• ... [wipes drool]
• Barack Obama is on vacation with his family in Kailua, Hawai'i this week. [Huffington Post]

• Bowlers are peeved that he might turn the White House bowling alley into a basketball court. [Wall Street Journal]
• He produced a web video announcing the people that will be running science policy for his Administration and not one of them believes in creationism. [Washington Post]
• And Joe Biden is going to head up the White House Task Force On Working Families, but stop calling him a "Czar" of something because he is the Vice fucking President and the Obamites have famously put a kibosh on calling anyone a Czar anyway. [CNN]
• Current Vice President Cheney has trouble understand that rap music stuff and would like those kids to get the hell off his lawn. [Think Progress]
• Sarah Palin blames John McCain's advisers for pretty much everything. [Huffington Post]
• Hillary Clinton just forgave her $13 million campaign loan, but still owes Mark Penn more than $5 million (and a host of other vendors about $1 million). [New York Times]
• Toyota is about to report its first operating loss in 70 years, despite all that talk of so-called union benefits being the problem that is plaguing the U.S. auto industry. The auto bailout will nonetheless proceed apace, including the part where they reduce wages and benefits of GM and Chrysler workers. [MSNBC]

According to the study, 61 percent of women think the media is biased against women and that it treated Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin unfairly. More than half of the women polled think Clinton was treated unfairly in the media and 70 percent thought Palin got shafted. One reason? Older women pointed to the focus on the female candidates' appearances:

Women over 50 said Palin was asked questions and subjected to unfair comments by a remarkable 2/1. They are more likely to recall stories being written about Palin’s hair and clothes than Obama’s healthcare plans.

Despite the large volume of stories about the appearance of the candidates, 70% of women think those topics are not fair game for discussion.

Which is all well and good and I don't disagree that people should read more about policy issues, but my experience this cycle is a lot more of our readers clicked through and commented on stories about Wardrobe-gate than any of my posts on serious policy issues like health reform — and I'll bet, if you asked another, more "mainstream" media outlet, the story was the same. Newspapers, magazines and blogs are money-making enterprises, and they make money selling readers stories. So unless these women spent more time trying to read about health care reform — and I believe they didn't — and were stymied by the wall-to-wall Wardrobe-gate coverage, it's not really fair to blame the media for giving them what they obviously wanted to read.

Worse yet, according to the Daily Beast poll, the same women decrying the sexist media coverage not only won't call themselves feminists, they would be horrified if their daughters did so:

Voters reject the term and the category of being a “feminist,” with only 20% of women willing to use that word about themselves. Nor do they want their daughters to become feminists—only 17% of voters said they would welcome their daughters using that label.

In the least surprising results, men thought everything was fairer than women did, with two-thirds of men claiming they treated women equally at home compared to half of women thinking they were treated equal to the men in their lives behind closed doors. And although they recognize — to a degree — that women have it harder at work and in politics than men, there's nary a Bradley effect in sight when asked about a woman President:

But 4 in 10 men freely admit sexist attitudes towards a female president. 39% of men say that a male is “naturally more suited” to carrying out the duties of the office. Almost equal numbers doubted that a women would be strong enough to carry out the job of Commander in Chief.

That means that nearly half of the men surveyed, despite all their bullshitting about how women don't have it that bad, don't think that men and women are actually equal in their leadership capabilities. Sexism, I guess, isn't a problem as long as we don't expect to be treated like we're as good as men — and as long as we don't have to call ourselves "feminists" to boot.

The Barrier That Didn’t Fall [The Daily Beast]

Earlier: McCain (Palin) On Women's Issues: When It's Not Sparse, It's Not Good
Standing Up For Equality Can Have Its Downsides
McCain And Contraception
Another Week, Another Unsuccessful Tactic From McCain-Palin (This Time, It's Abortion)
Marriage Equality? Money Talks, And Politicians Ought To
HIV Proven To Be Older Than John McCain (And His Bad AIDS Policies)
Equal Pay? Women Of Color Get The Short End Of The Stick
Pay Equity For Women In The U.S., U.K. Remains Elusive Despite "Education And Training"
A Uterus Costs 50% More In McCain's Health Insurance Market

• Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, facing perjury charges in one case and assault charges in another, has been ordered to remain in Detroit instead of attending the Democratic convention. He tried to argue that his presence was really important to the Democratic party, but if Obama doesn't feel it's necessary to play nice with John Edwards, it's no surprise that his spokesman denied wanting Kilpatrick around either. [Washington Post]
• In other convention news, Hillary Clinton's going to get the opportunity to watch people vote for her Presidential campaign one last time before really, totally turning her delegates over to Obama. [Washington Post]
• And while some people I know are against Evan Bayh for VP because of war-mongeriness, others will probably turn against him upon finding out that he'd bring Mark Penn aboard as an adviser. Ugh. [Attackerman, The Atlantic]

• Jackson Browne is suing John McCain for copyright infringement for using his song "Running on Empty" in anti-Obama ads. He's not just mad about not getting paid, though — he, too, is an Obamaniac. [LA Times]
• John Moore, author of an anti-Bush book, like a number of other prominent Democrats (like Ted Kennedy) and anti-Bush types has found his name on the government's no-fly list. The FBI swears it's not political as though people actually believe that, and Moore says, "I'm stuck with everyone else on this list, wondering, am I someone's political enemy or do I live in a country where the government is just utterly and completely incompetent." Dude, like it can't be both at the same time? [CNN]
• Female suicide bombers returned to their regularly scheduled bombing programming earlier than I predicted on Tuesday. [Associated Press]
• Victoria Osteen prevailed in the lawsuit filed against her by a supposedly-wronged flight attendant. It might be actual justice, but where's the justice in my loss of Schadenfreude? [Associated Press]
• Uncle Pervy might resign, but it might not save him from prosecution. If it doesn't, why wouldn't he just hold stage another coup or something? Like we'd complain? [HuffPo]

• John McCain told a crowd that the "people who decide these things" told him there would be 2-3 Supreme Court vacancies soon. Of course, those are lifetime appointments, so it's either that McCain's in contact with Death or he's forgotten one of the fundamentals of the third branch of our democracy. [HuffPo]
• Speaking of idiocy, Attorney General Michael Mukasey decided today that no one will be punished for the illegal hiring practices in the Department of Justice under Alberto Gonzales. You know, because no one cares, except for those people denied jobs for not being Republican-y enough. And maybe the people fired. And those people transferred for not complying. And Democrats. Well, hardly anyone, anyway! [International Herald Tribune]
• In a blast from the past, corrupt bribe-taking Republican Congressman Bob Ney is getting out of the slammer soon! Democrats have already started a collection to send him to Minneapolis for Labor Day, since he helped them so much in the 2006 elections. [HuffPo]

• Cindy Sheehan, who has vowed to never disappear from the media spotlight ever again, has qualified to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in November as an Independent. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer would be rubbing his hands with anticipation, but even he's sick of Cindy Sheehan. [HuffPo]
• Suicide bomber recruiters have apparently tired of using women as suicide bombers and started dressing men up like women to do it. Just kidding! Real women will return to bombing next week. [LA Times]
• New York City's abortion rate is up to 72 abortions for every 100 live births, which is almost 3 times the national average. Advocates blame it on a lack of access to affordable birth control and a reduction in birth control usage. Anti-abortion advocates have already started calling New York City Gemorrah, since they already used up Sodom on San Francisco. [Crane's]
• Mark Penn thinks Obama needs to play up McCain's "record" on women's issues. This is the type of advice you get when Mark Penn isn't getting paid millions of dollars to play divide-and-conquer with your staff. [Politico]

MEGAN: Ok, given the absence of news other than the fact that I was right about Edwards' timing issues with his story and the halt to military action in Georgia, perhaps we can dissect The Atlantic's piece on Hillary's campaign based on all the email and memo traffic.

