Weekend Update - Tabloid Edition

• Okay, Mark Morford will help us out of this one, so let's get it over with. Michael Jackson is dead. Could we please get back to reality now?


• Arthur writes: "In an attempt to drive Coca-Cola out of India a nationalist group has a new weapon. It may work in India, among the most fervent, but I doubt that it will enjoy any wider popularity. By the way, I see this story as more interesting than Mark Sanford's affair. Another Republican hypocrite? Yawn. Talking about family values and chasing after a lady in Argentina? Stale news."


• Ever hear of the Bakken Formation? Probably not. But you should. North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation. A U.S. Geological Survey assessment, released April 10, shows a 25-fold increase in the amount of oil that can be recovered compared to the agency's 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil. That's a bunch of oil. So why aren't we drilling?


• New York police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of June 28, 1969, forty years ago. Days of rioting followed. Gay people are still second-class citizens in this country. Frank Rich comments.


• Okay, just one about Mark Sanford, we can't resist. Maureen Dowd writes how he got into trouble as a man and tried to get out as a woman.


• All this stuff going on in Iran have the neo-cons sputtering and spitting. "The democracy movement in Iran has thrown Republican ideologues into such a tizzy of circular logic that they're stepping on their own dicta." From The Nation.