That November, she attended a public debate on the subject "The West or Islam: Who Needs a Voltaire?" The first three speakers called for a new Voltaire in the West, a rational reformer to counter Western arrogance and neocolonialism and consumerist decadence. Only the last speaker, a refugee from Iran who taught law at Amsterdam University, spoke up for the "critical renewal" of Islam.



During the question and answer period, comment was heavily supportive of the first view. Finally Hirsi Ali raised her hand. Here is what she said as she recalled it in her 2007 memoir, Infidel: Look at how many Voltaires the West has. Don't deny us the right to have our Voltaire, too. Look at our women, and look at our countries. Look at how we are all fleeing and asking for refuge here, and how people are now flying planes into buildings in their madness. Allow us a Voltaire, because we are truly living in the Dark Ages.

And speaking of said Dark Ages: In a gesture that Hirsi Ali will appreciate—she considers the date of her escape to freedom her "real birthday"—Frederick Douglass marked the tenth anniversary of his escape in a special way. He published in the North Star an open letter to his former owner, Thomas Auld, one of the slaveholders whose religious profession he deemed a travesty. It is a most unusual and highly charged communication, and this is how it ends:

I will now bring this letter to a close; you shall hear from me again unless you let me hear from you. I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery—as a means of concentrating public attention on the system, and deepening the horror of trafficking in the souls and bodies of men. I shall make use of you as a means of exposing the character of the American church and clergy—and as a means of bringing this guilty nation, with yourself, to repentance. In doing this, I entertain no malice toward you personally. There is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine, and there is nothing in my house which you might need for your comfort, which I would not readily grant. Indeed, I should esteem it a privilege to set you an example as to how mankind ought to treat each other.

I am your fellow-man, but not your slave.

MOE: Okay, this is the kind of paragraph too good to check, but I kind of wish they'd checked it anyway:

They have reason for concern: News last year that the biggest named beneficiary in Mrs. Helmsley’s will was Trouble, her Maltese, led to death threats against the dog, which now requires security costing $100,000 a year.

I really don't see how this is possible, unless there is a business more lucrative than supplying ammunition to the Pentagon or starting an Iraqi resistance organization. How hard would it be to just take Trouble to some sort of doggie day care, where he could relax and meet other dogs and begin a new life away from all the old ghosts and outrageous comments? Which reminds me,
MOE: If someone has a hit out on your dog, do the police have any responsibility to keep it alive?
MEGAN: Who would put a hit out on a dog? Like, a for-real hit? Didn't people see A Fish Called Wanda?
MOE: And isn't this whole story sort of a study in how people who have excessive affection for animals — maybe there is something wrong with them?
MEGAN: Anyway, I would think the cops would dismiss both the threat and the person reporting it as cracked.
MOE: And that
MOE: is when you call in the $100,000 ex-KGB pet security service.
MEGAN: I mean, if you have $5-$8 million to spend in, what, like 10 years or less, given that the dogs were a certain age when Leona died, why now?
MEGAN: I mean, why not, Freudian typo.
MEGAN: Anyway, so did you see the harbinger of the economic apocalypse? Starbucks is closing 600 stores.
MOE: Leona Helmsley was once heard saying, "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes." And in that vein I think we need to remind readers that Barack Obama, double Ivy Leaguing arugula-chomping card-carrying member of the elitist elite, got a home loan that may have saved him $300 a month. THREE HUNDRED A MONTH. Don't get me wrong, I'd love an extra $300 a month but if they went through some shady unethical business to save that no one can ever accuse them of being too highbrow ever again.
MEGAN: It doesn't even sound like they got it somewhere shady. It looks like they went through a local bank (support your local businesses!) who probably don't see a ton of wealthy customers or super-jumbo loans, showing nearly $500,000 in annual income, a $2 million windfall payment and the potential for book earnings. I'd bend over backwards to get those people as customers, too. Did I tell you back when I was trying to find an interesting job out of grad school, before I decided stupidly to be a lobbyist, I interviewed for a position in private banking? That's banking for super-rich people. It's all about relationship-building. The .375% they maybe lost on the loan discount they gave to get the business (in that world) is more than made up for the volume of business you get from making a wealthy customer happy. I wish I'd gotten that job.
MOE: Yes I know all about private banking. I had a friend whose dad was a client. The guy kept her on a budget but she would call at all hours to get funds. This sort of blew my mind. Starbucks, meanwhile, is a terrible terrible thing. I mean, these stores represent less than 5% of their stores, and apparently 70% of the closures are happening at stores that opened after 2005, so your Starbucks is probably safe, but for the exurban power centers and lifestyle strips that it will effect, the trickle-down (ha!) effects will be intense. Because those guys rely on Starbucks to pull in other tenants! And if they can't get Starbucks they're left with a 60% vacant strip mall!! Enough of those in your zip code and people might have to start moving back to cities.
MOE: Oh in other news, and I thought Pennsylvania state senators were sleazy. And also, how is this even possible. And also, Helmsley originally tried to leave $12 billion to her dog but the judge reduced that to $2 billion and even pitched in a few million for some grandchildren Helmsley had deliberately left out of her will.
MEGAN: You know how you know the Massachusetts guy is a bad politician? Unlike a Congressman, he's not running for re-election.
MOE: Oh god and thank the deities Obama nabbed the critical Streisand endorsement.
MEGAN: Well, that and Michelle's speech last week should help him corral some of the LGBT Hillary supporters that are still upset.
MOE: Yeah he's no Vito Fossella.

Prosecutors alleged in a news release that Marzilli told one woman, "The sex is sweet, the sex is sweet, you want it, and you want to go with me."
He allegedly asked the second woman "Do you have any undergarments under that?"

I'm trying not to mention Italy's dismally low birth rate right here.
MEGAN: Well, Congressman Fossella could've helped out with that, what with his 2 kids with his wife and one with his mistress, he's totally beating the replacement rate!
MEGAN: Also, "the sex is sweet"? Was he fucking high? That shit wouldn't get a boyfriend laid, let alone a stranger on the street.
MOE: Oh check it out Obama beat out McCain as barbecue guest even though I hear McCain, inexplicably given what we know of Obama's iPod, did better on the "who'd you rather carpool to work with." Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a poll yet addressing the question, "Which candidate would you rather have holler at you on the street?" James Marzilli might have just won the Worst Holler
MEGAN: In other insult news, Paul Begala would like to apologize to dirt for calling Republican lobbyists dirtbags:

"I think it was wrong for me to call those fat cat lobbyists dirtbags," said the longtime Clinton confidante. "It is an insult to bags for dirt around the world."

MEGAN: Even the RNC spokeperson laughed at that one.
MEGAN:

"A bag of dirt will have the occasional fecal matter, but generally dirt is good," he said. "I'm a gardener and I grow tomatoes. I love dirt. I should have said oil bag [when talking about GOP donors], or a chemical bag or toxic bag. After all life grows out of dirt."