SPENCER: You know, nothing incoming but the reggae drumming. Yeah I did what you should always do after getting the shit kicked out of you at a Rancid show you're too old to be at: read a Tolstoyesque campaign post-mortem at 2 am.

MEGAN: (I hereby highly recommend that everyone take a moment and click through and read that link, by the way, as it's a piece of very excellent writing by Spencer. We'll wait.)
You were much more productive than I. I just came home and went to bed.

SPENCER: When I was I guess 8 I remember skinning my knee really badly and seeing a bunch of goo pus up past my shredded skin. For whatever reason — like a science experiment, I guess — I figured that more goo would emerge if I split the skin further, and sure enough I was right. Now that was fascinating — weird viscosity, unfamiliar color, surprising heat. I've never seen anything like it until I read this Josh Green piece about Hillary.

So point one: Mark Penn. Complex figure after all!

MEGAN: Oh, man, I'm about to just give up and let you right. You obviously beat me to coffee-drinking, not that my stomach can handle it after that mental image.

SPENCER: Red Bull not coffee. Carbona not glue.

MEGAN: Yes, Mark Penn: not the biggest problem! I was amazed.

SPENCER: Anyway Mark Penn. Actually worse than you thought. Get a load of how he assesses Obama's promise to America:

Save it for 2050.

MEGAN: Well, except that he elbowed everyone out of the way and ignored chain of command and basically acted like he was fighting his colleagues.

SPENCER: Holy shit dude! It actually gets worse.

MEGAN: You know what amazed me?

SPENCER: This?

Listening to Brit Hume say that Obama is surging while Hillary failed to do X is almost comical and certainly transparent. The right knows Obama is unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun, and a third party would come in then anyway.

MEGAN: No, but that's pretty stunning, too. My point is far geekier than that:

Though Penn was “chief strategist,” he was a paid contractor, and thus barred from most targeting and budget planning.

Which means, in effect, that Penn spent 90% of his time trying elbow people out of the way that he couldn't even replace unless he gave up or took a leave of absence from his other very lucrative job, which he didn't want to do.

SPENCER: HAHAHAHA I am trying to write about this very issue in an Iraq context. Ray Odierno, who next month will be the U.S. commander in Baghdad, implies that he's going to carry out Petraeus' same population-protection strategy except with... 30,000 fewer troops. YOU CANNOT STRATEGIZE IF YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND/CONTROL YOUR RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS. You know what you get if you do?

MEGAN: So rather than acknowledge the lesser role that was BY LAW required to play, he let her fill those spots with actual people and then fought and undermined them every step of the way.

SPENCER:

Ickes seemed attuned to the asymmetric risk that accompanies overwhelming front-runner status: the collapse of momentum that would accompany an unexpected loss. He posited that Edwards and Obama could sustain losing Iowa and New Hampshire but worried that Clinton could not; he urged that she spend “substantial” time in Iowa; and he recommended a contingency plan that would haunt the campaign when his own budget team didn’t fulfill it. Noting the difficulty of raising more than $75 million before Iowa, Ickes stressed the need to maintain a $25 million reserve, presumably as insurance against a setback. The campaign wound up raising more than $100 million—but, according to The New York Times, by the time Iowa was lost, $106 million had been spent. The $25 million reserve had vanished, and the campaign was effectively insolvent.

MEGAN: But, it never really hits on who spent that money. That was always my question.Or did I miss it with my sleep-filled eyes?

SPENCER: But this is the thing I wanted to note about Penn: Josh is really good at pointing out that more than anyone else, Penn actually understood Clinton's path to the nomination: women, lower/middle class voters, self-ID'd Democrats.

If we double perform with WOMEN, LOWER AND MIDDLE CLASS VOTERS, then we have about 55% of the voters.
The reason the Invisible Americans is so powerful is that it speaks to exactly how you can be a champion for those in needs [sic]. He may be the JFK in the race [He means Obama — Spencer], but you are the Bobby.

That right there was 100 percent correct. I got the feeling in the piece that Josh was actually sort of convinced that Penn actually did think more strategically than the rest of the team.

MEGAN: Oh, totally, I think the problem was getting them all at the same time. I would give Penn more props if it had been the plan to target women and then swing back around to get the lower- and middle-class men. But it doesn't seem like it was. The strategy that got women to vote for her was one he opposed. Can we say that Mark Penn doesn't "get" women?

SPENCER: Well actually let me amend that: he had the best 30,000-foot-altitude vision, but he — and the rest of the campaign — evinced an absolute blind spot toward the basic facts of how to win a protracted nomination battle (ie, win the most delegates)... I really want to make another Iraq analogy but I will resist temptation!

MEGAN: Oh, yeah, also, I loved the Ickes memo on delegates, from December 22, 2007.

SPENCER: YES PLEASE talk about that. What struck you about Mark Penn thinking about women as an odd and unfamiliar abstraction?

MEGAN: I mean, it seemed to me his entire strategy on women was to gin us all up with the idea that her campaign was breaking barriers!(TM) and then go on to getting men's votes as though women didn't care about issues and whatever. Which, sure, some of us don't and were indeed all ginned up for a barrier-breaking woman President, but not a 2-to-1 margin of us like Penn was expecting. Plus, Penn's actual strategy was not to emphasize her female-ness, but just rely on women to recognize that a woman candidate breaks barriers while he campaigned for the other vote.

1) Start with a base of women.
a. For these women you represent a breaking of barriers
b. The winnowing out of the most competent and qualified in an unfair, male dominated world
c. The infusion of a woman and a mother’s sensibilities into a world of war and neglect

Start with a base of women how exactly?

SPENCER: Like a binding ingredient! Crush pine nuts and Nilla wafers in a food processor, then pour 1/2 a stick of clarified butter to bind; spread over a pie tin and bake at 350...

MEGAN: It isn't until he gets to talking about men that he talks about issues. He strategy of women is that OF COURSE there's some of us that will vote for a woman no matter what and then quietly sexism-bait us and put a pink ribbon on war policy and then turn to the boys and talk about serious issues.

SPENCER: Really, though, her lifetime of work gives her a base of women, doesn't it? I don't really see why that was wrong — but it definitely — and this is a huge irony — indicates that HRC could have... taken women's issues for granted!

You don't think she talked about equal pay and reproductive issues and health care and things that are typically thought of as women's issues, although of course all issues are women's issues and stop glowering at me like that...

MEGAN: But he's talking about getting 3-to-1 margins with women voters. She doesn't have a 3-to-1 margin because of her lifetime of work.

SPENCER: Good point.

MEGAN: Of course, Penn lists health care as an issue to talk to the men about, which fundamentally misunderstands the role that women play as purchasers in the health case system.

