1.  Loss of companionship to the family that let him be homeless rather than take him in?
   
2.  Loss of earnings by a homeless man?
   
3.  Or is it trying to hit the lottery jackpot in a jury trial?

Exhausted and overshadowed, the Wisconsin State Assembly continued its marathon session Wednesday, inching closer to the seemingly inevitable passage of Gov. Scott Walker's controversial budget repair bill.  By Wednesday [night], the Assembly had been in session for 35 hours and worked through just 23 of 103 amendments.

And while Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, R-Horicon, enforced limits on debate, it seemed clear that members were in for another all-nighter if they hoped to finish debate on the bill.

This is the debate that the Assembly Repubs tried to prevent in illegal action last Friday, passing the bill before taking up any amendments -- and before the Dems got there, on time.  At least, the time that Repubs had told them.  Repubs had their sheeple get there early to pass the bill without even a minute of discussion -- and refusing to recognize the first Dems to file in the chambers.  Dems eventually did shame Repubs into returning the bill to amendable status.

And then came the weekend, when Dems came up with more amendments (with a few from Repubs).  And now -- this is not way to do a good bill.

SAN DIEGO -- Thomas Gainsborough's name will be forever tightly yoked to "Blue Boy,"  the riveting portrait of young Jonathan Buttall, painted around 1770, standing atop a windswept hill in the English countryside and dressed in the satin garb of an earlier aristocratic era. It's the most famous portrait in America. The painting's brilliance, lofted by dazzling brushwork, has a lot to do with its celebrity.

1 cup Progresso Potato, Broccoli & Cheese Chowder
Total Fat: 12g Saturated Fat: 3.5

Republican Georgia State Rep. Bobby Franklin has introduced H.B. 1 in the Georgia Legislature, which, along with outlawing abortion, requires that all miscarriages (which the bill calls "spontaneous fetal deaths") be reported to the local county registrar within 72 hours, along with documentation that the miscarriage occurred with "no human involvement whatsoever."

But for those loyal Obama supporters who spent two years defending the administration's DOMA position on this ground:  if they have even a minimal amount of intellectual honestly, shouldn't they now criticize the President's reversal, this new refusal to defend DOMA?   If they really believed what they were saying for the last two years -- that a President is required to defend the constitutionality of all statutes -- then shouldn't they be vocally condemning Obama now for doing exactly that which they insisted he has no power to do?  Of course -- as the torture photo and civilian trial controversies also demonstrated -- one of the joys of partisan fealty and devotion to a leader is that one need not have any actual beliefs or positions:  you get to say whatever you need to say at any given moment to justify the leader's conduct, even if it completely contradicts what you said months or weeks earlier in service of the same objective.  Justifying the leader's behavior is the sole prism through which the entire political world is viewed; one is blissfully liberated from the need to formulate any actual views or principles.

James McAvoy(Wanted, Atonement), who plays Charles Xavier in Matthew Vaughn`s X-Men: First Class, just described the film to the LA Times as `kind of a love story,' and because the love story would be between Xavier and Magneto, I'm afraid that's going to be a tag that proves irresistible to many people.

Bill Maher Slams Muslim Men's Treatment Of Women, Gets Heckled By Audience Member

got this reaction from some poster at TPM.

which, I think, distinguishes Maher from one or two of the prominent right-wing bigots who seem to be faking it for ratings.

Maher is not faking. He's a hater. Ugly stuff.

Psy-ops allegedly used on US Senators to convince them to spend more on war in Afghanistan

A report in Rolling Stone accuses the U.S. Army of illegally ordering a "team of soldiers specializing in 'psychological operations' to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war."

got this as a first repsonse

is kevjumba a heterosexual bear wrestler

He's been very expressive in his statements, even at the Saddleback Forum when he ran in 2008. He spelled out very clearly what his view was, and frankly, it's inappropriate , wrong-headed, and not helpful to the overall discussion when people try to say he doesn't have a birth certificate or he's a Muslim. To me that demeans the entire real discussion--what is he proposing and whether it's good for the country--that ought to be the centerpiece for our entire conversation, not what did he hear when he sat in church. If people went back and heard every sermon I heard when I was a little kid and some of the more fundamentalist pastors were yelling from the pulpit at me, if they took every one of those sermons and lifted out of them certain phrases and things, it could be scandalous, but only out of the context of the bigger picture. That's why I thought that a lot of the focus on Jeremiah Wright was misplaced.

Egypt's young people, fresh off of toppling a 30-year dictatorship through the help of social media, used that technology to grill Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday, asking her why the U.S. didn't express support for the revolution sooner.

"The attitude of the U.S. during the Egyptian revolution was to support the Egyptian regime first," read one of the nearly 6,500 questions, videos and audio files users submitted through the Egyptian social media website, Masrawy. "Then, when the revolution turned successful, the U.S. switched sides and supported the Egyptian youth. Why?"