• Yesterday, Sarah and Todd Palin got incensed about another David Letterman joke in which he suggested A-Rod impregnated her daughter at a Yankees game. (The daughter in attendance was 14-year-old Willow.) Gross. [Politico, LA Times]

• Responding to the Palins' accusations that he'd suggested their daughter had been raped (technically, under New York State law, A-Rod would be committing at least statutory rape by having sex with a 14-year-old), Letterman responded (video at left) that he thought Bristol Palin had been there. He considers the matter "cleared up." [Entertainment Weekly]
• In more blasts from campaigns past, Reverend Jeremiah Wright says that "Them Jews" are keeping Obama from talking to him. Yeah, it's Rahm's fault.
• Fox News' Shepard Smith concedes that, in the wake of yesterday's Holocaust Museum shooting, the DHS report on right-wing extremism his network decried was a warning we ignored at our own peril. He also says his email from probable viewers is increasingly frightening. [Media Matters, Huffington Post]
• The U.S., Great Britain, France, China and Russia have all signed off on UN sanctions against North Korea, where Kim Jong Il is expected to be increasingly rone-ry. [LA Times]
• Jong Il can, however, look forward to a visit from Jesse Jackson. [NPR]
• Obama, for his part, has told Bill Richardson to shut the fuck up about the situation. [Politico]
• With House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unswayed by the Administration's arguments that the troops will be imperiled by the release of more detainee torture photographs, Hillary Clinton is now saying they might put diplomats in danger, too. [Politico, The Plum Line]
• Apparently, the Senate is too busy watching videos of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to care too much about anything else. [NY Times]
• Even though Senate Republicans have had a fit that they didn't have enough time to rip Sotomayor to shreds in the media review Sotomayor's disclosures, they've requested yet more information. [Washington Post]
• The shoe bomber, Richard Reid, is on a hunger strike; apparently being overly thin is a fashion encouraged by the Pentagon to his comrades-in-arms at Guantanamo Bay. [Times, Huffington Post]
• China is saying that Palau can't have the Uighurs they wish to imprison, likely torture and possibly kill, but Palau doesn't care. [Huffington Post]

• P.U.M.A. hunter Katie Halper put together a campaign commercial for John McCain so that his female supporters all understand what they're voting for — including unequal pay, a lack of reproductive choice and half-assed health insurance coverage. Politics starts at home, ladies. [Katie Halper]
• Actual McCain staffers and Sarah Palin are trying to convince John McCain to open up Wright debate again because — as Sarah said yesterday — they've got nothing to lose. McCain, however, still likes his dignity some, so they're sneaking around behind his back to find other people to fund it. [Politico, CBS]
• Yes, of course, Obama is totally prepped to talk about Ayers tonight. He's probably prepped to talk about Wright, too, if it comes to that. [Chicago Tribune]
• McCain's been prepping, too, if this leaked debate prep video is anything to go by. Join in on my liveblog (thread starts at 7:30 ET, I start blogging at 9:00 ET) to see if he takes any of their advice! [The Jed Report]

• Wonder Woman Linda Carter thinks Sarah Palin is the anti-Wonder Woman, calling her "judgmental and dictatorial" and suggesting that Hillary Clinton is more the W.W. archetype. Go Linda Carter! [The Hill]
• Apparently, since Colin Powell is now a confirmed African-American, having announced it at a rally in Africa, Fox News is ready to guarantee that he's going to endorse Obama. There's nothing racist about that, though, nope, not at all. Don't you know all black people do everything together? [Washington Independent]
• Kansas Senator Pat Robert's Democratic opponent, Jim Slattery, has a new ad that makes it look like Wall Street is pissing on us little people. That's kind of what it feels like some days. [Attackerman]
• With another stock sell-off on Wall Street, today was one of those days. [NY Times]

Anyway, the point being, McCain's policy prescriptions, such as, have failed to capture the imagination of the middle of the American electorate the same way they failed to capture the imagination of the Republican-controlled Congress when most of them were proposed by the Bush Administration. But having hung out with enough fear-mongers and race-baiters, McCain's staff does have some ideas of what they think might just turn it around: character assassination. That's right, bring on the smears!

I mean, to a degree, I guess the Obama camp is lucky that the smear-tastic new advertisement by McCain is such a hack job that even Time scribe Jay Carney wonders how in the world it got this bad. Well, it's pretty obvious:

1. Take an ad you already started that was intended to highlight how much to Democratic leadership sucked on the bailout plan
2. Realize that most Americans aren't polling that way now
3. Shoehorn stuff about Bill Ayers into it the same way you've randomly shoehorned it into the campaign
4. Hope no one notices the irony of one candidate for the highest office in the land accusing the other of "ambition," let alone the racial undertones of accusing him of being too ambitious
5. TBD
6. Electoral success

The next step, obviously, since Republicans are "calling" for the McCain campaign to go after Jeremiah Wright, is to find a way to do it without calling into question Sarah Palin's own questionable religious affiliations. Ooh! Ooh! I know! They'll just "leak" a story to the Republican-leaning Wall Street Journal about how they're totally being pushed to bring up Jeremiah Wright but their candidate is way too honorable for those sorts of shenanigans. People's religions should be off the table! And then they get to soften the image of their candidate while bringing it up and make it look like he's not the one attacking anything even as they send off the Vice Presidential candidate and the surrogates with plenty of anti-Obama talking points on both issues.

Now, if only every time you mention his name, you can get someone in the crowd to shout, "Traitor!"... Yeah, that should distract those stupid Americans long enough that they forget that McCain's economic plans are Bush 2.0, that he wants to keep America's military engaged and dying in Iraq, that his new mortgage bailout plan is not only Hillary Clinton's idea but extremely costly and that his health care plan is the worst idea since teabagging Charlie Keating. They're in it to win it!

McCain-Palin 2008 Launches New TV Ad: "Ambition" [John McCain]
Bill Ayres Gutted Your 401K. Who Knew? [Swampland]
"South Park's" Investing Lesson [Motley Fool]
McCain Campaign Is at Odds Over Negative Attacks' Scope [Wall Street Journal]
Does Sarah Palin Have a Pentecostal Problem? [Time]
McCain Supporter Calls Obama A 'Traitor' At Campaign Rally [Think Progress]

ANA MARIE: Greetings from Milwaukee's FINEST hotel.

MEGAN: You're at a Marriott, aren't you.

ANA MARIE: But you know, I had to wait, like 90 minutes for my luggage last night. I didn't get a king size bed! There is no creamer in my in room coffee! WIRE COAT HANGERS!!!! Actually, we're at "The Pfister," which has led to many attempts at humor from the traveling press corps. Personal favorite? "Pfister? I hardly knew her." (Hi, Sasha!)

MEGAN: See, I prefer wire coat hangers to the kind that don't come off the rod, which it's just like: really? I'm going to steal a hanger? Fuck you.

ANA MARIE: Actually, the coat hangers are fine. And there's a robe. That was all a rather extended segue into Alex Balk's rather awesome rant about a certain campaign journalist's peak at "how the other half lives." That someone would — apparently unself-consciously — use the title of a book about the lives of the desperately poor to describe the life of a pampered campaign journalist is... gosh, the word "ironic" is overused, huh I admit: I have complained about such things as HAVING TO GET UP EARLY. Or WAITING IN LINE.

MEGAN: Not that I like mornings. Or other people in my way.

ANA MARIE: Totally! It sucks!

MEGAN: Or pretty much anything before coffee.

ANA MARIE: But you know what? I am staying in Milwaukee's finest hotel. And I'm not being sarcastic.

MEGAN: I used to work for a Milwaukee-based company. It's really not a bad town. It's way better than Lansing. Plus, you really can get cheese with pretty much everything you'll eat there.

ANA MARIE: But to anyone complaining in public and unironically about pretty much anything inconvenient about life on the trail gets one response from me: I bet they deliver the luggage right on time in Baghdad, asshole. Seriously: More journalists have died covering that illegal war than any other international conflict. So if you are unsatisfied with the food in the file center, I am sorry. And this is just staying in the realm of "other bad jobs IN JOURNALISM you could have." If we went in the direction of "thankful for having a job at all" I could get a little angrier. Oh, and I've just made a discovery! Outrage is as good a pick-me-up as coffee.

MEGAN: Yeah, asshole, come blog with me! My couch can totally fit two people and I guarantee you won't have trouble finding your bags because my apartment is small. Also, I mean, like, has that guy not traveled other than for work? My sister went on her honeymoon and the airlines lost her luggage for two days.

ANA MARIE: Oh, and did I say "other bad jobs in journalism"? I meant "other jobs you could have in journalism which is rapidly shrinking pool thanks to the ever growing trend of treating news as entertainment and otherwise not putting any money at all into actual investigative reporting but instead spending $50k a month to keep you on the trail covering Barack Obama from the confines of a slightly off-smelling CHARTER PLANE."

MEGAN: He should be thankful it's not a bus.

ANA MARIE: A bus that people the color of certain presidential candidates used to sit at the back of. I suppose we should move along. But if I see Dean Reynolds today, I will ask him if he slept well on the pillow top beds here at the Pfister.

MEGAN: Why, so we can state obvious things like McCain's mortgage buyout plan will cost taxpayers money? Let alone make the government the entity responsible for foreclosing on people?

ANA MARIE: Oh god. Well the good thing about McCain's plan is that it depends on him being elected president.

MEGAN: But he's that one with the stones to bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran which we're obviously going to need to do.

ANA MARIE: Well I was worried we'd look silly going bankrupt as a nation spending on only two wars. Three? That makes us look like at least we have a reason.

MEGAN: Well, if we actually gave a shit about nuclear proliferation we might have had 4, but since it's all about posturing and hating on those of the Islamic faith, we might keep it to 3.

ANA MARIE: (Side note: apparently outrage+hangover is a worse combination than coffee+hangover because I'm kind of nauseous!)

MEGAN: Not including Pakistan, of course, we would never attack Pakistan, what with its stable and Democratic government run by a kleptocrat with little intention of hurting his personal access to power and money by reining in Taliban and al Qaeda insurgents on the borders that are attacking American troops in Afghanistan. There, well, that's a time for diplomacy.

ANA MARIE: But Megan, they're all BROWN (ish)! Can't add NoKo to the list just based on that? Well, Pakistan is a failed state.

MEGAN: It totally was (not) when Musharraf, our Great Ally, took it over in a political coup.

