Brief summary: JetBlue decided to sponsor YearlyKos in 2007. They provided air tickets in exchange for having their corporate logo on the YearlyKos site and promotional materials.
Bill O'Reilly found out that JetBlue were sponsoring YearlyKos and erupted into his usual firestorm of invective. He sent a Fox camera crew to doorstep the CEO of JetBlue, and accused DailyKos of fomenting hatred, based on sampling a handful of pointed comments on the DailyKos website. His response is totally fallacious, since commenters on DailyKos are not writing for the site, any more than commenters to a Washington Post article would be writing for the Washington Post. However, like many people passing themselves off as serious media figures, Bill O'Reilly would never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Just to put this whining by O'Reilly into context, this is the man who claimed a couple of weeks ago that cities in the USA were being terrorized by lesbian gangs. This is also the man who has a long list of threats that he has levelled against any group he happens to disagree with, and whose pronouncements are routinely agreed with and expanded on by posters at any number of authoritarian websites. To say that this is an example of the pot calling the kettle black is one of the understatements of 2007...
But I digress. After the appearance of O'Reilly's firestorm, JetBlue initially did nothing, merely noting that they advertise both on YearlyKos and on Fox News. Nothing unusual about that. Corporations are usually non-ideological when it comes to acquiring customers. Until there is a difference between a Conservative dollar and a Progressive dollar, many of them will continue to adopt an even-handed approach to advertising.
However, when the firestorm continued, JetBlue panicked and decided that Something Must Be Done. They told YearlyKos that they did not want to be associated with the event any more, requesting that their name be removed from all event materials, the web site etc. although they still stood by their ticket offers.
While superficially magnanimous, the change of policy is possibly the worst possible decision that they could have made. They now are trying to face both ways at once - they want to send a signal to the irate O'Reilly viewers and listeners while not totally abandoning their support of YearlyKos. Unfortunately, this does not fool anybody. After some thought, I emailed this to JetBlue:

It has come to my attention that, following a particularly vicious and hypocritical attempt by Bill O'Reilly on Fox Television to smear Dailykos for allegedly promoting anti-American views, while ignoring his own track record of slandering any person or group of people which whom he disagrees, JetBlue has made the decision to cease promoting its sponsorship of the upcoming YearlyKos convention.
Strangely, you appear to have not withdrawn the actual sponsorship, which to my mind means that you are currently trying to have it both ways; you are trying to placate a bullying, intolerant TV personality who has nothing useful to contribute to national debate, while also trying to curry favour with progressive electors.
I have been on the planet long enough to have encountered other individuals and corporations who tried that tactic with me, and it demonstrates that they either have no proper principles and ethical compass, or they think that I am stupid and gullible, or both. To use an old English expression, I did not come down from the hillside with the last rainstorm, and trying to face both ways at once is highly transparent and condescending, and insults my intelligence.
If JetBlue has decided that its interests are better served by pandering to a bullying, intolerant and bigoted TV and radio host such as Bill O'Reilly, then I have decided that my interests will not be served in future by considering JetBlue for any of my personal travel. Since I do travel frequently by air, you have hereby disqualified yourself from competing for a significant amount of my personal spending.
I will also add your name to the list of corporations that I do not purchase goods or services from, because those corporations do not support what I consider to be my personal goals and the interests of the United States and the wider world. You can view this list, this email and any response that I may receive from you at http://grahamshevlin.com/current.
I regret having to write this message at all. However, in the current political climate in the USA, where the use of smears, slander and veiled threats has become an integral part of the modus operandi of authoritarian media figures, JetBlue cannot sit on the fence. You have to decide whether your interests would be better served by pandering to those types of individuals and their supporters, or whether your interests are better served by approaching progressive and tolerant groups of consumers. We do not make as much noise as Bill O'Reilly, but we spend a lot of money on leisure, and you will not be getting any of my money in the future until you modify your approach to attracting customers.
I cannot make that decision for you - but I can help to provide you with a compelling reason for choosing to align yourself with progressive consumers. I hope that this letter helps you to make the right decision for JetBlue and the USA.

