MEGAN: Greetings from the frigid north, where my father is currently suiting up in full snow regalia to head outside and snowblow away the foot of snow in our driveway in temperatures that should reach 15 degrees! (Without wind chill, of course).

SPENCER: Greetings from Washington D.C.'s historic blogger Flophouse, where the heat has evidently decided to give out the week that the managing company and most of my roommates have skipped town for this farkakteh holiday. I'm typing this on my couch in a Triple F.A.T. Goose coat and probably look like a South Park character

MEGAN: Only if you have a knit hat with a pom pom on it, or your hood drawn close around your face.

SPENCER: Hmm I should put the hood up.

MEGAN: Also, the local "news"cast here reliably informed me that it is now Hannukah, this strange eight day holiday celebrated by the Jews over something to do with war with the Syrians and macaroons and candles. And oil, though I'm not sure Syria has much oil.

SPENCER: now now now. Hannukah is more properly understood as the first-ever war for oil.

MEGAN: I still fail to see why it merited 70 seconds of explanation! On the news! The Jews! They don't celebrate Christmas! Do they even know it's Christmastime at all?

SPENCER: Is it actually Hannukah? I hate that bullshit holiday too. It's a bunch of Jews trying to out-vulgarize Christians. Have some self-respect, it's embarrassing. Do you really need an explanation for why THE MEDIA devoted so much time to a JEWISH HOLIDAY

MEGAN: To explaining its existence? Yes. What amused/annoyed me was how the anchorwoman managed to infuse such awe into her voice when explaining it, as though she was explaining to the viewers some strange, secret thing they'd never heard of before. It's fucking Hannukah, it happens every year and has for longer than Christmas. The end.

SPENCER: I love how the Catholic girl is more offended than the Jewboy

MEGAN: Former Catholic. I get offended over the insult to my intelligence, and more so when I've been drinking until my parents seem normal.

SPENCER: sorry! I keep forgetting that you Christians don't have to be Christians if you don't choose to be, which is not the case for Jews.

MEGAN: Former Catholics get all of the guilt and none of the absolution. It's the only real choice for a true masochist. Anyway, so a real media outlet informs me that the mortgage crisis is Bush's fault?

SPENCER: Ah, now we have the natural tie between religionethnicity and broader political questions. I didn't read that story and wouldn't have understood it if I had, so I don't know if it blames Jews at all for the mortgage crisis, unlike the giant Ponzi scheme that's been going on for some time which is obviously the fault of the Jew. But isn't it fair to say that over the last eight years, our three biggest core-competencies as Jews — the media; international finance; and American foreign policy — have seriously suffered? I'm kind of gratified Obama doesn't have Jews in his cabinet. We need to take a knee and think about what we've done.

MEGAN: I believe it blames it all on Bush's laissez faire regulatory policies, not the Jews. But I had not been paying attention to who wasn't in the Cabinet, that's sort of interesting.

SPENCER: well, that's the whitewashing Jewish media for you. Actually it isn't! Politico is the one media organization in DC that's practically judenrein. Seriously, they're one giant cucumber sandwich. Wrapped in a foreskin. Another symptom of the Jew's weakening hold on this country.

MEGAN: Cucumber sandwiches? I have never once eaten one, but I come from the land of Fluffernutters and baloney-and-cheese-on-Wonder-bread.

SPENCER: Nonsense. I read on Ta-Nehisi's blog all about cucumber sandwiches.

MEGAN: I cannot get on board with a steak cooked past "mooing." If I wanted to eat carbonized carpet padding, I wouldn't pay $30 for the privilege.

SPENCER: PREACH IT. I have no idea why you'd ruin a perfectly good piece of red meat

MEGAN: Besides, like Sarah Palin before me, something about the thrill of the hunt makes me enjoy it more, even if it is just chasing a piece of beef around my plate as it tries to escape from my fork, screaming.

SPENCER: No one could possibly believe a steak is improved by removing its flavor. Speaking of removing its flavor, or at least numbing it, did you & Ana talk about Levi's mother's apparent oxycontin dealership? Because, i mean — SHIT.