ANA MARIE: I am too hungover to even roll my eyes.

MEGAN: Also, do you think anyone in our foreign policy establishment has looked around and gone, hmmm. Maybe the reason countries like Iran want nukes is because when countries like Pakistan get them —regardless of their politics or warlike nature — America starts teabagging their leaders?

ANA MARIE: (And drinks last night were, of course, bought on the tabs of various major news organizations. BUT THEY DID NOT HAVE BASIL HAYDEN AT THE BAR, so I'm pissed.) Or, you know, countries like Iran want nukes because we have them?

MEGAN: My hangover is brought to you courtesy of a $9 bottle of Greg Norman Syrah bought at the grocery store. My outrage is from 2 years of a foreign policy Masters program.

ANA MARIE: I love Greg Norman wines! I had some GN chard on Tuesday. At the PF Changs in Nashville. Where dinner was courtesy of a nice Secret Service agent. BUT THEN IT RAINED. FUCK YOU, UNIVERSE.

MEGAN: Well, it was after Labor Day, presumably you weren't wearing white.

ANA MARIE: I haven't worn white since my thighs grew to their current size.

MEGAN: Best headline to a boring story we'll get all day: "Todd Palin had unusual access to wife's staff."

ANA MARIE: His wife has a staff? I thought we only made transgender jokes about Hillary! Yay, progress!

MEGAN: Also, I guess we now know what kind of kicky sex she was with "Driller" who I think the Secret Service probably should have dubbed "Drillee" if this is true.

ANA MARIE: I'm just glad women in power no longer have to be kind of butch in order to have people suspect they have a penis.

MEGAN: Well, they are pretty easy to buy these days, except in Mississippi.

ANA MARIE: And Scalia is so pissed about that. I see Hannity re-upped with Fox. So, you know, the nation is safe. In the sense that Colbert will not be cancelled for the next whatevermany years.

MEGAN: I think Scalia is pissed at the proliferation of sex toys because he blames them for not getting any ass. When, really, even lacking a sex toy, I would not ever have fucked Scalia. I don't think I'm alone in this.

ANA MARIE: Okay, I have met Scalia and I found him charming. But I also — in my single days — was not a stranger to sex with guys that made me hate myself. (Thank you Chris for saving me from that!)

MEGAN: You know, I actually thought about it and there's not anyone I hate myself for fucking. But I am also really egotistical, so it might have just not made a dent.

ANA MARIE: I actually argued with Scalia about partial birth abortion. At a party.

MEGAN: And? Did he argue back?

ANA MARIE: He basically tolerated my and my friend's drunken ranting with good humor. When he probably could of had us arrested. Or killed. Quick side note: I was once telling this story the daughter of one of our major presidential nominees and she asked, "Who's Scalia?"

MEGAN: Ok, but, I mean, it's not really fair to ask Malia to know these things.

ANA MARIE: Hint: this daughter had skin that could not in any way be described as "dusky." To be fair, Malia was really articulate when she defended the Kelo decision.

MEGAN: Anyway, should we discuss the new Ayers ads?

ANA MARIE: Christ. Here's the thing — and I know you might/will definitely disagree — what's weird about the Ayers shit is that, of all the things you could use to draw Obama's judgment into question, the best you can come up with is Ayers? Serious? Because I honestly think the 20 years he spent in Jeremiah Wright's church is a more interesting question. I ultimately don't think it changes my mind about voting for the guy, but it's a more interesting question.

MEGAN: Well, I mean, I don't disagree with you that there are better rational things but I think the Ayers think allows McCain's campaign to repeat the word "terrorist" over and over again and you know people ain't thinking some white college professor dude.

ANA MARIE: Yeah. Tho I don't think McCain actually focus-grouped that. Then again, he didn't have to.

MEGAN: It's like a twofer. It's hard for people to articulate why it's racist and wrong and it engenders the responses you want.

ANA MARIE: And the really funny thing? I don't think anyone on the campaign actually put any thought into that strategy. It just sort of happened! Like casual racism everywhere.

MEGAN: I don't know, this is the team of political strategists that gave McCain a black baby 8 years ago. I don't think it's unintentional. Because, like you said, the Wright thing is more interesting and complex. And, God knows, McCain's got his own bad associates, so it's not like they're doing Ayers to avoid getting into Palin's religion either.

ANA MARIE: You're going to make me link to my article about how Steve Schmidt is not a "Rove protege" again, aren't you?

MEGAN: You can, but I wasn't necessarily talking about Steve Schmidt, either. The Bush 2000 team pre-dates Schmidt.

ANA MARIE: Interestingly, most of the Bush 2000 team is actually working for Palin.

MEGAN: Who is, naturally, the person out there hitting on Ayers the hardest.

ANA MARIE: Yes, that is suggestive. And not in a good way! (Unlike, say, the idea of Palin's "staff".)

MEGAN: It's just another wink and a nod from Bible Spice.

ANA MARIE: Can we use that metaphor from now on, instead of "dog whistle"? Which is insulting to dogs.

MEGAN: Yeah, it's really unfair to compare dogs to racists.

ANA MARIE: Someone last night caught me watching Top Model on the plane and (there is a connection here) I had to explain that after a long day of covering an increasingly ugly race, pretty much the only things that help me unwind are really bad reality television shows and pictures of adorable animals.

MEGAN: I watched Project Runway, but, in the end, I wish I'd just stuck to Rachel Maddow.

ANA MARIE: NO DO NOT TELL ME
SPOILER ALERT
::HANDS OVER EARS::
LALALALALALA

MEGAN: Ana, I hate to tell you, there is no Santa Claus.

ANA MARIE: I am bitter and cling to my belief in a gun-toting Easter Bunny.

MEGAN: Good morning, sunshine! Is there somewhere you are at? Because I got up to thunder and lightening...

MOE: Hey sorry I've been having some issues with the internet.

MEGAN: Ugh, I feel you there. Technological ones, or just a deep and abiding hatred for it?

MOE: Well like, it seems like it's on, and I'm getting your messages, but you're the only buddy I see and the rest have disappeared. So actually it's pretty cool, sort of like if the internet could all just run the way it did in 1996 and there were no Gawker commenters…

MEGAN: So, a little from column A and a little from column B! Anyway, I just had to ask if you wanted a good laugh, because then I would encourage you to read this article about how Condi is sad that there aren't more African-American diplomats, as though that is something, like, completely outside of the control of the Secretary of State. Who does, after all, appoint the senior ones. It's that kind of lack of self-awareness that I'll miss about the members of the Bush Administration, at least until Biden brings some of them up on charges.

MOE: Wow this broad doesn't stop getting better eh? Sarah Palin charges rape victims for rape kits and Alaska for nights in her own home. When my dad was in the State Department I remember it was rather difficult at the time supposedly for a white male to make it to senior foreign service, so I guess Warren Christopher did try to do what you're suggesting and promote minorities. And I believe that if you're an underrepresented minority standards are different on the oral exam, or your application gets expedited, whatever. The thing is that basically there are not enough African American diplomats for the same reason there are not a lot of Ivy League educated African American JD community organizers; there is not exactly enough money to pay off your student loans in the State Department, although they give you a lot of free education once you're there.

MEGAN: Word on the not being enough money to pay off your student loans, I looked into it in college and could've taken a Hill gig and come out better at the end of the first year if I'd worked on moving up in the ranks on the Hill.

MOE: And you have to be extraordinarily well-educated and pass a test that is not exactly accounted for in the No Child Left Behind act. Yeah, Condi might have noticed these things before…

MEGAN: Yeah, that exam blows, and then the oral is totally based on a judgment of the reviewers and all about how you interact with the other people there, so I can see as how it might not exactly be encouraging a groundswell of new minority foreign service officers. And, notably, plenty of places charge for rape kits. Like, until very recently, North Carolina. Hell, I expected to be charged for mine, but Virginia doesn't. On the other hand, Condi does not appear to be a Palin fan, so she's got that on her side.

There are different kinds of experience in life that help one to deal with matters of foreign policy...I'm not going to get involved in this political campaign. As Secretary of State, I don't do that.

MOE: Hahahaha she doesn't think it matters that her husband rode his snowmobile to the Bering Strait that one time?? As for the oral exam, my brother passed the written and failed the oral and said something along the lines of, "look, knowing who they did take, fuck that." I'm not exactly sure what that means though. I will tell you that now you've got me sitting here thinking, "Hey, I am a white non-money motivated person with no student loans who was, at least before I subjected my brain to so many hundred successive nights of alcohol abuse, a good 'test taker', who would like to quit this industry and get out of the country, maybe learn a language or two…hey!" I don't think you need a college degree if you pass the test. Let's sign up for the foreign service exam Megan! I'm sure the government would be so happy to have us.

MEGAN: I will sign up for the Foreign Service exam, but only if you agree to take it sober and I will take it drunk and we will see what happens and write about it. I am an excellent test-taker, too, but I really have no intention of moving to Uganda for two years. One of my grad school classmates ended up in the shittiest post in the world — Quebec City. Plenty of people don't pass the oral, actually. In grad school, they made us practice it even if we didn't intend to take it and the secret is: to be a complete asshole. Don't concede. Defend your point long past the point of absurdity. That is the key to becoming a U.S. diplomat. If you concede in the face of irrefutable logic, then you'll make a shitty diplomat. Now, go forth and prosper at the oral.

MOE: Well would you look at that, the Wall Street Journal is just flat-out accusing Sarah Palin of lying! "Despite significant evidence to the contrary." My dad's first post was Reykjavik. Luckily for him — less so for my mom! — he also passed some "language aptitude test" that enabled him to go to China right after. Hey, speaking of, did you know Alaska had an "embassy" right here in New York? So internationalist of them!

MEGAN: I do love that every other state has their clubhouse in D.C., but Alaska was like, fuck D.C., we're gonna have it in the Big Apple!

MOE: What is so weird about that is that aside from my dad I never met anyone in all American diplomacy who was really like that. And I was pretty sure my dad would only do that sort of thing to piss me off. That is interesting. I wonder how standards have changed.

MEGAN: Well, maybe everyone besides your dad is, like, able to control it in their personal life, or able to fake it in their professional life? I wasn't in grad school that long ago, really. Also, I guess if the WSJ is accusing Palin of lying, this shitty OpEd proves once and for all that there really is a firewall between the reported side and the editorial side?

[laughs hysterically]. God, I crack myself up sometimes.

