MEGAN: Good morning! I am struggling for something funny or interesting to say here, so let's just pretend I said something pithy, okay?

SPENCER: God, show some effort, will you? Though you always have something pithy to say. You're pith filled. Talking to you is like screening Revenge Of The Pith. Unlike this asshole.

MEGAN: I had the pith taken out of my by the last half of the bottle of red I drank last night.

SPENCER:

“I’m from Arkansas. I understand why she’s popular…. It’s the job of our side not to attack who she is but to focus on differences in policy.”

MEGAN: Well, now, see, I don't disagree with Clinton, but I'm not the fucking former President of the United States saying it either.

SPENCER: Please no more sir. Enough of this. You're not wrong, substantively. But you really ought to come to terms with the fact that you are no longer in a position to hector the Democratic Party on strategy. Notice that the comment implicitly presumes the Democrats are attacking Palin's character, which is a key GOP meme right now. And you know what Bill Clinton was great at, throughout the 90s? Attacking his opponents' characters.

MEGAN: Right, the full article makes mention of the fact that it's echoing Karl Rove's advice, which is not something I like to hear said about Bill Clinton. The great thing about Clinton used to be that he could do it without getting caught doing it.

SPENCER: Yes, Bill Clinton never got caught doing anything. Anyway.

MEGAN: Well, except that one thing that one time...

SPENCER: Let's not waste any time: Steve Schmidt is shanking the New York Times! And Politico's Ben Smith! And soon Marc Ambinder! You're next, whore.

MEGAN: Steve Schmidt can come and get me! I will be a partisan on the rag, which is way worse than "a partisan rag".

SPENCER: Sridhar Pappu and I were tossing this around in our office: clearly this is a cynical move to rally troglodyte-cons who for some reason feel threatened by a fucking newspaper. Blah blah blah that's obvious. But when you're really the sort of politician those troglodyte-cons embrace and identify with, you don't need to sound the media-bias alarm. Like Bush never did. Palin never does. Dole and Bush Senior were the ones who whined about the press. It comes from a position of weakness, exposing itself like a twisted Foucaultian undercurrent. No?

MEGAN: Well, Cheney did call a reporter an asshole on mike, I think that was probably better than screaming about media bias. I honestly think it makes them look really stupid, especially when they didn't do it when the Times was all intimating that he was boinking the lobbyist. Now they're biased? Please. Even George Will is attacking McCain right now.

SPENCER: No no no, they absolutely did. Rick Davis put out a huge fundraising letter that represented the campaign's first opportunity in 2008 for McCain to make a serious pitch for troglodytecons. They've been laying the groundwork to get rid of the sense on the right that McCain has always been the media's candidate. If I'm not mistaken, they rejected the NYT's endorsement. My personal favorite part in Ben Smith's piece is this cameo from tittyboy Michael Goldfarb:

One McCain aide, Michael Goldfarb, said Politico was “quibbling with ridiculously small details when the basic things are completely right.”

Hahahahahahaha! I remember when Goldfarb's still-employers at the Weekly Standard were harping on that line about CBS's Bush-National Guard fabrication-story being "fake but accurate."

MEGAN: Well, they have criticisms! That the criticisms themselves are flat-out lies doesn't mean the spirit of the criticisms are wrong!

SPENCER: Speaking of ample-bosomed gentlemen on the right, we should probably discuss the latest moment of incandescent grace from Jonah Goldberg

MEGAN: I think Jonah Goldberg should stop buying up all the nice bras in my size.

SPENCER: What bra-buying tips would you offer him? I'm serious. This is potentially lifechanging for the poor fellow.

MEGAN: If he's looking for a supportive garment, he should make sure to get the appropriate strap size and avoid demi-cups and balconette bras. Otherwise, he'll look like his boobs are about to spill out everywhere, which is pretty much why I buy exclusively demi-cup bras. That, and the ability to fool my eyes about their size if there isn't enough material to cover all of my breasts.

SPENCER: But do you think pieces like this — wherein observations of racist intimations become indicators of a deeper-seated racism — result from, say, poor back support?

MEGAN: I think that, really, the poor back-support is less problematic than the weight pulling on the muscles on the front of his chest. Only that painful sensation you get from too much jiggling would cause Jonah Goldberg to completely exonerate any potential racists in the Republican party by pointing out that there are racists everywhere! Including in the Democratic party! Well, ho-kay, Jonah, you caught us. Racism is a problem in this country. Also, I think the earlier part of his article in which he says it isn't why people are not going to vote for Obama but then admits that it is, that's totally from feeling sad watching them droop. Gravity's a bitch.

SPENCER: Just a few moments of Googling resulted in such beautiful moments in rightwingery as this:

You: a racist who is not planning to vote.
Me: a guy who thinks this country will be worse off if Obama is elected
This comment is for you! Perhaps you won’t vote, but Oprah and her followers will.
You might decide to sit out the election, but Sharpton and his followers won’t.

Um, what?

MEGAN: Yes, I am a huge follower of Al Sharpton. Well, there was that time at the DNC when I followed him to try to get a picture, but he was walking really fast so I gave up following him.