MEGAN: Was it oxy? I was convinced it was meth. Either way, I'm guessing someone won't be babysitting much. If it was meth, though, the house could be a Superfund site, depending on how long she was cooking. For real, Arkansas had so many meth labs a couple years back that it cost the state and the feds a ton to clean up because they all ended up being so polluted they became Superfund sites.

SPENCER: no it was definitely Oxycontin. I learned it from watching Alex Pareene.

MEGAN: One would think it would be hard to get enough oxy to distro in rural Alaska, since it's a controlled substance and all and monitored by the feds, but I guess that is why she got caught.
SPENCER: In any event. I liked his point about how we were supposed to venerate the Palinites' rugged white authenticity. Cuts both ways, doesn't it?

MEGAN: The only people that venerated the Palin's white rural authenticity are Republicans that grew up in urban areas and avoid places like where I grew up in the fear that they might get their wingtips dirty. They like the idea of the noble lower middle class or the poor that could lift themselves up by their bootstraps, and not the actuality of sitting on there decomposing sofas with the Coors light cans and full ashtrays talking about how both their kids went to state schools but live at home because they can't find jobs. A Republican friend who grew up around D.C. called me last week in the midst of some Caroline Kennedy coverage and said, "Did you know that half of the welfare payments in the state of New York are made upstate? And that half of the industrialized jobs in the country that have disappeared since the Reagan years came from upstate New York?" And I was like, um, yeah. I grew up there.

SPENCER: I'm just going to sit back and watch you riff. Preach!

MEGAN: There wasn't a boom in the 90s up here! We went from being the headquarters of General Electric (hello, Jack Welch, and fuck you very much, the stock sucks now, too) to being a minor gas turbine generating plant and a bunch of semi-reclaimed green space. One in every 2 adults or something up here works for the state. Ohio? Pennsylvania? We got your rust belt, only it's gotten a little thinner in the last 25 years, but so have our local budgets. It didn't take 7 days to fix the electricity here and in Western Mass (hello, Rachel Maddow's family!) last week because they couldn't. It took a week because there's not enough money in it for a big electrical company to care to spend the money to fix it quickly.

SPENCER: I'm from Brooklyn, where upstate — everything north of Yonkers — is an abstraction. I've heard you also have a nuclear power plant that doesn't work well?

MEGAN: Not where I live, there's still some minor nuclear research that's done, apparently, but no one really talks about it. Anyway, my parents were without power for 5 days and we live in "town" so I'm a little bitter. Also, I spent the one night that I wasn't snowed in drinking with a really old friend whose job was outsourced to China this year and who, because of the economy, is working at a FedEx facility part-time, unable to make ends meet, but thankful that the work means he doesn't have to be on the dole.

SPENCER: God, my feet are startng to freeze.

MEGAN: If I had money, I would buy you a slanket.

SPENCER: Is anyone around Scotia NY expecting to see anything out of the Obama job-creation package?

MEGAN: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. Oh, thanks, I needed a good laugh. I mean, that stimulus is aimed at temporarily fixing the recent unemployment. This part of the country — and others, I shouldn't mock our Ohio and Pennsylvania brothers-and-sisters-in-shabby-arms too much — the unemployment and underemployment is structural. It's two decades worth of declining employment and population. I mean, we lost a Blockbuster and a McDonalds here, and one of the two liquor stores went out of business. When you can't support a liquor store, man... Anyway, in other outrage news, the Prop 8 people who totally promised they weren't going to go after the same sex couples that got married before the vote are totally going after the same sex marriages that were performed just in time for Christmas! They want to give 18,000 married people annulments for Christmas! How charitable!

SPENCER: one of them is my rabbi, if you can believe that. It's not just a Christmas miracle!

MEGAN: Oh, and noted moralist Ken Starr has signed up, too. Actually, it makes a kind of perverse sense that a bunch of Christian bigots would try to annul your rabbi's marriage for Christmas.

