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.

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: Yo sorry I'm late I had massive insomnia last night. What's going on? I feel like I read 759 different "think pieces" on the election last night.
MEGAN: Yeah, believe me, I tossed and turned for kind of a while last night and then woke up in the middle of the night and was up for a while. I think there are a ton of fucking think pieces out there because there's no actual news to report.
MOE: What do you mean? Obama totally went bowling! And drank Yuengling.
MEGAN: I'll guarantee that he's a better bowler than me. I once got a gutter ball in a bumper lane instead of hitting actual pins.
MOE: Okay, so I read the entire fucking Kelefa Sanneh piece on Jeremiah Wright in the New Yorker. I read the entire elegy to the Republican party in the Times Magazine. I read probably 28 pieces calling on Hillary Clinton to bow out of the campaign, about 25 of which came with the disclaimer "I know she won't but." Nora Ephron's may have been my favorite. Shit, now I can't find it.
MEGAN: I mean, I don't understand why everyone all of a sudden wants her to drop out except for the polls last week that show Democrats are all getting pissed enough at the other guy's people to vote for McCain, and thus also don't understand why the other guy's people would continue pissing off her people by calling on her to drop out.
MOE: She should drop out because, at this point, she's been beaten, and she's been beaten by a candidate who had a lot more to prove.
MEGAN: Well, but she's not quite beaten yet and she's bloodied him pretty damn well in the last couple of weeks.
MOE: She's bloodied herself worse on imaginary sniper fire
MEGAN: I mean, I just think that the calls all started because of the polls that show Nader taking votes from both of them and McCain beating either one of them, but that's a stupid reason. What she ought to do is Fire Mark Penn.
MEGAN: And then stop improving her negative rating
MEGAN: I mean, I guess I sort of wish it was over, but that's mostly because I'm fucking sick of talking and writing about it, but that's not really a good enough reason. And, also, calling for her to drop out is pissing off a lot of her supporters, which is worse than keeping going.
MOE: I dunno. I feel like a lot of her supporters are over it too. I mean, look, when was the last time we had a knockdown dragout with Sinister Rouge? Here, by the way, is the Nora Ephron piece.

She is me, and then again she's not. I used to love her and I no longer do, but unlike what usually happens when love dies, I still think about her far too much. When she tells a big lie, like her recent Bosnia episode, I can lose hours trying to figure out why. I mean, why? Was it one of those things that she'd said so often that she'd come to believe it? Was it a story that had worked in the past so she thought she'd gotten away with it? Did she honestly think that no one would rat her out? Does she not understand that if you're famous, there's almost nothing you do that someone doesn't have a picture of? I have no idea what the answer is to any of this because I'm not a liar and she is. (By the way, I don't think she was always a liar, the way some kids are born liars and never get over it. I think she was once a truthful person and her lying skills were forged in the early years of her marriage, forged in the crucible of Bill's infidelities and in her role as point person in dealing with them. This is what happens when you marry a narcissist: he spills the milk, you clean it up and your love grows. And then you end up a liar, just like him.)

Many conservative activists have become so dissatisfied with the party's heresies, particularly on immigration and government spending, that as Cole's staff took over, the committee's fund-raising pleas were being ignored and, on at least one occasion, returned in an envelope stuffed with feces.

"You go back to the Reagan years, and even before that, and we always had a three-legged stool: anti-Communism, anti-abortion and tax and spend," Dan Mattoon, the Republican lobbyist and former deputy chairman of Cole's committee, told me. "The first leg dropped off when the Berlin Wall fell, and after 9/11 we've tried to do the same thing with terrorism, but it's not as strong. The second leg, tax and spend, was pretty strong until George Bush. Then we had just one leg of the stool, which was social issues, and I think that you look at the makeup of the younger generation and there's more of a libertarian view on social issues." Cole says that the party's rhetoric on issues like gay marriage has cast Republicans as too reactionary for many suburban districts. "My problem on social issues is the tone — sometimes we have been too shrill, and that has alienated voters who might otherwise have joined us," he told me. The challenge, then, is finding a new generation of candidates who aren't.