SPENCER: And all the more to your point. Let's talk about the Equality/Sexism non-speech!

SPENCER:

In the aftermath of Obama’s historic race speech on March 18, Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas congresswoman, urged Clinton to deliver a speech of her own on gender. Clinton appeared very much to want to do this, and solicited the advice of her staff, which characteristically split. The campaign went back and forth for weeks. Opponents argued that her oratory couldn’t possibly match Obama’s, and proponents countered that she would get credit simply for trying, inspire legions of women to her cause, and highlight an issue that everyone in the campaign fiercely believed was hurting them—sexism. But Clinton never made a decision...

MEGAN: Yes, the non-speech. The one all the women Penn wanted on board wanted her to give but she never gave because she already had their support and didn't have to.

SPENCER: Megan, should she have made the speech? To put this as delicately as I can, playing off the deep deep desires of women for a woman president was a very good strategy for Clinton, except that it had to be combined with an actual ability to overtake the delegate lead Obama amassed, and that never happened.

MEGAN: I don't think she should've made it in response to Obama's speech. Barring a hook, a specific instance of major sexism to with to tie the speech, I think it would've looked like a tit-for-tat. But I think after New Hampshire, before Obama's race speech, then would've been a good time to speak out AND it might have produced tangible consequences.

SPENCER: Yeah I'm with you on that — imagine if she went right from the crying/NH victory and said fuck this, you know what's not fair about the way women in this country are treated? let me count the ways...

MEGAN: Right, that would've been awesome. But I mean, after March 18th was Pennsylvania at the end of April, which (you'll recall, since we were there) she won anyway. I don't think it would've moved the needle in North Carolina or even in Indiana by much, possibly in Oregon but not in Kentucky.

SPENCER: Whoa look at you, Chuck Todd. I'll leave the whiteboard stuff to you.

MEGAN: Sorry, but that's the truth. For her overall political career, for her legacy, yes, I would've wanted her to give the speech. But after March 18th, and I hate to side with Mark fucking Penn, but he was right on this. It wouldn't've done her any good.

SPENCER: You know what's missing from this piece? Any discussion — aside from a cursory graf — that the reason why she lost was her Iraq vote.

MEGAN: Yeah, it's like that only mattered in Iowa. Um, no. Only, and New Yorkers keep saying this, she might not have won re-election in 2006. I don't necessarily buy that, especially given the way the Republican party self-destructed in that race, but that wasn't foreseeable.

SPENCER: if she voted against the war, Obama would have practically no traction and she would have kicked the shit out of Edwards. And, uh, speaking of kicking the shit out of Edwards, you HAVE to check out this looney-tunes column from Sally Quinn. Just read the first graf (that's all I read).

SPENCER:

I just want to smack him across the puss, as my Savannah-born mother used to say. I want to smack him across that pretty puss, those pretty eyelashes, that pretty hair. I want to shake him and knock his pretty head against the wall.

How many psychological tics can you count? The two "puss" references? The battered-husband fantasy? GODDAMN IT BEN BRADLEE LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO! YOU'RE SO FUCKING STUPID BABY AND I LOVE YOU SO MUCH AND WHEN ARE YOU JUST GOING TO FUCKING LISTEN TO ME.

MEGAN: The blaming the wife? I love how, obviously, Edwards told her the whole truth and nothing but. Because that's when men do, when caught out there, they don't mitigate AT ALL.

SPENCER: Okay, that's all I have to say.

MEGAN: Wait, before we go, we can totally tie that back into Hillary! Because where have we heard this kind of rhetoric before?

SPENCER: Where have we heard it?

MEGAN:

Not only did she allow him to run, exposing herself and her children to the pain and humiliation that would inevitably come, she could have allowed him to destroy the Democratic party in the process. This man was running for the President of the United States on a lie and she knew it. If he had not entered the race it could have changed the outcome of the primary. And what if he had won the primary? Think of the people they betrayed — yes, THEY. They betrayed their devoted staff, the supporters who sent in millions of dollars, the taxpayers who supplied Secret Service protection (I want my money back) , their party and their country. She stood by and let him lie and lie and lie.

Oh, wait, this was the same shit the Right spewed at Hillary.

SPENCER: Really a shame she never made that sexism speech. HRC: It's not too late.

MEGAN: Morning! Shall we get right down to analyzing the whole Edwards debacle?

SPENCER: I just wanted to say I went an entire weekend without fathering any illegitimate children OR vindicating Mickey Kaus.

MEGAN: Hey, and I haven't gotten knocked up either, so, congrats to both of us!

SPENCER: But this changes nothing. Mickey Kaus, now and forever, snacks on goat penis.

MEGAN: Well, I mean, he said it was really tasty.

SPENCER: So, you said in your post Friday that Edwards can't be Attorney General, which disappoints me tremendously. Do you think Elizabeth can launch her own political career? She's in remission, right?

MEGAN: Actually, I don't think she's in remission. She's incurable, so it's still going, sadly. I would've rather have seen Elizabeth's stellar political career. Rewind? I mean, the biggest problem is that paternity isn't going to be resolved. Rielle's not going to allow a DNA test, so everyone will continue to suspect it's his kid as I already do.

SPENCER: You saw her dKos diary, yeah? She wrote this like a pro:

John has spoken in a long on-camera interview I hope you watch. Admitting one’s mistakes is a hard thing for anyone to do, and I am proud of the courage John showed by his honesty in the face of shame.

I started singing the Ramones' "Swallow My Pride" to myself when I read this. and also "Swallow Goat Cock" By Kaus and the Goatees.

MEGAN: Which, I'm sorry, totally negates the whole "I asked her not to come on camera" bullshit Edwards pulled on Friday to appeal to us ladies.

SPENCER: He did what now?

MEGAN: On Friday, in his interview, Edwards told Woodruff that he not only didn't ask Elizabeth to appear with him but asked her not to, in effect saying he didn't want to be Spitzer, McGreevey or Craig, getting lambasted for having his wife by his side while admitting to this shit. BUT he had her talk to Bob Schieffer on the phone (sobbing, according to Schieffer) to confirm the 2006 version of events and then she did the thing on Kos.

So, I'm sorry, we don't have the visual, but I don't think he's a better guy. Also, as I said in my piece on Friday, I think he's lying on the timing and nothing I've read since does anything to disabuse me of that notion.

SPENCER: Well shit. But here's something else: in liberal circles in 2007, the drunken chatter was that Edwards didn't want to run for president, but Elizabeth, facing the clarifying prospect of her own mortality, wanted him to. Sounded plausible at the time! He had no chance of getting the nomination as soon as Obama jumped in, and possibly none before. But but but but BUT how could Elizabeth have known he slept with Rielle Hunter and then said "Fuck it, Johnny. You should still be president!"

MEGAN: I'm guessing that was just a story he put out there to look like less of a shitty husband for continuing to run while his wife had cancer. I'm sure she was supportive, but there was no firm indication that she'd live until the 2009 Inauguration when she was first diagnosed.

