Hey everybody, we’re back. Best item in the feed backlog so far: Al Qaeda Also Fed Up With Ground Zero Construction Delays [video]

Forget those San Sebastián travel plans; the Basques are blowing up stuff again.

Apparently “artists” are the original, ungentrified, legitimate inhabitants of Williamsburg. Aye, the cruel forces of a market economy will not even spare midwesterner painter twenty-somethings! There is no justice.

Bush goes to the old continent conveniently after technically.us leaves because, “We keep trying to build a big useless threatening mysterious missile defense system in Eastern Europe, and our bestest ally ever Vladimir Putin doesn’t seem to care for it.”

Terrorist movie-plot semi-finalist for Schneier’s contest written with some heart: “It must have been a pretty meadow, Wilkes thought, just a day before. He tried to picture how it looked then: without the long, wide wound in the earth, without the charred and broken fuselage of the jet that gouged it out.”

Philadelphia is putting the hurt on the physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight: “Boy Scouts of America’s Cradle of Liberty Council must publicly affirm it will not discriminate against openly gay people—or pay fair-market rent for the city-owned Logan Square land on which their landmark headquarters is located.” Bwa ha ha. The technically.us staff is thirty-three percent gay Eagle Scouts by the way.

Everyone loved America’s Current Mayor today for telling terrorism scaredy cats to “get a life” 1. Gawker 2. Boing Bong 3. Wonkette (in the bizarro-world order they ran in.) We love you too lately, Bloomie!

In an article about how kids these days only play on computers, The Times gives us plenty to be scared of with an illustration of a flag-waving Giuliani wearing woman-cut pants and a Never Forget! tee while walking down an invisible catwalk to meet afro-Beyoncé. Gaze upon it, lest your nightmares remain boring.

Like the dog in the The Accidental Tourist, Wisconsin squirrels were way ahead of us on Bush: “For years—dating back, some say, to the start of the Bush administration—squirrels had been stealing and desecrating flags, shredding them for use as lining in their disgusting nests.”

City Slicking devoted its extracurricular energies today to a pressing concern at Eat. If you’re running low on hobo-snobbery, there’s your fix.

The Times faces a corrupt Alaskan pol: “When he was approached near the House floor by a reporter, Mr. Young responded with an obscene gesture.” Shudder. There is still drama and danger in journalism, at least when stalking cornered Alaskan wildlife.

President Bush is basically saving Manhattan from the automobile. It’s his subsidy that gave Bloomberg the courage to act on congestion pricing, and it’s his office’s support and the subsidy’s deadline that will get it passed in the assembly within the next two weeks. Without their war powers, Bush’s neocon policy wonks ain’t cataclysmically bad!

Somehow, the long-running Apple ads where everyone relates to the wrong dude and finds the premise generally insulting, well, they’re credited with selling a ton of computers and just won some award. This must have something to do with people actually buying “for dummies” books for themselves. All hail target-deprecating marketing!

Unexpected support from deep Queens makes congestion pricing pretty much a done deal. Congressman Joseph Crowley: “the overall plan … will make this a more livable city and make it easier to attract the best and the brightest not only from around the country but from around the world.” If Queens continues down this path of rational thought, we are totally buying one of those houses they have out there.

Times editorial board calls out national Dems for being total pandering losers on conservation. Reminds us of local politics, where reps in our party (like mayoral wannabe Anthony Wiener) are trying in vain to stop brave proposals by Republicans that discourage harmful consumption.

Stanley Fish rejects recently famous atheists because they haven’t devoted their entire lives to criticism of Christian literature, like him. Nice dodge, but their strongest arguments take apart the modern culture of religious pluralism. The one embraced by public figures all over the world, even here. Fighting back with old time Christianity might be intellectually invigorating for Fish, but he’s reenacting a battle that ended twenty years ago.

Not only is the Sagrada Familia hideous and never going to be finished, now it’s blocking a train tunnel in the only big European city with a transportation system worse than New York’s. Get it together Barcelona. You’ve got that whole Gaudi park already. Do you really want to be a one-architect city? Of course you don’t. Abort that unsacred monstrosity.

