Done with that, I'm headed for my studio where some of my friends and I will drink some beer, smoke some weed, and I will play my guitar really loud.

Tomorrow I'll go for a mountain bike ride.

Oculus - you made me bust out laughing!

And it really, really needs to come back.

Since I'm of German-Irish descent and have a German surname -- as do also millions of other Americans, I might add -- the very notion that a benign play upon (or use of) a German word / name in everyday banter would be disingenuously construed as somehow indicative of Nazi-baiting on my part, quite honestly didn't even enter my mind.

But it sure did yours, apparently. And that would imply to me that either you're perhaps trying to pick a fight with me, or that your knowledge of Germans and German-Americans is at best embarrassingly superficial -- or both.

Nowadays some 2,500 children, a third of them girls, come to the field every week. They are organized into 135 teams, with each team practicing twice a week. Some have been in the program for years. And that is what distinguishes Amandla from many other organizations: the coaches get to build up real relationships with their charges. They don't just know which players are particularly fast runners. They also know who is having problems at home or in school, and in addition to talking to the children about these problems, they also listen to them.

Zech points to a muscular young man in a yellow shirt. "None of this would work without guys like Bota." The 29-year-old is one of the 20 Amandla coaches. He wears a whistle around his neck, but until recently he was still carrying a pistol in his belt. His arms are covered with the scars of knife wounds. "Bota is a fluke," says Zech.

The former gangster has been enrolled in the state-approved "Youth Leadership Programme" since October. Over a two-year period, young people with strong leadership skills are trained to become positive role models for the children. While they might have been afraid of Bota in the past, they are now drawn to him. After passing practice, he explains to them why one always has a choice in life. He ends many sentences with the words: "You understand?" -- as if he were handing a relay baton to the children. "Yes, coach!" they shout in response.

And the rest from last week, in case you missed any.

Vol. 87
Vol. 86
Vol. 85
Vol. 84
Vol. 83
Vol. 82

AN AXE LENGTH AWAY (a comic a day)

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) said on Sunday that he believes National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden is a whistleblower, not a traitor.

"He may be doing things overseas that we would find problematic, that we would find dangerous," Amash said on Fox News Sunday. "But as far as Congress is concerned, sure he is a whistleblower. He told us what we need to know."
...
"Without his doing what he did, members of Congress would not really have known about it," the Republican lawmaker said. link

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."

OK.

Nearly six months after President Obama used his State of the Union address to outline a broad, progressive agenda for his second term, many of the policy priorities that earned applause from his base appear to be gathering dust.

The White House and Democratic allies insist that the president is making measurable progress on his goals, noting instances where Obama has taken executive action on his own or built coalitions with Republicans in the Senate.

They also argue that even where the president falls short of legislative wins, he has framed the issues to succeed down the road. Obama's continued push for priorities recognized as popular with voters forces Republican lawmakers to both oppose the measure and reinforce their obstinate reputation, strategists say.

But a look at the list of policy goals the president pushed for in his February address reveals little movement on a wide variety of objectives.

SNIP

Despite a laundry list of instances where the president's agenda has become mired, White House officials are preaching patience.

"The gridlock of the moment is not predictive of what is going to happen in the future on big issues," senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said last week at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast.

"If we'd had this breakfast in August of 2011, and I had said to you, 'the president is going to go out and he's going to campaign and he's going to make the case for protecting tax cuts on the middle class and raising the rates on the wealthy back to what they were under Bill Clinton,' you all would have laughed me out of the room," he continued.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev subscribed to publications espousing white supremacy and government conspiracy theories. He also had reading material on mass killings. Until now the Tsarnaev brothers were widely perceived as just self-styled radical jihadists. Panorama has spent months speaking exclusively with friends of the bombers to try to understand the roots of their radicalisation. The programme discovered that Tamerlan Tsarnaev possessed articles which argued that both 9/11 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were government conspiracies. Another in his possession was about "the rape of our gun rights". Reading material he had about white supremacy commented that "Hitler had a point." Tamerlan Tsarnaev also had literature which explored what motivated mass killings and noted how the perpetrators murdered and maimed calmly. There was also material about US drones killing civilians, and about the plight of those still imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.

Link

Charlie Pierce:

I can't tell you how disappointed I am that apparently there was no literature found that dealt with the one-worlder threat posed by Agenda 21. However, the late Mr. Tsarnaev seems to have spent months marinating in 100 different spices of American lunacy before he decided to bust out of Prison Planet with a bang. Turns out he was a bipartisan sociopath, a kind of No Labels/Third Way dude when it came to attempts at mass murder.