Britney Spears passed a drug test, making her officially temporarily boring, an occasion TMZ today marked by posting in one of its nineteen required daily Brit posts the sentence "Blah blah, phone, gum, paps, blah, ding dang, blah, fans, cops, escort, blah y'all." (Blahblah = the new Dada! Or something.) Anyway, fear not: there were about 96 understudies for her recurring role in "What kills more brain cells than reading about Britney Spears" today, and that's without even mentioning the phrase "Larry Craig." I'm starting with the mayor of Atlantic City, who disappeared two weeks ago and today turned up in rehab after a summer plagued by scandals stemming from the fact that he lied about being a Green Beret. To his credit, the guy had won two bronze stars in two separate stints in Vietnam, the "Special Forces" part was the only embellishment — was that really necessary to be elected mayor of Atlantic Fucking City? I mean, have you been to Atlantic City? It is soooooo not worth it.

I mean, I personally kind of love the place, but that's just because it's slummy and decaying and sort of like how you'd imagine a resort town in Romania, only with possibly more Romanians, at least during summer. The Eastern Europeans get shipped in like seasonal mail-order brides to tend the beach bars and Starbuckses that the impoverished populace doesn't qualify to work for, pretty much every job held by a female requires a uniform that seems to be some sort of variation on "stripper," and the whole enterprise has made a retarded sum of money for Donald Trump and a handful of slightly-less-chumptacular property developers, which is a nice little parallel for the nation's larger income distribution scheme, to which both the Fed and Senate Maj. leader Harry Reid (Nevada, natch) provided a nice little boost today, Bernanke by cutting some other sort of interest rate that was either more or less symbolic than the last interest rate he cut by half a percentage point but whatever PARTY!!!, and Harry by assuring all those high-rolling financial engineers at private equity firms that he wouldn't be interrupting the racket whereby they somehow pay a tax rate on par with your average single parent T.J. Maxx cashier. (That would be 15%, and yeah I'm just guessing.) But even Harry was totally outshone by the Bush administration, which managed to alienate an Iraqi Jewish supporter whose father had been executed by Saddam Hussein while simultaneously botching a valuable link to what the fuck Al Qaeda is up to these days, when it clumsily released the last Osama Bin Laden tape too early and fucked up everything for pretty much everyone; oh god they aren't even disputing any of it. Keifer Sutherland — did anyone realize Keifer Sutherland had actually had a BAL of 0.22 when he got his first DUI? that's not wimpy! — was sentenced and David Hasselhoff fell off the wagon again — SHOCK. And yeah that's my cue for a little "same here."

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