MOE: I would have suggested he said "bag of coal" but that would be insulting to the barbecues Americans are so eager to invite the Obamas to. Did you check Harry Reid's YouTube performance? It's gone viral. I'm not sure why? But I endorse!
9:15 AM
MEGAN: While I'm watching that, you should read Attackerman's post on our using 70s Chinese torture manuals to train our soldiers on how to torture effectively and watch the video of Christopher Hitchens getting waterboarded, but not for any prurient interest.
MOE: I was going to bring that up with you, first you do it, then this graffiti artist does it and now the Hitch signs up. Does he address whether it's more painful than getting his balls waxed? Actually, can we just do that from now on? Wax the balls of these guys? And I read the story on how we got our interrogation tactics from the Chinese, who also incidentally invented water torture except no wait they didn't they just got wrongly accused of that, and I feel the same way in this sense. Also remember about the INS using Soviet drugs to sedate detainees?
MEGAN: I do remember the sedating detainees thing, that's just fucked up. I wonder if Hitchens saw the video of me waterboarding Jim (lost in the Wonkette server transition when they got sold, RIP waterboarding video) and thought it looked less crappy and scary than it was?
MEGAN: Also, I would think that ball-waxing would be Geneva-compliant, as long as it wasn't women doing it.
MOE: Thomas Frank digs through the Library of Congress on McCain adviser Charlie Black and finds a cynical former officer of some young fascist society that employed nasty smear tactics and liked to take money from poor and give it to fatcat oil bag Republicans.
MEGAN: Black founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which, if what Franks says is true, explains why people think PACs are all shitty and dirty and not just money clearing houses for the most part:

NCPAC's calling card was slime. It constantly attacked members of Congress for votes they hadn't cast and positions they hadn't taken – "there have been a few mistakes made in terms of research," was all Mr. Black would admit – and the group's main accomplishment was dodging the campaign-finance laws of the day.

Why does McCain keep this guy around? He's the Pied Piper of bad press.
MOE: And it's not like the McCain campaign is wary of downsizing! Um, do you think that when rich evil people are irrationally devoted to their pets it's a sign that there is something just fundamentally fucked up about pets in general? Because I sort of do.
MEGAN: I think it's something fundamentally wrong with the lives of those rich people.
MOE: She evicted her own widowed daughter-in-law.
MEGAN: Like, they're so alienated from other people and feel like the only unconditional love they get is from their pets (which may be true — God knows Leona wasn't known as a great humanist and treated people like shit, so they probably didn't like her).
MOE: Yeah but do you feel like you know a fair amount of people who, given the money, might become even more pet-obsessed and gradually distance themselves from all humanity? Because I feel like I do. I don't know. Maybe I'm just sort of a hater.
MEGAN: I can't really say, I know, like 6 friends with pets and one of them is you.

MOE: Okay, first of all, re the companies chosen for those coveted Iraq oil contracts of course they did, some people are complete idiots, Paul Krugman thinks Obama needs to be more like Reagan than Clinton…so what's Obama doing here??



MEGAN: On the first story, gotta love this quote:

The advisers — who, along with the diplomatic official, spoke on condition of anonymity — say that their involvement was only to help an understaffed Iraqi ministry with technical and legal details of the contracts and that they in no way helped choose which companies got the deals.

I mean, does anyone actually believe that?



MOE: Also I don't know if you've been reading about this book but it's been eliciting some really surprising rarely-articulated viewpoints from pundits such as:

The people who fund and run the GOP are simply too committed to the idea of cutting taxes for affluent people and reducing government spending… In fact, even saying the GOP estabilshment is "committed" to these things understates the grip of economic libertarianism over the party. It suggests a worldview that's the product of some reflection, when in fact the economic libertarianism of big GOP donors is mostly an expression of their self-interest

And in case you didn't catch what he was trying to say there:

—i.e., they want to keep their own taxes low.

MEGAN: As for McCain's record, not to bash on John Aravosis whose work I normally like, but Jeffrey Klein did that story way better, like two weeks ago without going into the gutter at all.



Well, the problem with Noam Scheiber's analysis in that review is that he repeats the claptrap that the GOP is ostensibly committed to reducing government spending, which is utter bullshit.

Let's bust that myth people. They are committed to saying they want to reduce government spending, and committed to spending more of it in ways that appeal to them ideologically (i.e., defense, abstinence education, marriage-promotion) or appeal to their constituents (i.e., earmarks)

MOE: Okay here's the thing:

The authors say they blew their chances to capitalize on their opening to these voters “by confusing being pro-market with being pro-business, by failing to distinguish between spending that fosters dependency and spending that fosters independence and upward mobility, and by shrinking from the admittedly difficult task of reforming the welfare state so that it serves the interests of the working class rather than the affluent.”

To "distinguish between spending that fosters dependency and spending that fosters independence and upward mobility" is, as near as I can figure, the opposite of "pro-market."

MEGAN: Yes, I would agree with that completely. Of course, apparently, "spending that fosters independence and upward mobility is — surprise! — serendipitously spending on things like marriage promotion and putting more black people in jail and abstinence education!

Douthat and Salam say to the contrary that the social issues are a major part of working-class insecurity. “Safe streets, successful marriages, cultural solidarity and vibrant religious and civic institutions make working-class Americans more likely to be wealthy, healthy and upwardly mobile. Public disorder, family disintegration, cultural fragmentation and civic and religious disaffection, on the other hand, breed downward mobility and financial strain — which in turn breeds further social dislocation, in a vicious cycle that threatens to transform a working class into an underclass."

Great, so, the government is now going to be able to solve the problems of family disintegration by.... making divorce harder? Making marriage necessary for all pregnant women? They're going to solve religious disaffection by... making religion mandatory? And, God knows the Democrats love them some public disorder. Yum, goes perfectly in my coffee.

MOE: The thing that is so dreamy about talking about this stuff as a failure to distinguish between the different kinds of "spending" is that it really cuts to the heart of the issue that, as some guy points out on today's WSJ edit page OF ALL PLACES…numbers lie!

MEGAN: Whoa, seriously, someone spiked the coffee with LSD at the WSJ this weekend:

there is no such thing as "the economy."

MOE: The first Harper's reading last month said this a lot better, but I'm not sure where it is online. Maybe I'll just screengrab it here.

Dammit, it doesn't want to let me, oh well.

MEGAN: Although, back to the intersection of economics and politics, I spent hours yesterday obsessed with the implications of this chart. Which goes with this article but the article's less interesting and not just because I like pretty pictures.

MOE: Oh here it is. Anyway we forgot to discuss < a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aftgJ3S0euEQ&refer=home">Steven Hatfill, whose name is not Mohammed and therefore actually got some money out of his whole post-9/11 harassment, or we never did, because that happened on Friday and I was too tired out from Dimitri the Lover to do a proper news roundup, but hahaha he did well for himself. And Mallaby who I generally love has something on oil and speculation and whatnot.

And now I have to try to get on the internet bus

BRB as they say.

9 minutes

MOE: And I'm back! On the bus. But I'm still using the free Dupont wifi signal so I'm not sure if that's sustainable.

MEGAN: I think it kicks in on the bus pretty soon, but we can totally hurry up.

