MOE: let me tell you something pathetic

MEGAN: Away

MOE: I just went down to the deli, bought an iced coffee, forgot the iced coffee at the deli.

MEGAN: Oh, I do that mostly with leftovers at restaurants

MOE: I guess I should go get it.

MOE: What are you reading this morning?

MEGAN: What's crappy hour without caffeine?

MEGAN: Most about how McCain's hiring all of Rove's people

MOE: Oh yeah, honestly, why is he doing that? Reading this "massive campaign shakeup" thing I was thinking, Is it really time for this? What has McCain even done "wrong" so far? And they couldn't get rid of Charlie Black? Also, isn't Charlie Black a weird name? Like an obscure mendacious Peanuts character.

MEGAN: What he's apparently done wrong is not hired enough Rove people? I mean, when I saw the news yesterday about the shake up, I thought it was to get rid of Charlie but there's not a word about it, actually, it's just bringing on more people.

MOE: Wow tell me this isn't a little overly "synergistic"…Also there is totally a joke to be made re zookeeping and Republicans but it is the Thursday before a long weekend so…

MEGAN: And Newt Gingrich grew up in Harrisburg?

MEGAN: Also, I've been reading about how Fox Photoshopped the NY Times writers to make them look uglier.

MOE: Oh this thought did not go through: "Yeah but did you get the Bronx Zoo bugs crawling all over that as you tried to read it? And you know what they say about Pennsylvania being "Alabama in between."" It was pretty deep. I still haven't gone and gotten my coffee. Last night was rough.

MEGAN: If I lived in a 5th floor walk up, I wouldn't leave the house much. I mean, I already don't leave the house much, but still.

MOE: Holy shit that is insane re Fox News. Can the FCC just shut those fuckers DOWN? The other day they were insisting that birth control was an "abortificient." I was screaming at the TV and I have no emotions so it was something.

MEGAN: The FCC has no control over cable, but the liberals have this brilliant idea of bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, which would set an arm of the FCC to policing that right wing and left wing views have exactly equal amounts of television time, not that that's not scary and creepy depending on which party is in office but of COURSE the Democratic party will have power forever and ever so it won't be a problem.

MOE: Oh right the FCC can't police cable, duh. Which is kind of hilarious since cable penetration in this country is probably 80% of households. But the misinformation those guys consciously and constantly disseminate surprises and pisses off even me, on a daily basis! Also, the ads on the E&P website are funny. One's about how to deal with your yellow teeth. I wonder if they suggest Photoshop!

MEGAN: Anyway, so, like McCain is best buds with Sarkozy who is going to meet with Syria and Caroline Kennedy is more than window dressing, but I am having trouble caring about anything other than the Brinkley divorce trial in which it turns out that her soon-to-be-ex only banged his teenage mistress 10-12 times in the year he was having an affair with her, but he gave her, like, $300,000? Damn,

MOE: Whoa he gave her three hundred grand? I wrote something the other day in Dirt Bag about how I wasn't so much feeling the Brinkley divorce but then yesterday when he admitted he only hired that girl to do typesetting for his firm because he wanted to fuck her I was like, "Ooooh, oooh, we should probably do a post on how to tell if someone is hiring you for a "job" that is actually prostitution!" And then I promptly forgot natch. Dude, his lawyer is a dick though!

MOE:

"For goodness sake: She's on her fourth husband," Sheresky told the court. "Your honor, we're here because of the self-indulgent wrath of a woman scorned."

MEGAN: Well, she's on her 4th husband because she sadly keeps marrying assholes and idiots, you idiot asshole.

MEGAN: Also, by the way, he reportedly stuck Billy Joel's daughter Alexis's face in a bucket because she took a long shower and something flooded.

MOE: No. fucking. way. I think Alexis is on the cover of Ocean Drive this month and I was going to buy it but…Ocean Drive is really heavy and…I just can't fucking believe this guy! And I wanted to talk about FARC and whether that laptop had anything to do with saving Betancourt and what she is going to say about Hugo Chavez now but…actually this is a really good story. And it's on the covers of the NY tabloids every day so that makes it sorta "news" right? Also it is the third of July motherfuckers!

MEGAN: That's right! Plus, um, can we have a little Bush/Rove conspiracy theory about the timing of his trip to Colombia and the freeing of the prisoners?