So, maybe seeing him as President was her semi-dying wish, maybe she'd internalized his desires to that degree that she thought it was, but it sounds to me like a pretty campaign fairy tale intended to make us believe in the John-and-Liz as a team thing. Anyway, back to why I'm sticking by my suspicions that he's still lying: Sam Stein thinks he is, too, and he's got even more evidence about when John and Rielle met, and when she got hired. And the Updated Newsweek story about how Rielle was indeed still going around claiming to be having an affair with someone the reporter knew (which, he didn't know Andrew Young) in January, which is the blind item Page Six had in January 06 as well.

SPENCER: Here's where I get exhausted with the story. OK OK he fucked her, might have fathered an illegitimate child, career's come to an end, it's DONE right? Does it matter if he's lying to the public if he's not going to be a public official anymore? At what point do we say enough, he's out of politics. I say right now!

MEGAN: Oh, you know me, I'm the type of person who hates to let that shit go. But on to new topics, then! Like the leaked Clintonian emails. Damn, I hate when shit makes Mark Penn look less incredibly wrong. Can't we just stick to mocking the chapter of his book about appealing to American snipers?

SPENCER: Let's chew on this a moment:

Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

MEGAN: George Bush in 08?

SPENCER: ... and so begins the header on a million GOP/McCain fundraising emails.

MEGAN: I mean, really, at this point, Penn ought to be getting fucking royalties from McCain's campaign.

SPENCER: so, congratulations, black people! Remember how you thought whites don't see you as American? Mark Penn just confirmed it. You are officially off the hook for the Iraq war.

MEGAN: Wait, according to Virginia Congressman Jim Moran it was all the Jews' fault anyway.

SPENCER: I'm curious to see in Josh's story what the Clinton machine's reaction to that memo was — whether that launched the Wright-based whisper campaign or whether the Clintonites rejected it. Yeah yeah that shit. But really — if that memo was ignored/repudiated, it's one thing. If it was ACTED UPON that is quite another.

MEGAN: Do you think that whether the Clintonistas put the Obama in Somali gear photo out there will be in there?

SPENCER: Mike "who's your celebrity crush" Allen says the Penn memo was 3/30/08 so I think that post-date Somalibama but NOT some of the Wright stuff.

MEGAN: I think this much was acted upon:

Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America American to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back

Which, really, means Penn should pay royalties to Karl Rove.

SPENCER: Except Rove wins elections
MEGAN: What his lackeys will do with John McCain is another question.

SPENCER: ... ok back to Edwards for one second: can he really not be attorney general? He had such balls! He was going to be the leftwing John Ashcroft, fucking with the right just to fuck with them! The mailed fist in Obama's politics-of-hope-and-reconciliation velvet glove? Really? I have to give up the dream? The dream of indictments for torture and rendition and US attorney firings and warrantless surveillance? What if he just says the kid is mine? The Democrats are going to have 57 fucking Senate seats!

MEGAN: I really don't think he can be. Can you imagine those confirmation hearings? Especially if it turns out he was still lying? If he used donor money to pay his mistress (let alone hush up his mistress)? Did you check the Baron angle — that's Edwards' finance chair who paid both Rielle and Andrew Young and his wife and kids to get the fuck out of North Carolina but says he didn't get the money from Edwards or the campaign? Oh, right, and this:

The associate, who asked not to be identified, said Mr. Young has privately made conflicting statements about the extent of his relationship with Ms. Hunter and whether he is the child’s father.

Like, all of that, up for review, in the confirmation hearing for the guy who's supposed to play gotcha with the Bushies? I think you need to get yourself a new legal pitbull, as do I.

SPENCER: BUT GODDAMN IT i need to see someone go to jail on this shit. I guess if you're Obama you want to be light years away from Edwards' cocktrouble, but if he doesn't appoint a real left-wing SOB for AG I will be sorely disappointed. Now I feel fucked by John Edwards. Hopefully I remain unpregnant.

MEGAN: Well, how much would you sorta like to see, um, Bill Clinton in that role. If the Dems get 60 in the Senate.

SPENCER: Well, not if he acquiesced to that Penn memo!

MEGAN: Can you imagine Bill Clinton with subpoena power? His bar membership's been reinstated.

SPENCER: and that's a confirmation hearing you relish?

MEGAN: Hey, I said if they get to 60.

SPENCER: actually on second thought, it would be awesome to see Clinton-as-pugilist putting it back on, say, Inhofe or Sessions.

MEGAN: I'm just enjoying the thought of Bill Clinton with the power to investigate the dirty laundry of those that investigated his blowjobs, because you know there is worse than a couple of intern beejes going on in Washington.

SPENCER: But speaking of going back: the right-wing veterans organization Vets For Freedom are sending right-wing Iraq vets to embed in Iraq. and you know what? I have absolutely no problem with this.

MEGAN: Really? That the Weekly Standard and the National Review are putting a bunch of right-wing non-jouno partisan hacks on the masthead for the purpose of war promotion and we're footing the bill? Please explain.

SPENCER: That "we're footing the bill" bullshit applies to ALL EMBEDS.

MEGAN: Yes, which I'm fine with when their stated purpose is not to promote the war and elect John McCain.

SPENCER: Like, you paid for my trip to Baghdad & Mosul last year, and I reported from a liberal perspective. That's structurally indistinguishable from what the VFF ppl are doing.

MEGAN: Except you're an actual reporter.

SPENCER: It's not something the Pentagon is in the business of stopping. You'd rather not live in a world where the Pentagon starts deciding who is and who isn't a reporter.

MEGAN: No, you're right, I just wonder why the WS and the NR can't find actual reporters to go. Is there a word for that?

SPENCER: A bunch of antiwar bloggers have embedded as well. The embed program is open, and in terms of the "harm" they do, only the 27 Percenters who still back Bush would read this shit anyway.

MEGAN: Chiiiickenhawk or something?

SPENCER: No, I doubt that, I just think the Standard & NRO know a gimmick when they see one, and think that it'll be harder for leftwing antiwarriors to attack pieces written by vets. and to that, I must quote Beyonce: "they must not know 'bout me, they must not know 'bout me." but, look, you know, the game is the game, and let's see how they play it.

MEGAN: I am happy to attack pieces written by vets. Heck, I've gotten into no less than two ugly political arguments with veteran friends of mine and finally threw up my hands and said, "If you want to buy what they're selling, rationality and actual facts aren't going to convince you, so don't ever ask me questions again."

SPENCER: Also, speaking of BALLING, everybody note that my roommate and homie Matt Yglesias launched his new ThinkProgress blog today!

MEGAN: Congrats to him! Should we talk about that little war thing that started this weekend? I hear, by the way, that anything good about Russian cuisine comes from Georgia.

SPENCER: I dunno. I make a kickass borscht.

MEGAN: Georgian wine is definitely better, not that it's not virtually impossible to come by here.

SPENCER: So yeah while I was driving for an internet-free weekend in State College, PA Russia attacked Georgia or something? I should know about this shit so enlighten me.

MEGAN: Well, so, Georgia went into the disputed territory of South Ossetia where the citizens apparently want to go back to being Russian, so the Russians moved in. And because they're the Russian military, they routed the Georgians. Now they're bombing the capital of Tbilisi and sending ground forces to Gori, which is in Georgia proper, about which one diplomat said, "They seem to have gone beyond the logical stopping point."

SPENCER: Also LOL my friend Benny's band is on the cover of the new Kerrang!

MEGAN: Man, your friends are sort of kicking ass today. They're like the Russians of pop culture.

