perpetrated by a meth-addicted lemur who uses GeoCities. It’s Friday, and we would rather think about something that does not make our brain hurt just by looking at it.

[DigBoston / ACLU]

Gee, I wonder what will happen if we build roads and bridges, then completely ignore them for decades and drastically cut funding everywhere in order to suck the knob of the right wing’s newest golden calf, austerity? Surely nothing bad will happen ever, because debt and deficit are lurking in the corner, threatening to molest your kiddies worse that Ghost Harvey Milk, and Jesus loves austerity.

Well, folks in Washington State got a taste of austerity’s sour splooge yesterday when a bridge on Interstate 5 straight up collapsed:

The major highway bridge linking the Washington state city of Seattle with Canada and the rest of the Pacific north-west region collapsed late on Thursday, dumping several vehicles and the people inside into a river.

The four-lane Interstate 5 bridge collapsed about halfway between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, Trooper Mark Francis of the Washington state patrol said.

Since last night’s bridge collapse, which at least was no motherfucking Minnesota bridge collapse, Jesus, officials have blamed a truck that was overloaded and ran into one of the bridge’s spans.

But shouldn’t a truck NOT be able to take out an interstate highway, unless it is overloaded WITH TERRORISM?

Yr Wonkette has a sad over the bridge collapse in Washington State. But if the GOP continues to have a hissyfit anytime anyone wants to spend a dime, even to help with GODDAM TORNADO RELIEF, then this kind of shit will continue to happen.

Let’s wonksplore some facts and data about transportation funding (CLICK! It’s not like we are lecturing on the 5th amendment again!)

Lots of the roads and bridges in the United States were built back in the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s, when some crazy liberal started putting people to work by pouring vast amounts of concrete around the universe, and then another total anti-American forced Congress to pass and fund a bill to build interstate highways. Since then, the feds have been handing out monies to states and localities for all kinds of new roads and highways. However, Congress has been spending less and less monies over the years, and our infrastructure is starting to be as worn out as Rick Santorum’s ass after “special time” with Glenn Beck.

Spending on infrastructure, as a percentage of the GDP, has dropped to its lowest levels in 20 years. Politicians like ribbon-cuttings and photo-ops, but repairing bridges deemed “functionally obsolete” is not sexy at all, sorry motorists, have a nice trip see you next fall. While things like high-speed rail are the sexy new thang, regular old roads still need some political and financial TLC.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 25% of American bridges are either functionally obsolete or structurally deficient. Yikes?

In April, the Chamber of Commerce even took their collective gums off Mitch McConnell’s peener long enough to utter, “We strongly urge Congress to continue to reject cuts to federal program levels that would, in turn, pass the buck to states, localities and the private sector. These cuts are not acceptable to the chamber.”

The Congressional Budget Office has said that in order to keep the highway trust fun in the black, Congress would have to raise fuel taxes by 10 cents a gallon, dramatically reduce spending to about 8 cents for every dollar it spends now or find more money for transportation somewhere else. Chances of Congress actually doing anything other than finding a quick band-aid before pissflapping about which party is at fault? About nil.

That’s because we live in a world where it is better to yell at a Kenyan Socialist Mooslim than to try to make any improvements whatsoever, so we have a dilapidated infrastructure and not much help in sight.

(Then again, the Kenyan Socialist Mooslim himself had a chance to do some “investy stuff” — legal term — for our bridges back when they were doing that whole Stimulus shtick, but chose to get it through Congress by giving everyone like a hundred clams to go hand directly to the Walmart heirs instead.)

So this is a GOP/Teabagger self-fulfilling prophecy. Step one: yell about how the gubmint is ineffective at doing anything. Step two: Use austerity measures to drastically reduce spending on everything. Step three: watch government not be able to function because of lack of said resources. Step four: yell about how the gubmint is completely ineffective. Step five: Thunderdome!

The GOP is using the same strategy with Obamacare – yelling about how it sucks while withholding the very funds that could make it more effective, and then putting Kathleen Sebelius IN JAIL for getting outside funding like a common criminal.

