OPEN THREAD

Since our hosts haven't put an open thread up for a while, I'm taking the bull by the horns. I've got a couple items that individually aren't really worth diaries but collectively might interest some of you...

• Regarding the mind-bogglingly stupid fight over women getting their contraception: Planned Parenthood has launched their Fill My Pills Now website. Post a story, read a story, get involved. (To clarify: it's not stupid that we're fighting it, it's stupid that we're having to fight it. Fighting for one's birth control in this day and age is f*cking archaic, like fighting your drugstore over whether you can buy dental floss.)

• Did anyone catch Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC news guy and President Bartlet's father on The West Wing, on the Al Franken show on Air America Friday? He was on to tell Al that the Bush's Social Security plan is dead. It was dead last week, it's still dead this week, and it will be even more dead next week. Bush is now in the 78th day of his 60-day Social Security Bamboozlepalooza tour, and he's been reduced to appearing before Republican audiences in Republican states. Interestingly, his new plan which cuts benefits for wealthier people gets more Democrats supporting it than Republicans - until those Democrats find out that it's Bush's plan, at which point most of them stop supporting it. Cue "He's King Midas in reverse".

• Is anyone else in the Bay Area as irritated as I am that our local Air America affiliate, KQKE-The Quake, stopped broadcasting Morning Sedition at its regular time? They put the wake-up guys on at some godfarsaken hour in the middle of the night, and in their place now it's three hours of Jerry Springer. Let me tell you, this guy is boring enough to put me right back to sleep. What the hell were they thinking? Have they even listened to the show? There is no f*cking humor in his show! How the hell am I supposed to wake up if they can't make me laugh? They should put the Morning Sedition guys right back where they were, as they know how to actually wake people up (you know, like a morning show is supposed to), and put Springer on at 11pm so he can lull people to sleep. I really wanted to like the guy, and maybe the first two hours that I never catch are more interesting, but regarding the times I've caught it, I don't think I've ever heard a more boring radio show.

• Portugal will soon get the world's first "wave farm", a new-ish kind of energy production that makes use of the power of ocean waves. It will be in the form of agiant orange "sea snakes" five miles out from shore. See the BBC story here. This is cute: the Scottish firm that developed the technology warns that Scotland is falling behind in wave-farm energy production. I'd guess that less than 1% of Americans would even know what the hell a wave farm is.

OK, that's all I've got. What have you got to share?