SPENCER: Yeah so that sucks and we should set to work on the diplomatic course of getting the UN Security Council to turn back the invasion and restore the status quo ante.

MEGAN: Yeah, that's sort of what the Georgians think only you know who sits on the Security Council?

SPENCER: Yeah yeah.

MEGAN: That's why the UN has been so effective in Chechnya. And you know we aren't going to do it because Bush is hard at work at the Summer Olympics and he's seen into Putin's soul.

SPENCER: You know what sets a really bad precedent? Invading other countries while circumventing the UN Security Council. I mean call me crazy!
MEGAN: Well, right, and that. The Security Council basically functions as a rubber stamp for the foreign policies of its members.

SPENCER: Next he'll look into Rielle Hunter's vagina.

MOE: oh here you are...

MEGAN: As always, right here, just multitasking and reading crap on the internet

MOE: I just remembered it was my afternoon off which is really fucking good because I am totally out of ADD drugs again and um, I had to get really wasted last night.

MEGAN: Yeah, I'm taking the afternoon off as well, but mostly so that I can drive back to D.C.

MEGAN: So, want to see the shittiest ads of the Presidential race so far?

MOE: Oh Jesus. Oh fucking Jesus. Okay, let's play a game: what's more depressing?You knew we were holding Saudis, Yemenis and Pakistanis without evidence in Gitmo, but did you know about the Chinese???

MOE: There are 16 Uighurs there, picked up mostly in Afghanistan after they got sick of the Chinese oppressing them.

MEGAN: Aw, dude, we have 16 Uighurs? Great. How much you want to bet that the Chinese got their intel on the Uighur terrorist threat against the Olympics that they used to justify further oppression from us?

MEGAN: Oh, wait, that was easy. Here's an article about it from the Voice of America, which is America's radio station abroad.

MOE: Yeah aren't we not allowed to listen to VOA in America because it's propaganda? And yes the Chinese assistance in the war on terror is very invaluable to our struggle against Muslim extremism which is the worst problem a country has ever faced in the history of modern statehood!

MEGAN: "They" will destabilize our government if we let "them," so we must protect the most important parts from destabilization, and the Bill of Rights is only, like, the 3rd most important document, definitely.

MEGAN: It doesn't say anything about the pursuit of happiness or executive privilege.

MOE: I love this headline: Judges Cite Need for Reliable Evidence To Hold Detainees …

MOE: it's like something you'd read in the daily newspaper of some fledgling democracy!

MOE: here

MEGAN: Judges Ask Administration To Stick To Principles On Which Country Founded, Not Dismantle Democracy In The Name Of Security

MEGAN: Well, if we want to stick to depressing news, how about a Biblical justification for attacking Michelle Obama (and, basically, every Jezebel) for defying God himself by not being subservient and thereby attacking Barack for not being godly enough to appropriately control his wife?

MOE: Dude apropos of absolutely nothing while I try to slog through the Gail Sheehy piece on Hillaryland and the Sy Hersh piece on Iran under the influence of absolutely no drugs check.out. this outfit. It looks like something Huma Abedin might recommend!

MEGAN: Dude, don't slog, I can break that shit down for you.

MEGAN: 1: Hillary and Bill hired a bunch of people who didn't get along, thinking that was a great campaign strategy. Like her Senate office and, frankly, the Bush Administration, it was a insular group of people used to defending the hordes.

MEGAN: 2. Mark Penn sucks and blames everyone else for his failing.

MEGAN: 3. Everyone hates Mark Penn, who used to privately call Bill Clinton when he couldn't convince Hillary or the other staff to do what he wanted because he's a tattle-taling bitch.

MOE: Also there was this

He sounded giddy, recalls Congressman Altmire. "'We’re going to win Ohio for sure, and Texas looks good, and we’re coming to Pennsylvania 'he said. ‘Keep your powder dry. Don’t endorse anybody—just wait it out.’?"The flattered first-term congressman said he was concerned that Senator Clinton might not play well on the top of the ticket. "President Bush won my district twice … "

Clinton interrupted him. "How well did I do in your district?"

"You won it twice."

"Well, there you go," Clinton said, gloating."

There was silence for a while, and Clinton assumed he had won his case."

"With all due respect," Altmire finally said, "you’re not on the ballot this year."

MOE: NEITHER IS ROSS PEROT!

MEGAN: 4. Ickes is pissed that Mark Penn made $20 million dollars, sucked, ran roughshod over him and still went out of his way to take politically untouchable clients (i.e., the Colombian government).

MEGAN: 5. The chunky Chicos necklaces and jewel-toned pantsuits were all the fault of Huma Abedin who is herself impeccably dressed, so she's now the world's biggest underminer.

MEGAN: 6. Hillary's make-up artist matched her eyeshadow to her suit jackets.

MEGAN: 7. Mark Penn railed against Hillary every showing emotion because he is at his core a sexist pig who doesn't believe women can be women and still President EVEN THOUGH that's the times when she connected best with voters.

MEGAN: 8. Both Clinton's undertook a concerted effort to pressure Obama into taking her as VP to the horror of most other Democrats who found it unseemly

MEGAN: 9. Patti Solis Doyle was ousted because they were out of money, not that they were out of money, per se, they were just out of primary money because donors can give $2300 to the primaries and $2300 to the general election campaign.

MEGAN: 10. Reporters were all drunk on the plane between Iowa and New Hampshire.

MEGAN: 11. Mark Penn sucks some more and is insufferably arrogant.

MEGAN: The end!

MOE: Okay so far on this. 1. Bush wants "regime change" and he's paid $400 million to fund it so far but that doesn't get you so far.

MOE: 2. There's some group called the Baluchis who are going to help us out because, you know, they're SUNNI.

MEGAN: !. Not in a country with oil it doesn't. In Cuba maybe.

MOE: 3. Some Democrats have gone along with this TREASON

MEGAN: 2. Not that McCain knows the difference between that and Shi'ites

MEGAN: 3. Um, they totally did, like they always do. Bush gives good belly rubs!

MOE: 4. The Joint Chiefs are not fans of this plan.

MOE: 5. Admiral William Fallon: I want to have his babies.

MEGAN: 4. The Joint Chiefs don't want their military legacies to be tons more soldiers dying in a pointless war.

MEGAN: 5. I'll leave that one to you. I wouldn't want to quit drinking for 9 months.

MOE: You don't have to completely quit, and definitely not for the whole nine months! Also you don't keep it down very well in the first few months of pregnancy anyway.

MEGAN: Yeah, I've heard that, though it reportedly depends on the woman. Also, with my personal history of (probably but not definitely developmental) birth defects, I probably would have to be way stricter than average.

MOE: But also I was not actually saying that literally just in response to:

Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”

When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”

MEGAN: Yeah, that is pretty fucking sexy. I'd hit it.

MOE: 6. There are some laws, about how Congress needs to hear about it if the CIA declares war on The Iran, because Congress is where the CIA would get money to do such a thing, but the Bush Administration maybe doesn't know about those laws, because they are still operating from the rule book that they were using when United Fruit chipped in most of the $$ for regime changes andsuch, only instead of United Fruit they are maybe finding another source for the money. (Bernanke?)

