Midday open thread

• Registration prices for Netroots Nations goes up after tonight, so save yourself a few bones and register now!

  Netroots Nation is back in Vegas this year, July 22-25. One nice thing about Vegas is that the room rates are dirt cheap -- $65-85 per night for a full suite at the Rio.

  And yes, Daily Kos is already planning another bash to close out the convention. It was hard work top the awesomeness of our first party in Austin, but we did so last year in Pittsburgh. And this year's will be even better yet.

• Round-up of the best iPad jokes. Some of my favorites:

  64 gig iPad will forever be known as the heavy flow model.

  If I order this, will my boyfriend and I have to worry if it comes late?

  If you and your friends all buy one, will they sync up?

  Later in the year they will be releasing the companion tablet pen, the Ipon.

  It's so beautiful when an electronics company finally becomes a woman...

  Eh, I prefer the CVS brand. A few bucks less but does the same thing...

  So will iffy Wifi coverage be called iSpotting?

  Are you there, God? It's me, Marketing.

  That's what happens when your marketing team is all male. I'm still getting one, with a bluetooth keyboard. It'll be a perfect travel machine. Maybe I'll even sport it around Netroots Nation.

• Evan Bayh logic:

  Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) explained that the procedure should be avoided because it may bother Republicans. And if Republicans are bothered, they may not work with Democrats on bipartisan solutions.

• Joe Lieberman is now using twitter, and yes, it's as bad as you'd imagine.
• Rudy Giuliani, liar. Yet the media keeps inviting him back to peddle his typical brand of bullshit.
• CIA agent who claimed waterboarding successfully cracked Abu Zubaydah now admits he made it all up.

  “I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”

  In a word, it was hearsay, water-cooler talk.

  “Now we know,” Kiriakou goes on, “that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”

  Indeed. But after his one-paragraph confession, Kiriakou adds that he didn’t have any first hand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn’t. And he claims that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: “In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.”

• Mocking Big Hollywood is like shooting fish in the barrel, especially when they can't keep their stereotypes straight.

  I'm not even sure why I'm paying any attention to someone who would write:

  Seems to me her tragic story makes ideal fodder for Oprah, for all those women’s magazines, for all those butch professorettes of “Women’s Studies,” for a Susan Sarandon or Sandra Bullock role.

  Because honestly, if you write the phrase "butch professorettes," you're clearly confused as to what stereotype you're trying to convey: "These masculine fairies, I mean, feminine meatheads, I mean—I mean—I mean."

• Given the chance, I'd be as reclusive as J.D. Salinger. For me, being social has been a life-long struggle, one not helped by a condition called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. So if you've met me and I don't seem to recognize you, it's because I don't. It's a shitty condition to have when your job suddenly requires you to spend significant time in social situations.
• Panoramic view of the top of Mount Everest.