SPENCER: Let's call this for what it is. Barbarism. I'm sick of arguing about the merits of gay marriage. They're self-evident from a civil-rights perspective. All that's left to do is, as you're doing, point out the bad faith and bigotry of people like the man who's going to be preaching during the inauguration.

MEGAN: Well, and if Time's John Cloud is to be believed, Barack Obama, too. Of course, I kind of called it.

SPENCER: I don't like the framing of this piece in the slightest. It's not just a problem for gays that Obama is coddling this homophobe, it's a problem for America, indicating a persistent — what was that word you used earlier? — structural deficiency in American politics that you can say all this Bull-Connor shit about millions of your fellow Americans and be treated as a force to be appeased. I mean, I suppose I'm inconsistent here, as I think you should appease Moqtada al-Sadr and not Rick Warren, but let's treat Warren like Moqtada al-Sadr in terms of the contempt that we hold him in and invective and treat him to.

MEGAN: Yeah, fuck that guy with a chainsaw.

MEGAN: So, apparently we missed the memo yesterday? It was officially name calling day! We should spend the rest of Crappy Hour hurling invective at one another and other people in honor of the holiday, IMHO.
I mean, I don't really see any other reason to invoke Ken Starr or call one's opponent a monster.
Also, according to one of the news stations yesterday, Ickes and Penn got into it this week and devolved down to "Fuck you!" and "No, fuck you!"
MOE: I love that Samantha Power — declared the "smartest woman in America" last month by Marie Claire — gave that interview to the New Scotsman. Ummm what?
I also like how she says "We fucked up in Ohio."
MEGAN: And than is all "Oh, by the way, the headline making thing I just said is, like, totes off the record even though I said nothing would be." Like, was she drunk?
MOE: She sounds drunk. But also: "monster"... okay ... I mean, there's like "created a monster" and "monster trucks" and "cookie monster" and they all kind of have different connotations. Ughhhh but what do I know.
I kind of want Samantha Power for prez now.
MEGAN: Um, also this little gem: "You just look at [Clinton] and think, 'Ergh'."
I'm not saying I don't want to go get drunk with her because, frankly, if that's what she says to reporters sober, well, drinks are fucking on me and let's go somewhere that they'll make 'em strong and keep 'em coming.
But congrats to Obama's ENTIRE foreign policy shop for keeping your guy in the news in a bad way! You did in one week waht Clinton couldn't do in 3 months, and that's tar him!
Ok, well, fine Foolsbee [sic] is econ, but you know what I mean.
MOE: Well I guess this takes away from the whole "disciplined campaign" thing...but...Ken Starr? Ken fucking Starr? Not that I want anyone seeing my tax returns. In fact, I am going to change the subject how bout.
And now how about I call everyone's attention to this somewhat puzzling comment of yesterday regarding Hillary's assertion that she had felt the presence of the Holy Spirit. It's about Smurfette.
MEGAN: Things I thought when tracking back to the Holy Spirit article: OMG, Christian Broadcasting Network? Wait, They have a "senior" national news correspondent? Wait, this article isn't negative? Wow, the right really does want her to win the nomination. OMG, head exploding
Also someone has spent waaaay too much time thinking about the Smurfs.

