Kristol: The official champagne of true conservatives.*
I really think the Weekly Standard is missing a valuable marketing opportunity here.
* - This occurred to me in the shower, and I thought it was funny enough to do the hack-job Photoshoppery. (And by the way, for a scary Separated at Birth update, see below.)
John Cusack lets fly with a 2,000-word disser-freakin'-tation at the Huffington Post. To wit:
One question for any Democrat: Who will have the balls to get us out of Iraq? If the Democrats don't step up and fill this vacuum, the Republicans will. They will take us out of Iraq. And then the Democrats will be left holding the bag - first as the enablers who let the Republicans take us into an unnecessary and immoral war, and then as the whipping boys who stood by while the Republicans kept justifying what was clearly an unnecessary and immoral war. They were so worried about positioning themselves as hawks, not being seen as soft on terror and war, that they lost the capacity for outrage when the person responsible for a legal memo that denied the validity of the Geneva Conventions was appointed Attorney General. And it was downhill from there.
Marion Barry: almost always good for a laugh. This from a bizarre story about a new gasification machine that has Mr. Barry all atwitter (is he, like, selling these machines?):
[The gasifier] now sits in a parking lot across from Union Temple Baptist Church. On Wednesday, the church's pastor, [Rev. Willie] Wilson, confronted Barry about placing the machine in a parking lot used by the church. The confrontation between Barry and Wilson devolved into a yelling match so heated that police intervened."What's wrong with him," indeed.Wilson called Barry a liar and told him to watch his mouth, according to footage of the fracas captured by WRC-TV (Channel 4). In return, Barry called Wilson "power hungry" and threatened to have the church's nonprofit status "investigated."
"He's out of his mind, being un-Christian and crazy like that," Barry said. "What's wrong with him?"
Via Last Call this afternoon: "It's about time Pat Robertson and Cindy Sheehan had a crazy-off to settle this thing once and for all."
Here's a fun number I saw floating around yesterday: Exxon Mobil's third-quarter earnings, "among the biggest quarterly profits of any company in history," translate to a per-second profit of about $1,250 (or roughly $4.5 million every hour).
Oh, the irony:
"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges."
Sen. Bill Frist brims with righteous indignation when discussing the recent leak of classified secret-prisons information, but he'd like to be very clear: he doesn't care that we have secret prisons, or what we do in them; he's just pissed off that word got out:
Frist was asked if that meant he was not concerned about investigating what goes on in detention centers. "I am not concerned about what goes on and I'm not going to comment about the nature of that," Frist replied.To be fair, it should be noted that Frist's reaction to the Valerie Plame disclosure a couple of years ago was equally indignant and entirely consistent with... No, wait, sorry. I'm thinking of Joe Wilson. Frist didn't really have a problem with that one.
Dover, Pennsylvania, ousts its entire pro-intelligent design school board. Take that, God!
In response, Nutty Pat Robertson threatens Holy Revenge:
"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city.""You've had your chance, Dover! The Good Lord hereby washes his hands of you. I personally look forward to dancing all all of your graves. Heathens!"
On Tuesday, the city of Hillsdale, Michigan, elected by write-in an 18-year-old mayor.
A cheer went up in the Sessions home when the results were announced over the radio. The Hillsdale High School student lives with his parents and 13-year-old sister Sarah.The mayor-elect, Michael Sessions, defeated a 51-year-old incumbent, raising the question, "What the hell kind of campaign did that guy run?"
You heard it here first: Stephen Colbert has just proposed that Drew Rosenhaus take Scott McClellan's place at the White House podium. What a marvelous idea.
Other Election Day results: Kwame Kilpatrick somehow pulled it off, California voters embarrassed the Schwarzengovernor, and Texas - by approving a constitutional ban on gay marriage - did its level-best to make the state even less tolerant than it already is. But let's be honest: they didn't have far to fall. (Maine, incidentally, defeated a similar measure; its gay marriage law will stand.)
