For all of us who were pumped over the prospect of watching David Beckham compete against the United States in their massively huge World Cup match against England on June 12...uh, that's not going to happen. Maybe someday...is there a Senior World Cup?

I have to say that I'm surprised (I shouldn't have been, but I was) and outraged over the protests against this cartoon by the Inquirer's Tony Auth, which depicts the principal of South Philadelphia High School, whose name is LeGreta Brown. First of all, editorial cartoons are, um, metaphor, people. Just because Ms. Brown claims she spends 12 hours a day at the school doesn't mean that she -- and her bosses on up to the needs-to-be-fired Arlene Ackerman -- weren't totally asleep at the switch, figuratively, as racially motivated violence escalated over time into a day long festival of mayhem against Vietnamese students and other Asians. If you don't believe that Brown and Ackerman displayed horrible leadership and deserve to be held an accountable, then your head is buried in something deeper than the desk in that cartoon.

That's why I'm reprinting the cartoon here at Attytood, in solidarity with Tony Auth. In fact, I'm going to reprint it here a lot between now and the day I come back from my book vacation. There's no more liberal value than saying 'no' to racism like the violence that occurred in that high school, and so I'm proud to stand with Tony Auth in doing exactly that.

On that note, have a good weekend.

Stu Bykofsky weighs in on the inevitable implications of, in his words, "when terrorists look like us."

JIHADJANE has a message for racial-profiling fans: Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.

JihadJane blew up the notion - never really widely held - that being a blue-eyed blonde should slide you through airport security like grease through a goose while everyone with a Middle Eastern name, a swarthy complexion or a turban should be strip-searched by Transportation Security Administration screeners.

Well, he certainly has a point about racial and ethnic profiling -- it will be interesting, if I get a chance, to hear Smercomish's take on this. But I think the broader point here is that Colleen LaRose was a woman with a world of problems before she discovered al-Qaeda. In all honesty I think it makes more sense to view her as Act III after the Austin IRS attack and the Pentagon shooting -- people who were deranged or narcissistic or both and who turned their demons toward something political. And I think that is a commentary on our times:

For too long in America we've had people committing random acts of violence -- usually toward their own family, unfortunately, and occasionally at crowded places like a McDonald's; in 2010, the focus is anti-government and anti-Americanism -- that's partly a reflection on the deep anxiety in U.S. society right now and partly because of the hypercharged media atmosphere (and yes, I mean on all sides) that we live in today. The Internet, in particular, enabled all three of these people -- to obsess on conspiracy theories or to post a death rant where millions could read it or, now, for a blonde, blue-eyed and deeply troubled woman from the Philadelphia exurbs to hook up with al-Qaeda. And if you believe in free speech and unfettered Internet access, as most of us do, there's no easy solution for that.

Some days you can turn on "Morning Joe" and just conclude there's no connection between our so-called grand political debate and the real slow drip-drip-drip that is killing the American economy -- and our kids' future in the process. Some days the slow drip is from gasoline:

Sunoco Inc., the Philadelphia-based oil company, says it's paying EquaTerra Inc., a Houston consulting firm, to recommend whether Sunoco should "outsource" information technology, accounting, personnel, and procurement jobs from its Center City headquarters, home to 750 of Sunoco's 10,000 employees.

"We have hired EquaTerra to advise us as we explore potentially outsourcing some functions," Sunoco spokesman Thomas Golembeski told me yesterday. Workers learned Friday of the possible job moves. EquaTerra didn't return calls for comment late yesterday.

Sunoco expects EquaTerra to report later this year on which jobs could be profitably outsourced to cheap labor markets in Asia or elsewhere. If Sunoco decides to outsource these jobs, it will seek proposals from contractors, Golembeski said.

First of all...uh, Sunoco, could you please explain to me what you've been doing with the wads of extra cash that I've been forced to dole out at your service stations these last few years? Surely you didn't lose that much on those discount cards from the Acme. And so now this is your gratitude for sevcral years of record profits -- inflicting a hurting on the Philadelphia economy, and not just the people who'll lose their office jobs in Center City but the guy who sold them coffee in the morning, and, yes, the service station owner who use to fuel up their morning commute to a job that's about to disappear forever.

Second of all, isn't this the real problem in America today, and one that no one in Washington -- or anywhere else -- has a clue on how to solve? Free-market solutions? Give me a break -- this is the free market in action. There's not a Republican tax break in the world that would stop Sunoco from shipping those jobs to India or China or wherever, given the huge disparity in wages. We could shut off the Internet -- we did pay for this microphone, after all -- and go back to a non-flat-world economy like we had in the prosperous 1950s, but that seems counterproductive and unpractical, doesn't it. I still think the best alternative would be to invest both more and more wisely in education as well as infrastructure -- what China is doing,

But the inevitable return of conservatives to power, at least until they screw things up for the fourth time in my lifetime, is probably going to lead to a new world order of ill-targeted austerity (money for tanks instead of classrooms) that will destroy my children's future in the name of saving it. God bless America. 

You knew it was a matter of time: Psychology Today is here to tell us what makes the Tea Party tick. I think the piece is both insightful and bizarre at the same time.