MOE: Wait only after you check out the culinary delicacy featured on the Weekly Standard blog I was looking at in hopes of finding some reaction to Hitch getting waterboarded, which I did not find, although I did find a review of a William Safire book by Chris Hitchens, who is still mad about Nixon…anyway.

MEGAN: Um, I really, really wish I hadn't seen that. I didn't mention earlier, but this Crappy Hour is coming to you live from my bathroom floor where I seem to be reliving last night's dinner in reverse in a most unfortunate way and I'm glad I puked after the last sentence I wrote before this because if I hadn't, I would've after seeing that picture. That said, Attackerman talked about Hitchens' waterboarding. He's not a fan of Hitchens, but he thought the video itself was important for people to see.

MOE: Well I was trying to look at right-wing blogger reactions to it you see because the right wing bloggers somehow don't talk about torture a whole lot. Also my coffee drink, which I went down and retrieved, is called "Big Black." Because Steve Albini won't fucking let it go that I wrongly referenced him in that Liz Phair post. Ugh.

MEGAN: I think the right-wing blogosphere is ignoring coverage of torture because, like actual torture, if they ignore it, they won't have to think about it seriously or try to defend the indefensible.

MEGAN: hey, if it's cool to be done, i'd really like to lie down for a while

MOE: go ahead babe. I was looking around for stuff to write about and um failing.

MOE: Ummmmm is it just me or is today, like, all about POLICY??
MEGAN: It does seem like my jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none brain when it comes to policy issues might come in handy this morning! Where do you want to start?

MOE: Maybe with the incredibly astute words of McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin:

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, chief economic aide to Republican candidate Sen. John McCain, dismissed the Obama strategy as "classic industrial policy which shows a lack of faith in private markets."

MEGAN: Obama's got this part right though: "How much you pay in taxes as a corporation a lot of times is going to depend on how good your lobbyist is."
MOE: I mean, what have the private markets done to instill faith in you lately? Are we supposed to be like Job with these things?
MOE: right.
MOE: This isn't something I would mind seeing: "Americans with incomes above $2.8 million would see their after-tax income decrease by 11.5%."
MEGAN: Hardly anyone pays the actual income tax rate because of loopholes. If I heard my now former boss say it once, I heard it 15 times, if you eliminate deductions and credits, you could reduce the corporate rate to, like, 25% without losing revenue. You could lower personal rates even further and eliminate taxes for a percentage of the population. It's an incredibly inefficient system.

MEGAN: I did an analysis of the candidates' tax plans on young single women. Obama's is better.
MOE: Did you see this handy graf on the rebirth of the plutocracy? Just before the Great Depression the top .01% of households averaged 892 times the household income of the households in the bottom 90%, and that number of course plummeted and only really began steadily rising in 1980 to the point that it's now 976. These are imperfect numbers, of course — how big is the top .01%? How about the top .1%? Etc. etc. But it's a nice visual aid!

MOE: The income required to make the Top 400 list of earners has tripled since 1992, AFTER ADJUSTING FOR INFLATION.

MEGAN: I mean, the question is, from a policy perspective, is whether that's truly undesirable and what can be honestly done about it. Given the nature of the international financial sector and personal and currency mobility, would heavy taxation be effective? Can we limit income? Can you create or force businesses to create better oversight and board systems to protect shareholder interests, say, with a mandate that multimillion dollar compensation packages that aren't effectively tied to long-term performance are considered not in shareholders' best interests? I don't think either of the candidates has really talked about serious policies aimed at resolving income inequality because it's such a squishy issue to get your arms around let alone resolve from a policy perspective.
MOE: A few things: 1. Well yeah I think income inequality is truly undesirable from a policy perspective. 2. And the only way to deal is tax the everliving shit out of capital gains and use that money to beef up the SEC and education. Because the people who set executive compensation, the people who "look out for the interests of shareholders," the people who monitor the people allegedly looking out for those interests, the people who kick out executives for underperformance and are charged with luring in a new guy to "clean house" — all those people are part of this racket. And one, their version of "long term" is at most five years. And two, they set the yardsticks, the standards. They're all friends and acquaintances and they all know exactly how much everyone gets paid and they've pushed the baseline up up up.
MEGAN: What is "taxing the shit" out of capital gains? Back up to 25%? Higher? Won't they just try to pull some work around if that happens, the way private equity funds are just an elaborate way around taxation?
MOE: Well every policy creates loopholes, and certainly you'd probably see some money shift to less taxable assets, not that we didn't see that already with the real estate bubble, but none of the hundreds of executives indicted on backdating their stock options worked for a private company, you know? I mean, eventually the big payoff in private equity tends to come from the public markets, right? Or an acquisition? The thing that people need to get through their thick fucking heads is that yeah, there's always a greater and greatest fool losing out here, and we've missed out on a lot of the fundamental zero-sumness of corporate earnings growth because our standards of living are being propped up by artificially low standards in China, which China maintains as part of its INDUSTRIAL POLICY.

