bapifar01: Midday open thread

A good question from the mother of one of the victims:
A federal jury on Friday convicted five current or former police officers in the deadly shootings on a New Orleans bridge after Hurricane Katrina.
Former officer Robert Faulcon, Sgts. Robert Gisevius and Kenneth Bowen, Officer Anthony Villavaso and retired Sgt. Arthur Kaufman were convicted of charges stemming from the cover-up of the shootings. All but Kaufman were convicted of civil rights violations stemming from the shootings. Kaufman, who investigated the shootings, was charged only in the cover-up.

However, the jury didn't find that the shootings amounted to murder.

The mother of 17-year-old James Brissette, one of the people killed on the bridge, said she was relieved by the verdict after "a long, hard six years." But she was puzzled that the jury could conclude her son wasn't murdered.

"How are you able to empty a shotgun in the person and it's not murder?" Sherrel Johnson said.
Not that your church has anything to do with running for president (ahem: Reverend Wright):
Following the revelation that [Michele] Bachmann and her family formally withdrew their membership from the Salem Lutheran Church in Stillwater, Minn., on June 21 ? then she officially declared her presidential candidacy in Waterloo, Iowa, six days later ? speculation as to why they left began. One immediate theory was that the Bachmanns wanted to sever ties with Salem Lutheran?s larger affiliate, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), whose stance on the Pope is considered controversial and potentially alienating to Catholic voters.
The explanation offered to the press ? by the Bachmann campaign and Salem Lutheran ? has thus far appeared to diffuse the initial controversy ... A few days later, The New York Times reported that after leaving Salem Lutheran Church, the Bachmanns started attending Eagle Brook Church, ?closer to their new home in another Stillwater neighborhood.?

Then the blog Spiritual Politics pointed out:

[C]ontrary to what the friends told [NYT reporter Sheryl Gay] Stolberg, not one of the campuses is actually closer to the Bachmann?s new home on the eighteenth green of the Stoneridge Golf Course than their old Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) church, Salem Lutheran, was. The drive from their mini-mansion to Salem is just eight miles, as opposed to 19, 28, 29, and 29 miles respectively to Eagle Lake?s facilities at White Bear Lake, Lino Lakes, Spring Lake Park, and Blaine.
No wonder Texas Governor Rick Perry has no problem with slashing money for education:
... He didn't do very well in it. A source in Texas passed The Huffington Post Perry's transcripts from his years at Texas A&M University. The future politician did not distinguish himself much in the classroom. While he later became a student leader, he had to get out of academic probation to do so. He rarely earned anything above a C in his courses -- earning a C in U.S. History, a D in Shakespeare, and a D in the principles of economics. Perry got a C in gym.

To be fair, college grades don't always reflect how smart someone is ... but a former classmate says:

"A&M wasn't exactly Harvard on the Brazos River," recalled a Perry classmate in an interview with The Huffington Post. "This was not the brightest guy around. We always kind of laughed. He was always kind of a joke."
The right-wing jihad against Media Matters by friends of Fox News continues, as a former White House counsel to George Bush files a complaint, asking the IRS to revoke their tax-exempt status:
Citing a pattern of ?unlawful conduct,? Gray writes in his petition, which FOX Business has obtained, that the nonprofit has ?executed a partisan strategy? in violation of U.S. tax law as it exists ?no longer to educate the public but, rather, to declare ?war on FOX,?? Gray says, quoting from an interview its founder, David Brock, gave to the website Politico.

And here's the funniest part of the complaint:

And Gray writes that aside from Media Matters? ?unsupportable attempt to tie FOX News to the Republican Party, the fact that Media Matters equates FOX News? with the GOP shows the nonprofit?s ?own partisan intent.?
A hilarious take on the right-wing fixation with cartoon characters:
When last we looked in on CNSN's Penny Starr, she was informing us about Obama's diabolical Alinskyite plot to use Lady Gaga to turn Italy gay. We are not exaggerating.
Today she shines daylight on Obama's diabolical Alinskyite plot to use SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora The Explorer to brainwash our great nation's children into performing Satanically un-American acts such as understanding science and turning off light bulbs during the daytime. Again, we are not exaggerating. [...]

What follows is probably the greatest sentence ever written on this or any other Internet:

The author does not explain how a pool is built underwater, how vehicles submerged in the ocean can produce exhaust, or how tires burn and send smoke into the air from the bottom of the sea.

SCIENCE!

Neither does "the author" (if that's his real name) inform us as to how sea sponges can wear pants, nor how starfish can talk. It's all a fraud! PHONY! SCANDAL!

But there's just no suckering eagle-eyed ace reporter Penny Starr from CNSN. No sir! If sea sponges can't work as fry cooks, why, the IPCC has some explaining to do.
The few, the proud, the millionaires:
People and households earning $1 million or more annually made up just 0.1 percent, or just over 235,000, of the 140 million tax returns filed in 2009, and just 8,274 returns were filed by people making $10 million or more. [...]
And, the data shows, the 235,413 taxpayers who reported earning seven digits or more in 2009 took in a total of $726.9 billion ? yet 1,470 paid not a penny of income taxes.
And millionaire tax breaks need to be protected so more things like this can happen:
At least 23 states have approved cuts to K-12 education for the coming year, reductions that will shrink or eliminate a broad array of school programs and services, particularly those serving the neediest communities, a report says.