It’s pretty brash that Apple featured the “Democrats Take Control of Congress” NYT headline an iPhone video. But for some people showing the NYT at all is a horrible partisan statement, and those people are all poor, or they’re rich but they only got their first “iPOD” last week, so their wrath doesn’t matter to consumer marketers.

Oh, no! Blowing up people is chill, but a decent man would spare the minarets.

Mitt Romney steps up to the gay-baiting plate with an ad campaign declaring his support for “traditional marriage.” Let’s skip the Mormon polygamy joke and go straight for Hey kids! We hope you like your new arranged marriages. And girls, get ready lots of fun obeying your husband until one of you dies. Tradition rules! Rhaaaaah!

Gawker gives a lesson in public space and privacy in the information age to the owner of a parked Farrari on Crosby (where we’re pretty sure it’s illegal to park anyway).

Cory Doctorow explains how we ended up in this intellectual property mess: “No one really knows what ‘Information Economy’ means, but by the early ’90s, we knew it was coming. America deployed the futurists—her least-reliable strategic resource—to puzzle out what an ‘information economy’ was and to figure out how to ensure that America stayed atop the ‘new economy.’” Cory’s version of the story is a new one to our ears, and sounds reasonable to boot!

Some grandpa hippie folding bike rider got a beat down for being uppity to the airport cops that just want to protect us from the terrorism: “I was rudely accosted, assaulted with battery, and tased at Minneapolis St Paul USA international airport by Airport Police, simply for choosing to leave the airport by bicycle.” Further proof that airports are the swirling vortex of authoritarian hell. We only suffer through them to go somewhere damn special, and that won’t include this terrible-sounding “Minneapolis” place! [via Streetsblog]

From the two of these things do not belong here department: “Witnesses say a blue Lexus SUV collided with a silver SUV on 41st Street. The silver SUV then jumped the sidewalk, where it struck two pedestrians.”

When Streetsblog links to the Queens Gazette letters page, you know it’s going to be good: “Contrast this hellish environment [of the subway] to the comforts of commuting in a car, with cushy seats, either by oneself or in company with an equally civilized and reasonably sane passenger or two.” New Yorkers with sympathy for those who live in the boondocks (so they can afford car notes, car insurance, car gas) need to know that they live there because they hate us.

Charming guest NYT column on Alaska (where everyone’s old relatives have moved to get away from the blacks—or maybe just our relatives!): “Uncle Ted is to Alaska what Huey Long was to Louisiana, and tributes range from the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport to the hundreds of projects built with ‘Ted Stevens money’ as your tax dollars are called in Alaska.” It’s a nice place, except for the people.

Gov. Deval Patrick: “In Massachusetts today, the freedom to marry is secure.”

It’s got the rounded type and the “beta” label, but Yahoo’s new gossip site for people of average intelligence—omg!—isn’t so much Web 2.0 as Hell 2.0.

Seriously, if one more pandering Democrat gets in the way of congestion pricing saving our freaking lives, City Slicking is going to become the official weblog of the Log Cabin Republicans. They probably already have one of those, but ours won’t have bear-on-cub porn so it will be better.

The Times is not letting this Alaska thing go. Thanks for that! The state on the final frontier of white flight decries taxes and the federal government while taking far more than its share of their benefits. Alaska is the capital of hypocrisy we’re glad to see it exposed. Even if it’s mostly retaliation for their congressman giving an NYT reporter the bird.

NYT is in “Ur City” messin’ up “Ur Room” with their new blahg. But don’t worry, they still plan on missing the point of weblogs: “The emphasis here will be on reporting, not punditry or snarky commentary.” Actually that sounds a little snarky. “The blog will feature news-maker interviews, documents, Web resources, photos, videos and other multimedia, as well as updates and follow-ups on the day’s news.” Zzzzz…

Times editorial board endorses burning down the house to keep Americans’ cars moving. That is, they didn’t mention a carbon tax and called CAFE the “most effective energy efficiency policy ever adopted by the federal government.” That’s right kids, because it is the only policy adopted to reduce oil use. So if we demand that cars be more efficient and that crops be burned as fuel (and somehow “make sure that [doing so] does not destroy valuable … lands”) we can save the world without using less. Good luck with that, us!

