With Judd Gregg withdrawal from the confirmation process for the Commerce Secretary position, we're totally reviving our campaign to get Wanda Sykes an appointment in the Obama Administration.

Basically, Judd Gregg is an asshole. He took the job as Commerce Secretary not to serve the administration of Barack Obama (or the Americans who elected him), but to serve the Republican party and his own ego. So, after actively seeking the appointment and then deciding he couldn't possibly support the President's priorities, he's dropped his bid to be Obama's Commerce Secretary having discovered that Obama is a Democrat and that he wouldn't be allowed to politicize the Census Bureau to help the Republican party gerrymander in its favor and minimize minorities.

So, then let me take a moment and suggest to the Obama Administration — since its vetters obviously checked out mentally once they got done reading through Hillary Clinton's disclosures or something — that, instead of having Wanda Sykes be the entertainment at the White House Correspondent's Dinner, that they suck it up and do what they should've done when looking for a Treasury Secretary and make Wanda Commerce Secretary. She's African-American, she's a woman, she's a lesbian, she'd be a welcome relief from all the stuffed shirts in Washington and she's really unlikely to have taken campaign donations for government contracts. I mean, come on, it's not like they've got standards!

Standards are something Stewart Parnell, the president of Peanut Corporation of America, also lacks. He's the guy who was so worried about losing profits that he pushed through shipment after shipment of salmonella-contaminated peanut products without a second thought for anything other than his bottom line — like, say, cleaning his fucking equipment or hundreds of sick little kids. So, he was up testifying in Congress, which is to say pleading the 5th because he knows full well what he did was illegal, and he got totally served by Oregon Congressman Greg Walden. Walden offered Parnell a taste from a big jar of peanut butter Walden's staff had helpfully decorated with police tape, and Parnell declined. As my friend Greg said last night: Mr. Walden, you should've eaten the peanut butter while pleading the 5th. Pop some Cipro and stuff your face with the stuff, then hole up at the Four Seasons in Georgetown until your ass explodes. And thus concludes today's lesson in guerrilla government relations.

Anyway, now even though Leon Panetta was confirmed as CIA Director yesterday and Rahm Emanuel admitted he made some mistakes and Obama might finally get on Sheila Bair's suggestion that lenders be subsidized to renegotiate mortgages in order to stem the tide of foreclosures, if our tips line is any indication, y'all would really, really like to discuss the plane crash in Buffalo. The Sri Lankan government could be seeking foreign aid to set up concentration camps for more than 200,000 ethnic Tamil refugees, but 50 relatively privileged Americans died in a plane crash and it'll be headlines for days and days with photos of the fire and the tail being sprayed down and long obituaries to each nameless face that died in this accident that we can all look at and feel momentarily sad about while ignoring politics and world affairs. Ooh, did you see that koala picture? So fucking cute, right?

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