MEGAN: Hypothetically speaking, then, not that this is in my personal best interest as a homeowner, one of the ways to keep people from transferring assets into real estate to reap tax benefits would be to reduce the tax preference for home ownership and for real estate more generally.
MOE: Right. Although I don't know if you'd do that in the middle of a housing crisis?
MEGAN: Which, by the way, would probably have helped slow the bubble, and would slow the growth in home prices because creating a tax preference creates a market for people seeking to exploit it and it pretty quickly gets built into the price
MOE: Well yes.
MEGAN: Well, why wouldn't you? I don't know that it could hurt anymore now. If you wanted to be fair you could grandfather it or give some sort of one-time rebate payment or something and call it a fucking day.

MEGAN: The mortgage interest deduction and state and local tax deduction (which includes property taxes) are two of the largest deductions in the tax system, that are taken advantage of almost exclusively by people earning above the median income. They're also, along with having kids, the main reason people in the so-called "middle class" end up paying the Alternative Minimum Tax, though "middle class" is kind of a stretch for someone making $100, $120K/year when median income is $45K, but I'll accept that definition. Obama's willing to go up to $250K.
MOE: I wonder if there is like, a rich folks CPI that tracks the rising costs of… luxury real estate, private education, corian countertops, that sort of thing.

MEGAN: Not, by the way, that this bears any relationship to the conversation at hand, but coffee may be helping us live longer. I'm hoping alcohol consumption offsets that.
MOE: Okay so I'm creeping through his interview and, you know, the Journal basically says "well Clinton said a lot of this stuff but then he became obsessed with the deficit and it's not like THAT'S not a problem right now" and Obama says like "well now we have energy problems too so there's that." Like there's this meme out there that alternative energy is going to become this huge new sector of the economy but like who is going to lead that?

MOE: Ha I like how it ends

WSJ: A lot of folks would say cutting corporate tax rates are equivalent growth.
Sen. Obama: I don't want a distorting effect of our tax code on corporate decision making. But that's different from just saying you know, let's run up the deficit another couple of trillion dollars …

MEGAN: And after all those bonuses, too!
MOE: Yeah they're only on track to get $19 billion this Xmas sad sad world. But I don't know, can we really make the argument that it would be societally optimal for that money to …maybe find other uses for itself?
MEGAN: Ooch, Obama is co-opting the Republican small government ethos, but with a delish Democratic twist — making it, you know, actually effective.

I think the danger is always to equate size of government with effectiveness, and I don't. It's not clear to me that we want a larger government, but we certainly want a government that is setting more intelligent priorities and using taxpayer dollars more wisely and structuring tax policies that are conducive to long-term economic growth. As I mentioned during the speech, there may be programs that no longer work. There's certainly all kinds of previsions in our tax code that are antiquated and are not spurring economic growth. We've got offices like the patent office that are outdated to take advantage of new discoveries here in the United States.

Republicans have gotten so focused at starving the beast or cutting off the snake's head that they've forgotten they can actually do proactive things to reduce gov't. Or, in the case of this administration, they haven't wanted to reduce its size.

MOE: Thomas Frank doesn't have a new column out yet I guess that happens tomorrow but he changed the name to "The Tilting Yard." Weird.
MEGAN: Is it, like, a Cervantes reference? Is he Don Quixote?