MOE: Ugh dammit Hamilton Nolan is in there I know it.

MEGAN: Well, Hamilton aside, do you want to talk about Reverend Wright's supposed mistress or are we way too bored with him?

MOE: I can't see, but what's funny about Wasilla charging rape victims was that it's the same total bullshit about Palin and her fiscally responsible term as mayor and by fiscally responsible I mean running up deficits big enough to put every child through a year of college. Yesterday I went to see Tom Frank speak with Lewis Lapham and he pointed out that preaching fiscal responsibility only to run up huge deficits was a clever strategy Republicans call "de-funding the left"…and after the panel I overheard some dude saying he was still angry at the Democrats for voting for the war and that he was probably voting for Nader or Paul and I just thought, "oh God, fuck everyone."

MEGAN: Well, the whole idea of lowering taxes was supposed to be to "starve the beast" only it turns out that Republicans — and their constituents — love the beast as much as tax-and-spend Democrats and the only real difference is what part of the bext each side wants to feed. Also, the OpEd is about Fannie and Freddie.

MOE: Okay Hamilton Nolan is still in the WSJ. I wouldn't roast him here if I didn't think he could take it though. I guess Gawker Media could get another fucking Journal account. Oh god and speaking of Fannie and Freddie what the fuck did I do to deserve 442 comments here????? I'm afraid to look.

MEGAN: Anyway, I can summarize for you: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are a complete clusterfuck but GWB is (now) totally right for bailing them out because to do otherwise would totally drive people out of their home in droves but in a McCain-Palin Administration there will be homes for everyone and lobbyists are all to blame or maybe not all to blame but none of it is the fault of Republicans nosireebob. Vote McCain-Palin for change from the Democrats who are the source of all evil and have been running the country for the last 28 years even though 20 of those were Republican.

Apparently, the Gawker commenters were mostly discussing economics, at least for the first 100 comments. After that, I can't guarantee anything.

MOE: We never get that many comments, it is not like Crappy Hour.

MEGAN: Someone started talking about spanking, and others about Canada, so that might have something to do about that.

MOE: Also they got on me for "No one has ever listened to Bush," which is a joke of course, but on a few different levels, because who in his administration has even ever really listened to Bush? I mean, Dana Perino's statement was so absurd it's hard to know quite how to deal!

MEGAN: I mean, people don't understand that few people listen to Bush himself before formulating policy, they just do it and then go in and present a shitty alternative plan and he agrees. It's like how you dealt with your parents sometimes.

MOE: So tell me about Jeremiah Wright's mistress. Is she one of those female suicide bombers? A former concubine-protege of Putin? A Weathergirl??

MEGAN: She is a church secretary in Texas, supposedly. The picture, though, is worth 1,000 words. Also, her husband is pissed she was boning a black dude.

MOE: Whoa and what happens when Kim Jong-Il dies? God I hope this country realizes how awesome it would be for people like us if it decided to leave that decision in the hands of Sarah Palin. It could be the first summit Wasilla ever hosted! Just think of the opportunities for pork. And moose stew!

MEGAN: Oh, God, and when the thought of moose stew makes me hungry, it's time to post this bitch and get some breakfast.

MOE: Toodles love. I miss it here. I have a new family now and…most everyone is very nice!

MEGAN: No, the Clinton thing is totally epic, I fully support a separate post for that.
MOE: ok cool... i suppose then that we should talk about... florida and michigan, jeremiah wright, rosencrantz & gildenstern…
MEGAN: Wait, aren't they dead?
MEGAN: (Sorry, it was a pun that had to be made)
MOE: we all die is sort of the point
MEGAN: That's sort of existential for this time of the morning, I thought I was supposed to be the depressed one!

MEGAN: By the way, I meant to say, all I dreamt about last night was Bill Clinton and economic insecurity.
MOE: Dude Dodai and I saw the Sex & The City movie. All I dreamt about was…shoes.
MOE: NO NOT REALLY.
MEGAN: Aw, those would've been some awesome dreams, though.
MOE: I would say the movie made me ill, but I was ill before…it's just such A Soul Murdering Work Of Staggering Consumerism
MEGAN: Yeah, that's sort of why I went to see Indiana Jones instead. That, and the fact that my companion was a straight guy.

MEGAN: Anyway, so that that Pfleger guy is the new Wright and Obama's church is the story that shall never die even though he quit it this weekend and no one can answer the riddle of why they would continue to tape the damn sermons.
MOE: This Pfleger guy is soooooo much more fascinating than Jeremiah Wright. WHERE DID HE COME FROM? And unrelated: Did you read how there are still seven or eight Jews in Baghdad? It totally is ruling the Most Emailed List, as if it were a story about pandas or spotted owls, only that's really now how it is…anyway their synagogue closed after the war "made it too dangerous for them to worship openly." Great going, us! And everyone used to be so nice, and Muslims were nice to Jews and Sunnis were nice to Shiites, but not anymore, except that there are so few Jews that the Muslims actually are still nice to them…anyway. Back to Pfleger.

MEGAN: Right, because the only violence the Iraqi state used to countenance under Saddam Hussein was the violence that it itself committed against the Kurds and political dissidents! But, yes, Pfleger.
MOE: Dude, has someone made a mashup of this vs. Harriet Christian? Because that sort of demands to be done.
MEGAN: By the way, in point of fact, "der Pfleger" is German for "male nurse." Not that that's important.
MEGAN: Oh, God, Harriet Christian. What a wack job. "Inadequate black male," Harriet? Gosh, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones must've loved that shit.

MOE: Seriously, okay, the thing here is 1. If it didn't sufficiently speak to Pfleger's own point that what he said was probably just as offensive to most folks as anything Jeremiah Wright said but it's harder to argue with him because he is himself white, then 2. Harriet Christian pretty much does the rest of his job for him.
MOE: And the Rosencrantz reference was MoDowd's. So unlike me, I know.
MEGAN: I don't know, was Pfleger more acceptable? Was he just the straw that broke the camel's back, or was it worse?
MOE: The thing is that this lede

They say that every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves. And every Hamlet gets his Rosencrantz.

is typically retarded, but I remember that play being my favorite thing I'd ever read back in high school, and maybe that's why McClellan appeals! Except McClellan was probably aiming more for Guildenstern. Spokespretty Dana Perino can be Rosencrantz.
MEGAN: Is openly mocking Hillary Clinton worse than "God damn America" and "the government invented AIDS" and shit?
MOE: See, I guess I didn't see Pfleger until after I'd seen Harriet Christian. How come no one has made a mashup of this shit yet?
MEGAN: Nope. Could we set it to, like, Keystone Kops music?
MOE: Someone should do that, and then splash in some Michael Richards
MEGAN: Ooh, right.

MEGAN: Anyway, so Howard Dean (who is apparently the new devil to Hillary supporters) called Geraldine Ferraro's comments on race "outside the mainstream and unhelpful." That's a start, really.
MOE: Here's a little passage from a Chicago Tribune story about how Rev. Pfleger got into this line of work:

Clements has remained an activist ever since, leading anti-drug campaigns, encouraging black adoptions, convincing parishioners to open their hearts to ex-offenders. He often joins forces with a white activist priest, Rev. Michael Pfleger, the pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church on the South Side. As it turns out, Pfleger was also in Marquette Park the day King was hit with the rock.

PFLEGER WAS 16, a kid from nearby Thomas Moore parish. Everywhere he went for several days leading up to the march, people in his Southwest Side neighborhood were talking about the pending march. Why couldn't they stay in their own place? They took away our old house. They took away our old neighborhood. They took away our old church. They drove us out. Now is the time to draw the line.

Pfleger and two friends hopped on their bikes and rode to the park to see if they could get a look at King, the man who was causing all the trouble. When they got to the park, it was scary. "I saw this hate," he says. "I had never seen them, my neighbors, like that. I'd never seen that side of white people."

His neighbors were cursing and throwing rocks. There were police in riot gear and there he was, King, looking calm, trying to say something to the mob. But Pfleger couldn't hear over the screams of "Niggers, go home!"

MOE:

"King was in control," Pfleger recalls. "And the more in control he was, the angrier the crowd became. I thought to myself, 'Either this man is crazy, or this man has some sort of power I want to know about.' It was the greatest, most powerful class in non-violence I'll ever get in my life."

The next day, Pfleger started reading whatever he could find about the march and about King. He cut out photos of King and taped them to the back of his bedroom closet door as a sort of shrine. Today, in his office at St. Sabina, he has half a dozen photographs of him: King addressing thousands of people at the rally at Soldier Field, King speaking at a temple on the North Shore, King and a young Jesse Jackson the night before King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

"People ask me all the time why I became a priest," Pfleger says. "I tell them it was really a black Baptist minister who called me into ministry. My activism today was unquestionably birthed that day in Marquette Park. I think of him as a mentor."

MOE: That's from 2006
MOE: In 2002 he was involved in some controversy when a black team joined his mostly white suburban Catholic school league and parents were like "we don't want to go play there it's unsafe."
MEGAN: "I'd never seen that side of white people," kind of helpfully sums up what I think every right-thinking person's view of racism is. Like, the horror that you could be associated with something that is so very, very obviously deeply wrong.

MEGAN: The first time you see it or experience it, it should make you sick to your stomach that there are people like that in the world.
MOE: So here's the question: Geraldine Ferraro: obviously unhelpful. Michael Pfleger: more helpful than unhelpful, over the long haul, I believe. And yeah, racism is completely stomach churning the first time you experience it from your community. I mean, my initial experiences were all in Asia, which was slightly different, because it was like, my little kid friends grumbling about how Chinese spit and/or smelled and/or always insisted on touching our hair. It was beyond my comprehension at the time how they could even think those things, to be honest. It used to bother me so much. I would stand there dutifully while someone touched my hair and yearn to apologize for the Opium Wars and having an air conditioner and such. Oh… phew! Geraldine Ferraro is now back on Fox. Someone needed to put the crap back in this Crappy Hour!