Everyone wants in on the coming New York City congestion pricing funds (the ones charged for massively and exclusively occupying city property), even the pathetic New York State Senate. But poor New Jersey can’t hope to pull that scam, so instead they’ll just say dumb things: “Governor Corzine said on Monday that he was concerned that congestion pricing would lead to a surge in mass transit that New Jersey would not be able to handle.” We imagine they’ll handle that horrible surge about as well as we handle their cars barreling down our streets.

Wonkette: Iraq & the Housing Crash: Totally the Same! Allied with home-renters everywhere we continue our silent insurgency.

NYT reminds us what reporting is with a four internet-page long profile of Speaker Silver, the guy who might ruin our lives by “cautiously” blocking NYC’s plan to regulate automobile use from his throne in some place called Albany. City Slicking is obsessed with congestion pricing, but you couldn’t pay us to click that Next Page link.

From yesterday’s Boing Boing stream, Furries and their Escalade! [video]. Just watch it, please. We’re pretty sure that’s not an Escalade, but maybe we’re just confused because the blight of them in Manhattan is entirely of the black and white varieties. Anyway, this might help cure people who think that driving an enormous tarted-up truck is in any way sophisticated (hello, our grandparents!) or cool (hello, Long Islanders!).

Language Log on baseless invocations of science: “Misleading appeals to the authority of ‘brain research’ have become the modern equivalent of out-of-context scriptural fragments.” Boo-yah!

Maureen “Meeow” Dowd: “It doesn’t bode well for the cultural health of the country that Hillary picked a song by Celine Dion, who combines the worst of Vegas and Canada.”

Gawker says they do not like Slate’s anti-celebrity-profile doo-dad, but they are lying. That piece is really pretty good—and just imagine how awful it would be if Shafer wrote it. (We pray that Ron’s new The Spectator column is slated to replace the dilapidated Press Box entirely.)

NYT still schooling us about this whole reporting thing, with front page links like “On the Blogs—On the Runway: Q & A With Sarah Jessica Parker.” They’re right! Weblogs not ruined by news organizations just can’t run that kind of crap.

If only the law would catch up with the primal mob in recognizing that accidental motorized violence hurts just as bad as a beat down. Mobs tend to go too far, and get the wrong guy, but they show more humanity than remote observers by recognizing that machines do not magically absolve their operators of responsibility for carnage.

In this alternate universe of ours, President Bush continues to save New York from the urban-auto mistakes of its past by backing $2 bil in never forget funds for an actual train from Manhattan to the freaking JFK airport. Terrorists will probably ride it, because they’re foreign and foreigners like trains, but that’s just something we’ll have to deal with.

The Onion has some iPhone deets: “Comes with an iPhone hat, so people know you own an iPhone during the brief periods you’re not using it.” Yeah maybe not, but we’ll be surprised if there isn’t a distinctive Bluetooth headset in the box or sold separately for that very purpose.

We know that Jack Shafer is still writing Press Box because now he’s pissed off Daring Fireball (a column that people read): “Jack Shafer, Slate’s media critic, argues in ‘Apple Suck-Up Watch’ that the press has a silly crush on Apple and has paid and continues to pay undue attention to their products.” Fireball argues that the press attention is only following that of the public. Obvs! Shafer and his pal Paul Boutin have come to this Apple party so late they can’t keep up with their pesky, supposed readers. If Shafer must write about publications with unhealthy Apple obsessions, the best example is his own.

The Wrath of Sadik-Khan. She sounds real nice in her NYT profile, but that interview was the day before New York Democrats showed us just how flimsy their commitments to public health and safety are when faced with important concerns like operating deadly unnecessary personal tanks in the city for free. Today, Ms. Sadik-Khan is growing out dreadlocks and practicing her finishing moves for bloody revenge against the craven Assembly. Or so we fantasize.

Yunzer demonstrates iPhone! We are not even kidding. He manages to say “phone” with an O the first two times or so, then it’s iPhewn this and iPhewn that. Barrels of fun. Also, is a white guy wearing all black who likes Macy Gray. After watching (five minutes of) this video, we’d rather be seen taking calls with a banana.