Sincerely

Graham Shevlin

I personally believe that JetBlue should have refused to change any aspect of its sponsorship policy. By pandering to the bullying of Bill O'Reilly (and make no mistake, as a victim of playground bullying, I see the bullying pathology etched into every word and action of Bill O'Reilly), JetBlue has shown that they have no spine, and that by this pandering, they have become an ideologically biased corporation. That being the case, as an ideological consumer, I will not give them a cent in future. They are now in my blog linklist of corporations that I will not buy anything from.

UPDATE - This little pile of intolerance gems has been unearthed from Bill O'Reilly's website. Also, over at DailyKos is the interesting story of how O'Reilly's website cancelled somebody's premium membership even though they never posted to the site...possibly on suspicion of actually reading the site contents and noting the incidence of bigotry and hatred.
Memo to JetBlue: DailyKos is worse than Bill O'Reilly's website how, exactly?

UPDATE 2 - Now O'Reilly is threatening to "destroy' DailyKos...what a pathetic excuse for a playground bully this guy is. You would think that he might have heard of the old saying that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Courtesy of Orcinus, here is another compilation of O'Reilly's approach to dealing with people and groups with whom he disagrees...
Memo to Bill O'Reilly: Bring It On. I do like to see what a playground bully does when he is called on his dysfunctions.

Sen. David Vitter held a press conference and wheeled out his wife to sit by him for a public show of support. Her body language said more than his words did. To say that she is gutted and deeply uncomfortable is an understatement.
It is interesting how hypocritical authoritarians always reach for props when their hypocrisy is exposed, as they attempt to demonstrate contrition and evidence of changed behaviour. Any prop will do, but especially God, family, and children (how many times have you seen small children carrying placards at anti-abortion demonstrations?). All of this makes perfect sense if you have read George Lakoff's book "Moral Politics", which shows how authoritarians (aka Strict Parents) frame messages to explicitly include emotional appeals like "for the children". (This, by the way, is a key fuel item for the anti-abortion lobby, and partly explains all of the little children carrying placards at their events). The "rush to find God" is transparent to me - it always seems to be an attempt to gloss over accountability by uttering phrases of the type "I was a sinner but now I have found God". I wish some journalist or interviewer would ask the rather obvious question "what does God have to do with the fact that you behaved like an asshole?", but I'm not holding my breath...
Larry Flynt, of "Hustler" magazine fame, is threatening to unleash a list of at least 30 names culled from Jane Palfrey's phone records, that he says will be sensational. Whilst it would be nice if the President and VP were on his list, I somehow doubt it. I do, however, expect several more Washington-based individuals to be doing the "Vitter Dance" in the near future.

...telling her how disappointed I am that the Democratic Party in Congress is spinning its wheels on oversight. Here is what I wrote:

Dear Madame Speaker,

I was pleased that the current session of Congress commenced with a solid Democratic majority, because, as a progressive supporter, I believe that progressive leadership offers the best future for the United States after 6 years of dysfunctional and deceitful leadership by the Rupublican Party.
Among other badly needed initiatives, I believe that Congress, as one of the two components of the Legislative Branch, needs to return to one of its core objectives of providing oversight to the Executive Branch.
It is therefore with sadness that I am writing to you to inform you that currently I am dismayed, disappointed and angered at the limited progress being made by Congress on oversight.
The current Executive Branch has no intention of submitting to Congressional oversight, as its most recent actions make clear. The President is quite clearly determined to resist oversight by any means, and probably hopes to "run out the clock" on any Congressional attempts to apply that oversight. As John Dean (a former Watergate figure) makes clear in this article, the Executive Branch is determined to avoid oversight and accountability, and cannot be expected to comply with any of the previously-accepted rules of engagement with Congress.
These are not normal conditions in the USA as I write this letter. A highly unpopular President is resisting attempts at accountability for a mis-conceived occupation of a country that was invaded under false pretences, and which is costing America lives, credibility and money on a daily basis. He is seemingly determined to avoid both a change of strategy and any accountability. In a situation like this, strong and principled leadership is required. That being the case, Congress has to be prepared to adopt new tactics to assure oversight. The statutory approach of citing non-complying individuals for contempt has no chance of success, since it will be delayed in the court system. The only viable remedy is for Congress to institute its own proceedings using the Inherent Contempt clause.
Your website has a banner that shows the countdown to the enactment of a much-needed minimum wage increase. Whilst this is a worthy achievement, it may become an epitaph for Congress if, by failing to exert the perogatives of the Legislative Branch, the Executive Branch is permitted in future to overrule future Legislative Branch initiatives on a whim. I consider the issue of oversight to be the single most important issue facing the system of governance right now. All other initiatives (except possibly ending the occupation of Iraq) are a sideshow. As this poll result shows, electors do not currently have a high opinion of the job being done by Congress. In my humble opinion, the failure to provide oversight to the Executive branch is a major contributor to the low satisfaction ratings.

Madame Speaker, the current situation is your chance to position yourself as one of the great modern American political leaders. Congress can rise to the challenge and turn back the attempt to by the Executive Branch to permanently expand its powers and perogratives, or Congress can allow itself to be diverted and delayed in the application of oversight.
If Congress chooses the latter path, the Executive Branch will permanently increase its power at the expense of the Legislative Branch, and future members of Congress will find themselves marginalized and overruled on a daily basis by the Executive Branch.
Your choice is to accept the Executive Branch epxansion of powers, or fight it with all of the means at your disposal. I will not support any political party in future that does not rise to that challenge. At this time, I do not see a compelling reason for me to vote for the Democratic Party at a national level in future elections. It is the responsibility of a political party to defend and assure the continued viability of the U.S. system of governance. Your party, by failing to exert strong oversight of the Executive Branch, is not currently discharging that responsibility.

Madame Speaker, America is waiting for you and the Democratic Party to assume the responsibility of leadership, in order to safeguard the future of the U.S. system of governance. Please do not squander this historic opportunity.

Graham Shevlin

I will be interested to see what sort of form reply I receive...

UPDATE - 2 weeks since I wrote this note and I have not received a response. The cynic in me is unsurprised...

Link: http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/client/act_dsp_pdf.cfm?name=mr070713-1topline.pdf&id=3575

..according to this poll. While some of the poll results are being witheld for "marketing reasons" (i.e. the polling organization is drip-feeding the results to get more publicity), a rating of 24% Yes and 76% No to the question "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job?" is pretty abysmal, and is actually worse than the poll response to the same question applied to President Bush.
This confirms my fear that by pussy-footing around on the issues of confronting the Bush administration on it's entrenched defiance of Congressional oversight, the Democratic majority in Congress is spending all of its goodwill and not getting any positive return. It is time for solid leadership to hold BushCo accountable, and I am not seeing any solid leadership. Either the senior Congresscritters are suffering from Beltway narcolepsy, or BushCo threatened to release the photos, but either way, this is an excellent example of lack of leadership at a time when the country desperately needs it.

...now lies within the orbit of the House Of Representatives. Today Harriet Miers, a former advisor to President Bush, failed to attend a House Judiciary Committee meeting. She had been served a subpoena to appear before the Committee.
The White House claims that "Executive Privilege" trumps the subpoena, and therefore Miers does not have to appear in front of the Committee. The argument is weak on at least 2 grounds:
1. Harriet Miers is no longer employed by the President or his administration, and therefore cannot claim Executive Privilege, since Executive Privilege only applies to current employees or advisors.
2. Precedent does not support the refusal of presidential advisors to answer subpoenas, since President Clinton sued in Federal Courts to prevent his advisors from having to appear in response to subpoenas, and lost that argument. (His advisors then appeared in front of the Committee).