Anyway, what's fascinating about the chart I sent is about the redistribution of wealth in this country, from the Midwest to the Coasts (by and large) and the weirdness that Alaska and Hawai'i were two of the richest 12 states in 1976.

And about how the richest states — and by and large, the richest people — are increasingly turning to the Democratic party. Fucking elitists.

—-—-—16 minutes—-—

MOE: Hey

Do you read me?

MEGAN: Yup

MOE: The wifi server is allegedly just getting reactivated

So I'm on bberry.

Anna is going to kill me but. If this works it isn't a bad thing. Free wifi in DuPont is good!

MEGAN: No problem! I got grabbed coffee and a yogurt and plugged my computer back in as I was previously sitting on the front porch watching my neighbor playing with his baby and the cats of the 'hood stare at me

Anyway, the wifi bus worked fine for me the one round trip I took it. I, um, spent most of the time IM'ing with people.

MOE: So Cass Sunstein co authors an oped in the Wash Post... Cass sunstein is the Obama policy adviser yes? It doesn't mention that. But anyway it is about the death penalty. I wanted to bring up Juan Williams admirably

MEGAN: Juan Williams?

Also, Cass Sunstein, I'm not sure if he's an adviser but he's definitely a fan

MOE: Frustrated performance on fox news Sunday re the supreme courts striking down the gun ban

MEGAN: Sadly, I have no cable but I will find a clip.

I mean, my parents have no cable because my mother doesn't believe in it.

MOE: Maybe I can find a clip. What he lacked in eloquence he made up for in abject what the fuckitide

My dad and I talked about whether murder is the worst crime. He believes in the death penalty for people who cut off peoples legs and gouge their eyes out and such.

MEGAN: On the other hand, I think blind people and amputees would probably disagree, right?

MOE: If I can't get wifi on this bus I'm going to make them drop me off on the side of the 295

MEGAN: As though there's wifi along 295?

MOE: Well if you had your arms and legs cut off and your eyes gouged out by some crazy child rapist you might feel like giving that guy the lethal injection, I dunno,

MEGAN: But is it worse than murder? Would I rather be dead than mutilated? I guess I already made the decision a long time ago that I'd rather be a living sexual assault victim than a dead one. So I guess that makes murder worse.

It's kind of a subjective question

MOE: Yeah anyway sunstein mostly discusses the evidence or lack thereof for and against the concept that the death penalty is a deterrent which is sort of the same question...

MEGAN: For the death penalty to be a deterrent, people would have to believe sincerely that the likelihood is that they will get caught.

MEGAN: Most people aren't weighing the consequences of their actions or thinking that far ahead, frankly.

MOE: I wonder what the penalty for advertising internet access on your bus service and failing to deliver is...

MEGAN: Ok, that's totally a capital offense.



MOE: Lol I just passed the capitol.

"Our egghead actuaries crunched the numbers based on all the data we have about healthcare," explained Tom Epstein, a Blue Shield spokesman. "This is what they found."

But once you exempt pregnancy, what do men and women do significantly different? Men die young more often, and women seek preventative care (which is supposed to lower the cost of health insurance in the long term). Naturally, that's a problem.

See, the thing about insurance is it is technically supposed to be about risk pools, not usage statistics. So, if you're a young single woman on birth control who goes to the doctor when you have a mild case of bronchitis instead of going to the emergency room if it becomes pleurisy (a real disease! my friend had it last year) or pneumonia, then you're supposed to be in better shape price-wise because you're being cost-efficient. But if insurance companies are pricing insurance based on if you use it — as has happened in other insurance fields, such as homeowner's insurance — then any usage, even if it's efficient in the long-term, will ratchet up your costs over time and discourage you from utilizing the very insurance you're paying for. Gotta love a market failure!

But what does this mean? According to Elizabeth Edwards, it means that if John McCain has his way and eliminates the tax preference for employers to provide health insurance in favor of an individual tax preference, we ladies will all be paying more for our health insurance than the men. Matthew Yglesias thinks that more and more plans will be designed for and marketed to men, if for no other reason then than 29 percent of women are dependent on someone else's insurance and only 13 percent of men are, while men are twice as likely to buy their own insurance even today. In fact, fully half of men are primary insurance holders, while only slight more than a third of women are — meaning even if they're less than half the population, they're the population for whom insurance plans will most likely be design and to whom those plans will most likely be marketed. And then they'll just charge us extra for all that stuff that guys aren't using, and because they can.

So even if you're not technically using it, just having that uterus will cost you extra, and I'm not just talking about cramps, either. While John McCain's "reforms" aren't going to do much for us single types, though, my analysis says the other President candidate's plans might actually help. Plus, I think we all know which guy is more likely to push for legislation making health insurance coverage gender neutral, and it's probably not the guy who called his wife a cunt.

Gender Can Cost You In Individual Health Insurance [LA Times]
Elizabeth Edwards On The Inequitable Individual Market [ThinkProgress]
Gender and Insurance [Matthew Yglesias]
Women and Health Insurance Coverage [Kaiser Family Foundation]
Health Insurance And the Single Girl [Glamocracy]

MEGAN: This D.C.-based hangover case is trying to get pissed about something but all I can come up with is a sense of mild disgust that Cindy McCain cites Princess Di as an inspiration. I mean, I know between all her recipe-swiping and whatever that Cindy isn't the most creative person in the world but come on! Between this and Jackie O, can she choose more archetypes of the supportive-but-not-controversial wife to emulate to get her husband elected?
MOE: Wait, one sec, I forgot to tell you I'm doing DIRT BAG today. You know what that means? I fucking read TMZ and Page Six etc. etc. all morning. Apparently Janis Ian via David Geffen turned down an offer to do music for The Graduate. And that is what passes for a Page Six item on a Thursday in late June when Richard Johnson is on vacation!
MEGAN: Well, you go get dirrrty, I'll be here when you get back and not remotely envious of your gossip-reading.

MOE: Wait cindy mccain cites jackie as an inspiration? I thought that was Michelle's territory? And wasn't Jackie kind of controversial? Didn't she like, do drugs and give her daughters eating disorders and repress a full 90% of her emotions like all those beautiful icons of her generation??
MEGAN: Well, sure, but no one said anything about that until much later.

MEGAN: Anyway, we should probably totally talk about the whole North Korea thing briefly. Like, I sort of wonder if it's a good thing that all Kim Jong Il has to do is turn over some stuff detailed his weapons programs — without actually, you know, stopping them — and we're already lifting sanctions?

MOE: Well, what the fuck good have the sanctions done? How much thinner can they get in North Korea? I dunno…I kind of don't get the sense that we're dealing with a rational, logical guy in that Kim Jong Il. Maybe "engagement" would be kind of like the oil cleansing method of fighting breakouts. Like a "love bomb" on that show "Intervention."
MEGAN: Except that didn't we try that in the Clinton Administration? We offered them enticements, conducted negotiations and then Kim did what he wanted to do anyway which was get his hands on nukes. It's totally a no-win situation, but I guess I'm concerned in the medium- to long-term that allowing ourselves to be economically invested there could have negative repercussions on our foreign policy since it, you know, seemingly always does.