"I don't need the nominee to win; I just need him to be competitive enough that we can win behind him in the places that should be ours," Cole said. "I need him to be Gerald Ford."

When I asked the House minority leader John Boehner how he assessed the committee's fund-raising so far, he told me: "It stinks. No other way to put it."

No. I'm thankful I got fired when I did, so that I didn't have to be associated with what they subsequently did.

McCain recently confessed in public that his grasp of economics is limited.Yeah. That's a great place to start from, isn't it?

MOE: ah tere you are
  you can tell by my typing that I am extraordinarily hungover
But you will tell even moreso from my thought process
 
MEGAN: I am a little hung over myself, and dying for a Diet Coke. But it's pouring rain here.

MOE: OH my god the "Video Professor" himself is on Fox and Friends.
 
MEGAN: Nuh-uh! Switching now!
  
Wow, he's orange.

MOE: He's giving away a FREE BASKET of HIS INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEOS
Um and then they cut to a big segment on who got kicked off American Idol
Never suggest that Fox only has time for its right wing ideological agenda.
 
MEGAN: Does Elton think AI is still racist?
Okay, NO WAY is Donald's hair not thinning. Also, this is pretty much why I watch CNN even though they replaced my Soledad.

MOE: Yeah I would watch MSNBC probably because it's the Fox News of Trotskyists but ...I still can't figure out why they're both muted on my cable box. I think I should probably call time warner. But who wants to do that?

MEGAN: Oh, God, and be on hold forever? But at least it's not Comcast. Neener neener, Comcast, I got FiOS
Oh, God, that asshole that asked Chelsea about Monica is going to be on CNN. Does he not realize that everyone thinks he's a complete douchebag?

MOE: Okay so, some stories. Hillary wants grandkids. But why should we trust you, lying pimp puppet Chelsea? How do we know she didn't actually say, "I want a grandcat so in the middle of the night I can slaughter it??"
  Also, I don't care that that guy asked Chelsea that question.
  I mean, the way it was phrased was annoyingly Fox News.
  But fuck, she is an adult  
He looks like an ass.

MEGAN: OMG, totally. I just think it's a douche move to ask a girl about her father's affair. He is an ass.
 
MOE: Meh.
 I mean, I guess.

MEGAN: Ha, he's saying other dudes from his communications class wanted to know the answer. Because they're dudes.
 
MOE: The chance it would get answered by someone like Chelsea are so slim...the chance you'll look like an ass are so high.
 
MEGAN: They're all trying to figure out how to cheat on a woman and get her to stick around.
 
MOE: Fuck if Chelsea knows. She wanted her mom to leave him when she was ten or something.

MEGAN: Dude, so, remember how they passed that law allowing pilots to carry guns in the wake of 9/11? Yeah, some guy shot up his own plane by accident yesterday. I feel safer. You?

\
MOE: Oh god: 1. Who. 2. You know what's depressing is I just checked Facebook and my Horoscope says it's a good day for my "intellect" rating. And my initial thought was, "And I squandered it on THIS HANGOVER" and my immediate corollary thought was "Which is so bad I am believing my horoscope"? I think we should talk about that Pakistan story though. In the Washington Post, on how Musharaf's reduced powers are forcing us to bomb them with our own two ...well, bomb them unilaterally. Does this vindicate Obama? Because I'm really hungover.
  
But that's how it seems.
Also Donald Trump is on Fox & Friends talking about his brief run for the presidency. And he's saying that he didn't plan to run. "People tinkered with me. I made a speech in New Hampshire and people said, 'He's running!'" Um, Donald? Remember that book you wrote about your plan to run for president? Because I do. And it was AMAZING.
Donald Trump is like the apotheosis of everything I love about this country/city/dudes/etc.
 
MEGAN: Can Donald Trump just disappear again, like he did in about 1996? Because that was amazing.
Also, my Facebook horoscope says "A dramatic change in your attitude or appearance could have a negative impact on family relationships right now. You may not have done anything as drastic as a nose ring or a facial tattoo, but you could risk making a bad impression on someone whose help you will need in the future." Luckily, I barely leave the house, so I can't make a bad impression on anyone!