So hooray for austerity!! With sequestration slashing funding indiscriminately, we wonder what Teabag-made disaster is up next for our great land? Bad water that causes a disease outbreak? Tainted meat served to an elementary school? Or maybe we’ll continue to fall for the Teabagger lines and the GOP will take over the Senate in 2014. Think of how much fun that will be!

[The Guardian/Washington Post/ASCE/Pew Charitable Trust]

Law blog Lawblog BLAWWWG. Time for more lawzzz! What are we thinking about/talking about/still really fucking pissed about today? We are still mad about this judge dude who LITERALLY sold kids and we get to write about it now because his sentence just got upheld.

A federal appeals court Friday upheld the conviction and 28-year prison sentence for disgraced former Luzerne County Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr…

A jury convicted Ciavarella in February 2011 on 12 of 27 counts, including racketeering and conspiracy, for pocketing a portion of $2.8 million to send thousands of Luzerne County youths to a pair of for-profit juvenile detention centers.

Maybe you were not paying enough attention when this all went down or maybe you were, but either way it is time for a trip down memory lane with yr Wonkette because fuck this guy. For years, this living sack of scum took goddamn oodles of money to send kids to a private detention center for pretty much no reason at all:

Between 2003 and 2008, two Pennsylvania judges accepted millions of dollars in kickbacks from a private juvenile detention facility in exchange for sending children — girls and boys, some as young as 11 — to jail… the 13-year-old incarcerated for throwing a piece of steak at his mother’s boyfriend; the 15-year-old for throwing a sandal at her mother; the 11-year-old for calling the police after his mother locked him out of the house; the 14-year-old for writing a satirical Myspace profile. Another 14-year-old, an A student, was sentenced for writing “Vote for Michael Jackson” on a few stop signs; she had a seizure while in detention, banging her head so hard she cracked her dental braces.

Mark Ciavarella is the judge who sent away all those children — and several thousand others — in cahoots with Judge Michael Conahan… After the briefest of hearings — the average length was four minutes — kids were dispatched to detention centers in which the judges had a financial interest. If parents were unable to pay the costs of detention, their children were sometimes held longer. One teenager’s Social Security survivor’s check, from his father’s death, was garnished to pay the costs.

Did we say fuck this guy already? We don’t care, because FUCK. THIS. GUY. He wrecked thousands — THOUSANDS — of kids’ lives by sentencing them to hell, and then had the fucking temerity to demand NO sentence for himself because it was hard to handle all the publicity when he got caught:

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court tossed about 4,000 convictions issued by Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008, saying he violated the constitutional rights of the juveniles, including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea.

Ciavarella, 61, was tried and convicted of racketeering charges earlier this year. His attorneys had asked for a “reasonable” sentence in court papers, saying, in effect, that he’s already been punished enough.

“The media attention to this matter has exceeded coverage given to many and almost all capital murders, and despite protestation, he will forever be unjustly branded as the `Kids for Cash’ judge,” their sentencing memo said.

Somehow we imagine they were given more than four minutes to plead his case, too. Weird.

Some of yr Wonkette are lawyers but those some of us would rather eat a gun than write a sentencing memo saying that this dude shouldn’t go to prison for this. 28 years is much too damn short a time for being this terrible. Indeed, though yr Wonkette, lawyer parts or no, are 100% anti-death penalty hippies, if we believed in executions, this guy would be the first against the wall, Chinese-official-caught-extorting-styley. Seriously, fuck this guy.

[Times-Tribune]

Why is total mob capo of the DHS HHS Kathleen Sebelius shaking down companies to send arms to Iran so it can rape Nicaraguan nuns? This is an excellent question, one posed just this week by Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, previously known for being the boring guy who ran for president before Jon Huntsman whose most exciting personality quirk was wearing plaid. Here, let us let ThinkProgress parse it at ya.

In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) charged that Sebelius circumvented Congress’ refusal to provide funds for the administration’s health care law by raising those dollars from outside groups, just as “Col. North was accused of using money raised in an arms-for-hostages swap with Iran to fund and work with private organizations providing military support to rebel armies in Nicaragua.” [...]

“With Iran-Contra, Congress had also prohibited support for the rebels, while in the case of health-care funding, Congress has refused to provide the amounts that the administration has asked for,” Alexander wrote. “But the principle and the legal prohibitions are the same.” Republican chairmen and ranking Republicans on five congressional committees have asked the Government Accountability Office to look into the matter.