MOE: Has becoming economically interdependent with China had negative FP repercussions? I mean, sure you'll find lots of instances where that would be the case — the whole career of this guy, such as — and they haven't been exactly helpful when it comes to dealing with the DPRK, maybe some casino magnate can convince them to change their policy about sending North Korean border-crossers back to North Korea, but I'm trying to hone in on what you're saying with the "always does." Anyway in the case of North Korea is the big new concern their cooperation with Syria? I still haven't read the story. I'll do that now. Also we should maybe discuss child rapists and FISA.

MEGAN: I mean, in my mind, we find it really easy to take a hard foreign policy stand in countries where we have no economic interest or, in the case of the Iraq, where a hard foreign policy stand is aligned with our economic interests. Sometimes, like with Burma, that's probably a good thing, other times less so — agricultural competition and Cuba comes to mind, actually. But, yes, China was the example I was thinking of when saying our economic interests seemingly trump our foreign policy ones. Like, there's a whole army of lobbyists that will lobby for their companies' interests in China and strongly oppose any government action against China in a foreign policy sense that might interfere with that.

MOE: Oh god CHECK IT OUT we averted recession go us.
MEGAN: Well, we avoided it first quarter by just being anemic.
MEGAN: I'm not feeling the growth love.
MOE: Yeah I was being sarcastic but you know me.
MEGAN: Also, don't we all love how we live in an age where all kinds of information is at our fingertips, but economists still can only call it an official recession in retrospect 2 financial quarters later?

MOE: I think we should seal all aggregate economic data for a few years and come together as a nation to figure out what would really make everyone happier.
MEGAN: See, I actually wonder if it would even be possibly to determine that given our culture is so steeped in the idea that the ability to consume = happiness
MOE: Anyway, would you get in a time machine and, like, assassinate Kissinger before he had a chance to chill with Mao? Oh shit that reminds me I've got that Harper's somewhere with the amazing transcript of that. Because I wouldn't. Would I? Nah. I mean, it would be interesting.
MEGAN: I've watched and read too much SciFi to think that changing the past like that would be a good idea.
MEGAN: Anyway, so, wiretapping and child rapists?
MOE: Yeah I mean, I'm not really that interested in this fire and brimstone shit but Bobby Jindal is apparently like, okay, if you won't let us execute our child rapists I am going to have them CHEMICALLY CASTRATED. I'm almost afraid to click and find out what that meas.

MEGAN: Well, look, there are 5 states that have the law on the books now, but Louisiana was the first. Patrick Kennedy (poor, black) was the first child rapist ever given the death penalty in such a case, in 2003— but the law was passed in 1995
MOE: Oh man it's just Depo-Provera??
MEGAN: Yeah, mostly. Also, chemical castration doesn't solve the problem Chemically castrated rapists have offended again.
MEGAN: Plus, hello, life in prison?

MEGAN: Basically, the idea is that you can't get a boner or you can't ejaculate, but you can rape a person without a dick and Viagra can overcome Depo. Plus, it's rooted in the idea that rape is about sexual arousal, when when is at least as much about power and dominance.
MEGAN: So, if a rapist wants to show dominance, he doesn't need an erection. Lots of rapes are committed with objects (see:Joe Francis' rape).
MOE: Oh dude…uh speaking of dominance ?…WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH THE POLLS WHY DOES GALLUP SAY IT IS A TIE AND EVERYONE ELSE IS LIKE UH-UH OBAMA IS WINNNNING
MEGAN: Well, Gallup says it's within the margin of error, so they're not even sure it represents a change.
MEGAN: The Rasmussen standard is "likely" voters, while Gallup only asks registered voters.

MEGAN: The real mystery to me is the LA Times/Bloomberg poll which has Obama miles ahead but uses the registered voter standard.
MOE: No but like all the polls had Obama 12 points ahead, and then Gallup came out and declared a tie, but whatever I wanted to go back to the fact that, like, even if you isolate North Korea economically they have gotten really good at printing fake currency so that is a problem. Anyway, here's Condi Rice telling everyone how she decided to remove North Korea from the terror list. Nowhere does she say "they are not terrorists because LOOK THEY DON'T BELIEVE IN ALLAH" but you know that's the subtext.
MEGAN: Sure, counterfeiting our money to give to terrorists in exchange for stuff legit governments won't sell them: not terrorism. Because they're not Muslim.
MOE: Oh, well that's simple enough. Registered vs. likely, sure. Mystery solved.
MEGAN: Also, back to the LA Times poll, they included Barr (3%) and Nader (4%), both coming mostly from McCain voters. Also, the LA Times poll is the only one with that large a margin, the Rasmussen and Gallup are both within each other's margins of error.
MEGAN: Also, it appears that the LA Times poll asked about isues and party affiliation, which would naturally affect responses. Gallup just asks "who you gonna vote for."

MEGAN: So, like, to me, that would indicate that in a knee-jerk reaction poll, they're more even but when voters are asked to think about the issues and with whom they agree and what is most important to them issues-wise, Obama does waaaaay better. Which is really interesting.
MEGAN: Yes, I did take statistical methodology as part of my major in Sociology, why do you ask?
MOE: Wait, ADD time, back to the Supreme Court death penalty decision and how it maybe reflects a shift on how the Court views executing people.

Justice Kennedy's majority opinion includes striking comments indicating possible skepticism about the entirety of capital punishment jurisprudence. In a remarkable statement, he says that the court's extensive body of death-penalty case law "is still in search of a unifying principle." That's a pretty bold statement about the whole project. And consider this statement by Kennedy today: "When the law punishes by death, it risks its own sudden descent into brutality, transgressing the constitutional commitment to decency and restraint."

MEGAN: Well, that goes along with the statement in the majority opinion that taking the death penalty off the table to child rapists reflect shifting social values about the death penalty.
MEGAN: That, like, since the standard for "cruel and unusual" changes over time as society changes, so does the Constitutionality of the punishment. I'm okay with that.

MOE: Me too! I think I'm also okay with Karl Rove calling out Obama's "alpha male attitude." Because, LOL!

Mr. Obama's alpha-male attitude was evident even as he stumbled towards and over the primary finish line. First, his campaign announced in May it was talking to Patti Solis Doyle after Sen. Clinton fired her as campaign manager. This served only to pour salt in the Clintons' wounds.

MEGAN: Right, because most politicians and political operatives aren't Type A personalities AT ALL.

MEGAN: But I guess Karl is himself a little more passive-aggressive, and if Bush really did fire him in church so he couldn't make a scene, so is Bush, so maybe Karl's just too used to passive-aggressivity to view assertiveness as anything other than hyper-aggressive?
MEGAN: WAIT oh my God, Karl Rove is everyone I date.
MOE: Um, also how did I miss Obama dissing Scarlett Johansson, (which Mickey Kaus deems "inexplicably clumsy," somewhat inexplicably, since he cops to having watched her video, and like, hello.)