MOE: Well he had the same column name, "Fighting Words" as Hitchens, whose last column on Hillary and sexism is the most Hitchens thing Hitchens has ever written, right down to the Juanita Broaddrick ref:

Posterity may well remember the Hillary Clinton campaign as the nearest that a member of the female gender had thus far gotten to the nomination of a major political party. But the episode will be recalled for many other salient features as well. The first time that the wife of an ex-president had leveraged her first-lady status into a senatorial seat and then a bid for the presidency. The first time that the candidate's spouse (and campaigner in chief) was a person who had been disbarred for perjury and impeached for—among other things—obstruction of justice.
MOE: The first time since the 1960s that a Democrat seeking the nomination had implicitly relied on a "Southern strategy" of appealing to the rancor of the "white working class." The first time since the lachrymose Ed Muskie that a candidate's eyes had welled up with tears in New Hampshire. The first time that a woman candidate was married to a man who had been believably accused of rape and sexual harassment (see my book No One Left To Lie To). The first time that a candidate had said of her half-African-American rival that he was not a member of the Muslim faith "as far as I know." The first time that the loser in the delegate count had failed to congratulate or even acknowledge the winner on the night of his historic victory.

MEGAN: I tried to write something about it, but it's so hard to respond to stupid sometimes.

MEGAN: This is, after all, the same dude that ejaculates at the thought of Bill Clinton. Granted, it's at his humiliation, but I don't think that makes him any less of a gay, S&M fetishist with a hair trigger. I feel sorry for his wife.
MOE: So maybe Tilting Yard was a dig at Hitchens who I bet 1. gets it and 2. has had on more than one occasion, like, epically tilted into something mid-rant at a party or something, but that is just my guess.
MEGAN: Well, if by "tilted" you mean "stuck his small British peen into the vagina of a 19 year old with hero worship in her eyes," then, yes, he's done that at parties.
MOE: So guess what, I totally missed talking about torture again, or the Army official who claims he was fired for refusing to approve a billion dollars in shady fees to KBR, or like, drilling in the wildlife refuge or whatev. Do you have anything to say about this shit?
MEGAN: Oh, McCain doesn't want to drill in ANWR, he wants to drill along the CA/FL coasts, something that Bush and Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist and Arnie and the Republicans from all those states have opposed because it will ruin the views of Republican voters who hate high gas prices and environmentalism but love them their views.

MEGAN: Also, the KBR thing is just confirming what everyone already knew, which is that pressure was applied at some point. I am amazed that no one caught the part where the Administration recently signed a 10-year contract with KBR to provide services to our troops in Iraq. That's, you know, until 2018.
MEGAN: We also didn't talk about the floods will raise food prices or the Chinese expat newspaper article about Obama's skin color, but shit happens.

A couple of days ago I visited some friends, all artistically-inclined, who live in a converted factory in a remote corner of Brooklyn. They have a tree house and no bathroom door and someone plays the lute. It was all very countercultural and very bohemian and Vogue would have adored it. I was reminded of this as I read through this month's Vanity Fair, in which Christopher Hitchens waxes nostalgic about his days as a youngish Trotskyite living la vie boheme in Soho and the Village. The piece is a meditation on the vanishing world of bohemia, and a call to save the Greenwich Village block (Seventh/Greenwich/11th/13th) threatened by a massive and soulless hospital building. "Every successful society needs its Bohemia, a haven for the artists, exiles, and misfits who regenerate the culture," claims the piece.

Now, it's no secret that Hitch phones it in a lot of the time (drink in hand, one assumes.) And it's also absolutely true that the new building will almost surely be a monstrosity that wantonly destroys old, attractive blocks and succeeds in further eroding the character of the city; the Apple could stand to profit by London and San Francisco's more civic-minded example in this regard. But to claim such destruction has one whit to do with the preservation of New York's bohemia - or anything other than nostalgia - is disingenuous in the extreme. Not only is the West Village one of the most expensive hoods in a very pricey burg - no secret there - but New York hasn't played host to a real bohemia for decades.

I dig the idea of the Boho west village as much as anyone: who doesn't like the idea of Edna Saint Vincent Millay and Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas leaping around in romantic squalor, tripping over each other on cobblestone streets? It's so appealing precisely because it doesn't exist anymore. Even those well-preserved Greenwich Village streets in no danger of demolition are now thronged with Marc Jacobs stores, the former tenements selling for millions, the White Horse Tavern and Cafe Wha? thronged with NYU boys swilling Heineken. I really don't know what Hitch is on about.