Well, we certainly don’t see any difference there, do you? Certainly not that one was secretly selling arms to a hostile nation, to secretly fund an outfit that Congress had specifically prohibited funding because of all the nun-raping, and that the other was getting funds for something that was in fact legislated by Congress? Hahaha, just kidding, that would be a stupid contrast.

Does the Obama administration say this is all square and aboveboard? Well, what would you expect them to say?

Obama administration officials insist that Sebelius was following authority laid out in the Public Health Service Act — which allows the secretary to “support by grant or contract (and to encourage others to support) private nonprofit entities working in health information and health promotion, preventive health services, and education in the appropriate use of health care” — but “has made no fundraising requests to entities regulated by HHS.” The New York Times reported on May 12 that Sebelius did solicit donations from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and H&R Block.

BURN HER.

Oh, is there anything that could turn this story from superfuckingdumb analogy that wilfully misunderstands the nature of the two cases and conflates them ridiculously, into “holy shitballs that is some brass ones lying”?

MAYBE!

In 1991, while serving as Secretary of Education for President George H. W. Bush, Alexander actively and enthusiastically sought private dollars to fund the administration’s education initiative, America 2000. Alexander crisscrossed the country to sell the program after Congress failed to approve Bush’s education funding request.

But it is totally different, Alexander argues, because it just is.

[WSJ, via ThinkProgress]

It had been a while since we heard from our old friend, union thug speed bag Steven Crowder, which was just fine with yr Wonkette. A mommyblog of our delicate constitution can only listen to so many Ashley Judd rape jokes or complaints about how trans people will destroy the integrity of the honorable sport of two people whaling on each other in a cage. If Steven Crowder had beaten a retreat from the limelight to spend his time dousing himself in Axe Body Spray and pretending not to hear all the other guys at the gym laughing as he slides two five-pound weights onto a barbell, the circus still sends plenty of clowns into the ring for us to facepalm over.

Alas, this week the human-shaped anal fistula popped back up on our radar with a charming little video designed to be a middle finger poked in the eye of the 1.7 billion Muslims with whom we share this planet. Because if you can be a dick for no reason other than you like to luxuriate in your own dickishness, you can’t pass that up.

Wait, what’s that, Steven Crowder? You have some sort of intellectual point you are exploring?

(H)e said he wanted to get to the root of terrorism by comparing the “model citizens” of both faiths.

First off, that’s dumb, because we all know that followers of both Islam and Christianity have found excuses in the ideologies of their “model citizens” to justify terrorizing and killing non-believers. Steven Crowder, you should try reading up on some of the history that occurred in between the respective births of Jesus and Wrestlemania. But more than that, if your starting position for this inquiry is that one religion’s holiest figure was a saintly, respectful, sensitive benevolent hippie who liked nothing more than to buy a pretty gal dinner and ask for nothing in return, and the other religion’s holiest figure is a unibrowed misogynist bigamist cuckold with pedophilic tendencies who in one scene in your video tries to lure a little girl into his SUV with a giant lollipop and a creepy smile, we’re going to go out on a limb and suggest you are not making an honest intellectual inquiry into the roots of anything. All we’re getting is a glimpse of your own narrow-minded, blinkered, intellectually incurious worldview.

Yr Wonkette certainly has no problem with taking religions and their holiest figures down a peg or ten, even if doing so drives Ohef Sholom Temple to one day demand we return our Bar Mitzvah certificate. We also think the death threats roiling the video’s YouTube page are terrible, even though provoking them was part of the intention so that this intellectual midget could pound his chest on Twitter while his supporters tell him how “brave” he is. But Steven Crowder, you are just straight up trolling with this hackish piece of “comedy.” We suggest a new career, one that will not hurt others and is more suited to your talents and scholarly capabilities, like test subject in a makeup lab or selling pencils out of a tin cup on a steam grate.

P.S. Oh, and this? We feel safe in assuming we are not the only Jew who would like to be left out of your crusade for martyrdom. Please to fuck off now, thank you.