MEGAN: OMG, she looks so freaking happy to be on Fox. Goddammit, Geraldine, try to look a little less self-satisfied.
MEGAN: Dude, they just completely laughed at her when she quoted Jackie Mason. I'm beginning to be uncomfortable.
MEGAN: Oh, are you kidding? She's like, "If people said that crap about Obama, we would be horrified." Oh, really, Geraldine? You mean, like, when Andrew Cuomo said that Obama cannot "shuck and jive" at a press conference and his press people successfully convinced everyone to ignore it and not a single Democratic party leader in NY or beyond called him out on it?
MOE: I'm clarifying the Pfleger thing; it was his school in the "dangerous" neighborhood, and his school was rejected from the Southside Catholic Conference or something on account of that, and then he went public with racism charges, and then a lot of Catholics were like "why couldn't he have been a little quieter about this shit."

MEGAN: Ah, lovely. Well, Chicago is such a lovely, well-planned city. Ahem.
MOE: Jesus I didn't even know what "shuck n jive" meant.

"To shuck and jive" originally referred to the intentionally misleading words and actions that African-Americans would employ in order to deceive racist Euro-Americans in power, both during the period of slavery and afterwards. The expression was documented as being in wide usage in the 1920s, but may have originated much earlier. "Shucking and jiving" was a tactic of both survival and resistance. A slave, for instance, could say eagerly, "Oh, yes, Master," and have no real intention to obey. Or an African-American man could pretend to be working hard at a task he was ordered to do, but might put up this pretense only when under observation. Both would be instances of "doin' the old shuck 'n jive."

MEGAN: Yes. It's a racist term.
MOE: Um yeah.
MEGAN: But his press people called everyone in the universe (I ought to know) and were like "he meant bobbing and waving!!! you're taking it out of context" and I was like, there's no context for that
MOE: What I wonder is if there would have been way more of those types of slips had Barack Obama been more stereotypical. Had he not been reared with such colossal reserves of cultural capital, the "something for everyone" biography, the arugula plus the brotherhood plus the atheist mom plus the Indonesian stepdad etc. etc.…had he simply been more stereotypical, had he had an "I could have been baking cookies all those years" moment. Do you think there would be more overt racism involved in his campaign? Because I did, but quotes like Cuomos

MOE: Quotes like Cuomo's just make me think it doesn't even matter. They're digging through the history books, finding the anachronistic phrases that will send messages to the right constitutents…so I guess it is less overt.
MEGAN: I mean, he's had his cookie-baking moments, in my opinion, his "stereotypical white person" about his grandmother and stuff. But, yeah, I mean, it horrifies me that either these very bright politicians are using these fucking "code" words like "shucking and jiving" and "kid" and whatever else so that people under a certain age who don't know them won't know that they're being racist and people over a certain age will get the reference. It's like Bush and his fucking evangelical code word bullshit in all his States of the Union and shit.
MOE: But like, it's just racism. You get to the point where, as we've discussed before, he's inoculated himself to this shit, to the point David Duke himself can't get it up to really hate on Obama, and yet we've got Harriet Christian of Manhattan… it makes no sense.
MEGAN: Because, I'm sorry, you don't grow up in the South when they grew up, you don't get to talk about how inspiring the civil rights movement was to you as a politician and then claim not to know.
MOE: And…re racism, institutional: did you read the Post Magazine cover story on Tatum O'Neal's drug of choice? Because I didn't have time but I should have.
MEGAN: I didn't, either, I was still all obsessing about politics, but the sentence disparities for crack v. powder cocaine are completely fucked
MOE: Here's his spiel before Congress:

My name is Michael Short. I am here because in 1992 I was sentenced for selling crack cocaine. Before that, I had never spent a day in prison. I came from a good family. I had no criminal history. I was not a violent offender. But I was sentenced to serve nearly 20 years. I was 21 years old.

They'll be chatting about the story at noon for anyone who still thinks racism exists in this country!
'
MEGAN: But, no, see, it's not racism it's racial resentment, didn't you learn anything?
MOE: Newsbreak Terror Roundup: an attack on the Danish embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, a growing sphere of influence for the Taliban, has killed six, Syria has agreed to allow IAEA weapons inspectors to check out its North Korean JV, and something about the Iraqi jail system being less terrible than before. And should we talk about Puerto Rico?
MEGAN: Oh, sure, Puerto Rico. Hillary won! Ricky Martin danced!
MOE: Oh dude, I didn't see the National Review had run six separate stories on Friday trashing McClellan. Good grief.
MEGAN: Well, you know, it's like proving that someone's not a witch by piling stones on them. When they've crushed his chest, he'll be redeemed.
MOE: Ugh, I hate the "well-worn tell-all path" line. I just don't subscribe to the "All ousted tools of the idiocracy are unhappy in the same way" line of reasoning, but if anyone tracks down his partisan ghostwriter the Prince Of Darkness…is probably too lazy but he'll get a lot of hits with misleading headlines suggesting he has!

MEGAN: I really think PoD is giving Bobby too much credit. Let's return to caling him the Earl of Minor Despair. Or the Count of Emotionally-Instigated Intestinal Distress
MOE: Wait, he has emotions?
MOE: Ya think?

Obama's Latest Pastor Disaster [Newsweek/WaPo]
Hillary Clinton Attacked At Barack Obama Church [YouTube]
Clinton Supporter Thrown Out Of Rules Committee Meeting [YouTube]
Glamoracy [Glamour]

In which we adopt the persona of Women's Voices. Women Vote robocaller and misinformation chief Lamont Williams, if he only had a voice.

MOE: Oh look at this, Obama's "aura of inevitability" has diminished. Remember when that happened to Hillary? How can we ever democratically elect a president if he/she doesn't have that "aura of inevitability"? It's unamerican!
MEGAN: You have to have an aura of inevitability, it's sort of like an aura of infallibility and of course the President is infallible!
MOE: This is uplifting. Troops don't want to seek counseling for their psychological/psychiatric issues for fear it will hurt their careers. And with good reason: up until now you've had to given extensive interviews if you report that you've sought mental health help when applying for security clearance.

One in four of the troops surveyed said he or she knew "nothing at all about effective mental health treatments for issues that may arise from their service in a war zone," Robinowitz said.

The interviewer later prefaced a question by saying she wanted to "turn the page" from the Wright controversy.
"No, you don't," Mrs. Obama replied.

MEGAN: Anyway, so, the mental health in the military thing, it's sort of like Dodai wrote only with greater consequences. Also, it's my experience that your can get a clearance as long as you're honest about stuff, it just takes longer.
MOE: Sometimes Dick Cheney really sorta steps out of character, you know?
MEGAN: Sometimes, it just seems like he's fucking with us.

MEGAN: Sort of like Bush with that whole Mission Accomplished" thing
MOE: Yeah you wouldn't think that what with orchestrating the sophisticated propaganda effort to recruit, brief and dispatch retired military commanders to defend the war on teevee and such that...he'd have the time to advocate against trying to save the whales? He is truly a multitasker.

MOE: Did you read that story, by the way? It came out on a weekend so I think we never got to it but it's worth checking out (all ninety pages of it, probably!) The fascinating thing was how the appearance of these supposedly "objective" pundits was used within the administration to give officials a sense that the tide of public sentiment was turning.

"The impressions that you're getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false," Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.
The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on "Today." "There's been over $100 million of new construction," he reported. "The place is very professionally run."
Within days, transcripts of the analysts' appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

MEGAN: What does he hate about whales? Or if it just that they are yummy?
MOE: Sometimes they get in the way of fast ships transporting oil or nukes or whatever I guess.
MEGAN: Or sweet, sweet babies for him to drink the blood of?
MEGAN: Anyway, yeah, I did the story although it sorta didn't surprise me. I kinda figure everyone on TV has an agenda, I guess it's more the coordination part that seemed too much like walking and chewing gum for this administration.
MOE: My ex-boyfriend led a "Mission Accomplished!" wheat paste postering campaign throughout Philadelphia about...three years ago I guess. Now I'm getting nostalgic! Over 3,000 troops have probably died since then. And, oh yeah, at least half a million Iraqis.
MEGAN: Well, really, obviously their lives are not as important as our ability to keep driving SUVs and ignoring the human costs of the war, so, you know, shhhhhh.

MOE: Moving on to matters slightly more obscure but, sadly, no less significant when it comes to our choice of Custodian Of the Unaccomplished and to that end Iraqi lives, this Women's Voices Women's Vote voter fraud conspiracy-type thing is sooo fascinating.
MEGAN: No, totally. It's like, completely shady and bad, very Rovian. I should go find their tax returns.
MOE: It's like oh I get it. Women get more representation if we dispatch a man named "Lamont" to call "single women" aka "black folks" and give them all the wrong dates, times and deadlines for registration to vote. I'm kinda slightly more annoyed about my primary nonvoting experience now.
MOE:

* Michigan officials ended up "fielding tons of calls from confused voters" after Women's Voices did a February mailing to "380,000 unmarried women" — including numerous deceased voters and even more that were already registered. Sarah Johnson of Women's Voices "seemed confused by the confusion," the Lansing State Journal reported.

MEGAN: Ha, also, Page Gardner has a ton of donations to groups like EMILY's List (supporting Clinton) and, slightly strangely, Congresswoman Allyson Schwartz (committed Clinton superdelegate) and state Democratic committees but not one Presidential candidate this cycle.
MOE: And this is why I love Barack Obama: What's he spent, close to half a billion dollars on television commercials? And yet he tells people at rallies they should turn the TV off.
MEGAN: She gave to Kerry in 2004, though, and to Clinton's Senate re-election campaign.

MEGAN: Podesta's on the board.
MOE: Obama is probably just trying to keep people like Page and the Pentagon from polluting people's brains. What do people like Page get from a Clinton administration? Jobs? Or the "aura" of access?
MEGAN: I think it's the aura of access. I mean, people really, really, really, really get off on the idea that they can call the White House and someone will return their phone calls, and on those grip-and-grin pictures.
MEGAN: Like, I went to a dinner thing when I was still a lobbyist last year, very high-end, extremely rich people there. And they all queued up and waited for an hour to get a grip/grin with Mitt Romney.
MOE: ew.
MOE: Did you catch any Hillary on O'Reilly? Bc I missed it.

MEGAN: I can't watch O'Reilly. I keep seeing clips of her saying Wright's comments were offensive.
MEGAN: O'Reilly... it's like, I don't even get the smallest sense that he knows how unintentionally ironic he is. The only reason I can watch Shephard Smith in the afternoon is half the time I think he's winking when he says outrageous stuff. That, and I'm a total hag.

Propaganda via Jesse Goldstein of Space 1026.