MEGAN: Ummm, I would guess it has a lot more to do with downplaying the black man-white woman vaguely flirtatious suggestion aspect of it.
MOE: Ya think???
MEGAN: Which is just sad.
MOE: Interesting Spiegel piece on Why Russia Is Risking Another Cold War by amping up its military might. The answer seems to be that it isn't, but Putin talks a good game.
MEGAN: Well, who would they have a Cold War with? We're all into hot wars now, and really only in terrorist-sponsoring states that just happen to be Muslim and don't have nukes and shit.

MEGAN: Obama, by the way, is flip-flopping on the DC gun ban since he's trying to win swing states and the Supreme Court is expected to throw it out today.
MOE: Ugh and what the fuck was up with FISA?
MEGAN: The security of the American people trumps their need to protect (i.e., sue over) their right to privacy. He managed to combine a Republican argument on the supreme importance of national security with an implied Republican argument on tort reform. Plus, he can't look soft on terrorism or something and the Democrats have collectively decided to cave on telecomm immunity because they like having Bush scratch their bellies.

MOE: Oh here, they threw it out. Yay.
MEGAN:

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for four colleagues, said the Constitution does not permit "the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home."

MOE: Scalia wrote the opinion. 5-4 decision. Can't wait to read!

MEGAN: You can right here, if you want.

• The Grandmaster Flash memoir is out, and I know a big plot point is how he beat cocaine, but fuck if the guy doesn't sound as endearingly hyperactive as he did rapping about stagflation three decades ago or whatever. Apparently he's a hero in Burma? [Newsweek]
• All this time I've been calling Barack Obama a Muslim and it turns out he's actually a Hindu who worships some golden monkey god? [Times of India]
• Senator Chris Dodd moved his entire family to Iowa all to win one percent of the vote and I am not happy to report his powerful speech in opposition to retroactively granting big telecom firms the right to spy on people will no doubt prove equally in vain. [Wash Post]
• The Supreme Court decided to let Exxon off the hook on some of these pumped up oil spill fines. I mean, we can't very well expect those guys to scrounge up the money to find new sources of oil if we force them to pay putative damages for every little thing they do wrong, can we? You decide. [NYT]

• Also in the Supreme Court child rapists won a victory of sorts, and Barack Obama apparently does not approve. [Wash Post]
• Countrywide Financial was sort of the poster bank for the whole "Rent to own, No credit no problem" mortgage concept that is now costing taxpayers $300 billion or so, so it makes total sense that billionaire CEO Angelo Mozilo's tears would garner a standing ovation at the latest shareholders meeting. Wait no, actually it doesn't. [LA Times]
• I gotta say, I totally agree with this so far and it's kind of a disappointment. [Wash Post]
• Scoff all you want about how a grown man should be capable of distinguishing between a teacher dressed up like a Ninja for a costume party and the genuine Ninja article, but in this post-Virginia Tech era can schools ever really be too cautious? [Phillyburbs]

MOE: Ralph Nader thinks Obama is "acting white" to hone in on "white guilt" which doesn't even make sense but white people are eating it up blah blah blah asbestos. Thought 1: I would really love to hear him discuss all this with Karl Rove. Thought 2: Ralph Nader is supposed to be Arab; where does he get off making payday loans and asbestos his thing???

MEGAN: Nader is Arab, though Christian Arabic. My question is whether he went and, like, looked at Obama's plans on predatory credit or mortgage fraud or Obama's agenda on agenda on poverty before he opened his maw and called him "half African-American" as an insult.
MEGAN: Oh, and payday loans are in there, too, Ralphie.

MOE: And Efraim Diveroli reminds Thomas Frank more of Jeff Spicoli than Andy Samberg. He advises Obama to launch a reverse Grace Commission to examine the "sordid history of privatization in all its details." That would, like, make my crappy hour every day. And yeah re Nader, it's not like he spent his political career in Vermont, move on…the antipathy he inspires from the old guard sanctimonious left is kind of amusing.
MOE: See, why can't all those California lefties be like these guys???

MEGAN: I could see you volunteering to staff that commission, dude. Did I ever tell you my dad's old job was "privatized" when Pataki took office in NY? They contracted out his whole department at the university to get people off the ostensible payroll (though mostly people were just shifted around into departments that were led by the friends of the Republican overseers), and in my dad's case, his boss went to the Powers That Be and showed them that the entire department, salaries, benefits and supplies, cost less than the outsourced gig and pointed out the contract they were about to sign would leave the university without technical support after 4.5 months if the number of calls remained the same. The PTB signed the contract anyway, the contractor met his service quota by the end of the 3rd month and stopped providing service at his initial rate, the university ended up quietly re-insourcing the contract and the Republicans got to claim "credit" for "getting" 10,000 people off the state payroll. Good times.
MEGAN: Re: the George Bush Sewage Treatment plant, a synchronized flush is a waste of water, people. Also, Republicans can't talk about wasting money renaming stuff after Republican Congressman now Libertarian Presidential Candidate Bob Barr's little crusade to name a building in every state after Ronald Reagan, which cost millions and millions of dollars. They can suck a ballot-initiative treatment plant and I can call it NATIONAL airport, fuck you very much.
MOE: Tell it to the Disgrace Commission! And yeah everyone calls it National Airport. Was it Chris Hitchens who was once interviewed and the whole time he spent blusterfully refusing to call it Reagan? Anyway that's something we can all agree on. Here is something else: Irish Catholics in the media really fucking how to embarrass themselves.

MEGAN: Um, wow, it's actually kind of hard to offend me but the person (people?) who wrote that have managed. Irish-Catholics are a "gang of kooks"? They have "the obsessiveness of their ethnic/religious culture"? Irish Catholics at NBC are "a gang of such perfect crackpots"? Patrick Buchanan is "the sane one of these three."?
MEGAN: Dude who wrote that: go fuck yourself.
MEGAN: For real.
MEGAN: With a spiky acid-tipped dick.

MEGAN: Instead of me just being angry, why don't we soothe my ruffled feathers by talking about Russ Feingold and why I really think he should've made Obama's short list. The man's a liberal's intellectual wet dream, a civil liberties god, etc.
MOE: Dude, maybe I am just too Irish Catholic, but I read that whole thing and thought - as I laughed — GUITY GUILTY GUILTY. All the oversharing! The demons! Using the romantic notion that the Irish Catholic are some scrappy disadvantaged minority in the Washington news media as an excuse to look out for the interests of Maria Shriver?? No, that's just kind of funny. But Maria Shriver repeating that story? As Kathleen Matthews said "All of us who are Irish say, Let's purge the dark side of our Irishnessand let's hold on to the good positive side of it." Which I think means get me a drink and I'll tell you the story of this one time a guy shaved off my pubic hair before we fucked and I thought it was really funny at the time because I was on Vicodin but not so much when it grew in. He was Catholic too, but Italian or Portuguese or something. Dark.

MOE: All of which is just to say.

MATTHEWS (6/16/08): So let me ask you about the ethnic piece of this. Why do Irish Catholics make some great cops, such great prosecutors? Michael, I mean, they are!
…
BARNICLE: I think it begins—as just Pat referenced, I think it begins with so many Irish Catholics of a certain age, of a certain generation, with their parochial school education, and they come to life later on with a missionary zeal for the truth because it begins in parochial school.