A great quote from PETA, courtesy of Wake-Up Call (which, in turn, got it from the New York Daily News):
Dick Cheney's annual poultry-plugging pilgrimage to South Dakota is again drawing fire from animal-rights activists. "When we first heard that Dick Cheney was hunting pheasants, we thought that it might be a misspelling of 'peasants,'" PETA rep Jen McClure told us.
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) tries JDate. (Because it worked so well for Steve Rothman (D-NJ)....)
I know it's old news now, but I thought I ought to at least mention it here: Corzine's awesome, Forrester's not; Kaine's awesome, Kilgore's not. The voters have spoken. Bring it on, '06!
This just in: Drew "I Love This Man" Rosenhaus might be a bigger slimeball than even Scott McClellan, my personal slimeball du jour.*
* - French for "really big asshole."
Alleged FNC vice president Joe Chillemi allegedly harrassed alleged women. Allegedly.
The suit charges that Mr. Chillemi, in a discussion about a television segment focusing on sexism in the workplace, said, "Of course I'd pick the man" if he had to choose between a woman and a man for the same position, because he was concerned that a woman could become pregnant and leave her job."Plus," Chillemi added, "we could never embed her with combat troops, because she'd probably get some kind of infection from spending all that time in a ditch."
Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) plagiarizes blogger. Shame ensues.
This is preposterous, and Brown should be chastised, but I'd like it to be noted for the record that should any Member of Congress choose to plagiarize anything I've written, my protestations can be readily silenced via a surprisingly small "donation" to my "campaign fund." Wink, wink.
The New York Times editorializes:
After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long.
Sam Alito's thesis adviser, fresh off his dis of W., slams Clarence Thomas:
"Sam is his own man," Murphy said. "He'll never be 'Scalito.' And then it's a gross insult to say in the mold of Clarence Thomas. Their IQs are so radically different.... We're not talking about someone in Sam's intellectual league."
A friendly reminder to my loyal readers: after years of scandal and corruption, New Jersey election laws are sufficiently mangled so as to not actually require individual voters to be registered - or, indeed, present - in the state in order to vote in its elections. And thanks to an innovative vote-matching program sponsored by Johnson and Johnson, votes cast between 1:30 and 2:30 in the afternoon this year will count double! So vote early and vote often, people. It's what good Americans do.
Time magazine reports that "well-wired" conservatives (oxymoron?) predict a bit of an exodus:
If [Rove] leaves, he will not be alone. Several well-wired Administration officials predict that within a year, the President will have a new chief of staff and press secretary, probably a new Treasury Secretary and maybe a new Defense Secretary.
Matt Santos broke out the liberal laundry list last night on West Wing's debate episode. It made me cheer, so I thought I'd post it:
Santos: I know you like to use that word, “liberal,” as if it were a crime.Yeah! Take that, "Alan Alda"!
Vinick: No, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have used that word. I know Democrats think “liberal” is a bad word. So bad you had to change it, didn’t you? What do you call yourself now, “progressives,” is that it?
Santos: It’s true. Republicans have tried to turn “liberal” into a bad word. Well liberals ended slavery in this country.
Vinick: A Republican president ended slavery.
Santos: Yes, a liberal Republican, Senator. What happened to them? They got run out of your party. What did liberals do that was so offensive to the liberal [sic] party? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did conservatives do? They opposed every single one of those things, every one. So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, “liberal,” as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, Senator. Because I will pick up that label, and I will wear it as a badge of honor.
Krugman uncovers the "unpublished additional material" originally written by Hans Christian Andersen to accompany The Emporer's New Suit. Allegorific!
My loyal readers (ha!) will note the changes I've made this weekend, which include for the first time (1) a list of links, (2) a fancy drop-down menu for the archive (which, admittedly, seems less fancy when you realize that Blogger provides the code to anyone who wants it), and (3) a Greatest Hits page, which took forever to put together. Call it a thank you for your years of devoted readership.
