Blog Heap of Links for the day 16 December 2011

Estimated bare minimum cost of Mooch’s impatience: $100,000. Good thing for her it’s someone else’s money.

Eric Holder is an attorney general who is specifically horrid. Unfortunately, his sheer inadequacy allows him to fit in perfectly with this particular president’s cabinet.

Holder fails at what should be the first qualification for his job, namely in how he promotes depraved behavior instead of freaking stopping it. It may offer precisely zero comfort, but imagine how much more damage he would inflict if he was any good.

The only present relief is knowing that someone with bad ideas is bad at making things happen, although Holder has managed to inflict quite enough bloodshed even with his astoundingly limited skill set.

Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone's GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan. [h/t War News Updates]

Iraq War's 'Last Casualty' (The 4,483rd American) Is Mourned

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is rebranding itself to try to lose the negative "baggage" associated with the larger terror organization's identity, according to a senior Arab diplomat who says the Yemeni-based group is trying to attract more foreign fighters to its cause.

One of the last of the founding fathers of comic books, writer/editor/artist/publisher Joe Simon, died yesterday at the age of 98… first editor at Marvel Comics… [co-created] Captain America with artist Jack Kirby… [and] Guardian and the Newsboy Legion, the Boy Commandos, and Manhunter… created the romance comic… one of a handful of creators without whom the American comic book field would not be as we know it today….

Merely having a state medical marijuana card, BATFE insists, means that you fall afoul of Sect. 922(g) of the federal criminal code (from the 1968 federal Gun Control Act), which says that anyone “who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” is basically barred from possessing or receiving guns or ammo (with the bogus assertion that such possession implicates interstate commerce, which courts will pretty much always claim it does).

Time lapse animation of the demolition of 660 W. Division, one of the last remaining buildings within the Cabrini-Green housing projects in Chicago.

For the first time on record, the Chinese Communist party has lost all control, with the population of 20,000 in this southern fishing village now in open revolt.

The last of Wukan’s dozen party officials fled on Monday after thousands of people blocked armed police from retaking the village, standing firm against tear gas and water cannons.

What the SOPA legislation allows government to do is to consign all those foolish “pulldown” requests to the dustbin, and simply to freeze the entire offending site on the basis, not even necessarily of that site having reproduced some copyright-infringing (in their judgments, of course) material, but simply to have linked to it. Once a complaint is made, there is a presumption of guilt, and the matter drops out of their hands, to be litigated in the usual ways.

Such a process clearly works against the small, independent blogger, and provides a lot of potentially remunerative busywork for lawyers. It also provides a lot of potential for professional and semi-professional “offense chasers” to get kickbacks (or referrals, if you prefer) for discovering transgressions, and for ideologically driven offense chasers to tie up sites whose views offend them personally with nuisance lawsuits.

It’s time for a different type of redneck joke. Rednecks know who they are, and have been very tolerant of mockery, and they don’t require the jokes to come from another redneck, lest you be killed.

Take a look at these and ask yourself, am I a redneck?

You might be a redneck if: It never occurred to you to be offended by the phrase, ‘One nation under God.’ ....