es
MOE: Um, okay, topic switch. Back to Pennsylvania. Hillary has Governor Ed Rendell on her side, former mayor of Philadelphia, crusty lecherous fat gregarious machine politician known for busting unions and trying to get with writer Lisa De Paulo. His son is an Evangelical Christian, which is weird since he's a Jew, but whatev. Anyway, Anna sent me this story about how Pennsylvania could tip for Obama and I just don't see it. it's just...nah. People take orders from their block captains there, you know? Obama is fucked in Pennsylvania. I'm pretty sure. Fuck, I could be wrong. But you know.
MEGAN: Pennsylvania's a pretty machine state. Of course, the unions screwed the pooch in 04 where they split their own fucking ticket and backed both Arlen Specter and John Kerry, but whatevs.
MOE: Oh look fun, the Economist has turned it into a contest of wine drinkers vs. beer drinkers. I should take this opportunity to point out that Pennsylvania is a very good place to buy wine, as long as you do so before 9 pm., because the state is the largest purchaser of wine in the country, making it like the Wal Mart of decent wines. Props to the antiquated liquor laws; I never appreciated you till I saw Louisiana.
Arlen Specter is the machine. Ed Rendell is the machine. Comcast, the airport, a few law firms, the insurance company...they're all in this together, and none of them are particularly ideological, but if there's one thing they're not big on it's, you know, CHANGE.
MEGAN: Side note: fuck you, Comcast!
Ugh, Pennsylvania politics sound fun, and vaguely mobbed up.
MOE: You know what's also big in Pennsylvania, no surprise? ANARCHISTS. People say "change" and you think "oh those nasty dirty rotten crust punks squatting in the crack den? We thought that place was bad when it was a crack den..." And speaking of anarchists, they took credit for yesterday's terror attack on Times Square by sending postcards to Congress saying "We did it!" whereas Hamas, in stating it didn't bomb that Israeli school, just sent a text message. "We bless this operation. It will not be the last." Just notes on evildoer etiquette.
MEGAN: Except now they're saying that that LA-based anarchist/weird dude is not involved, he's just crazy and a bad writer.
MOE: Ah, so the lesson is, if you want people to take you seriously, just send a text message.
MEGAN: Unless you're dumping the person.
MOE: By the way, the Hamas text message...was that like, a group text message i.e. "karaoke sing sing 11 p.m. come out BYO!!!!" or an individual text message sent to the New York Times??
MEGAN: Dude, why does Hamas have the cell numbers of people for the NYT? Also, I'm guessing it's a blast text.
It's like, is there some terrorist Pr guy who walks around Gaza with a cell full of journalist numbers so he can text message everyone when they bomb stuff or kill people?
if that's the case, btw, I'm pretty sure there world is fucked.
MOE: P.S. did you hear about
>this story in Vanity Fair blaming Bush Condi et al for a botched coup that led to the Hamas takeover of Gaza?
Think on that for a second. I have to brew coffee before I like die or something.
MEGAN: Wow, for an Administration filled with neocons, they certainly didn't learn any lessons from previous Cold War Administrations about how to run a motherfucking coup in a small country in order to install friendly regimes.
Oh, wait, whoops, sorry, they've actually always sucks at it. My bad.

MOE: Apparently even "avowed neocons" were mad about it which is why Cheney's chief Middle East adviser resigned. But yeah, I mean, reading it you're just sort of struck with, wow, Bush was in a big hurry to do SOMETHING with Israel and Palestine...why exactly? Just bored?

"Everyone was against the elections," Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. "Bush decided, 'I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.' Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, 'The president wants elections.' Fine. For what purpose?

"Everyone blamed everyone else," says an official with the Department of Defense. "We sat there in the Pentagon and said, 'Who the fuck recommended this?' "

MEGAN: I want to say that, in Boeing's case, it was bolts or rivets or something
Yeah, I vaguely recall being in anti-counterfeiting meetings with a really lovely Boeing lobbyist and hearing her talk abut that.
MOE: Oh, look, here's a story on airplane parts. Frank Ahrens, didn't he used to cover...something inconsequential I actually used to read about? Music maybe? Good going on the aerospace beat Frank!
MEGAN: OMG, quality control

During a visit to one parts supplier, the inspector general's office observed an employee who "used a piece of paper, scotch-taped to the work surface, as a measuring device for a length of wire on an oil and fuel pressure transmitter."

Related: A League Of Her Own [Men's Vogue]

MOE: So as badly as we may have fucked up Iraq would like to renew our contract for the next 10 years but how about we talk about something more fun than that.

MEGAN: Yes

MOE: Like Monica, Paula, Kathleen and Juanita!

MEGAN: Oldies but goodies.

MOE: Oldies but plastic surgery-preserved and enhanced!