Maybe when I die you and Slut Machine can have an IM about being Irish and use some of these exchanges as a guide!
MEGAN: I used to have a Irish Catholic boyfriend shave my Bush regularly. But I don't think it had anything to do with us being Irish or him being Catholic or me being formerly-Catholic. I just don't like being called a kook or a wackjob because of the religion that my mother chooses to practice. Like we're all some crazy cult or something? I don't have a lot of lines, but that dude crossed it.
9:25 AM
MEGAN: I mean, a lot of NY and Boston cops are Irish. I don't know that I'd call them all great, though. It's more like a family business for a lot of people, like the military but with less moving.
MOE: It just appealed to my missionary zeal for the truth I guess. The "cooks" part was just a joke pretty much. Okay, so what else? Ralph Nader is also profiled in the Post today. Such charisma that guy:

When an aide relays a young woman's request to stop for a picture, Nader has had enough. "No!" he snaps, walking away. "It's always 'one more'!"

MEGAN: Such a nice guy, that Nader. Can you believe people hate him? They've just been brainwashed by the two-party system! It's not because he's an egotistical, self-centered asshole who doesn't care what actually happens to this country as long as he gets on the teevee.
MOE: Oh god and the media is doing its best to make me squirm today…like did the Obama campaign really have to release his iPod playlist? I mean, sure, it's cute when Meghan McCain does it but…wouldn't it have just been cooler if some girl had been using his same Wifi signal and clicked on "Barry's LimeWire Tunes" and then the world got to know the only natural way how Obama was listening to pirated Ludacris tracks?
MOE: Musical interlude

MEGAN: Well, he totally had to prove that 99 Problems wasn't on it! Also, if I find out that the shitty new Sheryl Crow album is on his playlist, I'm out.
MEGAN: Is is sad that I sort of fucking love Roll Out? The summer that song was out, I was working in Bethesda and driving to work, and I used to blast it in the car with the windows down singing along, even though Move Bitch is a better D.C. traffic song.

MOE: God I fucking love YouTube. And no, "Roll Out" is just fucking irrefutable. My friend Don actually has these games, "The Irrefutables" where you take one artist, and you say totally arbitrarily, "Okay, there are nine irrefutable Billy Joel songs, NAME THEM." And then what ensues is part-race, part-debate over whether "Always a Woman" is indeed irrefutable or whether you should be hanged for even suggesting as much. And then there's another game called "You think you're so cool, but you can't deny…" And that's where you take a cheesy song or artist and then the debate is over whether you can, indeed, deny the merits of, you know, "Maybe I'm Amazed."
MOE: Or in the case of the Obama playlist, "My favorite Mistake"
MOE: You can also do it with other things, such as you think you're so cool, but you can't deny…TIM RUSSERT.
MEGAN: This is probs an Irrefutable.
MOE: Dude that movie was fucking irrefutable. The Stones are a band you never want to get into the Irrefutables with though because everyone's drunk and you can't count that high. You have to break it up with bands like that, like maybe Stones songs set in train stations…

MEGAN: Sorry, I'm now totally distracted by the Stones, damn you
MOE: Also, a final thing, you can't get into Irrefutables unless you have a certain amount of distance from the artist. Like I wouldn't personally attempt it with Neko Case or obviously the Replacements or Pavement, and you probably wouldn't want to get into it with Barack Obama and Stevie Wonder and to that end fucking yes, it is summer
MEGAN: Or, we could bring it all back to Tim Russert, yet again, since I'm a narcissitic Irish Catholic.

• Some anonymous collector just bought this Monet for $80.4 million from the kids of some famous collectors from Columbus, Indiana. No really, I thought it was a mistake too, but there really is a Columbus, Indiana, and before they died the couple who amassed this insane art collection were like the hipster royal family there. [NYT]
• A Druze border policeman killed himself in Israel while Sarkozy was watching and the family is asking that his name not be released, but like, I kind of think it's a little late for that. [Haaretz]
• I'm not saying we should adopt all Afghanistan's policies but $100 million just from taxing shit most countries pay hundreds of billions criminalizing sounds pretty tempting…[BBC
• Obama is polling creepily well right now, which makes me nervous, but can you blame the voters when McCain is out there straight-talking about how his offshore drilling ideas are kind of cheap psychological tricks? [MSNBC]

• Okay, if you haven't figured it out yet, Anne Hathaway's boyfriend Rafaello Follieri hired priests, bought robes, fabricated "engineering plans" and bribed low-level Vatican tourism officials — along with some sort of Italian journalist — to make people think he was the chief financial officer of the Vatican, endowed with the unique privilege of selling off Catholic Church properties all over the world, only all of that was a complete load of shit and he knew essentially no one, and the fraud is kind of awe-inspiringly brazen, and thankfully New York decided to digest its juicy bits. [NY Mag]
• You know what, Nancy Pelosi? Amen. [Chicago Sun-Times]
• If all the world's millionaires lived in a single city it would have almost two million more people than New York and no fucking clue where to get its nails done. [Yahoo]
• "I don't go out as much as I used to. Instead of going to a bar I'll stay home and get a six-pack."A story on the dismal consumer sentiment numbers out today hits home to the blogger drinking a $3 22 ounce Sierra Nevada. [WSJ]
• Florida is trying to cut down on carbs. [Wash Post
  
  

The truth is, this country loves to label people, put them in boxes and keep them there. Let's say you're watching TV and keeping track: White guys are businessmen and politicians; black guys are athletes, entertainers or criminals; black women are video hoes or Oprah. Or The Angry Black Woman, you know, the one who is always telling somebody off, working her neck and letting the insults fly. (See: Omarosa, thousands of bit parts in movies, multiple seasons of The Real World.) It's been more than 20 years since The Cosby Show debuted but it seems like people have a tough time wrapping their heads around the idea of a black female lawyer. And so, in typical American fashion, we attack what we don't understand.

Michelle Obama — who is not even technically the one running for office — has been accused of being hateful. Unpatriotic. Too elite. A baby mama. But she's something the media, the news and the pundits hardly even recognize: An extremely modern woman, a product of her history, background and age. As Kaplan writes: "A recent New York Times profile, in distinguishing Michelle's background from that of her husband, described her as being 'a descendant of slaves' — as if that's a unique fact rather than a collective one that applies to the vast majority of the millions of black Americans whose families have been here for hundreds of years."

But critics are determined to tear down Michelle. The "whitey" comment she claims she never said from a source that does not appear to exist? It's basically a smear campaign, declares Paul Waldman for The American Prospect. Are people are so uncomfortable with a woman in power that they don't know what else to do? Writes Waldman:

"Cindy[McCain] seems to have undergone the same Stepford reengineering that produced Laura Bush, complete with loving gazes and immovable smile. You'd never know that she actually runs a company worth an estimated $250 million.

Which might suggest that if you're a woman married to a man who wants to be president, the best thing to do is pretend you neither have, nor ever harbored hopes of having, a career. But there's not much you can do about your skin color — nobody is going to be calling Cindy her husband's "baby mama". What you want to be, above all, is gentle and timid. Not your own person, with your own ideas and ambitions. Not a threat to anyone."