Although the House of Representatives can issue a contempt citation against Harriet Miers (or any other Administration figure, for that matter), using a statutory process developed in the 19th century, the challenge is that the enforcement of that citation is by the court system - a court system that the Bush Administration has stacked with its own political appointees. In addition, the use of the court system leaves the persons cited for contempt with the ability to appeal their citations all the way up to the Supreme Court. This would allow the Bush Administration to "run out the clock" on the whole investigation and oversight process.
The remedy that the House of Representatives must use is the principle of Inherent Contempt, which was the original method for sanctioning an individual for contempt of Congress. Inherent contempt is enforced by the Sargeant-At-Arms, not the wider legal system, since it is a Congressional sanction, not a criminal law sanction. The Supreme Court has in the past ruled that inherent contempt is not subject to legal appeal and that it is constitutional. Persons cited for inherent contempt can be jailed until they purge their contempt (usually by agreeing to testify), and they have no right of appeal to the courts.
The last time that the inherent contempt principle was used was in 1934, so it is not a normal process. However, we do not live in normal times. We are witnessing an Executive Branch that believes itself to be, quite literally, above the law, and is blatantly ignoring and disrespecting the Legislative branch.
Contrary to what some people are writing, this is not a "constitutional crisis". It will only become a constitutional crisis if the House of Representatives allows the Executive Branch to prevail in the current situation. If they do not firmly and authoritatively prevent the Executive Branch from ignoring the other two branches of government, then that will render a significant portion of the US model of governance obsolete.
The House of Representatives has two choices. They can duck this challenge (and issuing contempt citations through the courts is ducking the challenge, for the reasons I outlined above) and render themselves irrelevant, as future Presidents ignore them and bypass them. Or they can meet the challenge by citing Harriet Miers and other persons (as required) for inherent contempt, and, if necessary, forcing them to testify by jailing them until they reconsider their defiance. If they take the latter choice, they can be preserve the role of the Legislative Branch in America's future. The choice is theirs.
I am stating (for the record) that I will not support any House of Representatives member or candidate in any future election who does not support the use of inherent contempt in the current situation.

UPDATE - John Dean has an article at FindLaw that supports my conclusion; the Bush administration wants a confrontation so that they can permanently expand the power of the Executive Branch. The only way to avoid this is for Congress to commence its own contempt actions.
If Congress fails to prosecute for inherent contempt, then they are conniving in their own marginalization, or they are working on the principle that the next Democratic President will be able to use the same expanded powers...either way, marginalizing the Legislative Branch is not a positive outcome.

...is in the air, as the release of the phone records of Jane Palfrey, the alleged D.C. madam...er, entrepreneur, has claimed it's first scalp: Sen. David Vitter (R-La).
Here is his grovelling press release:

WASHINGTON - Sen. David Vitter, R-La., apologized Monday night for "a very serious sin in my past" after his telephone number appeared among those associated with an escort service operated by the so-called "D.C. Madam."
Vitter's spokesman, Joel Digrado, confirmed the statement in an e-mail sent to The Associated Press.
"This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible," Vitter said in the statement. "Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling. Out of respect for my family, I will keep my discussion of the matter there — with God and them. But I certainly offer my deep and sincere apologies to all I have disappointed and let down in any way."

This press release contains the usual accountability dodge of having God run interference for him (if I could have a dollar for every time I have seen a hypocritical politician discover God when caught engaging in malfeasance, I would be writing this from my lagoon hut on Bora Bora...).
The more amusing thing is that Vitter has a letter on his website that promotes teenage abstinence and faithfulness inside marriage.. Here's a quote from the letter:

...teaching teenagers that saving sex until marriage and remaining faithful afterwards is the best choice for health and happiness.

...the smell is starting to overpower me...