[YouTube / The Blaze]

So there was big Boy Scout news yesterday, where the Boy Scouts are gonna go gay all of a sudden. There are really three acceptable ways to react to this bit of news. First, there is the “meh, don’t care because Boy Scouts or am a lady person or whatever” reaction. There’s also the “wooooooo yay gays” reaction. Last, there’s the “yay for this but sucks that you still can’t be a gay grown-up and be affiliated with scouting” position, of which yr Wonkette is a proud member. Or, you can toss all the reasonable responses right out the window and go straight to OHMYGOD LIFE AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER:

“We are deeply saddened,” said Frank Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee. “Homosexual behavior is incompatible with the principles enshrined in the Scout oath and Scout law.”

The Assemblies of God said the policy change “will lead to a mass exodus from the Boy Scout program.” It also warned that the change would make the BSA vulnerable to lawsuits seeking to end the ban on gay adults.

BREAKING. MUST CREDIT WONKETTE. Conservative churches have a sad about teh gheys (but only the young ones) being around other manly heterosexual boy Boy Scouts, because they might make the manly boys think about buttsecks or something. Who else is sad? Rick Perry is VERY sad:

“While I will always cherish my time as a Scout and the life lessons I learned, I am greatly disappointed with this decision,” he said.

That’s OK, Rickster. Everyone in ‘Merica was greatly disappointed with your presidential run. Or was that greatly embarrassed? We can’t remember. The usual suspects like Peter LaBarbera are the saddest pandas of all:

Peter LaBarbera heads Americans for Truth About Homosexuality. “The Scouts has now become an organization which promotes the normalization of homosexuality,” he laments. “If you say that open homosexuality is consistent with being morally straight, you are a confused organization. You’re sending a confused moral message to young boys.”

LaBarbera goes on to say that “the Scouts have snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory that they won when they preserved the right in the Supreme Court years ago to not have homosexual Scouts.”

In case you don’t know who Mr. Peter LaHannaBarbera is, he’s this guy:

He has just posted pictures from what is called “Up Your Alley,” a street fair in San Francisco. LaBarbera made a point to post lots of pictures of naked folks and others engaged in lewd acts.

And included is his commentary about those “nasty homosexuals.” This is a supposed acount of acts from a Americans For Truth volunteer who took pictures at the Fair:

As with previous sadistic street fairs, police non-enforcement was so lax that deviant, homosexual sex acts were allowed to go on in the streets as fair attendees passed on by. In his 50-minute stint, Ron photographed two oral sex acts at Up Your Alley – one in which a man “serviced” two men in uniforms, and the other involving two men engaged in fellatio directly in front of a booth. No action by either the police or a private “Folsom Security” staffer was taken against the law-breakers .

The only way to combat gay sex is to go watch some gay sex, people. Every red-blooded manly-type hetero dude knows this, and it is their solemn sworn duty to pass that knowledge along to the youth via the Boy Scouts. To do otherwise makes you a traitor or a ghey or a communist or all of them, Katie.

[TPM/One News Now]

George Zimmerman’s attorneys have found the smoking gun, you guys. You see, it was totally warranted for their client to murder a 17-year-old boy, whom he’d been following, at night, and who then may have jumped him and kicked his ass while he was being followed by a strange man, because that boy once texted pictures of a handgun, and himself with gold teeth, and marijuana, and also he got in a fight at school.

Guilty? FUCK YEAH!

On Nov. 22, 2011, three months before the shooting, Trayvon wrote about being involved in a fight. His unnamed opponent, he wrote, “got mo hits cause in da 1st round he had me on da ground an I couldn’t do ntn.”

Six weeks earlier he wrote a text message about problems at school involving a fight: “I was watcn a fight nd a teacher say I hit em.”

He also exchanged text messages with friends about smoking marijuana.

Defense attorneys are expected to argue the marijuana use is relevant because in a phone call to police a few minutes before the shooting, Zimmerman described Trayvonas acting as if he were on drugs.

We seem to recall someone else involved in that incident had a gun, too — like, an actual gun, instead of a picture of one? Unlike Scott Baio’s black friend, in this case a picture probably can’t do much harm. But our mind is hazy. It must be all those gold teeth we smoke.

[OrlandoSentinel]