SPENCER:

You might be too busy to vote for McCain, but 85-90% of blacks will vote for Obama.
Get your lazy racist scum of the earth butt out there and vote for McCain. Why? Because it is best for America. Is McCain perfect? NO! Is Obama evil, or bad, or would he be a rotten President? Nope. Obama is a liberal. That’s my agenda. I don’t want some liberal partisan hack from the Chicago political machine to run this great country. Will he ruin it? Nah. It would take more than one man to ruin this country, but we will be worse off with him as Obama as President, in my opinion. So vote. Everybody who is not a racist hates you, and ignores you, so I am reaching out to you and asking you to vote for John McCain for President

How brave of this fellow! He clearly was too modest to accept such accolades, so he posted this anonymously.

MEGAN: Bravo, good sir! Racists have voting rights too! Unless they've been to prison.

SPENCER: Here's my favorite part:

To our liberal and Democrat friends and readers: Shut up. Don’t even complain about this comment.

MEGAN: Oh, well, I feel pwned.

SPENCER: Jonah, is that you? Don't make me hunt down any IP addresses!

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had — what Johnson describes as the body's ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying is, "hold their liquor." So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol's toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors — by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. "Most of the world's population today," Johnson writes, "is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol."

Yeah, this doesn't really explain that super-species of excessively-cerebral alcohol-allergic people you encountered in college who are now entirely too accomplished to hang out with you, but, you know, fuck 'em, right?

Earlier: Who's Sabotaging Your Relationships? It Could Be Darwin, But You're Probably Too Distracted To Care

MOE: Okay I cannot tell you how much I read and forgot last night while trying to get to sleep. And then a fucking earthquake came and toppled a thousand cell phone towers and trapped 900 high school students in school and if it's anything like the 1976 earthquake of a slightly lower Richter 240,000 people stand to die.
MOE: Did you also read how in Burma they are counting the survivors because it's easier than counting the dead? I guess the death toll there is supposed to reach 100,000...
MOE: But the Most Emailed story is this thought provoking Tom Friedman column.
MEGAN: That was last week, before the military decided that all the food was for them. So, I think we can safely assume that the total survival rate will be about equal to the members of the junta, the military and their families, since apparently everyone else is just supposed to die quietly and let the soldiers dump their bloated bodies in waterways so no one knows.
MEGAN: Fucking Tom Friedman.
8:55 AM
MOE:

That restriction has angered local government officials like Tin Win who are trying to help rebuild the lives of villagers. He twitched with rage as he described the rice the military gave him.

"They gave us four bags," he said. "The rice is rotten — even the pigs and dogs wouldn't eat it."

He said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had delivered good rice to the local military leaders last week but they kept it for themselves and distributed the waterlogged, musty rice. "I'm very angry," he said, adding an expletive to describe the military.

"The government told us that school must reopen June 1, if you have a schoolhouse or not," Myint Oo told his visitor. "'Teach under a tree if you have to,' they said."

When he began describing the devastation to the school and village, a portly man in a white T-shirt who also seemed to hold a position of power interrupted.

"Don't tell these foreigners anything," the man said.

Myint Oo replied that he wanted to talk to the visitors in the hope that they could help rebuild the village.

"They will send the facts to the world and show the weakness of the Myanmar government," said the man in the white shirt.

"This is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation...In the omphalocentric process of self-construction and discovery," today's youth "stalks love like a wary hunter, but has no time or target — not even the mellowing Communists — for hate."

MEGAN: Maybe he can talk about how he held the Metro system's budget hostage until they agreed to spend more than a million dollars to change all the signage in the system to reflect the full name of National Airport.
MEGAN: But to guarantee his ability to fuck over the Republican Party and my ability to have something interesting to write about, I would totally make my first political donation to him.
MOE: No Peggy is totes the weird answer to Maureen Dowd. Her prose is kind of hilarious, like the way she seems to go inside a dark room and close her eyes and meditate and return with a Very. Melodramatic. Assessment. Of the feelings and attitudes governing the political awareness of the American populace. I should have Maria do a Best Of Peggy I think. And does McCain really need Bob Barr undermining his campaign when he's got RON PAUL undermining it already?
MEGAN: Scroll down, by the way, for the picture of them standing in front of the Eiffel Tower with a Ron Paul sign. Crazy ass motherfuckers.
MOE: Also: didn't two McCain advisers just step down after admitting to representing the Burmese junta? (That might lose Laura Bush's vote.) McCain is kind of a lousy subject right now.
MOE: Here we go.

Doug Davenport, the regional campaign manager for the mid-Atlantic states, founded the DCI Group's lobbying practice and oversaw the contract with Myanmar in 2002.
"Doug has tendered his resignation and we have accepted it," Jill Hazelbaker, McCain's communications director, wrote in a e-mail.
He joins former DCI Group CEO Doug Goodyear, who resigned yesterday from the post of convention CEO after Newsweek reported that DCI was paid more than $300,000 to represent Myanmar's ruling junta.

The Democratic front-runner's wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party's nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility.

A procedural hearing on Fossella's drunken-driving arrest - which ultimately exposed his double life - is slated for a Virginia courtroom Monday.

MEGAN: Ah, that's the brilliant thing! When he got pulled over for running a red light drunk, his excuse was that he was on his way to a friend's house, after which he admitted he was going to see his sick kid.
MEGAN: Only his official kids were in NY with his wife. And, OMG, they've been having an affair since at least 2003? Five years? Dude, what the fuck. Even Kennedy got a divorce.
MOE: Even Prince Charles got a divorce! Dude did we learn anything over the weekend about this minister who officiated the Jenna wedding?
MEGAN: He's an Obama supporter who also does weddings?