(Just as an aside: Where does the "black women are threatening" thing come from? Is it because all black people are seen threatening? Wild somehow? Unpredictable? Fierce? Savage? Or is it related somehow to sexual power and matriarchal households, which, if successful, would somehow doom the beloved American patriarchy?)

The crazy part is that Michelle Obama should be treated as a great American success story, someone we can all relate to or be inspired by. Without being forced to "soften" her image. She's a working mom! With brains! What's not to like? It's a paradox: Her story — growing up not rich but not poor in Chicago, making it into Princeton and becoming a lawyer commanding a six-figure salary — is actually the American dream. So why is she being treated like she's the American nightmare?

(Meanwhile, despite what the critics say, some Americans are embracing Michelle Obama: Her Us Weekly magazine cover did well and she might even be on the cover of Essence.)

Then there's this: With all of the attacks against Michelle Obama, why is no one rushing to her defense? Mary C. Curtis recently asked this very question in the Washington Post. "Where are Obama's feminist defenders?" she writes. "I want to know: What does Gloria Steinem think? She was out front with her support of Clinton, promoting the importance of a female president. She has even endorsed Barack Obama. What's her reaction now that the knives are out for another strong woman?" Ms. Curtis seems to lean toward the age-old concept that feminism has elitist, racist roots: "The woman who employed my educated mother to clean her house never quite saw her as a sister in the struggle for equality," she writes. "But in America, there's seldom a cost for disrespecting black women."

Barack Obama's campaign is built on a single word: Change. Isn't it about time it applied to the way a black woman is treated in this country as well?

Who's Afraid Of Michelle Obama? [Salon]
Smearing Michelle [The American Prospect]
Memo Pad [WWD]
Michelle Sells [Politico]
The Loud Silence of Feminists [Washington Post]
When It Comes To Michelle Obama, Where Are The Feminists? [Jack And Jill Politics]

Earlier: Michelle Obama And The Place Of A First Lady

MOE: So today Obama is a country club snob who sips a martini and alternately peddles a fruitcake version of the Constitution and makes snide comments about passersby while ignoring the beautiful date he brought for some new chick from out of town…ummmm is the whole campaign going to be this incomprehensible a tantrum? Why don't they go after the fact that his Christian outreach program consists of hosting things called "American Values House Parties"? That could at least make for some fun photoshop work.

MEGAN: Also, he wants to be President soooo bad, he's made up his own seal. But, to answer the question, yes, I think for the foreseeable future the campaign will just be one incomprehensible temper tantrum.
MOE: Do you think Karl Rove is trying to evoke a sort of Greg Germann image re Obama? Because Karl, I know you don't need me to tell you this, but it would be a lot easier to just play to the whole "latent racism" thing. But not nearly as fun!
MEGAN: People say they want clean campaigns, but they only pay attention and change their minds when it gets dirty, so it'll get dirty. Plus, you know, you've got pissed off PUMAs and the media is all sad that their golden boy refused to take public financing and so it's their disappointment that drives the coverage right now because they are literally 90% of the total population of people that understand what public financing is on a basic level and what it means that he didn't take it (and they're probably still mad that 99% of their viewers/readers didn't give a fuck about it).
MOE: oh my Goddd just when you thought David Brooks was sticking to his meds…

MEGAN: Whoa:

Every personal trait that led Bush to make a hash of the first years of the war led him to make a successful decision when it came to this crucial call [to have a surge]

I don't think that qualifies as "off his meds" as much as "on hard drugs this time."
MOE:

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.
Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence he never would have overruled his generals. Bush is also a secretive man who listens too much to Dick Cheney. Well, the uncomfortable fact is that Cheney played an essential role in promoting the surge. Many of the people who are dubbed bad guys actually got this one right.

Ha ha, yes, dubbed. Oh for the rest of the world to be so attuned to the selflessness and idealism at the core of all Dick Cheney's actions.
MEGAN: Dick Cheney's just a peach! He knows what he's doing!
MOE: Anyway, I must confess, I think of stability in Iraq right now and I think not necessarily "failed state" or "fragile state" but honor killings and virginity checkups and the like. In that vein I don't think of coal consumption and "a distinctly American problem, as opposed to that of oil" automatically but according to this guy, James Hansen, I should. Do you sometimes wish all these nebulous global warming based arguments for minimizing waste and reducing consumption would do like the ice caps and wash away to reveal to Americans the secret reason everyone's trying to get them to stop driving Hummers and living in exurbs and swilling bottled water and gorging on high fructose nuggets of deforestation and animal cruelty which is to say IT'S JUST BETTER FOR EVERYONE THAT WAY??

MEGAN: Oh, I meant to tell you, HuffPo went out and couldn't find a single economist — not even a right wing shill — that would say that McCain's drilling plan would lower oil prices in the short-medium term?
MOE: Oh but to get to a point I was trying to make earlier coal is burned widely in China and I wouldn't call it "counterintuitive" to want to put an end to that. And yeah if the fucking Fox News booker couldn't find one I don't know how they were supposed to.
MEGAN: Two-thirds of our energy in this country comes from burning coal, and although the coal we burn is of high quality (and thus less environmentally unfriendly in terms of SOx emissions, if I recall correctly) than the higher-sulfur coal which is burned in China, it still ain't good. Someone on MSNBC yesterday, I wasn't looking at the TV so I didn't see who, said that we should try to become the Saudi Arabia of coal. I thought it was a bad talking point.

MOE: Did you read all the latest on our boychik Efraim Diveroli and the ambassador and the coverrup etc.

The day after the November meeting, the embassy’s regional security officer, Patrick Leonard, wrote an assistant an e-mail message obtained by the committee: “NY Times just arrived today and might be doing a story on this and it might get ugly. Ambassador is very concerned about the case.”
When The Times published its article on March 27, it was quickly forwarded to embassy officials. In an e-mail message to several embassy officials, Mr. Leonard said that the article focused on the arms company’s dealings. “No mention of Embassy involvement — thank God!”

MEGAN: HA! Wow, dude, way to remember that email is forever.
MEGAN: I guess Efraim wasn't the only dumb one in that conspiracy.
MOE: Also: I don't know dick about dick, but HOWWWW again does the expanding influence of an Iranian-backed Shiite cleric who, by the way, isn't opposed to exploding his fellow Shiites by the dozen for the sake of stirring up hostility towards Sunnis = the troop surge is a success? Seriously, Megan? You know me, I don't know much about this stuff, and I never really did trust that David Brooks since he made up all those facts about how you couldn't find a $20 dinner in Franklin County etc., but seriously…
MEGAN: OMG THAT IS THE SAME DAVID BROOKS?
MOE: Um, earth to Megan??
MEGAN: My friend gave me that book for Christmas like 7, 8 years ago and it was soooo annoying I never read it.

