When is he moving to Alabama?

He sounds well-qualified for Republican primaries.

An Italian court has accused the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and his lawyers of tampering with evidence by paying off witnesses in a trial related to his notorious "bunga bunga" parties and has asked prosecutors to investigate the possible corruption of a judicial process.

The accusation in the court's ruling could lead to a new legal headache for Berlusconi, who this week was kicked out of parliament for at least six years because of another, unrelated problem: a tax fraud conviction.

The court suggested Berlusconi paid off the would-be showgirls who attended his dinner parties so they would play down the sexually charged nature of the evenings when they testified. He did so, the judges asserted, because he was facing related charges in another case involving accusations that he paid for sex with an underage prostitute who was also a "bunga bunga" guest.

Citing testimony and telephone wiretaps, the Milan court said Berlusconi convened about a dozen young women at his Milan mansion on 15 January 2011 to meet his lawyers after the women's homes were searched as part of a police investigation into the parties.

From then on, the judges wrote, the women each received €2,500 (£2,000) every month from Berlusconi and subsequently offered unusually identical testimony in court, denying the parties had sexual overtones.

Making this famously fake video more accurate than ever.

So close...

Looks like Comet Ison will not end up being a spectacular show as it emerges its solar encounter quite damaged. Stupid Sun...giver of all life...but destroyer of cool comets.

Bill Kristol just came out for invading it. Have at it Bill, get working on that rocket there and take care of it.

Forget taking the Lions and the Points

It's Thanksgiving, you have another more personal spread to work on. And remember at least you are not Mike Huckabee's tailor. But you could be his radio network programmer.

Mike Huckabee's radio show is coming to an end. “The Mike Huckabee Show on radio, which was heard 3 hours a day on over 200 radio stations across the country since April of 2012 will conclude its run at the end of the final show on Thursday, December 12,” Huckabee wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday. Hr thanked the affiliate stations who aired his show, his listeners and Cumulus Media, adding that he and the company "mutually agreed to conclude" to end the show.

Just like today Mike and his wife will mutually agree that four servings of mashed potatoes is enough. Hard to believe a show with such trenchant analysis as this, is unable to survive.

Mike Huckabee labels Lara Logan a ‘hero journalist’ for discredited Benghazi report

But as you are not Mike Huckabee, have a great Thanksgiving...and if you want nostalgia, you might consider recreating the Thanksgivings of your youth. [cross-posted at Firedoglake]

Every classic Thanksgiving rolled into one...

This is brilliant and deadly accurate.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

Way to slander 'em when they're down fellas

While the Catholic Church actually talked about the poor like you might expect a humanitarian organization to do...another more usually reliable group decided not to pay much attention.

The World Health Organisation has been forced to retract claims that crisis-hit Greeks are intentionally injecting themselves with the HIV virus to collect state benefits almost two months after the shocking allegation was revealed in a report that triggered global media coverage. Blaming the mistake on an "editing error", the Geneva-based body issued an unreserved apology on Tuesday, saying it had been wrong to claim that "about half" of the debt-stricken country's new HIV infections had been self-inflicted.

Two months? Way to get on that folks. Beaten even by a 60 Minutes producer.

Of course, corrections are only for some folks -- better to perpetuate lies that keep you employed as a pundit.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

Two days to Perihelion!

Will Comet Ison survive and give us an awesome sight to see at sunset (or will it be sunrise)in December? Or is it gonna disintegrate (it comes without 3/4 of a million miles of the Sun...and relatively that's damn close)? Until then, here is is as it appeared recently just before sunrise (captured in the Canary Islands).

The most modern 'Murican story EVER!

Amazingly, it happened in my home state, not Texas.

Centerville Police have made an arrest in connection with the gun shot fired inside of the Walmart Supercenter in Centerville Sunday afternoon. Christopher William Strube, 50 of Centerville, was arrested and charged with discharging a weapon within the city limits of Centerville. Police made the arrest at approximately 9 a.m. Monday morning. According to a press release from the Centerville Police Department late Monday morning, Strube said he was carrying a .45-caliber gun in his pants pocket. He stated that a bottle that he was carrying hit the handgun and caused it to fire one round. The press release continues to say that Strube advised that after the gun went off he paid for his items and left the store.

A bottle of what? I think it would be irresponsible not to speculate. Note that AFTER his gun went off, he continued shopping. You don't even do that at an adult bookstore. *rim shot*

Cinema Veritank

Hard to believe a movie produced by the fertile mind of Rick Santorum would be a critical and commercial flop.

The power of prayer has failed to save The Christmas Candle, the new release from Rick Santorum's faith based film studio, EchoLight.

The Christmas Candle, set in the fictional English village of Gladbury and billed as "a timeless holiday film for the entire family", attracted widespread critical scorn as well as dismal box-office results, having grossed just over $1.6m (£988,000) after two weeks on release.

Yes, nothing spells box-office like Dickens without the, uh, Dickens but all the schmaltz as well as a ton of preachiness.

By now it's pretty clear that your openly religious movies make money only when they come with a heavy dose of torture-porn.