Insightful:

Psychologically speaking, however, it offers relief from helplessness and a sense that things are falling apart. It offers a sense of cohesion and identity based on certainty, a commonality of interests, innocence, and even martyrdom. While the world of the tea-party'ers is filled with danger, it is a danger mitigated by moral certainty, clarity of purpose, and a definable external enemy.

The "problem," then, is not the paranoid story line but the anxiety, helplessness, and pain that generate it. And that pain is not irrational or crazy. It's real. We all feel it. Most of us do feel helpless in relation to the most important aspects of our lives, from the nature of our work to its security, from our politicians who are on the corporate dole to those perpetuating gridlock through their narrow ideology, from the quality of our health care to its availability, and from the isolation and loneliness of everyday social life.

The piece by Michael Bader makes the point that I completely agree with, which is that people who've lost their job or who are frightened by conditions in America right now deserve empathy -- these are folks who in making cases are looking for answers and are turning to the simplistic ones oftered by the likes of manipulative folks like Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. The only sane approach is to offer these people a better alternative, as opposed to heaping scorn, which is very bad politics but more importantly bad humanity. The "Teabagger" joke was funny for a day or two when some of the protesters naively called themselves that, but people who still call them "Teabaggers" now are hurting their own cause, greatly.

And so the thing I find bizarre about the article is a purported plea for empathy with such a condescending tone, especially this part: "I hate these folks but I also understand them." Huh? How can you empathize with someone and hate them at the same time? I do have tremendous contempt for the extent that racism is involved in the Tea Party movement (based on what I've seen, that would be a lot for a few and a little for some more) -- but at day's end individuals should be judged...as individuals.

I've also wondered if it's over-the-top to call the right-wing movement "The American Taliban," as Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos will do in a coming book. I would say generally, yes, it is over-the-top, but not when referring to this alarming group called Repent Amarillo:

An evangelical Christian hate group called “Repent Amarillo” is reportedly terrorizing the town of Amarillo, Texas. Repent fashions itself as a sort of militia and targets a wide range of community members they deem offensive to their theology: gays, liberal Christians, Muslims, environmentalists, breast cancer events that do not highlight abortion, Halloween, “spring break events,” and pornography shops. On its website, Repent has posted a “Warfare Map” of its enemies in town. Calling Repent an “American Taliban,” blogger Charles Johnson notes that the group’s moniker “Army of God” is a rough translation of “Hezbollah.”

The only thing I would add to this is, wow! The original piece on Repent Amarillo is here.

You know all about the Tea Partiers running around, complaining about President Obama violating the Constitution and calling for his impeachment -- you may also heard there's a Coffee Party rising in a response, sort of, to the Tea Party. Here's something I think the Coffee Party can make agenda item No.1 -- President Obama violating the Constitution.

At least nobody died when Barack Obama lied -- except the American way of criminal justice.

A couple of times there've been news stories about a reunion of every living American president -- but this is a first: A reunion of every living "American president" -- plus two deceased ones! I reckon everyone on the planet has probably seen the Funnyordie.com video with Armisen/Obama, Ferrell/Bush 43, Hammond/Clinton, Carvey/Bush 41, Aykroyd/Carter, Chase/Ford, and introducing Jim Carrey as Ronald Reagan. (Here's the link in case you haven't.) I'd give it a 7 out of 10 for yuks, losing points for its earnest put plodding message for...banking reform?

But a couple of other things. First of all -- Dan Aykroyd? Is that really you in there? Second of all, the video is dragged down a tad by Carrey's annoyingly over-the-top Reagan -- necessitated by the fact that "Saturday Night Live"'s original Reagan, Phil Hartman, was murdered by his wife in 1998. He was always one of my favorite SNL performers, and he is still missed today. Here's Hartman as the Gipper in one of the funniest political satires ever:

Why do Republicans hate their own presidents? -- now it's Ulysses S. Grant:

Ronald Reagan is honored by, among other things, an airport, a freeway, an aircraft carrier and -- ironically for a critic of big government -- one of the biggest federal buildings in Washington.

Now, some of the late president's admirers are launching a new effort to add another honor: printing his likeness on a $50 bill in place of Ulysses S. Grant's.

In polls of presidential scholars, Reagan consistently outranks Grant, said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), who introduced legislation to make the change.

Modern Republicans pay almost no props to their own war heroes -- first it's the lack of respect for Dwight Eisenhower, the greatest GOP president of the 20th Century, and now the general who won the Civil War. Think it's a tad ironic that the guy who wants to take Grant off of money is from a Confederate state, North Carolina? What's the real agenda here?

"I'm very upset," said Keya Morgan, a New York-based Grant scholar who has a Web page on the 18th president. "I have all the respect in the world for Reagan, but what he accomplished is not anywhere as important as what Ulysses S. Grant accomplished."

Meanwhile, if the Treasury really wanted to honor Reagan, it should bring back some of the large bills that were pulled out of circulation in 1969, like the $100,000 bill, which featured Glenn Beck's favorite president, Woodrow Wilson. Why? Because it was Reagan who took the United States from a creditor nation into a debtor nation, so if we ever do pay that gazillion or two back to China -- don't hold your breath -- we could turn over a suitcase filled with Ronald Reagan funny money.

As George W. Bush probably is saying about now, writing a book is...hard work. So here's a Bob Dylan song I can't get out of my head -- wonder why. And Dylan used to have a sense of humor...who knew?