More to the point, New York bohemia itself is a lost world. The whole point of bohemians is that they were a true counterculture (and if you like this stuff, I really rec Among The Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson.) Their ethos depended upon butting against a status quo that was entrenched and rigid in a way we can't imagine. It was actually a societal risk in the 19th and early 20th centuries to pursue a career in the arts, to say nothing of a financial one. Anyone living in New York today does not have the luxury of poverty; you have to be somewhere cheaper. If you can manage it on a starving artists's ducats, you're not gonna be anywhere picturesque, that's for sure: most of the artists I know don't fancy themselves as denizens of Staten Island.

Obviously you can still make art here. And you can certainly be poor. But the classic bohemian ethos has been embraced by the mainstream, which kinda ruins everything. Books like The Bohemian Manifesto and Simon Doonan's latest, Eccentric Glamour, break down bohemian lifestyle into an easy-to-replicate formula, describing the various types and subgenres upon whom to model oneself ("The Beat", the "Simone de Beauvoir" etc.) In the current Lucky Jean Godrey-June rhapsodizes about the 60s boho influence on fashion. While Bohemianism always had an aesthetic element to it, and a good deal of silliness, too, it was still about forging paths, backed by (often vague) principles.

My friends' space is neat. I think one of them even has parents somewhere in the Midwest who disapprove of his lifestyle; the others only wish they did. But they are hyper-aware of the lifestyle they are replicating, the bohemians who came before, and the fact that one can't help, today, but have something of a safety net. That building's going to go up, and that makes me sad. But the fact that it feels like there is so little left to be discovered - that we can only reinvent - makes me sadder.

Last Call, Bohemia [Vanity Fair]

• Laura Bush gave a speech about Burma a.k.a. Myanmar and disaster preparedness and Jenna's wedding. Her lipstick was very well-applied. More than 10,000 people may die as a result of the cyclone. Harry built a limestone altar in Texas especially for the wedding. It will be "permanent" in contrast to many of the structures in Myanmar, where limestone and most other things are in short supply. The ruling junta is holding a referendum this weekend to solidify its control of their dirt- poor, isolated disaster zone and I guess this means they win. Governments that are more efficient when it comes to killing citizens than warning about floods always win in the short term. And also the medium term. [Huffington Post]
  
• Hey, speaking of nuptials/Third World personalities! Mariane Pearl might be Angelina Jolie's maid of honor. [Times Of India]
  
• The primary was so ugly, John and Cindy McCain couldn't bring themselves to vote for a candidate in 2000. [Huffington Post]
  
• Kind of similar situation with John and Elizabeth Edwards and Hillary and Obama. [TPM]

• A nun says Catholics like Hillary Clinton because they want to stick it to the Catholic Church for being so sexist. [Slate]
• Do you ever think how maybe back in the eighties Michelle Obama made a pact with Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan and Stokley Carmichael aka Kwame Toure to groom a charismatic neo Malcolm X figure only so they could later sacrifice him when he became too powerful and universally respected like something out of Malcolm X or like the Bible? Me neither, but that's sort of what Chris Hitchens seems to be saying. [Slate]
• The Rush Limbaugh Hillary Clinton lovefest is kind of cute in that sickening way true love is always kind of sickening. [Rush]
• Oh great now Germany is getting our jobs? [Indy Star]
• If you haven't been on food stamps or some other form of welfare yet you might as well go out tonight and pair an extravagant meal with an expensive bottle of wine because in all likelihood you are someday going to be impoverished, friends; just know it happens to the best 75% of us. [UPI]

Hirsi Ali, for her part, blames Islam — and not a lunatic fringe — for 9/11 and would like everyone to renounce this idea there is a fucking God already. Hirsi Ali, from our previous readings, would seem to be kind of high on her own awesome Powers of Intellect, and irritatingly self-promotional about it, but this strikes at the heart of the division between the two women's worldviews.

The writer Paul Berman suggests that the difference between them may be due to the fact that Ms. Manji was raised in the warm, liberal, welcoming precincts of British Columbia, where religion could be a comfort rather than a burden, where pluralism was an assumption, a fact of life. (Ms. Manji was kicked out of her Islamic religious school for asking too many questions, but before that she had been cared for at a Baptist church, and at age 8 even won its Most Promising Christian of the Year award.) Ms. Hirsi Ali's early years, by contrast, consisted of dictatorship, war, patriarchy, genital cutting, confinement and beatings so severe that she once ended up in a hospital with a fractured skull. Ms. Manji offers her own support for Mr. Berman's conjecture: "Had I grown up in a Muslim country, I'd probably be an atheist in my heart."