MEGAN: With the stipulation that Kathleen is sort of obviously suffering from mental illness and so our job is to hope that she gets treatment and not to make too much fun.
I think Monica's probably still without, but the other women: completely surgically "enhanced"

MOE: Well to be fair to Juanita I really have nooooo idea. Okay, so: race to find a better image of Paula Jones than the one here!

MEGAN: OH MY GOD MY EYES!
I did not turn "Safe Search" on
You know I don't use it, and you are maybe not a good person.

MOE: Crap, I forgot I had moderate safe search ON.
what did I miss????

MEGAN: The Penthouse spread was apparently not her first experience with public nudity.

MOE: Hahaha I love how when you check your Google settings you can click "Esperanto" as a language."

MEGAN: Oh, my soul hurts now.
But this might be my favorite because it strikes me as funny.

MOE: Oh.My.God.

MEGAN: Let us just tell people, as a public service, do not do a Google image search for Paula Jones without your Safe Search function enabled.

MOE: Wait, did you read this story? Apparently Bill told Monica he wouldn't go for Kathleen because of her small breasts? Because Kathleen had confided in Linda who told Monica?

MEGAN: I mean, Kathleen's cat disappeared years later and she thinks Hillary's minions catnapped and killed it.
Also, her husband killed himself that day.

MOE: Here's what I think: he pawed her, the subsequent smear campaign made her batty.

MEGAN: He pawed her on the day her husband blew his head off. I'm not sure the smear campaign was required.

MOE: Oh, that's totally true. Her life was full of problems and her story was full of problems and she was a desperate, desperate woman. But I think it's a vicious cycle. What was her husband's deal anyway? They just said they had financial problems of "his own making."
And no one preyed on the weak more than Linda Tripp.

MEGAN: That I agree with. She was no one's friend.

MOE: There's CYANIDE in them Christmas sleighs
And she was possibly the last person to see Vince Foster?

MEGAN: She sold out every single person she befriended for... something.

MOE: Yeah, she couldn't even pay to get her own work done.

MEGAN: It was never her face that needed work, it was her soul. She was Dorian Gray without the protrait.

MOE: Oh MY GOD you have to read the story.
The author goes to LInda Tripp's Christmas shop and Linda claims she's not Linda!!!
I mean, I've never been to that particular shop, but Christmas shops are small.

MEGAN: Well, and she's been on the news that she owns it!

MOE:

I look at the woman who calls herself Karen and she looks back, her mouth twitching. She bears an uncanny resemblance to the pictures I have seen of Tripp, postplastic surgery. Could this be Linda's sister? But her sister isn't called Karen.

I explain who I am and that I had heard Linda owns the shop. "She does actually - with her husband," says the woman who calls herself Karen. That must have been the husband I had glimpsed going into the back of the store earlier wearing lederhosen, just as he is pictured in the leaflet advertising the store.

But no, it cannot be him because, as Karen tells me when I ask if I can speak to them: "They are not here right now. They won't be back until tomorrow."

But you are here. You are her, I want to say. But then I remember what Linda Tripp told Monica when discussing what she would say if she was asked under oath about the affair with Clinton: "I would do almost anything for my kids, but I don't think I would lie on the stand for them." Linda Tripp would not pretend to be someone else when a reporter came in.

"She doesn't speak to the press at all," says the woman who calls herself Karen, but then adds: "I am told they are going to do one interview," for the tenth anniversary. I wonder who told Karen. Linda?

MEGAN: Maybe all those years of evil-doing have taken a toll on her mental health?
I don't think I could have an entire conversation about myself in the third person without messing it up.

MOE: Jesus Christ the whole thing is so creepy.

MEGAN: I mean, Gennifer Flowers seems almost like the normal one, or Monica.

MOE: Um, so you wanna read Bob Herbert's treatise on misogyny while I look for that Penthouse cover?
Well, the difference is that Gennifer is supporting Hillary while Monica is not.
Or that Gennifer is blond and Monica is brunette

MEGAN: Gennifer is comfortable with her sexuality and what she did and Monica is not.