MOE:

"The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding," the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the legal threat confronting some agency operatives for their involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of suspects in the war on terror. "This drove t"the over-all authorization includes killing, but it’s not as though that’s what they’re setting out to do. It’s about gathering information, enlisting support."

And how are you going to enlist support if you don't kill a few evildoers here and there???

MEGAN: More likely Chevron.

MEGAN: And, obviously, if you didn't mean to kill them, it's, like, totally ok. Casualties of an undeclared war, man.

MOE: 7. There is some group called the Gang of Eight that includes Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and John Rockefeller and it occurred to me that I forgot the members of the Gang of Four besides Jiang Qing. You always remember the girl involved in something like that. BTW God bless YouTube!

MEGAN: I mean, the problem with getting a declaration of war is that no President has really ever bothered. They get an authorization to do whatever the fuck they want to do and then use it, bypassing Congress's constitutional powers in that regard.

MEGAN: His hip thrusting is kind of freaking me out, man.

MOE: Ew yeah I know…if cheap wine is doing that to him…btw Admiral Fallon's nickname is "Fox". Silver fox!

MOE:

"Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing," Fallon’s colleague said. "The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney."

The Pentagon consultant said, "Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that."

MEGAN: He really just does get foxier the more you read.

MOE: 8. Were we speaking of cheap wine? Because there was an explosion someplace in The Iran called "Shiraz."

MEGAN: Which the Australians pronounce Shur-azz instead of Shur-ahz

MOE: 9. Oh yeah, remember Mossadegh? Weird how you can't spell that name without "Mossad." Anyway he's briefly mentioned, not by name but I always wondered what happened to him and turns out he stayed under house arrest until 1967. He was TIME's Man of the Year in 1951. Dude old Timestyle was soooo trippy.

MOE:

For all its power, the West in 1951 failed to cope with a weeping, fainting leader of a helpless country; the West had not yet developed the moral muscle to define its own goals and responsibilities in the Middle East. Until the West did develop that moral muscle, it had no chance with the millions represented by Mossadegh.

Hahahah they sure found some growth hormones for that whole "moral muscle" problem!

MEGAN: But, like steroids, it kind of rots your brain and shrinks your testes and makes you pissed off and gives you unsightly acne. Or whatever the foreign policy equivalent of those things are.

MOE: 9. We are overestimating the amount of ethnic tension we can stir up in Iran because the Baluchis really hate the government but actually, the "Baluchis" according to Robert Baer, is just a more Italian family restaurant chain sounding name for Al Qaeda, and they are bad dudes who cut people's heads off and shit, no lie, KLS is a Baluchi, and so is Ramzi Yousef.

MEGAN: Oh, but, like usual, we'll just pay them now and depose them later!

MOE: 10. Then there is some Tufts professor who tells us about a violent Al Qaeda funded resistance movement called the Iranian People's Resistance Movement and wouldn't it just figure with a name like that they are supposedly connected to the "drug culture."

MEGAN: Wait, so there are two al Qaeda's in Iran? Nice.

MOE: 11. Probably more, but then there are some Kurdish groups too, and they all get shitloads of money from the CIA for doing absolutely nothing, and I think I just decided what to do with my life or at least the next year of it. "My Year In The Iranian Resistance." How about it Megan? We'd totes get famous. Angie and I were going to try to get a defense contract a la Efraim Diveroli but her boyfriend said it was probably too late for that. Her boyfriend who works, in the Pentagon, for a defense contractor. I wonder how much money the most highly remunerated person in the Pentagon makes. Anyway. Also I forgot to mention it but

MEGAN: Dude, I'm all up for going on the government cheese, especially if it's someplace cool like Iran and we could get a book deal out of it!

MOE: 12. Al Qaeda has money too and they're sending it to Algeria, maybe because it's the home of Zacarias Moussaoui and he was a hoot.

MEGAN: Well, if you're not talking defense contractors, the most highly remunerated person at the Pentagon is the SecDef.

MEGAN: Well, I guess that means al Qaeda doesn't like Sarko. If they're spending money their they must be recruiting there, and if they're recruiting there, I'm thinking Paris. They haven't had an attack yet, but we have, the UK has and Spain has.

MOE: No I am talking defense contractors. Also Pastor Pfleger I forgot to mention his appearance on GMA but he appeared on GMA.

MEGAN: Oh, well, then it's got to be, like, the CEO of Boeing or something. That's my guess.

MOE: Yeah but the CEO of Boeing ... not Mullally.. shit, I dunno, anyway, it's not important, his OFFICE is not in the Pentagon. See what I'm saying?

MEGAN: Ah, ok, I see what you're saying. I'll be the grunts who have to work in offices there still don't make more than the SecDef. I can't find his pay, but the highest guy below him makes $200,000, so I'm guessing it's about that or a little more.

MEGAN: So, once again, you're officially the world's most reliably friend and Crappy Hour replacement and I owe you drinks and probably Moe does too.
SPENCER: what happened to Jezebel's own Nancy Spungeon this morning
MEGAN: She is stuck in a never ending bureaucratic nightmare that involves queues and, apparently, no email access.
SPENCER: well there is hope
because what that describes has taken place at guantanamo bay for the past 7 years
and yesterday it came to an end
MEGAN: Well, sort of. I don't see them shutting it down today.
SPENCER: somewhat.
right you are!

U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey says the Supreme Court's decision on Guantanamo detainees won't affect military trials against enemy combatants.

Mukasey, speaking Friday at a Group of Eight meeting of justice and home affairs ministers, said he was disappointed with the decision.

but there's absolutely no legal rationale for the camp anymore
MEGAN: God, it's so disappointing when you have to stop raping the Constitution.
SPENCER: one of my favorite pieces of Bush-era memorabilia
MEGAN: Mukasey's got a case of Constitutional abuse blue balls.
SPENCER: are two memos, both by John Yoo, about GTMO from early 2002
in the first, Yoo says that we need to stash detainees at GTMO in order to circumvent the Federal Torture Statute, which governs actions by Americans abroad — the rationale being that GTMO is American soil
MEGAN: John Yoo, who can safely proselytize his own special brand of "constitutional analysis" from his chair at UC Berkeley's law school.
SPENCER: as anyone who's ever been there — and i'm still hungover, that place is one huge party — can attest
but in the next memo, he says that the virtue of GTMO is that detainees won't have any rights in federal court, because GTMO is outside American soil
put that in the time capsule
savor it first, with its flinty-yet-rich aroma
MEGAN: Mmm, yummy, it's like sheep crap in the midst of a hot summer.
SPENCER: hey, look, i wrote about getting yoo kicked off the Berkeley faculty
there's an effort afoot by former Clinton official & Berkeley prof Brad DeLong
in the comments of this piece "ufred" asked if DeLong was really "as zealous as the fool he condemns"
"ufred" is MY DAD
my dad is one of my comment trolls
anyway
MEGAN: Speaking of shit, we should probably briefly discuss Mark Penn's insane rantings about the campaign.
SPENCER: oohhhh yeah i LOVED that piece
MEGAN:

So who didn’t listen to you?
Well, look, it’s not that people didn’t listen. It’s that people had a different idea of how you win against him. I had the idea that the best way to win against him would have been to go against him like any normal candidate as early as possible, because, as I often say, once the cat’s out of the bag, you really can’t put the cat back. It becomes a ten-times-harder task. And so we fundamentally disagreed on whether to take him on, on Iraq, you know.…
When you say “we”—
[laughs] Well, me. And President Clinton sided with me throughout this. The rest of the campaign… Look, their views were honorable views. It’s what they felt. I just think—

So it was you and the president against the rest of the campaign?
Me and the president thought, Take him on, take him on early. You know, bring out the fact that he gave these interviews saying that his views now were about the same as Bush and that his votes were the same as Hillary’s. And you know, therefore, take away a lot of the myth that’s brought up about his Iraq position. If you were to go through all of the strategy memos and all the preparations, it was always about, “What’s the difference between us and Obama? How can we illustrate that? How can we make that clearer?”