MOE: Ooooooh, this is what mine says.

It is impossible for you to be content with superficial answers now, and you are impatient with people who avoid looking candidly and honestly at root causes and hidden reasons for any problem or situation. You tend to force your views on other people now. Also, you can become obsessed with an idea or problem until you have figured it out.

MEGAN: My God, the Facebook horoscope people, like, know you. Today.

MOE: So did Hillary plagiarize her Bosnia trip account from Olympia Snowe?
  Is Chuck Phillips as much of an idiot as Bill O'Reilly, as Jay-Z once notably suggested?
Oh look, the GDP is suffering, but corporate profits are still on the rise! That's great, great news for those of us in the problem solving business.
 
MEGAN: Anyway, so on Pakistan. I can't believe that people were all freaked out about Obama saying we'd go after OBL in Pakistan with or without Pakistani permission. I mean, had it been the anti-war people freaking out, fine, but hawks were the ones who wigged. I mean, the only reason we haven't yet is so's we don't destabilize Uncle Pervy. But if we go after them now, maybe, Obama can actually live up to his doctrine about changing the way we do foreign policy or something.
Olympia Snowe's totally voting for Hillary I bet.
And Chuck Phillips must be the only person in the world that thinks that Diddy is anything but a middle class guy. He's probably even nice.
Also, if you'd like, a moment of silence. The inventor of the Egg McMuffin has gone to the Playland in the sky.
 
MOE: Oh, and shit, just in time for tax season: guess who's suddenly "under scrutiny" as a result of this financial crisis that no one understands: the accounting industry. What a surprise! You mean, the ones who actually understand this shit are the culprits? When was the last time the accountants were blamed for some arcane financial scandalcrisis thingy? The last time one happened? Speaking of, calling all corrupt accountants: I still need one! And now, to resume denial. Re Pakistan: everything you said. This is why I'm eager to see a McCain-Obama foreign policy debate play out. But Hillary is taking it to the Convention. Where, by the way, we are going. Don't worry if you want to bring someone home I can sleep through pretty much anything.
Holy SHIT re the egg mcMuffin! Did you see that I wrote about egg mcmuffins yesterday?
 
MEGAN: I did! Also, I was sad you didn't mention the time I actually made you one on your actual stove.
 
MOE: I was really hungover that time.
Or wait, in pain...something.
 
MEGAN: I remember, that's why I made you one! Runny yolks and all.
 
MOE: But thank you. I used to make those all the time on the actual stove but english muffins are curiously hard to come by and/or expensive in this neighborhood, in contrast to Harlem, where they were abundant and cheap.
I know you care, audience.
 
MEGAN: No, we were both shitty drunk the night before. That's when we met up with Greg Wassertrom and Hunter Walker and then you went to a party and I got drunk and waited for you at the bar downstairs and argued with some Hillary supporter just because I could.
Because I was feeling argue-y.
  Really? I'll bring English muffins up next time.
By the way, how much do you want to give a low dollar donation to get in on the raffle to have dinner with Obama? Because I want to. Bad.

MOE: Oh right. That night. I went to Jessica's house and we discussed ...cannibalism. I had just read that Harper's reading re cannibalism during the Great Leap Forward. Which, inspires me to bring you this small update re Tibet. 660 people have been held, according to the government. I am not sure why we are supposed to believe them, but that is what they say. And dinner with Obama: I knew when it started looking like he could become president that I was foregoing any chance for dinner with him, and that is okay.

MEGAN: Also, CNN is reporting live from Philly in front of the Art Museum and they are apparently having a Frieda Kahlo exhibit. I think we should task Commenter Braak to go and report back.
 
MOE: Hey Braak, speaking of, do you know about ESCHACON????
 
MEGAN: Only 660 people? That doesn't actually seem like a lot for China.

MOE: I am supposed to go down on Saturday and meet TRex and sundry other leftblogger types in Philly but...I also have like ninety other commitments, one of which is my sister, who just texted me telling me her newest documentary plan was "My Sister, The Marxist," and I should really try to do my taxes this weekend, if only for the sake of the art. Do you know there is a giant picture of ammunition on the front of the Times today and I havent' gotten to the story yet?Something about the Afghans. Ammunition is not the most photogenic thing, you know? I guess it's an image that conjures ...possibility. But.

