"Please stop torturing us, Dick!"

Calvin Borel's Triple Crown

Calvin Borel atop Preakness winner Rachel Alexandra, the first female to win the race since 1924.

The last leg of racing's Triple Crown runs in three weeks at New York's Belmont race track. And whether or not he rides Kentucky Derby winner Mine That Bird -- whose late charge nearly clipped Rachel Alexandra in the Preakness -- Calvin Borel has already won life's race.

“You don’t forget the people who brung you here,” Borel said. “Just cause I’ve gotten on a million-dollar horse doesn’t mean I can’t still get on a $5,000 one.” ...

It has been the rhythm of his life since he began his apprenticeship in Vinton, La., where Cecil had a stable of 60 horses at Delta Downs. Borel remains Boo, short for Boo-Boo, which his parents, Clovis and Ella, thought they had made when their fifth son was born. On the racetrack, he is called Bo-Rail for his insistence on taking the shortest route.

Borel learned the business from the ground up, mucking out stalls, changing horses’ bandages, rubbing their legs, working them out in the mornings and racing them in the afternoons. Fourteen-hour days were the norm, and Cecil was a demanding teacher.

“We didn’t have much book education,” Cecil Borel said. “But we’ve worked very hard. I’m proud that Calvin has earned everything he’s gotten.”

When Borel broke ribs, punctured a lung and had his spleen removed after a spill at Evangeline Downs in Lafayette, La., Cecil was among the first to comfort him. When Borel returned to the track, however, Cecil put him on the same horse, a filly named Miss Touchdown, for his first race.

They won.

Sunday Funnies

Lakers can't play worth a Jack

(Not in Houston, anyway...)

"Douchie" entries: Liz Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, Joe Barton again

Dick's little girl goes to bat for Dad:

Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz told Fox that she believes the Obama administration is only "interested in releasing things that really paint America in a negative light." In Cheney's view, the White House has decided "to side with the terrorists" by putting "information out that hurts American soldiers." Cheney also questioned whether the President really cares about American troops.

The apple fell right next to the tree. You stay classy, little lady.

It almost doesn't seem fair to include Billo the Clown in "Douchebag" competition since he is so overpowering on a daily basis. "Douchies" really ought to be for the occasional ignominious outburst by someone who generally knows precisely what they are prevaricating. But since he invoked Nazis (and thus Godwin's Law) he gets an honorable mention.

Here we link Keith Olbermann with the blow-by-blow smackdown of O'Reilly:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

There is a transcript here.

And finally, inaugural week runner-up Smokey Joe Barton gets in on the "Douchebag"action again this week, with his conflation that CO2 exhaled by people is the same thing as CO2 emitted by chemical plants (via Think Progress):

Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), known as “Smokey Joe” for his efforts on behalf of big polluters, is one of Congress’s most aggressive deniers of man-made climate change. For instance, in March, he said that the climate is changing “for natural variation reasons” and that to deal with it, humans should just “get shade.”

In a new interview with Newsmax, Barton continued his nonsensical approach to the issue, claiming that the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate carbon dioxide would potentially “close down the New York and Boston marathons“:

Barton says the average healthy adult exhales between four-tenths of a ton and seven-tenths of a ton of CO2 a year.

“So if you put 20,000 marathoners into a confined area, you could consider that a single source of pollution, and you could regulate it,” Barton says. “The key would be whether the EPA said that 20,000 people running the same route was one source or not.”

One indication that the EPA likely would consider 20,000 runners a single source of pollution is that the agency is trying to regulate waste-water runoff and emissions of drilling rigs in oil fields by attempting to define entire areas as a single source of pollution, Barton says.

A common conservative attack against addressing greenhouse gas emissions is to say that there are natural sources of CO2, so if we regulate industry we would have to regulate those sources as well. But this is straw man argument. As the the EPA notes, it is industrial sources of CO2, not natural sources, that “have increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere“:

Natural sources of CO2 occur within the carbon cycle where billions of tons of atmospheric CO2 are removed from the atmosphere by oceans and growing plants, also known as ‘sinks,’ and are emitted back into the atmosphere annually through natural processes also known as ‘sources.’ When in balance, the total carbon dioxide emissions and removals from the entire carbon cycle are roughly equal.

Since the Industrial Revolution in the 1700’s, human activities, such as the burning of oil, coal and gas, and deforestation, have increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. In 2005, global atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were 35% higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution.

In the interview, Barton mocked the EPA’s recent declaration that carbon dioxide was a pollutant that endangers public health and welfare. “There’s never been anybody who’s been treated in an emergency room for CO2 poisoning. It doesn’t cause asthma; it doesn’t cause your eyes to water; it doesn’t cause cancer.”

Of course, the EPA declared CO2 a threat to public health because of the catastrophic consequences of climate change, not because it is a carcinogen.

Who's your favorite Douchebag so far this week? Remember: no votes for Liz Cheney's pop; we want him to keep running his mouth.