So, guess who Mark Penn is really actually loyal to? Hint: it's not Hillary. Seems like that might've been part of the problem.
SPENCER: well, let's take this up for a second
let's say penn's argument carries the day and HRC went into Obama's Iraq record
how is that a net plus for her? all it does is remind voters that she backed the war
no?
MEGAN: No, he's got an answer for that, too!
SPENCER: even if she was able to highlight some earlier, less-strident opposition on his part?
MEGAN:

Why do you think the rest of the team was afraid to go after him?
I think they thought that her position on Iraq wasn’t strong enough to sustain a debate on Iraq.

Or popular enough.
Right. But her position, remember—we went through the early discussion of “Was it a mistake? Should she apologize?” Of course, the rest of the team wanted her to apologize. [laughs] And you know, she weathered that extremely well. She didn’t apologize, because she had given a speech outlining her position. On that day. And that speech held up. It actually explained why she voted for Iraq and why it was a sincere vote at the time.

SPENCER: HAHAHAHAHA
here's where Hillary really was victimized by the one-two punch of Mark Penn and sexism
MEGAN: I love how he's right and everyone else is obviously wrong. I hate this guy.
SPENCER: the interview makes clear that penn really does believe that HRC needed to vote for the war

People who try to dissect your role say, “Everybody wanted to humanize her, and Mark Penn wanted to prove that she was capable of being commander in chief.” Do you regret that?
No. No. The basis of people being able to support her is the belief that she could be president of the United States.

see there he's indisputably correct
HRC or any woman will always, unfortunately, have a harder time of this than any man
and that's one of the reasons, in 2002, Mark Penn was telling her — not that he acknowledges this in the interview — to vote for the war
the implicit premise being that if she opposed the war, she'd never be able to pass the CINC test
and the honest answer to that? we'll never know
MEGAN: Wow, I never thought about it like that.
SPENCER: but it's clear over the last couple days of retrospectives
that while sexism was indisputably a massive obstacle for HRC's campaign — "iron my shirt," etc etc, you guys on jezebel know this much better than i possibly can — if HRC hadn't voted for the war there would have been absolutely no rationale for Barack Obama's campaign
none at all
he probably wouldn't have either wanted to run, or would only have run to raise his profile for a future presidential bid, or in any event wouldn't have gotten much traction with Dem voters
MEGAN: But, I think you're totally right, he says the whole time that it was about proving her capable, as though people really thought she wasn't. Like, the premise is the idea that people would question a woman as CINC, and I don't think that was ever really part of the debate, not when it came to her. I didn't like her, but I never questioned that she was capable of doing the job, I just figured she wouldn't do it the way I wanted it done.
SPENCER: and the sad truth is that men, and even some women, see this differently than you
MEGAN: I agree that it was definitely an early, obvious difference on which Obama was able to hang his hat and garner a lot of support.
SPENCER: even if they don't want a war they still want to believe that she would launch one if necessary even if the one she voted for was unnecessary
MEGAN: But couldn't she have countered that argument with Bosnia and Kosovo? Afghanistan, even?
SPENCER: and if she recanted her support for the war, you would have seen McCain or whomever saying that you can't trust these flighty menopausal women with matters of life and death because who knows when they'll change their minds
ask Howard Dean.
and, as much as he's a pussy, he's not even a woman!
MEGAN: Howard Dean has been the ball-less wonder of this primary season.
SPENCER: the public, i'm sorry to say, doesn't give a shit about Afghanistan, which is both more important to us than Iraq and descending to nearly the same level of hell
MEGAN: I just get the sense that Mark Penn didn't get Hillary, he got Bill and rather than providing her with objective advise based on her needs as a candidate, he chatted with Bill (not an unbiased guy) and did his polls and fought with people he didn't like and fucked it up and is now blaming everyone else and I hope no one ever pays him again for a campaign but there's no justice in the world so he'll continue being rich as sin the end.
SPENCER: the next time we have a woman candidate for president, she'll either have to not been a part of the iraq debate; vote against it from the start; or support a current/popular/justified/successful war
MEGAN: And, yes, Afghanistan is fucked.
Anyway, so on to other fucked things. UMass have Mugabe an honorary degree once but finally yanked it this week.
Oh, and Britain's "reviewing" his knighthood.
SPENCER: my friend Samantha "Monster!" Power once wrote a great Atlantic piece about why you might be able to credibly consider Mugabe a genocidaire
he's a knight???
MEGAN: An honorary one, apparently, yes.
SPENCER: whoa
didn't he just re-imprison Morgan Tsvangirai?
MEGAN: I know, I mean, do you get to call the Brits all the crap he's called them in the last few years as he's tried to desperately hold onto power by starving and killing his own people
SPENCER: did the brits ever even revoke his commonwealth travel privileges? i don't remember
MEGAN: He re-arrested him yesterday but they're charging another, less internationally-known party official with genocide.
SPENCER: now here's a task for the next president
MEGAN: Yeah, they revoked his privileges the last "election"
SPENCER: as part of the U.S.'s reintroduction to a durable international order
shepherd our entry into the International Criminal Court
MEGAN: Tendai Biti, if he's found guilty which he will be if they want him to be, will probably face execution.
Isn't the Pentagon totally opposed to that, though?
SPENCER: and seek to bring war-crimes charges against Mugabe
oh yes
MEGAN: I thought I remembered that from grad school. Good to know nothing's changed.
SPENCER: but it's a groundless fear cynically stoked by the right
no one is bringing any charges against any american service(wo)man
or general
the court would be 99.999999999% more likely to focus on criminal heads of state
oh speaking of, another one for our Bush-era time capsule
way way back in 2003
MEGAN: Well, it's not that I thought it wasn't a groundless fear. But, yes, Mugabe should face something but he probably won't. Besides, he's still got Mbeki's support I think.
SPENCER: one of the favorite activities of the Pentagon's Doug Feith
MEGAN: Besides masturbating to gay beastiality porn?
SPENCER: was to force countries to renounce their Article 98 rights to refer foreign countries to the ICC if they wanted in on lucrative Iraq contracting
why?
because Feith knew we were torturing motherfuckers in Iraq
which is a war crime
indictable by the ICC
so, spiting the Iraqi people and foreign allies, that's exactly what he did
in the interests of Bush/Rumsfeld/Feith's declared right to torture Iraqis
MEGAN: So, but would they be indicting soldiers or the ones who ordered them to do it? Like, say, Feith.
SPENCER: the honest thing to say is that the ICC's so new it hasn't been tested
but the Nuremburg-era principle of command responsibility PRESUMABLY holds
and you only saw top regime officials prosecuted, right, my german-scholar friend?
MEGAN: Indeed, but there was also a de-Nazification program, sort of copied in Iraq less successfully, as I recall
SPENCER: oh much less successfully!
MEGAN: So, like, the idea was to blame command, let everyone else off the hook to restart the society and kind of pretend like it was all Hitler's fault and no one else's. Ahem. People who voted for Bush in 2004.
SPENCER: to which Doug Feith, like Mark Penn, blames... everyone else
that is a compromise i will take for now
MEGAN: God, it's like a fucking sport in Washington, the CYA-lympics.