Earlier: Obama Asks, We Answer: The 5 Stupidest Things Elisabeth Hasselbeck Has Ever Said

Related: Grace, Eventually: Thoughts On Faith [Amazon]

But if it's total nonsense, then why did Wright go out of his way to point out that he didn't see Barack Obama in church enough? And how exactly was making the best political speech of this generation on the subject dearest to Wright's heart a betrayal to anything other than Jeremiah Wright's ego? It's sort of like when you have two friends who used to date, and then one gets mad when she finds out you still talk to her ex, and she's sort of within her right, because he is the one who cheated on her, but that was like 53 years ago and he's not the one who gave her that STD that put her in this foul mood, and can't we all just get along already? Yeah it's sort of like that, only with Biblical undertones.

"We'll Find Out," Part II [The Page]
Revenge Is Sweet For Betrayed Pastor [NY Post]

• Barack Obama rejected/denounced his old friend Jeremiah Wright on television today on the advice of certain wise commenters and also prominent columnists and locking in a critical majority of my family members. Watching it was less fun than watching him shake the dirt off his shoulder but as Jigga would say "so necessary." [Wonkette]
  
• So the question remains: why the fuck did Jeremiah Wright give all those damaging, yammering unyielding undermining speeches? Newt Gingrich thinks he's just jealous. [ABC News]
  
• Though maybe he was just testing God? [Chicago Tribune]
  
• And Barack Obama finally de-friended him...only after consulting some cynical pollsters? Take it from a Republican. [JohnLocke.org]
  
• An African-American studies professor from a long line of Mormons wishes Mitt Romney was around so everyone else could be reminded how tame black liberation theology is next to some of the fun ideas Joseph Smith had. [TheRoot]

• There are a ton of conflicting poll numbers I could treat you with today but I'm going with the one discussed in this story because I'm sick of clicking on new windows and it concerns Indiana and because I'm biased, so kill me. [Indy Star]
• And here, anyone offended by my bias... [SayNoToCrack]
• Awkward segue alert! A teen FLDS member just gave birth to another inbred child of what was probably at the very least statutory rape, if the mother had any idea of her actual age. [AP]
• WHICH five IMF members did not vote in favor of giving more voting rights to developing countries? No really, which? [WSJ]

MOE: Stuff like skankgate is why I wake up in the morning anymore.
MEGAN: Away
MOE: Oh god, a Bush news conference at 10:30, does he have to keep giving those?
MEGAN: I love that now that he doesn't have to be re-elected he's totally cool with talking to the press.
MOE: And the press is like, "meh you?" Nice job on Deal or no Deal..
MEGAN: Also, they have some new guy on FoxNews who is their go-to guy for talking about Wright who I hate because he's just so annoying and stupid and I think I agree with you about morning shows. But skanky is a funny word if you've never heard it.
MEGAN: Was he subordinate to the banker on DoND? Because that's be a hilarious subtext.
MOE: Speaking of which I totally checked the comments late yesterday and there was one about Mauritania retaining a slave class, which totally reminded me of China also having a slave class, which made me feel a lot better about my current situation.
MEGAN: Why cabbages in that article, I wonder?
MOE:

The newspaper said 76 children from the same county, Liangshan, had been missing since the Chinese Lunar Year festival in February, 42 of whom had already left the region to work.
"The youngest kids found in the child labor market were only seven and nine years old," it said.

The pastor who was thrust upon the public consciousness as a caricature of the angry black man emerged after an exhaustive series of performances as a more familiar television persona: a voluble, vain and erudite entertainer, a born televangelist who quotes Ralph Ellison as well as the Bible and mixes highfalutin academic trope with salty street talk.

"When we have a billion people, you said we were destroying the planet./ When we tried limiting our numbers, you said it is human rights abuse," reads a poem posted on the Internet by "a silent, silent Chinese" and cited by some students as an accurate expression of their feelings. "When we were poor, you thought we were dogs./ When we loan you cash, you blame us for your debts./ When we build our industries, you called us polluters./ When we sell you goods, you blame us for global warming."

Shell, the world's second-largest, nongovernment-controlled oil company by market capitalization after Exxon Mobil Corp., posted a 56% increase in first-quarter revenue to $114.3 billion from $73.48 billion in the year-earlier period. The quarterly revenue is close to the gross domestic product of the Arab world's most populous country, Egypt, of $127.9 billion for 2007.

• "He's obviously a well-educated, sincere man who has done good work in building Trinity United Church of Christ. But, to borrow a phrase that Wright might have used in one of his sermons, his rant at the Press Club demonstrates, that he is also a damn fool." [TheRoot]
  
• Surely I wasn't the only one who detected some philosophical ideological undertones to the Lauren Conrad-Heidi Montag feud, but both actually turn out to support bombing Iran. [NY Mag]
  
• Perhaps because Iran recently condemned Barbie dolls. [NYT]
  
• The Fed's bailout of Bear Stearns is the "worst policy mistake of the generation." Well, I mean, we pointed that out already, but when a former Fed head of monetary affairs says so it's apparently "news." [WSJ]
  
• It was a real delusion. It was like [former New York Gov. Eliot] Spitzer: "I am doing something dangerous, but because of who I am, and how smart I am, it is not going to come back to haunt me." -89-year-old financial manager and historian Peter Bernstein. [WSJ]
  
• And now we've got 18.6 million vacant homes on our hands! [Wonkette]

• Congratulations, Daniel Pipes. What a marvelous job you've done fearmongering and mobilizing public sentiment against a champion of pluralism and cultural understanding. I am sooooo glad we have you around to prevent our children from learning foreign languages. [NYT]
• An elite Korean boarding school recently turned off the surveillance cameras it was using to ensure students didn't fall asleep during late-night study sessions. [NYT]
• Two North Korean refugees in South Korea poured paint thinner on themselves and tried to set themselves on fire at the Olympic torch relay on Sunday to draw attention to China's inhumane policy of sending North Korean refugees like themselves back to North Korea, and Chinese students threw rocks and bottles and pipes at them in retaliation. [NYT]
• And speaking of the Democratic People's Republic a a 28-year-old military officer just defected to the South. [ NYT]
• An express train derailed and crashed just southeast of Beijing, killing 70 people. [NYT]

MOE: Together again at last! We'll have to celebrate this. But how?
MEGAN: I can make mimosas, but I was sort of planning on doing laundry later.
MOE: Shall we talk about the Reverend Wright?
MEGAN: Well, everyone else is, including Reverend Wright.
MOE: Or the economy? The food crisis. Stop hoarding food, world! It is only getting more expensive because you think it is going to get more expensive! It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, don't you see?
MEGAN: I don't think everyone is hoarding. God knows I'm not.
MEGAN: My fridge contains: butter, really old bread, prosciutto, eggs, beer and leftover pizza that I'm likely going to eat when we're done. And the afore-mentioned champagne but it turns out I don't actually have any OJ for mimosas, so it's just straight champagne for me.
MOE: How was your weekend? I went to a wedding. It was wonderful until I realized I had no place to go once it was over, save 30th Street Station, which was very cold and miserable. At least I had the money to purchase myself an Eagles sweatshirt to wad myself up inside on the way home. Warm clothes at cold train stations is a rarity. My fridge contains mustard and hummus.

MEGAN: Glamour sent me to cover the White House Correspondents Dinner and the various parties. I spent it in dresses and heels rather than the tank tops and flip flops that a 90 degree sunny weekend should have portended.
MOE: Oh we should really talk about our fabulous parties then, I suppose. The Mauritanians suffering at the hands of all the sudden hoarding from the food exporting nations — here is one area where the free market could be virtuous, and yet when called to be virtuous, I guess we cling to national allegiances and self-preservational instincts...and anyway so Craig Ferguson. Do share.
MEGAN: Craig Ferguson was deemed hard-to-understand due to the acoustics and his accent, but I was upstairs in the bar at that point so didn't catch a ton of it. It wasn't as bad as Rich Little or as evilly good as Colbert 2 years ago and then it started to rain.
MOE: Oh and here's a link re the new unflat world, the rise of nationalism. God I hated The World Is Flat. 2% of Mauritania's land is arable, I just learned.

MEGAN: I hated that book, too. I can't remember why, because I read it in grad school, but I remember hating it. I hate all those books. Don't get me started on Guns, Germs and Steel, fucking piece of social Darwinist bullshit
MEGAN: Axelrod was just on MSNBC. I don't think Wright's new speaking campaign is sitting too well with him.
MOE: Here's a YouTube clip from the event. At around 9:40 he says to GWB, "I remember eight years ago you promised you were going to restore dignity to the White House...pause...By the way I thought you were fantastic on 'Deal Or No Deal'." I don't think you can compare Guns, Germs and Steel to The World Is Flat but that's just maybe because I read Tom Friedman to feel smarter than him and I read Jared Diamond to familiarize myself with the deluxe version of the conventional wisdom he purveys.

MEGAN: Nothing like some delicious conventional wisdom that all peoples are made to be conflicted and the "best" society will win!
MOE: Reading about the development of penicillin...the drug's discoverer, Alexander Fleming, was sort of this absent minded dilettante who was moved by treating soldiers in WWI to try and isolate antibiotics, but the drug would have gone nowhere — it sat around on his shelves for 20 years — if not for a group of scientists at Oxford, some of whom were motivated partly by humanistic instincts but one of whom notably (I'm forgetting who) thought he was doing something very dangerous because plagues were necessary to keep the population under control, but he didn't care because the project was so intellectually tantalizing, and maybe he was right about all of that. Who knows. Shall we discuss Bill Clinton's Obama envy, brought to you by a certain notable ex-colleague of Spencer Ackerman?
MEGAN: Wait, so, plagues are the opiates of the masses?
MEGAN: Also, I know nothing about Spencer's ex-colleague whatsoever that I didn't read about in that piece he wrote about him (which sounded like typical interoffice backstabby nastiness on the colleague's part), but I now know he's not a fan of Bill Clinton. He's not supposed to be even-handed or something, is he?
MOE: Huh? Even handed? Oh lord don't give me that. My problem with this Talk Of The Town is that, being a Talk Of the Town, it doesn't really address annnnything beyond the perception of the perceptions and, you know, a lot of people would truly like to have an answer to: were the failings of Clinton economic policy fundamentally the result of a Giant Sellout, or well-meaning inevitabilitarianism?
MOE: Which is not a word.
MOE: Also, my sense was that Angela Davis may have been cool, but that Stalin was not, and now people think I am so terrible, and maybe they are right.
MEGAN: Oh, well, I just mean that it seemed very much like the author didn't like Bill Clinton from the get-go, which made me roll my eyes and not really take anything he was saying very seriously.