If there's a silver lining...okay an additional silver lining...it's that Ted Cruz's "Life with Father" is going to be a very very limited direct-to-video release.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

Bibi the Bozo

Gawker found that Netanyahu, or as he is more commonly known among American Conservatives, "the Secretary of State" seems to think a LOT of things are "historic mistakes":

12. This weekend's groundbreaking multilateral agreement with Iran to shut down that nation's nascent nuclear weapons development program

11. Israel's 2005 agreement to withdraw from its occupation of the Gaza Strip

10. Israel's landmark Oslo Peace Accords between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat

9. Israel's landmark 1949 Armistice Agreement

8. Israel's landmark 1967 Six-Day War Agreement

7. Not bombing Iran in 2012

6. Not making the red line in his bomb diagram bigger

5. Making this gesture and this one

4. His first marriage

3. His second marriage

2. His third marriage

1. The whole doge meme

Just like "Jeopardy"

Wolf Blitzer, genius -- full-stop.

Flagrente Derangedio

Well, as you all know, after five years that clever President Obama finally engaged in 12-dimensional chess -- but not enough to fool John Cornyn.

Nope, Cornyn was on to the attempt of Barack Obama -- and five other nations in addition to Iran -- to agree to a deal JUST TO SAVE "Obamacare".

Thus two long-time wishes of conservatives everywhere have come to fruition.

1. They get to bemoan the continued existence of the underwhelming medical reform legislation they always dreamed of passing, until Democrats passed it.

2. They get to continue to bemoan "appeasing" things like not war via bombing brown people in the name of peace without actually having to do so.

This will not stand, well it may stand, but the dream of bombing the Iranians until the rubble bounces is such a long-standing right-wing wet dream it will not be given up so easily.

And naturally, the conservatives designee as Secretary of State (they consider him more American than the current American President) comes through for them...so to speak.

And, of course, the Democrats have their own enablers.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

Oh C'mon!

Obviously this is all because of gay marriage.

Charles Manson may be getting married -- or at least, that's what one of his biggest fans claims.

"I'll tell you straight up, Charlie and I are going to get married," the supposed fiancee, known only as "Star," told Rolling Stone. "I take it very seriously. Charlie is my husband. Charlie told me to tell you this."...

... "Charlie," however, has a different story. "That's a bunch of garbage ... That's trash," Manson told Rolling Stone. "We're just playing that for public consumption."

When Charles Manson is the SANE half of the couple, that's not a good sign.

The more things never change, the more they stay the same

Fresh as yesterday's third page of the business section headlines:

Chiquita Brands International Inc.’s bid to stop the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from releasing documents on payments to Colombian terrorist groups was thrown out of court. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington rejected the company’s argument that the damage it would suffer from disclosure of the records, in a case in Florida connected to the Colombian payments, should bar their release to a public- interest group under the Freedom of Information Act.

Chiquita used to operate as United Fruit Company, one can wonder what could be so worrisome with a glorious history like this?

The Banana Massacre.

Being responsible for the term "Banana Republic".

Pretty much being responsible for the invasion and overthrow of governments who were not sufficiently servile enough to "big Banana".

After a century of this, well, bullshit, they are afraid of what documents may show? Isn't it enough that they can do all this and the story still ends up buried in the business section?

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

I heartily approve of this ironic turn of events

Oh dear...oh dear, dear, dear.  

Craig Cobb, the self-described white supremacist who seeks to turn Leith, N.D. into an Aryan enclave, got a taste of his own medicine after DNA test results revealed on daytime television that he's part-African.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that a fellow white supremacist targeted Cobb with racially charged graffiti after his appearance on the "Trisha Goddard" show, where a DNA test revealed that he was genetically "14 percent sub-Saharan African." 

I wonder if it was Clayton Bigsby?

You did not truly known boredom until you

Know that this exists...

Million-Dollar Hobby: Inside the World of Big-Money Bridge

And you guessed it...Wall Street Money is behind this.

The International We broke it, you bought it proviso

Yeah, can anyone really blame them?

Representatives of most of the world's poor countries have walked out of increasingly fractious climate negotiations after the EU, Australia, the US and other developed countries insisted that the question of who should pay compensation for extreme climate events be discussed only after 2015.

Sure they are ironically led by China, the world's newest mass polluter, but otherwise, why should the countries who have been most screwed economically by the countries that have done their best to ruin the planet for everyone not expect some form of justice?

Of course, when Europe, the US and Australia say "only after 2015" they really mean "never".

So again, who can really blame them?

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

Don't worry, FoxNews tells me he'll be even more dangerous armed with Skittles!!!

Just over a week until Turkey Day

And already it will be the best Thanksgiving in years... Even if you are alone.

Oh, and here is the ultimate site for those of you who wish you could see every episode online.

That certainly isn't tea

Glad to see there's no hypocrisy there. Congressman Trey Radel, a tea party freshman lawmaker from Fort Myers, was arrested on Oct. 29 for cocaine possession in Washington, D.C, Politico reported. And to think, just a hooker away from the rock-star lifestyle.

It will be forthcoming...in oblivion

One could say better late than never. One hundred and fifty years ago, give or take a few days, Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address. A local Pennsylvania paper was not impressed.

We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of

As they never said then, "whoopsy!" This week the same paper finally got around to a retraction. In the same vein, we can look forward to about the Spring of 2153 when the remnant of the Washington Post, which no longer is publish in the District of Columbia --as its under water, has Zombie Fred Hiatt do the same for supporting the invasion of Iraq. In between editorials about the need to cut Social Security and Medicare and supporting the latest possible war. [cross-posted at Firedoglake]