Muslim Rebel Sisters: At Odds With Islam And Each Other [NY Times]
In Good Faith [NY Times]

Donna Langley, president of production at Universal, on Tina: "Tina really is the new woman who can have it all. [On TV], she navigates a man's world but maintains her own sense of self, she never has to compromise her ideals to get what she wants — yet she's not manipulative or coquettish. In her personal life, she's married, she has a lovely baby, she was the first woman to be the head writer at SNL — she's crossed all these barriers and milestones as a woman, so it makes her a great role model.''

Tina on late night munchies: ''I was playing a game with the camera guys: Guess What's Inside Me. 'Yes, there is Cheez Whiz inside me. Toll House cookies? Yes. Salami? Yes.''' Tina on Baby Mama: ''I liked the topicality of the fertility issues that affect so many people. There's so much weirdness and emotion about it. If you start with something juicy, you end up with a better [movie] than if you just start with some jokes. And Amy liked that it did not have anything to do with a goddamn wedding.''

Tina on Fame: "They should draw up an equation: What level of fame do you need to achieve to keep doing what you want? Because you don't want any more than that. You don't want someone to take a picture of your butt on the beach.... How do you get to be Christopher Guest? Just live your life, make hilarious movies with your friends, and then go home.''

Tina on "Real Women" in film: ''There was a time when Teri Garr was in everything. She was adorable, but also completely real — her body was real, her teeth were real, you felt like she'd be your friend.''

Tina on her big mouth:''Pretty soon my kid's going to understand what I'm saying and be able to access it on the computer. I screwed up something a few months ago and I was like, 'You know who wouldn't do that? Tom Hanks. You know who would keep his mouth shut? Tom Hanks. I should try to be like Tom Hanks.'''

Tina Fey: One Hot 'Mama' [Entertainment Weekly]
Tina Fey - "Marie Claire" May 2008 [Just Jared]

Earlier: Tina Fey To Amy Poehler: "I Wanna Put My Baby Inside You!"
30 Rock's Liz Lemon Drunk Dials, Sings Alanis Morrisette Into A Wine Bottle Microphone

MEGAN: I'm pretty sure it's just going to rain the entire month of April.
moe: I'm pretty sure I don't want to have anything to do with this job today.
moe: It's not raining here though.
MEGAN: Well, whatever we get you get, I think, so just give it a few hours. If it doesn't work, I'll drive up there and then it will definitely rain.
moe: Anyway I think we have to talk about John McCain calling his wife a cunt.
moe: Yeah, AGAIN.
MEGAN: Yeah, kinda.
moe: I would rather talk about Chris Hitchens calling Andrew Sullivan a lesbian.
MEGAN: Well, we should parse that for the second.
moe: Okay, commenters: by the news roundup post I am REALLY incapable of anything but reflexive absurdist counterintuitiveness.
MEGAN: Does a man no one in their right mind would want to fuck calling a gay man a lesbian make that an insult? Because, frankly, given the choice of the two of them and my carpet getting munched, it's Sully FTW.
MEGAN: And I've met both of them.
moe: And everyone knows John McCain is a dick, and everyone knows he has a huge temper, and his utterance, while one that I'm sure stung at the time and surprised onlookers, was very much in keeping with that reputation. And being sixteen years ago, and existing as it did as one of millions of moments that make up a marriage, I ...just...did not think it was that big a deal. I mean, it shows his vicious, nasty side, yeah. Am I further offended because the word he used was "cunt"? Not really. He has anger issues. He's insecure. I've seen worse and been called worse. It's fucked up, but seriously, when you talk as much as John McCain, you run out of four letter words. I dunno, I was just utterly ...whatever.
moe: I am insensitive, what can I say.
MEGAN: No, I mean, I guess I agree with part of that. Plus, when combined with trollop? The man was in the Navy, swears like a sailor and OBVIOUSLY he can't deal with losing his hair because he's rocking the combover to this day.
moe: The coldness and the naked insecurity of it was kind of interesting. But the word "cunt"?
moe: Right, also, "trollop"
moe: By "trollop" you're just laughing.
moe: "Cunt" seemed like an afterthought.
MEGAN: That said, if anyone I was dating did that, he wouldn't just have trouble raising his arms above half mast.
MEGAN: Trollop would be fine, though. Cunt would make me seethe.
MEGAN: But I'm sensitive. A guy I was dating in the fall "jokingly" called me a whore in a text message and I went into full-on blind rage.
moe: It's like, "oh crap, my antiquated put-down makes me look older than my thinning hair...fuck you, you...CUNT"
MEGAN: In fact, I wrote a post about it
MEGAN: And cunt won.
MEGAN: As the word a dude should never call you.
MEGAN: But, also, I'm sensitive about my makeup application skills, I think I've mentioned. So between the cunt and the makeup insult, I would probably have cried.
moe: Yeah well...I don't generally date verbal abusers. Though I actually don't think anyone at this point could call me a whore in any way that wasn't ironic. Also, I don't think anyone I have dated has ever been that mad at me, except when we haven't really been dating, which is kind of sad in its own way.
MEGAN: The emotion I most often feel at the end or after a relationship is annoyance. Like, I just get annoyed instead of mad, and that doesn't tend to provoke anger.
moe: Yeah, I dunno. I feel bad, now, calling attention to her misuse of foundation. I do not feel bad, however, using the word "tranny." I dunno. God I have cramps. Okay: so the real crime of that exchange is that if there is truth to the perception that Cindy is some sort of trophy Stepford wife, and John McCain, war hero etc. etc. was just sick of his Stepford wife ragging on him for being an old geezer, and also sick of any number of other things that happened that day, which is, I guess, probably the truth, then yeah, it's a statement that would sting. But...