MEGAN: Stalin was very uncool. The problem with Communism was that its intellectual advocates were always sort of idealistic and understandable while its practitioners were always crazy, power-hungry oppressive megalomaniacs.
MEGAN: Um, by the way, what is the kind of goatee called when the dude shaves most of the front of the chin but leaves maybe an inch on the very, very bottom, on the curve? Because that's what Reverend Wright has apparently grown.
MOE: I should just point out that my bias is having grown up for some time with communism, and having the sense from a very young age that while it was not so bad to be poor, it was creepy to be brainwashed. And please send a picture.
MEGAN: Ok, I take it back, actually, it turns out he's always had it, I just never noticed it before because I've never seen his face quite this big and it's a little grey.
MOE: And here's something that will shock you: Republicans preside over periods of slower economic growth and widening income gaps than Democrats. Paul Krugman doesn't understand why exactly but thinks there could be something to that and come to think of it so do I!
MEGAN: Laffer curve! Laffer curve!
MEGAN: Like, all these tax cuts at some point stop generating additional productivity and just turn into tax cuts.

MEGAN: OMG, Reverend Wright just said "I served 6 years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?"
MEGAN: The room erupted.
MOE: Well the Laffer Curve is kind of whatever, I mean it's just a tool to illustrate the law of diminishing marginal returns, but I guess this new graph would suggest, "ha ha, actually no, fuck Laffer and Keynes and all that noise, Republicans are just more likely to get it wrong, the end." Which I like because I kind of hate the Laffer Curve, insofar as it makes something really fucking mind-numbingly complex look pretty and simple and Reaganite.
MOE: Oh shit! Did he read that about himself in the Tribune?

MEGAN: But it's fun to say. Also, it ties conservatives up in knots right now because the evidence suggests that we're on the bad side of the curve even as they advocate more tax cuts and the Laffer curve is like the tax cutter's Bible.
MOE: Also, Wikipedia points us to this interesting CBO paper on how tax cuts at this point are just in no way fucking worth it.
MEGAN: And that shit's more from more than 2 years ago.
MEGAN: "As I said to Barack Obama, if you get elected, on November 5th, I'll be coming after you because you'll be representing a government that grinds people under," says Rev. Wright.
MOE: And fucking check out this editorial from the always-populist Wall Street Journal.

So Federal Reserve officials are whispering to reporters that they will consider a "pause" after another interest-rate cut this week. Perhaps we should be more respectful, but this sounds like the alcoholic who tells his wife he'll quit drinking next weekend, after one more bender. What Chairman Ben Bernanke needs isn't a gradual withdrawal from easy money but membership in Central Bankers Anonymous.

The practical impact has been to send energy and food prices soaring. This is a direct tax on both the world's poor and America's middle class. Just when the U.S. economy needs a resilient consumer given the fall in housing prices, these price increases have eviscerated consumer pocketbooks. In its attempt to help Wall Street and the financial system, Fed policy is punishing average Americans. The public is frustrated and angry with these price increases, and it has a right to be. Inflation is the thief of the thrifty middle class.

MOE: So dude, honestly, tell me about the WHCD because the rest of the news is really depressing. It's like recession, no wait depression
MOE: rich financiers have been profiting under a reverse-Robin Hood system whereby the amount of capital underlying securities steadily decreased as the risk was moved to the public balance sheet, the dollar is going to keep sinking, the entire financial services industry is a laughingstock...we need a new Decameron, if you will.
MOE: Did you see Heidi and Spencer? Who appeared, despite rumors they would not.
MEGAN: I did not see Heidi and Spencer. Going made me realize that I'd been in D.C. too damn long because I was all like "Oooh, Carlos Gutierrez! Fran Thompson! Helen Thomas!" and then I geeked out and played spot-the-celeb with this guy after making him pose for the photo and I totally didn't recognize Ashlee Simpson though I caught Donatella.

MEGAN: And then, since Samantha Bee was at Glamour's table, I chatted with her (cutely pregnant, but still in heels and I commiserated that she had to attend but couldn't drink and she said she only came because she figured when she pushed out a second kid no one would think she was cool enough to invite again).
MEGAN: And I took the picture at the bottom of this blog post.
MEGAN: And Bush's speech: lame.
MOE: Who the fuck was pete wentz the guest of?

MEGAN: I dunno, but he DJ'd the Capitol File party, so maybe them?

• Rev. Jeremiah Wright is going on PBS tomorrow night to reflect on his newfound fame. "I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint?" [NYT]
  
• OMG who's winning in Indiana???? Check this space back at 11 p.m. for the results of the very latest poll. [Indianapolis Star]
  
• Speaking of Indiana, its local media went all the way to the Evansville Abercrombie to solve the mystery of the Aberdudes. Reportedly, they're neither gay nor did they plan their outfits that way. Times like this you really wish Toqueville was around but maybe we'll be in shape to fully fathom that tomorrow. [NYT]
  
• John McCain made the outlandishly courageous decision to distance himself from the Bush Administration with regards to its handling of Katrina. [Wash Post]

• Sometimes the urban elite needs the sad reality of the mindset of the provincial American electorate spelled out for them but a lifelong Londoner born in Moscow sorta seems like a weird guy to be doing that. [Times of London]
• Even racists find it hard to hate Obama so Republicans are trying to remind them how much they hate that awful rap music. [Reason]
• Someday, when oil hits $500 a barrel perhaps, they will develop a pharmacological cure for mullah fatigue syndrome. [BBC]
• The kind of legal action that sort of betrays a misunderstanding of the whole "freedom of speech" thing. [Reuters]
• Remember how all your friends who were responsible enough to buy houses over the past few years had all these horror stories about getting outbid and showing up at open houses at 8 a.m. to a line of 86 people? Yeah, well, things change. [WSJ] Sorry to be a bonerkiller, dudes, but it turns out you'll have to scratch "cancer avoidance" off your list of reasons to jerk off. [US News]

MEGAN: So, did you hear? The DNC allowed Puerto Rico to switch from having a caucus on June 7th to having a primary on June 1st. This could be the first time candidates actually visit/give a crap about our remaining colonies. I have always been uncomfortable knowing we have colonies whose citizens are less than fully represented in our federal government. It seemslike that's why we had a war with England way back, right?

MOE: Yeah I grew up in DC so I'm kind of used to it.
I put it in the news roundup though.
The news roundup no one read because everyone was too busy watching THE HILLS.

Also the Puerto Ricans get that parade.

MEGAN: OMG, Ali Velshi on CNN likes doing stories about Facebook because then tons of people friend him afterwards.

MEGAN: I'm a little scattered this morning, I can't decide whether I should provide her with the attention by asking if you've seen the new Obama girl video in which she asks Hillary to stop attacking her man or if you've been reading Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's blog. The last entry he patiently explains whhy African-Americans don't trust our government. Also, that picture of Emmett Till always sorta makes me weepy.

MOE: Dude this Obama video is awesome
I stopped watching them.

MEGAN: I thought it was when I saw it last night, but it was 1 am and I'd been drinking. My taste is normally off but I was still kind of amused this morning.

Oh, yeah, I hadn't seen one in a while because it got annoying.

MOE: Right, they took their time on this one though. Also, whoever's voice that is is really good. Like wayyyyy better than Ashley Alexandra Dupre

MEGAN: Actually, it's Leah Kauffman, who is quite cute in her own right and that video I just linked is her asking Ann Coulter to "perfect" her, too, as she's Jewish. She talks about finally growing into her nose. I wish that had happened to me.

MOE: Sorry, I'm actually trying to post the video right now. It's so fun and timely! Um, what else is going on? All I've been hearing about is Sinbad. But here's an embarrassing revelation: I do not know exactly why Sinbad is famous. OR maybe he was never famous, which is why he was in Bosnia in the first place. And also, I was not aware Kareem Abdul Jabbar had a blog. I just feel so BEHIND.

MEGAN: Wait, whoa, like Sinbad, Sinbad?

MOE: Yeah, like, honestly, I always thought of him as that guy from A Different World

MEGAN: Me too!
Also, I'll link that shit.
I think I knew he was a comedian, though. But I feel like those USO shows are always second-string entertainers anyway. Sorry, Sinbad. I'm sure you're still funny. But you were no Dwayne Wayne.

MOE: No I knew he was a comedian, i mean I do not live under a rock, it's just that I ...well do you think Sinbad will plan a comedy tour on this basis?

MEGAN: Dude, this is literally the most I've thought about Sinbad in years. Like, possibly since he was on Hollywood Squares or something. Hopefully his agent is booking him on Larry King or something right now.
Ok, completely off-topic, but I went hunting for the video of that trip on CBS's site, and one of their most popular stories is Top 10 Reasons to Have Sex Tonight. Not one of them is because it's fun or because you want to. Stupid moralists at CBS. It's all like, it burns calories and relieves stress. Well, duh.

MOE: Oh fuck it boosts your immune system too?
And cancer risk, but I think that's the same thing.
Well that settles it.

MEGAN: We should have more sex?
I mean, not us together, but in general.

MOE: I am going to go get really desperate on behalf of my immune system. Tonight. Fuck intimacy issues; fuck celibacy in the name of mental well-being etc. etc. Masturbation is not going to save me from cancer.

MEGAN: Well, but only good sex. Bad sex makes you go, well, masturbation would've been a better call.
Masturbation saves you from really, really bad sex.
Sometimes.

MOE: Sad admission: I've been too lazy to masturbate lately. I'll get all revved up talking to some friend about, you know, the fallacy of a "soft landing" and the future of the dollar and the numerous problems the market can't solve, and I'll be on some sort of roll, and I'll be like, DYING to have sex, but there's no one around, and by the time I get all the way up my stairs I collapse on the couch and watch Jon Stewart. And it's kind of sad that even after watching Jon Stewart I'm not in the mood, but I'm not. I fell asleep on the couch instead. In my coat. I actually slept in my coat. Maybe it's just too cold to masturbate. Another good reason to have sex. Oh god, uhhhh, maybe we should address the troop surge right now? Like how the whole 4,000 deaths thing has put a damper on its "success"?
And by the way, Kareem Abdul Jabbar's blog about Emmitt Till is really sad. I didn't even know about that.
Or maybe I did; I have not had enough coffee. Again with the roommate.

