In a post on its Facebook page, BP acknowledges that those two images that appeared photoshopped had in fact been cut and pasted: “Although BP is a private company, we’ve instructed the photographer who created the images to refrain from cutting-and-pasting in the future and to adhere to standard photo journalistic best practices.”

TPM’s Jill Rayfield submits to week three of Glenn Beck University and a class they call “Charity 101.”

I’m just getting a chance to watch Rachel Maddow’s segment from last night’s show on the Sherrod case, tying it to the last 50 years of politically calculated right-wing race-baiting, fear-mongering, and just plain old racism. Just go watch it.

The White House’s description of the call: Read More

I knew a tropical cyclone in the Gulf of Mexico would wreak havoc on the oil cleanup and the effort to seal the wild well. I didn’t realize it meant they might have to reopen the cap and let oil resume coursing into the sea: “Worse yet, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said foul weather could require reopening the cap that has contained the oil for nearly a week, allowing oil to gush into the sea again for days while engineers wait out the storm.”

Here’s the projected path of the storm that is now a tropical depression in the Caribbean Sea southeast of Florida: Read More

Nevada GOP Senate nominee Sharron Angle tried her hand at doing a press conference — the kind where you speak for three minutes and don’t take any questions from the press.

Geithner sings Elizabeth Warren’s praises in breakfast appearance this morning, but stops short of touting her for post as top cop on consumer financial protection beat.

The correction now appended to Andrew Breitbart’s original post at Big Government introducing the edited Shirley Sherrod video:

Correction: While Ms. Sherrod made the remarks captured in the first video featured in this post while she held a federally appointed position, the story she tells refers to actions she took before she held that federal position.

All good otherwise.

Forty-eight hours ago the story was another bad apple found on Obama’s cart. By yesterday morning it was another black eye for Obama and Tom Vilsack for rushing to dump a blameless woman on no good evidence and cravenly or cowardly or pusillanimously running for cover because Breitbart, Roger Ailes and whatever other gods of The Crazy said boo! For progressives mad at their president, at some level, that’s understandable. They have no relationship with and expect only the worst from the Breitbarts and Fox Newses of the world. But with Obama they expect more. And it’s personal.

Still, you just have to back up from that and realize that as disappointing as Tom Vilsack’s first crack at this was, the idea that he or Obama is the bad guy in this story is not only preposterous but verging on obscene. It’s like the NYPD as the bad guy in the Son of Sam saga because they didn’t catch David Berkowitz fast enough. Or perhaps that the real moral of the story is that the woman with the stalker should have been more focused on personal data security. Not for some time has something so captured the essential corruption of a big chunk of what passes as ‘right wing media’ (not all, by any means, but a sizable chunk along the Breitbart/Fox/Hannity continuum) and the corruption of the mainstream media itself as this episode. Read More

I don’t post every stupid thing Newt Gingrich says (it is after all at least his 16th consecutive year of claiming to be considering a run for President), but every once in a while Newt outdoes even Newt: “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.”