MOE: Right, the Gennifer affair was downright wholesome.
Whereas you get involved with any powerful middle aged man at age 21 and it's going to haunt you. I mean, I IMAGINE.

MEGAN: Luckily, I'm not really attracted to powerful men.

MOE: Hey, here's something I didn't know:

The Starr team did not want much of the information they had uncovered to enter the public domain, because they believed it was too salacious and they wanted to preserve the dignity of the presidency. But when it was sent to Capitol Hill the House of Representatives decided to release it all before even reading it. "Our position was that it was not our job to tell the House what should or should not be made public. We believed that the House - especially because we had specifically warned them in the transmittal letter of the sensitive nature of the facts - would act responsibly and at least read the referral before releasing it."

MEGAN: I've never really had someone treat me like that in an interview or supervisory situation, but I come across as the kind of bitch who would sue.

MOE: I lived in Hong Kong and didn't really pay taxes so, you know, you deal with shit like that.

MEGAN: Good point.

MOE: Um so apparently now Hillary is being compared to Tracy Flick
There's a theme in here...somewhere...
Oh my god and speaking of Hillary did you get the most epic of all epic Robert Morrow, Clinton expert emails last night?

MEGAN: Naturally. That guy is just so... strange.

MOE: Well, he is mentally ill.
Is Ken Starr the lone oasis of sanity to have emerged from Team Rabid Puritan?

MEGAN: Wow, that would be strange, wouldn't it? Because, frankly, anyone that details someone else's sex life in that much written detail and isn't writing erotica but legal briefs obviously has some issues with sex

MOE: Right, it's kind of shocking to me he didn't turn up in a bathhouse somewhere. He's helping free death row inmates and there was a kind of sweet story a few years back in the Post about his work with, like, "the children." That said, all of the dudes emerged relatively unscathed. Newt Gingrich is happily married to Wife #3 and has refashioned himself as some sort of environmentalist, Joe Lieberman is hanging with the GOP frontrunner, Bill is saving the world etc., and every woman entangled in the whole mess ...well, it's messy.

MEGAN: I mean, that's not surprising to me at all. I think women (particularly of that generation) are far, far more conflicted about their own sexuality than men are.

MOE: Yeah, which is why I'm not quite sure I'm with Bob Herbert on the prostitution thing. Sex workers in this country, at the very least, GET something for being objectified.
Did you read Tracie's thing on "cerebral porn" yesterday?

MEGAN: I did. I mean, I think it's a hard line.
No pun intended.
Because I've worked near the downtown strip clubs here, and you can walk by in your nice suit looking not at all sexualized and the first thing every guy does when walking out is look directly at your tits.

MOE: Yeah, I don't know what is cerebral about getting off. I generally have to stamp out whatever vestiges of intellect are left at the end of the day.

MEGAN: I think if porn was less filled with fake plastic women that might as well be dolls, it would be a little less open to the criticism of misogyny.
Because, yes, it promotes a fantasy: that women are all huge breasted, incredibly thin, collagen injusted lipped sluts.

MOE: Sometimes I'll watch porn and I'll start THINKING "Why am I doing this? What about this is helping me achieve this release? Who are those girls? Where do they come from?" It's the bonerkiller to end all bonerkillers. That's why I'm going back to sex as soon as I can find a willing partner.

MOE: Yeah I think like anything — psychopharmaceuticals, for instance — it's just strange to argue that all porn is good, or that excessive exposure to it has no potentially deleterious effect on the way we see sexuality. So I'm with Herbert there. On the other hand I'm a fan of openness. Porn after a breakup is like Prozac after a breakup: you just don't want to become dependent. And yes, while porn and erotica can be thought-provoking or cerebral or an artform or whatever, it's .. uh ... well that's sort of missing the point of what it's meant to achieve.

MEGAN: I keep trying to think of a good response, but I don't have one. Also, now I'm like depressed and horny at the same time and have to work.

MOE: Depressed/horny is sort of the steady-state of the endlessly-recovering-from-the-last-breakup. Oh, to be married!
JOKE.