MEGAN: Well, but, like, obviously, Moe, duh, most of those people died before the surge. And they volunteered, so it shouldn't really put a damper on our warmongeriness.

MOE: OH wow, an election in Zimbabwe. I think 900 troops have died post-Surge.

MEGAN: I am drinking my official beverage of hangovers: Crystal Lite.
Coffee will come later.
Well, I mean, there's elections, and then there are "elections" in Zimbabwe under Mugabe.

MOE: Yes. And RealClearPolitics linked to some commentary about what it means in the FT but I'm not a subscriber, although I suppose I ought to be. Shoulda taken the meds I guess. Is it a slow news day? Because this linking Bill Clinton with Joe McCarthy thing is kinda old, and yet it's apparently still a top meme, which I think means we're scraping the bottom of the barrel. Yesterday on CNBC they were talking a lot about the Taiwan elections, whose results were not at all a surprise nor did they have anything approaching the economic ramifications they were suggesting, but I'm thinking it was the same problem. When will we get some fucking news?

MEGAN: About Taiwan? Or in general?
The problem is that Obama's sunning himself in the Virgin Islands right now. It's hard to make big news in a media blackout, i guess.
On Zimbabwe, Mugabe raised the salaries of all the government employees to get them to vote for him but since they're broke and sanctioned, he's just printing the money. Who says no one will learn anything from the Fed bailout of Bear Sterns?

MOE: The big stories in the Post are the fact that the Indiana primary is now what everyone's got his eye on. It could be a fair fight! Okay, and then there's some noise in the Times as to whether Obama is too liberal to be a unifier. I'm gonna have to go with "if McCain is what represents the GOP right now, then yes; next question." And hahahaha re your Mugabe joke but oh, good lord, did you read about this book?

MEGAN: Um, that writer guy's kinda sexy. Also, it's probably not a universal African tribal myth New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani.
Zimbabwe's been a cluster fuck for years and it used to be a nice, relatively stable place until Mugabe thought he'd lose power and decided white Zimbabweans were the devil. Also, I hope his parents are still ok.
Godwin's, I mean. Because it's really not a safe place at all right now and the elections aren't going to help probably.

MOE: Wait! I forgot! We haven't talked about how David Paterson could get soooooooo much money for his memoir at this point OMG WTF his life just keeps getting more interesting.

MEGAN: A middle aged man did drugs in the 70s. The fact that such a thing is news means either there aren't a fuck of a lot of glass houses around or that people really like throwing stones anyway.

MOE: Huh weird, and on a final note, maybe Rev. Wright was right? In the spirit if not the letter of what he says. Some reader just sent this in, with the message, "don't let the haters get you down babe." Aw! The haters are actually what get me up in the morning! Well no, actually, coffee is what gets me up in the morning. AHEM.

MEGAN: Dude, I'll get on Ebay and have you a new grinder in a week.

Editor's Note: My roommate just went to Starbucks to buy me some coffee. She is a wonderful person to whom I am eternally grateful. Also, she took our commuter mugs so as to reduced our carbon footprint etc. I love coffee, and my roommate. And the Earth, we both love it.

MEGAN: The Internet hates Crappy Hour!!

MOE: Oh my god! It's a miracle! You're here!

I'm the most hungover I have ever been

MEGAN: Wow, that's saying something. I'm just morning thirsty, but I might have a Target hangover...

MOE: I have a tequila/beer/whiskey hangover
it is amazing I am here
No nevermind
My fingers don't even work. that is normal

MEGAN: Whoa. Tequila and whiskey should never be mixed.

MOE: So...
HINDSIGHT

MEGAN: So, shall we kick it off with illegal passport searches?

MOE: I guess so. Should I scan in the passport from when I was 4 that i use to get into bars?
Yeah, so, Obama, what the fuck. I mean, what was it they expected to find?

MEGAN: He's a Muslimy Muslim from Muslimstan?

MOE: What if he's been to NORTH KOREA and SYRIA and RED CHINA and also YUCCA MOUNTAIN ????

MEGAN: OMG, he's NUCLEAR, people, NUCLEAR! Only without a nuclear family, so that must be like so bad.

MOE: no he totally has a NUCLEAR FAMILY
and they're PROLIFERATING

MEGAN: Nuclear nonproliferation is best, people.

MOE: ok, oh god, so. what the fuck. I'm like still drunk

MEGAN: And I'm actually caffeinated! This is obviously opposites day. Normally I'm the one whose fucking hungover and you've already had coffee.

So, like, what else is opposite?

MOE: I can barely drink coffee. Um, that stingray story is the opposite of boring!
MEGAN: OMG, this is why I don't go near beaches. Creepy.

Well, that and the fact that I'm ghost pale and hate being all hurty on my skin and having the world make fun of my sunburns.
MOE: The Bill Richardson endorsement was the opposite of what I expected.

MEGAN: I know! Rats, sinking ship, et al. Man, what must he have against Hillary? Why must the boys all gang up on her? It's MISOGYNY.
MOE: OH fuck
MEGAN: Oh, Jesus H. Christ. Also, that's the same publication that published that he was in the church on July 22nd when he wasn't.

MOE: Seriously, seriously I want to go back to bed now.
You think they just pulled that out of their asses?
MEGAN: No, sadly, I'm thinking they didn't.
MOE: That's the problem
MEGAN: Also, frankly, I'll admit, I stopped paying attention to the ins and outs of that particular intractable conflict like 7 years ago, aka, when I finished graduate school, so I'm sure there's refutable stuff in there because it's World Net Daily, but I cannot correctly identify it. But, overall, Obama does advocate dialogue, so it's probably more spun in a certain direction than actually completely wrong.

Sadly.
And, I think this is what happens when you run an anti-establishment campaign staffed with anti-establishment-y scholars. Fuck ups. Lots of 'em.
MOE: Oh yeah they say Obama loves Hamas and hates Israel and some aide of him named Malley is an anti-Semite

MEGAN: As a person of Irish descent, may I just stereotype my people and say: it does not surprise me that one of us would be an anti-Semite.
MOE: OH fuck it's Good Friday

I haven't eaten meat yet

Just cheese

MEGAN: My antidote to this day has been to youtube up some soothing music. And, since I don't celebrate it, hoorah! Steak for dinner!

Do you think there will be specials?
MOE: Maybe they will have Obama halal el sadr specials for people like you.

MEGAN: Or else they'll be full up with goddamn fish specials.
MOE: So that guy who just got fired from the McCain campaign for Twittering that video...

yeah I don't know where I was going with that. Just wanted to provide a link.
9:31 AM
Um, me and my roommate just sang the FreeCreditReport commercial in unison.

MEGAN: Twitter is evil! It's like gmail status, only worse. Like, for instance, a certain conservablogger I know who shall not be named but I know you hate has ended up as a gchat contact of mine, and encouraged everyone recently to be offended by us babykiller-bonerkillers promoting babykilling with a wire hanger necklace. And I almost sent it to you, but thought better of it.

OMG, I totally catch myself doing that and then realize that's the beginning of the descent into utter madness.

MOE: Oohhhhhhh I bet I know who you are talking about!

MEGAN: Shhhhhh.
MOE: I should have seen it coming at me like an atom bomb

MEGAN: Oh, fuck, like she reads this anyway? Certainly not that far into this.
I like the pirate one better than the car one, Free Credit Report.com people. Also, please never again let your actor do the white man's overbite and bob his head on camera ever again.

MOE: Yeah, no one is still reading now.

NO one.

MEGAN: Is it sad how we know this?

No, i have to say, ONE LONE COMMENTER (whyknot) apologized to me the other day for all the shitty white men in my life. So he's probably still reading.

MOE: Oh fuck, awesome scarf, Nancy Pelosi. She has the best scarves.
She like consulted the Dalai Lama on the color.
MEGAN: Why the fuck has Hillary Clinton not gone shopping with Nancy Pelosi? I mean, girl, please. You know you always pick out your most stylish friend and go shopping with her.

MOE: SO TRUE.

WTF HILLARY

MEGAN: Also, Hillary needs to embrace her curves and stop trying to hide her ass. YOUR ASS IS NOT A BAD THING>
MOE: Nancy has your best interests in mind.

MEGAN: It's only a bad thing in mom pants and overly long suit jackets.

MOE: Nancy Pelosi would not undermine.

MEGAN: I'll take you shopping!

No, Nancy would not undermine at all. She's be the one who'd be like, ummm, no, let's try these pants on you instead.
Also, Nordstroms or Needless Markup instead of Macys. It's not like Hillary can't afford nice suits.
And tailoring. Look into tailoring. I have a tailor because I am short and have a big butt, I cannot lie. Her name is Kathy and she's awesome and anyone who lives in DC can email me for her contact information.

MOE: Can we get back to Bill Richardson for a second though? Like, it takes you until practically April to realize Obama is a "once in a lifetime leader"? You don't really have the excuse of, like, not knowing he was until he started visiting your state...
Also did you read the thing on Meghan McCain?

MEGAN: Well, um, he was sorta busy growing the beard and probably getting all the strange he forewent on the campaign trail.
I did. Meghan, I'll repeat myself here on Jezebel if you didn't hear me the first time. Do NOT get a tramp stamp with McCain in an Olde English font. Just. Don't.

MOE: Also I want to point out I read this column at the deli this morning and snorted. Barack O'Bama...you have to be so hungover you're worse than drunk to enjoy that. But look, Drudge linked it!
OH, Meghan, get a fuckin BUTTERFLY on the small of your back if you want, I don't care.
MEGAN: No, please, make an effort not to be a girl cliche. For the good of the sisterhood.

Also, can I Hurt, Charles? NO MORE O'BAMA JOKES. They are not funny.
MOE: You voted for Kerry in '04 and are pretty much the best chance America has seen for a pro-life candidate's daughter needing to get an abortion in the White House since...well...I would have said Jenna Bush, but you know that motto of hers. "Be nice to each other and always use condoms." I bet Meghan doesn't always use condoms...speaking of, I like how she complains how she hasn't gotten laid and the only dudes who want to do her are investment bankers. She needs to become an Obama campaign Springtern!
MEGAN: Although, I have to say, I'm all for a First Daughter who runs on a platform of not fucking i-bankers. Run, Meghan, run! Preach!

(Even if you do have the "h" in your name).

MEGAN: So, apparently, fidelity is just a big fat lie for everyone now.