MEGAN: Well, if you go, tell TRex I say hi and that I am mad at him for not inviting me, too. I mostly did my taxes earlier this week, I just now have to figure out that whole home office thingie and whether there's anyway that I can possibly get enough of a deduction out of that to make it worth my time to figure it out.

MOE: Oh my god the story is actually kind of amazing.

But to arm the Afghna forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.

MOE: Okay, so the company is called AEY. Hedquarters: Miami Beach. 22-year-old CEO Efraim Diveroli: hott.In a shaggy way. Contracts up to $300 million. Wiretap suggesting: corruption; old arms; everything made in China. I haven't gotten to the jump, but already I am going to tell you: Israeli mob. Ecstasy trafficker family. And that brings me back to Trump, and this story I did about how he was doing business with the Israeli mob — unwittingly of course. everything is unwitting with him.

MEGAN: Because he is witless?

MOE: But yeah. I'm telling you. Mark my words. His family is in the ecstasy business. If only they were selling that to the Afghans. Also: how are you supposed to transport anything into Afghanistan if you aren't somehow wound up with contraband traffickers? No one talks about what logistics geniuses the drug traffickers are, and how we could probably make business a lot more efficient by legalizing drugs and learning their secrets. Well no one talks about that because it is a retarded thought. I'm jumping.

MEGAN: Actually, that's not a completely retarded thought. I mean, heroin is really Afghanistan's most successful export and it gets grown and distributed well despite all its problems. Like, we can't even manage to distribute money not to grow it well.
 
MOE: Here is the masseur. Also hott.

MEGAN: Albania's defense minister? Totally fuckable.
The masseur looks high as shit and like a drug dealer. I'm sticking with the defense minister.
  The masseur's eyes are like something out of a horror movie.
Efraim looks stoned.
 
MOE: Oh Jesus.

Michael Diveroli, Efraim's father, had incorporated the company in 1999, when Efraim was 13. For several years, a period when the company appeared to have limited activity, Michael Diveroli, who now operates a police supply company down the street from AEY's office, was listed as the company's sole executive.

MEGAN: Nice. Efraim looks like one of those guys I would happily allow to hit on me in a bar and use his rather limited vocabulary to tell me how fucking sexy I am and how I should go home with him and who I will never actually go home with because I think if you cannot say "cunnilingus" correctly you probably aren't going to be worth the time or the condom to fuck.

MOE: Ephraim is a young Israeli mobster from Miami. I interviewed one once. He was a year from federal prison, not that he revealed that to me at the time. He was the cockiest motherfucker I've met in my entire life. But, in the words of the intern who transcribed the interview: "God he sounded hot."
'
MEGAN: A little arrogance can be attractive in a man, especially, say, if a girl is particularly used to dating guys with maybe not a ton of self esteem NOT THAT I DO THAT OR ANYTHING but too much just pisses me off because normally it's not backed up by anything.  
But I'm also older than your former intern.

MOE: On a note unrelated to sex, the thing this story is making me realize is that the cool thing about selling arms is that, unlike with lead toys or drugs, they don't seem to get screened so much. This guy seemed like he was picking his up in Albania — straight-arrow country, that Albania — and they'd originally come from China in the sixties and seventies. In the sixties and seventies, when arms were probably being smelted in backyards while people subsisted on other people, not to get to circular about things. I am still awestruck by the... awesomeness of this story. 
Incidentally, the Albanian they hired to repackage this shit, Kosta Trebicka, is also pretty hot.

MEGAN: Our government defense dollars at work. No wonder we're winning the war.

MOE: OH my god best. So last summer, Trebicka and Diveroli, the 22-year-old, were talking about how tough it was to do business in Albania, and the 22-year-old suggested that Trebeckia send "one of your girls" to have sex with the head of the export agency. "Money might help too." It always comes back to whores.

MEGAN: And money. Also, really? Did any of these guys have trouble getting laid without having to pay for it?

MOE: Not if they're drinking with me. But you know the neocons: they like a challenge.