MEGAN: Ok, sorry. Wow, that guy's more of an idiot than I thought.
MOE: Yeah the only good thing Brooks ever did to my recollection was this Slate "Breakfast Table" with Thomas Frank that I will dredge up sometime for old time's sake. We could role-play it on Crappy Hour, in fact, but I get to be Tom.
MEGAN: Man, why do I have to be the stupid one?
MOE: David Brooks wasn't as stupid then, maybe he was taking Adderall who knows.
MEGAN: I don't know, that book sort of made me want to gouge my eyes out (sorry, Ed).
MOE: But no on second thought I'd rather be Brooks because I think his writing style would be easier and more fun to emulate. I just have a hardon for Frank.
MOE: Bobos in Paradise?
MEGAN: Yes, it's literally sitting on my bookshelf right now, staring at me.

MEGAN: Ok, the back cover quotes are like a rogue's gallery: Christopher Buckley declares "The self-loathing yuppie is dead," which, obviously not because Brooks kept writing after this.
MOE: Oh shit, so this girl: just about plain looking enough that…okay but seriously dude, what's up with the jacket? Also, who fucking holds hands? Ah the mystery of that particular specimen of humanity. Which reminds me did you read that New York Magazine piece on how Bill Clinton's speeches were actually written on a more elementary reading level than Bush's? Well that wasn't what it was about exactly obviously it was about Obama but you get what I'm saying.

MEGAN: Aw, I hold hands. I like holding hands sometimes. It's better than talking sometimes, and you know I love talking.
MEGAN: The thing that's amazing about Bill Clinton is his ability to take a speech, like, 10 minutes before he gets it, read it, and then give it with the right tone and everything that it sounds like he just wrote it, but perfectly. I guess it would make a kind of sense that it would be relatively easy language, etc, because most people don't like when you use big words.
MOE: Haha Reagan didn't know the names of many of his speechwriters.... Poor Peggy and her XXXes... did you ever read how she never really got to say goodbye to Reagan in Political Fictions?? It's heartwrenching really. And speaking of …speaking, you ever read this presidential speech? I read it after reading a particularly impressive TR introduction to this book on, of all things, the Mongols. Right now however I'm a little too hungover to parse.
MOE: Oh shit, segue but Charlie Crist: comes off rather well in this Deborah Solomon interview, but why does he look like he raided Tim Russert's closet before the photoshoot?

MOE: Wait, that
MEGAN: Hrm, it seems like we might have wanted to pay attention to this part a little more carefully:

The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals.

MOE: Ah the beautiful and the lofty. Gotta bring back the lofty.
MEGAN: Well, we could just start by having some ideals, that would be good too.

MOE: Anyway The Man in The Arena was quoted by Richard Nixon in his resignation speech. Nixon who ushered in the end of the Meaningful Speech when he formally separated his speechwriting department from his policy analysis department, which sort of begs the question which department wrote his resignation but that, folks, doesn't appear to be on Wikipedia. Oh and Barack Obama referenced Man in the Arena when he brushed that dirt off his shoulder…

MEGAN: Well, speeches aren't about policy, they're about PR. That everyone before Nixon didn't know that was just their loss.
MOE: Well the point of the story was that style and substance are distinguished from one another to an unproductive degree these days in the political arena, which I would argue is actually the opposite of true these days, it's more like style is differentiated from "substance-esque style", but anyway sometimes a speech is just about sticking it to the haters and this is pretty awesome.

MOE: .

Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary.

MOE: Of course this speech is just one long scathing critique of the critics so maybe not that much has changed except that I didn't know "voluptuary" was a word.
MEGAN: Dude, and now I know why voluptuous is sort of insulting: "a person whose life is devoted to the pursuit and enjoyment of luxury and sensual pleasure." is the definition of that! So, like, if I've got curves, then it's all about luxury and sensual pleasure? Dammit, where's my luxury? Where's my sensual pleasure?
MOE: I sense a POST coming on!!! Dude, here's a good paragraph from that New York Mag story
MOE:

M
y relationship to Obama has been a complex cycle of enthusiasm canceled immediately by self-correcting cynical objections, canceled by self-correcting enthusiasm, canceled again by the cynicism, canceled by the enthusiasm. Is he really this good, I wonder constantly, or do we just need him to be? The speech that finally tipped my inner scale decisively toward belief was his least decorative: no refrain, little alliteration, no audience exploding at shouted catchphrases—just the man himself standing there solemnly, neutralizing the hysteria of a potentially career-killing scandal with the naked power of grown-up thought. With his race speech, Obama chose the riskiest path in American politics: to be conspicuously thoughtful. It would have been like Clinton, in 1998, giving a long contextualizing address to the nation about human sexuality, the international status of adultery, etc. It was one of the most encouraging political moments I’ve ever experienced.

MOE: OK now I really have to figure out what picture to use
MEGAN: Enjoy!

• OMG remember Efraim Diveroli, the 22-year-old Andy Samberg lookalike from Miami with the $300 million defense contract to sell ancient Chinese ammunition to the Afghan insurgency via Albania? Apparently the US Ambassador was involved in covering up the scam, probably because Efraim was also Albania's leading supply of whores. [NYT]
• And speaking of…people we haven't thought about in a few months, Ashley Alexandra Dupre updated her MySpace! [People]
• 92% of Americans believe in God or something Godlike that doesn't sound quite as lame. But there are ways to combat this! 10% of people raised without religion describe themselves as atheists, and that likelihood goes even higher if you raise your kids Jewish. [LA Times]
• Rich people are actually less happy because they spend so much time doing the unpleasant things required to become rich, such as laying people off and outsourcing business functions to Bangladesh and actually like "working." [Washington Post]

• It's one thing to hope for another terror attack when you're among friends but when you're a McCain adviser talking to a reporter from a major national magazine you're going to get some shit. [TIME]
• That discount retail chain that brought the world the Sarah Jessica Parker clothing line is badly needs $30 million quick, I know you feel soooo bad for them. [WSJ]
• Why I love this country: when a candidate breaks a promise that was a centerpiece of his early base of support because, after all, all the late-adopters to the cause wouldn't be giving him so much money if they expected him to give it back, we call that bad for the "brand." [ABC News]
• The Economist discusses plans for a 100% Ron Paul supporter-occupied residential community in a story that invited me to wonder what it would be like if there was a 100% Jezebel commenter-occupied compound. Would you guys have a sex shrine like the Mormons? Would SinisterRouge be the first evicted? Would I, like Ron Paul, be afraid to visit? [Economist]
• America might try to open an "interest center" — sort of like an Embassy popup store, or an Embassy Lite — in Tehran, which I think is a good idea as long as they still get to sell alcohol. [Wash Post]
• Morgan Tsvangirai is hiding out at the Dutch Embassy and everyone else involved on the anti-Mugabe side of Zimbabwe's little flirtation with "democracy" got arrested so I guess that's the end of that. [Washington Post]

MOE: Morning Megan! Nice weekend? Good thing I already know the answer to that question because there are like ninety things we need to discuss this morning, and like, none of them is George Carlin! We should maybe start with how they abandoned that whole election idea in Zimbabwe after Mugabe made the truly salient point in a speech that "How can a ballpoint pen fight with a