MOE: It's biology!
Don't you love political sex scandal-pegged science stories?

MEGAN: Best pun by a scientist ever: "Infants have their infancy; adults, adultery."
But can we have a moment of silence for the end of my nascent crush on brand new NY Governor David Paterson?

MOE: Did you like the detail about how he took the mistress to Day's Inn, but he's also taken his wife to the same Day's Inn? Here she is. Isn't she a beauty? Though to be fair, I've stayed in places about four diamond ratings beneath that place in this town. And I have, like, 20/30 vision.

MEGAN: Like, ok, this I need to understand. Why if he and his wife live in Harlem, did he take her to the Days Inn to fuck her? Like, that's about 30 blocks from the Harlem line, right? So it's not even very far.

Like, I can totally see taking your mistress there, but your wife?

MOE: Yeah I lived in Harlem. That's like a two and a half mile walk and I lived up at 149th.
I bet the fuckin marriage counselor recommended it.

MEGAN: Oh, God, you're so totally right. Men are creatures of habit. He was probably like, I had a ton of great sex in that hotel, I'll just go back there! Rather than, like, shelling out for the W or something.
David, I have seen your wife. She deserved some high thread count sheets and strawberries and champagne from room service, I'm just sayin'.

MOE: I bet you can get "room service" from that hotel. It just comes from the local diner and they will totally mess up your order but as a plus they'll charge you $7.95, no matter what you got. I wonder if the Day's Inn is one of those hotels where there is a microwave in every room and free microwave popcorn with an advertisement for a Grey Line Bus tour on the packaging.

Soooooo...should we talk about Pastor KKKRazy?

MEGAN: Ah, The Reverend Not-Wright

MOE: The Reverend Wright wing conspiracy!
According to Fox News, he's sorta like Hitler.
Hitler did some great things1

MEGAN: Well, he does have a 'stache, I guess that seals it. I mean, except for the whole part where he's black and stuff.

MOE: He fixed the economy!

MEGAN: By starting a war!

MOE: Yeah well! Nicer guys have tried that and failed!

MEGAN: Well, several years into Hitler's war the economy in Germany tanked, too. Apparently, it's not that great for the economy unless you win and stuff.

MOE: So anyway, Obama is supposed to address the problem of the pastor who changed his life being some sort of Stalinist Che Guevara Islamofascist black supremacist firebrand and it's happening this morning at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, which is only about two blocks away from my old apartment (sigh!) and I hope they air it on Fox News because, for one, the sound isn't working on any of my other news channels and two, I love Fox News. They just interviewed Mr. Feeley from Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. Can you IMAGINE naming a character on a kid's show "Mr. Feeley" now? No! It's unthinkable! Anyway, let's really get into the Pastor Wright thing. I feel like no one in the media has a real opinion about this guy because everyone has had at least one boyfriend who has made more ridiculous utterances and, you know, it's not like Obama touched dicks with this dude. On the other hand, he's supposed to be some sort of spiritual adviser. But, like, "spiritual adviser" — what do any of us know about that? So we're all circling around one another, trying to figure out whether anyone cares, whether this is going to totally sink his campaign or just fly over their heads and... and...I still don't know what I think.

In other news, Obama has a black Chinese math nerd brother by another mother. Maybe if the Dalai Lama steps down the Chinese government can make him the official reincarnated Dalai Lama.

MEGAN: Well, CNN keeps running the clip where he says that Hillary Clinton doesn't know what it's like to be a black man in a country run by rich white people and I'm sort of failing to see that as being controversial. Are we arguing that the country isn't run by rich white people? The median income in this country is less than $45,000 a year and Congressmembers make more than $150,000 and the President makes more than $200,000.
Well, but the Dalai Lama would still be the Dalai Lama, only he just wouldn't be the political-leader-in-exile anymore.
MOE: No but he's apparently going to step down from his exiled title if the violence doesn't stop.
I'm not sure what the succession plan is but I would really love it if it involved an Obama.

MEGAN: That would be too much for me to handle in the morning.
MOE: I do love how Roger Cohen paints the picture of this guy as a "potential problem" for Obama. Because the Clinton clan is full of such upstanding citizens.

MEGAN: Lovely people, even.

MOE: Anyway, so...what is the worst thing this guy Wright has said anyway? "God Damn America" or that the government created AIDS? Did you ever date one of those guys who told you crack cocaine was invented in a CIA lab? Because I have. And this was before Wikipedia, so I finally had to Nexis the fucking story and all the ensuing retractions to shut him the hell up. Not that I really felt like defending the CIA! But the thing is, it took a lot of time for me to get it up to want to refute any of the retarded things he said, even though I loved him, and I sort of feel like that must be Obama's thing, like...blah blah blah. Anyway, as it turns out it doesn't seem like Obama spent that much time in church anyway.

MEGAN: Oh, but he used to say he went every week! I can't say that I dated a guy who thought crack cocaine was a CIA plot against white people (although, hello? FBI would've made more sense conspiracy theorists) but I've definitely heard it and it totally still holds sway among many people in this country. And, hell, fucking South African President Thabo Mbeki thinks we hatched AIDS to keep Africans from breeding and shit, so, you know, apparently it's pretty widely believed that we're coordinated and shit.

MOE: Oh man I just rewound my Fox and they were interviewing that black republican ex Lt Governor of Maryland and he was talking about how a "spiritual adviser" is a really important force in your life, he knows because he used to be in a monastery. Um, was Barack Obama in a monastery? Because I don't remember that part. It's like his Chinese African brother! (Oh my god, Chinese African! Do you think he is involved in Sudanese blood oil??) Anyway, whatevs! I'm about to change the subject. Can you handle this?
I actually read almost the entire account of the Week That Shook Wall Street and I have a takeaway.
MEGAN: Wow, no wonder we got started late. That's longer than Crappy Hour itself!

MOE:

Chief Executive Officer Alan Schwartz was out of pocket. Although Bear Stearns had been struggling with mortgage-related losses and problems in its wealth-management unit, Mr. Schwartz was hosting a Bear Stearns media conference in Palm Beach, Fla. On Wednesday morning, he left the conference briefly to do an interview with CNBC in an effort to deflect rumors about liquidity issues at the firm.

Steve Black, co-head of J.P. Morgan's investment bank, returned early from vacation in the Caribbean, spearheading the bank's efforts with his J.P. Morgan counterpart in London, Bill Winters. Mr. Black's role was pivotal. He was a longtime associate of J.P. Morgan Chief Executive James Dimon. And Mr. Black had a long relationship with Bear's CEO, Mr. Schwartz, dating back to the 1970s, when the two were fraternity brothers at Duke University.

At 5 a.m. Friday, Mr. Geithner, Mr. Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, calling in from home, joined a conference call to debate whether Bear should be allowed to fail or whether the Fed should lend it enough money to get through the weekend. At 7 a.m. they settled on the lifeline option.

• Barack Obama has always been black, but since he was raised by a white mom in Hawaii and Jakarta he did not always have much in the way of a black community, and so when he moved to Chicago he started attending this black church where the pastor says the sort of hyperbolic shit pastors often say, only the media doesn't really cover the hyperbolic shit that gets said at black churches the way they cover the shit that gets said at white churches because black people aren't constantly trying to equate abortion with the Holocaust or replace the Constitution with the Ten Commandments, maybe because they just aren't as bossy as white religious people because they've never been in a position of societal dominance, which is actually something of which they are both aware and not exactly stoked about, and when you are a preacher you kinda play to that. So, like, Obama is going to try and address all of this in a speech tomorrow night. [CNN]
  
• And good luck Barry: your pastor's approval rating roughly on par with Al Qaeda's. [Rasmussen]
  
• But the church people love him! [ABC News]
  
• A leading pimp says Eliot Spitzer must have been a sex addict if he had to pay for any of his sex. [NY Mag]

• Nancy Pelosi hearts Obama anyway. [NY Observer]
• Maybe she has sex dreams about him? [Slate]
• "Roger Magro thought his wife Crystal was 'full of baloney' when she told him she and her co-workers had purchased a Powerball ticket worth more than $276 million...Magro said his wife plans to continue working in the tax office, but he resigned Monday from his job as a sheriff's deputy." [Pittsburgh Channel]
• Was a Republican DOJ conspiracy behind the Spitzer sting? Probably. Does that make the scandal any less fun? Hard to say.
• You know what? I am so happy the market rewarded JP Morgan with a huge stock market gain today for its courageous decision to buy Bear Stearns for $2 a share in an unprecedented transaction practically guaranteed by the government to make them shitloads of money. Yes, that is what the financial sector needed today. All that and the Dow rose twenty points. [WSJ]

• "After the first play, a lot of the reaction was negative. But after the second play, it became, `Play that song again,' and `Hey, that song's not bad." That's the program director of New York's Z100 discussing lovely Ashley Alexandra "Kristen" Dupre's song "What We Want." (Some mashups here.) You might recall the same phenomenon surrounding "Hollaback Girl." I'm making this my first item pretty much solely because it's probably my last chance to run this picture of Ashley and her mom. [Houston Chronicle]
  
• Obama's crazy pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright hates America and he thinks all black people should, too, and Obama's excuse is that he missed church the day Wright blamed the U.S. for September 11. [ABC News]
  
• The good news: 13% of registered voters still think Obama is Muslim. [National Review]
  
• The Clinton campaign sent out a nasty letter about how Obama is a total loser. Then the Obama campaign annotated it to make Clinton look like the loser. It sounds like a loser move, but I think they succeeded anyway. [NPR]

• Recession: was there any uncertainty left as to whether it had arrived? Really? Okay, well, if the flurry of bank meltdowns, the credit crunch, the rocketing food and oil prices, violent job cuts, continued slide of the dollar and mad Fed scramble to inject money into the economy didn't convince you, we now have conclusive proof that American consumers have somehow managed to stop buying so much. [WSJ]
• Karl Rove credits George W. Bush with teaching him a lot about "trust and honesty and straightforwardness." [Think Progress]
• "The magic is gone" for the U.S., says French foregin minister Bernard Kouchner, that guy who was just on the cover of the New York Times Magazine.
• Yesterday I gave you pickle juice popsicles; today bacon lollipops! [Lollyphile]
• Christopher Ward, the former treasurer of the National Republican Congressional Committee, embezzled about a million dollars, transferring funds from the committee to various organizations to his own bank accounts to...whores? We can only hope. [Wash Post]