Welcome to the weekend edition of your open thread. It looks like we’ll have some nice weather on this last weekend before school starts. Yes, I’m dreading the return of school traffic on Monday. Enjoy this last weekend of freedom!

Have you been following this story out of New Jersey? New Jersey just missed out on the Race to the Top education money ($400M for the state). There was one clerical error that was enough to put them out of the money. Chris Christie blamed his Education Commissioner Brent Schundler, but Schundler has emails proving Christie is a liar:

Former New Jersey Education Commissioner Bret Schundler, who was fired today by Gov. Chris Christie (R) amid accusations that he’d lied to the governor about an error in the state’s application for federal Race to the Top money, is now saying that he did not mislead the governor at all.

The state lost out on $400 million in funds as a result of an error in its application, which provided budget numbers for the wrong years, causing New Jersey to lose enough points to miss out on the money. On Wednesday, Christie held a press conference in which he strongly blamed the Obama administration for the loss of federal funding, saying that Schundler had tried to fix an error in the state’s application during his presentation to federal education officials, but they would not let him.

Then on Thursday, the federal Education Department released a video of the presentation itself, showing the officials pointing out the error to Schundler, who was unable to correct it. As a result, Schundler was fired for seemingly misleading the administration about what had happened.

But now he says he did not mislead them at all.

Schundler showed the AP several emails supporting his story -and that Christie knew this all along. Schundler’s is also claiming that Christie fired him so that Schundler could collect unemployment benefits. I’m really not sure what’s going on here but Schundler and Christie appear to have a real feud. Pass the popcorn!

I don’t know how many you are fans of P.Z. Myers. He had a recent cardiac scare and had several stents put in his heart. He should be fine a few weeks and he’s doing a real public service right now, discussing his symptoms and his decision to get a check-up:

This whole hospitalization mess started a few weeks ago, when I was on my daily walk, and I’d gone a little farther and longer than I usually do. I was on my way home, and I felt a dull ache in my chest — nothing severe, nothing acute, just a soreness that spread into my left arm. And I stopped on the sidewalk, and looked ahead, where I was only a couple of blocks from home, and I looked to my right, where the hospital was located only a couple of blocks away. And the ache immediately receded, and I had a little internal debate between the nice angel on my left shoulder, and the dickish devil on my right.

And the angel said, “Oh, look, it’s just a little soreness and it’s going away already. Go home, have a cup of tea, lie down for a bit, and then you can get back to work, no worries. You’ll feel fine.”

And the devil replied with the potent one-two punch of reason and abuse: “You teach human physiology, you moron — you know this is one of the warning signs of heart disease. You’d have to be incredibly stupid to ignore this and hope it goes away…until a heart attack comes along to blow your heart up. Jerk. This isn’t even a choice.”

I thought about it a bit and realized that the remote prospect of dying (it was a very mild ache, and I had no feeling of imminent doom) was nowhere near as persuasive as the thought that I’d feel like an idiot if the iron spike of an infarct did nail my left ventricle at some time in the future, and I’d neglected a portent and hadn’t done the best thing for my health. So I turned right, even though I also felt a bit of a whiner for showing up at a hospital with such a small complaint.

They don’t call heart disease the silent killer for nothing. You can go many years without suffering from symptoms. My dad had a similar incident to P.Z.’s about a decade ago – same symptoms. He decided to get checked out and ended up having quintuple-bypass surgery. As I tell my friends – don’t be a health care martyr!

Welcome to the Friday edition of your open thread. Thank goodness for the end to a really loooooong week. I hope everyone else had a great week and has a fun weekend lined up.

Diarist dhonig at Daily Kos found this ad in Women’s Day magazine.

Did you catch that? Here’s a close-up of the first point.

Is this the reason for the wage gap? Some contact the Chamber of Commerce!

Bob Cesca lays out the case that this summer is “The Summer of Republican Race-Baiting.”

This year has to be some kind of high water mark for white antagonism against minorities, and evidence that the Republicans, along with the array of far-right apparatchiks, don’t really have a serious agenda for governing to sell or, for that matter, anything of value to say. And so they do this. They continue to tap into a mother lode of white majority self-pity and inchoate rage as a form of spackle over the gaping holes in their ridiculous policy arguments.