MEGAN: She did have a lot of foundation on, and for no reason that I could tell. She seems to have otherwise-lovely skin.
moe: Sixteen years later they're still together and she's gone through a lot and she's proud of her country and she wears too much makeup. It's terrible that society does to our women, sure. But sometimes we do it ourselves! Or have a professional do it. I professional applied my makeup the last time I was in a wedding. It was cringe-inducing, so I had to wipe it off and start over.
moe: I hated that woman.
MEGAN: That happened to one of my friends! It was like 1/4 of an inch thick! Her mother talked her into it. I don't like her mother.
moe: Here's the story of how in Israel "makeup artist" is just another code for "mossad"

MEGAN: She was just taking out her own insecurities on you.
MEGAN: Wait, just like John McCain.
MEGAN: I love when I can work something like that back in.
moe: You're good with the segues. I'm trying to figure out a way to work in all those weird online psychological tests Nick Kristof has been pushing.
MEGAN: Oh, yeah, those have been around for ages. We're all racist.
MEGAN: Basically.
MEGAN: We all clutch our purses like Barry's grandma.
moe: I actually couldn't even figure out how to work the first one. And then the second one said I implicitly showed a predisposition for Obama followed by Hillary followed by McCain.
moe: It took me 20 minutes of clicking and feeling like a retard to figure this out.
moe: Sometimes when you know something implicitly
moe: You should just leave it at that.
MEGAN: So, we implicitly like attractive people, have issues with our moms but still love them and mistrust scary old people? Sounds about right.

MEGAN: I'm sure you saw this, but it's now official that young people want old people to vote for Obama because the New York Times wrote about the trend.
moe: Oh, no see, but they advanced the trend: now it's grandchildren influencing these endorsements! Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle finally capitulated to a seven-year-old.

The two adult sons of Governor Doyle, 62, both black and both adopted, spoke to him with fervor about Mr. Obama's vision of a multiracial country. Then Mr. Doyle's young grandson piled on.

"He's a complete Barackomaniac," Mr. Doyle said in a phone interview. "When I asked him why, he said, 'I think he's really going to work hard for us.' I thought, that's it through the eyes of a 7-year-old. 'He'll work hard,' and 'for us.' "

"I'm glad they're interested in something other than their own self-interest and partying."

MEGAN: Well, you know, when they can pay them these days.
moe: Hey speaking of, Tina Brown thinks the election is like a reality show and that Clinton will end up the survivor. Wait, and speaking of Brits, most of them seem to like Obama. John Cleese wants to get a job writing his speeches! And also speaking of Brits, we still haven't talked about Sullivan/Hitchens.
MEGAN: I'm still confused about the icky straight man calling the HIV-infected former barebacking through personal ads gay man a "lesbian."
9:35 AM
moe: Here's the clip.
MEGAN: Wait, what the hell?