From comments made by DailyKos posters living in Louisiana, it seems that Sen. Vitter's, er, pre-pubescent indiscretions (extrapolated from the words of Rep. Henry Hyde, whose "youthful indiscretion" comprised an affair that started when he was 41 and continued for nearly 10 years) were already common knowledge in the state. Glenn Greeenwald, as usual, does a masterful job of eviscerating Sen. Vitter's basic hypocrisy.
A poster at DailyKos came up with this new electoral slogan for Sen. Vitter:

David Vitter: Because you can't have "sanctity" without a little tit.

Yes, this may be mean-spirited, but sometimes the right response to hypocrisy is ridicule.

One of the more obvious changes (and not for the better) in modern politics in the USA is the tendency for elected representatives, over time, to increasgingly convey that they have the job for life, and that electors are merely a peasky bunch of people who can be relied upon to "do the right thing" and consistently return them to office in election after election.
This blog posting examines that mindset. The term "Incumbistan" has been coined for this phenomenon. In reality, it is not difficult to see why the entitlement mindset has taken root. The percentage of truly competitive elections at State and local level has been declining steadily for a long time, as this Wikipedia artcle explains. As a result, many incumbent elected representatives only leave because of retirement, death or illness, malfeasance, or (occasionally) a pre-emptive decision to seek office elsewhere (a better opportunity, or a departure because they fear not being re-elected). The low level of replacement leads to stagnation in attitudes. Of course, it must also be noted that numerous candidates who originally ran for office declaring themselves to be "outsiders" and promising to enact term limits, once elected, suddenly suffer from amnesia and declare term limits to be No Longer A Good Thing (or, possibly more correctly, Term Limits Are A Good Thing But They Should Not Apply To Me Because...well, I Said So).

...to all my friends, past and present family and future friends in my adopted country. (Mind you, I think that the UK should also celebrate 4th July as the day when we got rid of an uppity bunch of colonials...).
The weather here in Texas continues to be most weird, with low temperatures and constant thunderstorms. Not good for pool parties, but good for taking pictures of cloud formations. I'm off to take some more pictures, assuming that there are enough clear patches for me to be able to actually get in the air...

Every so often, one comes across the story of a person who, for some reason clearly best known only to themselves, has devoted his/her life to what seems like a futile campaign of legal harrassment, filing of lawsuits etc. against anybody and everybody, irrespective of cost, time or consequence.
While I lived in the UK, in the 1970's and 1980's I grew used to reading about the increasingly bizarre and eccentric activities of Dorothy Squires, the Welsh singer who, in her old age, filed lawsuit after lawsuit, nearly all of them frivolous, to the extent that she was eventually declared a vexatious litigant and barred from starting any further legal actions.
While reading the Feedback page at Poynter Online today, I stumbled across a modern American example - Kay Sieverding. After initially reading her plausible-sounding letter in this section at Poynter, I began looking up her name to see if she was a victim of injustice. However, it soon became clear that the reality is somewhat different. She has been filing lawsuits like some people throw confetti at a wedding, most recently in Colorado, where she lived until moving (fleeing?) to Wisconsin. She has more recently spent time in jail, after she refused to withdraw a bunch of lawsuits filed in Colorado. She is a prolific letter-writer and bombards blogs and every other location on the Internet, even from jail. Her activities remind me of the Black Knight from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", who, even after being dismantled, still insists "OK, it's a draw...".
Al Bernstein, on his website, has this to say about how the brain sometimes works:

....our brains cannot distinguish reality from fantasy. To use the technical term, the brain is crazy.

It seems as though Ms. Sieverding has an obsession indicative of a combination of paranoia and grandiosity which causes her to operate as a modern-day Don Quixote. The more succinct English term would be "barking mad", but over here I guess "moonbat" might have to suffice.
Her activities remind me of the vain attempts by tax protestors to convince the court system that there is no requirement to pay Federal Income Tax.

Link: http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-refinery-conserve/431

...and which provides some context in order to explain why gasoline prices continue to rise in the USA.