Take a good look at the big stories of the last several months — the stories that have been driven by the far-right machine, injected into the mainstream and subsequently debated by the rest of the country — partly as a result of the far-right’s money, loudness and tenacity, and partly because these arguments are too obnoxious and outrageous, and therefore too irresistible, to avoid. I’ve been hearing a lot about August being “crazy month,” but the crazy topics have spanned the entire summer and beyond.

Cesca gives his examples: Shirley Sherrod, Anchor Babies, Park51 and Obama is a muslim rumors.

Actually, it could be all of the above because Beck simply outlined a number of so-called Muslim-ish things President Obama has done, and then left the sinister conclusions up to the imaginations and paranoia of his viewers. And by the way, that’s a major feature of the Strategy. Never draw the conclusion. Some examples. A black woman was talking about white people — and you know what that means. Mexican babies are automatically citizens — and you know what that means. The president with his mysterious religion and unusual name said positive things about Muslims — and you know what that means. We don’t know where Imam Rauf is getting his money — and you know what that means. Wink, wink. White rage is successfully tweaked. Mission accomplished.

Whether or not these issues are substantive is entirely irrelevant. The ends justify the means. Winning more power is the goal. Demagoguery, racial politics and specious arguments are fair game as long as they work. As long as the enemy is defeated. This doesn’t necessarily mean that every Republican is a racist (or, with regards to the specious arguments, an idiot). But what else do we call the deliberate inciting of racial bigotry and resentment for the sake of attaining power? It’s unethical, immoral and obscene. It’s race-baiting and it’s a major component of the Republican strategic arsenal.

Matt Taibbi has a more sinister take, comparing the rhetoric to the notorious “Radio Rwanda.”

Welcome to the Thursday edition of your open thread. I guess this is a repeat of Tuesday’s open thread (eh, A1?). Anyway, the floor is yours. Please use your platform for good and not evil.

Update on the AK-Sen race: Miller still leads Murkowski by 1700 votes with all precincts counted. There are 7,600 absentee ballots to count (not all in the Republican primary) so Murkowski still has a mathematically possible, though not probable, chance to win. We’ll have to wait a couple of weeks to have the official results.

All I can say is I agree with Paul Krugman 100%: “Fire Alan Simpson.”

I’ve also had my eye on Alan Simpson, the supposedly grown-up Republican co-chair, who has been talking nonsense about Social Security from the get-go.

At this point, though, Obama is on the spot: he has to fire Simpson, or turn the whole thing into a combination of farce and tragedy — the farce being the nature of the co-chair, the tragedy being that Democrats are so afraid of Republicans that nothing, absolutely nothing, will get them sanctioned.

When you have a commission dedicated to the common good, and the co-chair dismisses Social Security as a “milk cow with 310 million tits,” you either have to get rid of him or admit that you’re completely, um, cowed by the right wing, that IOKIYAR rules completely.

And no, an apology won’t suffice. Simpson was completely in character here; it was perfectly consistent with everything else he’s said, and with his previous behavior. He has to go.

Simpson has already apologized to OWL but I think he owes the rest of us an apology. President Obama has accepted his apology and Simpson is staying. I just don’t see how this commission has any credibility anymore. Is anyone going to be surprised when they cut the deficit by stealing our social security and leaving the huge military budget and Bush-era tax cuts in place?

Can we stop photoshopping away women’s curves? Christina Hendricks loses a significant portion of her hips in a photoshop job by London Fog.

The probable GOP nominee from Alaska is very, very far right.

Among Miller’s views: He wants to eliminate the Department of Education, believes the government shouldn’t pay for unemployment insurance and says of climate change on his campaign site that it “may not even exist.” Among the more mainstream GOP positions he’s taken: Miller would cut welfare; eliminate health care for the poor by scrapping Medicaid; and the Anchorage Daily News reported that he has has called for sweeping cuts to Medicare and Social Security with a goal of phasing them out entirely in favor of total privatization.

…

Democrats would say that Murkowski is a far cry from staunchly pro-choice (she has a 14% rating from NARAL), but that’s how she was portrayed during the campaign. Miller is backed by the Family Research Council and opposes abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, a view far to the right of the mainstream of the GOP. (Operatives have cited her lack of negative campaigning to respond to Miller’s charges as a reason for her surprising poor showing.)

I think he could get along great with Christine O’Donnell! The GOP has a lot of fringe candidates this year and I think the next 2 years will be characterized by complete and utter gridlock (enough to make you long for the days of President Snowe and President Nelson).