MEGAN: I thought the whole POINT of being a lesbian-in-a-bad-way was that you were meaner and more forward than us girlie-girl straight girls.
MEGAN: But it just means you are forgetful?
MEGAN: Or a whiner?
MEGAN: Christopher Hitchens: Still drinking.
moe: Maybe we should petition him to make "bonerkiller" his new miscellaneous put-down. And I know this is only tangentially related to anything, but this piece on how Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama's cousin Dick Cheney were born the same year was pretty cool, and I meant to link to it, and then I didn't because...Moe Tkacik: Still drinking.
MEGAN: I have to say, I still love articles that point out that Bush and Cheney never served in Vietnam
MEGAN: Also, good for Jeremiah Wright.

moe: Oh god, now weigh in on two things while I go find a more flattering mea culpa picture of Cindy McCain. The Washington Post is officially the best paper in America, and yes, journalism is dead.
MEGAN: I love how CBS is going to cut actual news operations in order to keep paying Katie Couric who nobody likes anyway to anchor a newscast filled with content provided by others.
9:50 AM
MEGAN: Also, the Weingarten story that won? Amazing. There's a little Asian man who plays a Chinese violin in the subway who no one notices but his music is beautiful and haunting and I always give him money and everyone else walks by. Chinese violins are, like, impossible to keep tuned and notoriously difficult to master, and it would make my morning to hear him even when I hated my job.
moe: One thing that's great about the Post is that, you know, they all know how to report stuff there, so if enough people land on good shit one year...a bunch of people you've never heard of can all win Pulitzers! And I say you've never heard of them only in the sense that they've never been personalities, like, on Gawker. And they don't write for the "Most Emailed List" because...the Most Emailed List isn't on the homepage! Sigh...if only "quality journalism" could make any $$$
moe: And yeah, I liked that story a lot. I like most things he does, though.
MEGAN: Oh, and if you haven't read the violinist story Gene won for, it's here.
MEGAN: Yeah, his features are always really good. He gets through the editing process with his voice intact.
moe: Well he is the editor. He used to be Dave Barry's editor at the Miami Herald. I don't think I know that from reading Dave Barry but. Here's something stupid Gene did that I linked to yesterday that no one commented on but you should check it out sometime bc it's funny.
MEGAN: No, if you haunt his chats, he's actually edited! He refers to his editor as Tom the Butcher.
MEGAN: I remember reading that!
moe: Man, I wish Tom would butcher me a little bit.

• "I heard Obama speak. He hit me with that he-just-got-done- watching-'Malcolm X,' and I swear to God, I'm like, 'Yo, Obama!' 'I'm Obama to the end now, baby!," says 50 Cent, who originally supported Hillary Clinton. He has since "lost interest." [MTV]
  
• One of the girls who tormented Megan Meier under the tutelage of evil mom Lori Drew is going to be on TV tomorow talking about how Lori turned out to be a crappy "mother figure." Um, yeah. [ABC]
  
• You know how after 9/11 the government consolidated all these government functions into the Department of Homeland Security, which was probably an expensive waste of time? Well they are sort of doing that with all the regulatory agencies that are supposed to keep track of how much money all of these sophisticated "security" things are worth so the economy doesn't find itself with a hole the size of the Russian economy in it. It will take a long time, and probably not work. [WSJ]
  
• Obama has his widest gap in the Gallup tracking poll of Democrats of any candidate since February. February! That is almost the month before last! [Wonkette]

• Oh, look who favors socialized medicine! The folks who provide it. Funny, that! Think they all got brainwashed by the happy British doctor in Sicko? [Reuters]
• Chelsea Clinton quotes Salt N Pepa. [Wonkette]
• Do Pennsyvlanians distrust women or black folks more? [AP]
• Paris Hilton is a "role model for young girls everywhere," according to Paris Hilton. [Redlasso]
• Finally, a pundit with the guts to take Hillary to task for this Bosnia thing. What would we do without you, Hitchens? [Slate]
• Did you hear about this whole "Earth Hour" thing? Yeah, don't worry, nobody did. [Time]

Chicks With Schticks [Vanity Fair]
Who Says Women Aren't Funny? [Vanity Fair]