MOE: Um it's about to get a lot easier to get as drunk as I unintentionally did last night in Utah.
Happy birthday Spencer!
MEGAN: Oh, yes, happy (belated) birthday Spencer!
That "private club" thing is such bullshit, it just means that every single bar charges you cover, including fucking hotel bars, but if you go into a restaurant and order food, you can get hooch. And I know this/hate this because I went to SLC on a business trip once and stayed in the Mormon hotel (no booze) and my co-worker and I wandered the streets of SLC desperately seeking alcohol but too cheap to pay cover until we figured out the restaurant thing. So, hooray Utah! I might come back.
Didja see the interview with Mark Penn, speaking of needing alcohol?
MOE: I never got the point past where the writer stopped arguing with Penn about whether he was allowed to ask him about the campaign. What happens next?
Robert Byrd is in the hospital by the way. He is also ninety. Is he a superdelegate?
MEGAN: He is a superdelegate, and he endorsed Obama.
Mark Penn thinks I'm a "small petite" and a "tech fatale" because I like gadgets and I'm not ashamed of being short. I hate Mark Penn more than I did before I read the article, and that's saying something.

The Penn philosophy of both politics and marketing involves identifying such groups through polling, then micro-targeting them with messages crafted precisely to their unique concerns. It's not pandering, he insists: it's an expression of faith in voters as smart and rational creatures who vote according to self-interest, not airy intangibles or well-packaged personalities. "They're not really voting for people on the basis of the colour of their tie," he says. "They're voting for people on the basis of [what it] means for them and their families at the time."

Oh, also, us "elites" are stupid and it's the working class people who are getting increasing rational:

I'm pretty sure I'm being filed away as a member of the "impressionable elites", a microtrend Penn identifies whereby working-class voters get ever more adept at making rational choices based on data, while only the more privileged - people who aren't "living through the difficulties with healthcare, and the economy, and the mortgage, and the job loss" - can afford to indulge in frivolous chatter about hope and change.

MOE:

And thus it was, Penn's critics argue, that for too long Hillary's campaign was a muddle of small, contradictory, cautious messages, when what the moment required was passion, inspiration, and a promise of change.

I didn't know he ran Clinton's 1996 campaign.
MEGAN: Yup, that's one of the reasons Hillary refused to ditch him
MOE: so where are the primaries today? besides south dakota?
MEGAN: I think maybe Ezra Klein doesn't like Penn either (I'm only adding this in because I actually busted out laughing when I read it)

"Microtrends is so bad that the question ... isn't whether it will destroy [Penn's] own reputation, but whether it is so epically awful as to take the entire polling industry down with it."

Montana. Big Sky State.
Don't let's make fun of me for knowing that.
MOE: I did a fourth grade report on Montana and even I don't know that. Also, did it ever occur to you that all these fucking states have to figure out a state flower? Unless they don't and that just happened to be what some of them did. Either way, I don't remember Montana's state flower. And I will say this of "microtrends": if we think our politicians are bad, look at our snack foods? I can't find where Ezra said that. Although I do appreciate the tag line "Momma said wonk you out." Ah, the young opinionated liberal DC blogger population and its hip-hop fluency. It's almost like they all went to camp together?
MEGAN: Google says Montana's state flower is...
wait for it
The bitterroot.
MOE: Sounds like our psychographic! It's the new "delicate flower."
MEGAN: Also, if they all went to camp together, this explains how I'm the odd kid out. I didn't even go to violin camp. I volunteered at the library most summers because I could bike or walk there and it was free and my parents couldn't really have afforded camp even if I was outdoorsy and wanted to go.
MOE: I was not outdoorsy really. I actually just should have lived in a city. So many kids are miserable growing up in the suburbs. I think it's what makes this country great.
MEGAN: It just always weirds me out, I didn't feel like the only person who hated/complained about Scotia, only 13 years later, I'm definitely in a small minority of people who don't live in the area.
So, like, if everyone hates growing up in the 'burbs, why does everyone insist on raising their kids there?
MOE: To teach them misery
MEGAN: Oh, well, then that makes sense! Also, remember the whole thing about Congress fucking up the Farm Bill? Turns out, it's Newt Gingrich's fault
MOE: Dude: "He's just a dishonest guy, he can't help it."Said Bill Clinton re the writer of the Vanity Fair piece. Followed directly by:

"The editor of Esquire— he sent us an email yesterday and said it was the single sleaziest piece of journalism he'd seen in decades. He said it made him want to go take a shower and he was embarrassed to be a journalist when he read it."

Um, David Granger? If you were thinking about cooking up yet another "how Bill fucked Hillary" expose, can I suggest that certain of your psychographics might be fatigued by this topic? But if the former president is lying, well, I suppose he can't help it.
MEGAN: I mean, really? He's got to accuse the writer of lying? Why not accuse all the anonymous sources? Why not pull an Et tu, Brute rather than laying it at the feet of the writer?
MEGAN: Heck, I was talking about this last night. You want to know what you do? You don't directly attack the guy. You say, with deep disappointment on your face and in your voice, gosh, you know, it's so hard when the people you trusted sell you out and spread rumors and innuendo about you. It's just heartbreaking that people I have loved would do that to me, but that's the nature of politics today, everyone looking to be their own boldfaced name. It's only slightly more heartbreaking than when his wife, Dee Dee, you remember, my former press secretary? It's only slightly more disappointing to us then when she refused to endorse my wife. Anyway, it's just so sad.
And then you shut up and everyone thinks he's a dick and that it's political and the stories stop.
MOE: See, I love how we play press secretary with these people. Btw I'm just being reminded that yesterday Balk blamed Clinton's assholery this election around on beta blockers. (So did Purdum, though I don't think that came till the sixth or seventh page.) Unrelated Catholics who support Obama are having a tough time getting served Communion in your town. I bet I know one priest who would be up for fixing that. Which brings me to: Obama quitting Trinity. Why? Now? That was a stupid thing to do and I didn't really say so yesterday.
MEGAN: I mean, they're probably sick of being mocked and threatened, he's sick of being asked about it, it's probably a pretty mutual break up.
Also, on the Catholic thing, I think that it sucks but that's the price you pay for being a Catholic who disagrees when you get a Pope who intends to bring us wayward thinking-we-can-disagree American sheep back into the fold of blind-following.
MOE: I used to not receive communion just because i was lazy. then i started having sex and getting it every time.
MEGAN: I stopped taking Communion when I quit the Church. My mom is really embarrassed when I accompany her to Church on Christmas and I'm like, you're more embarrassed that I'm showing respect for your religion and its rules than by me disrespecting the institution? Not that logical arguments have ever gotten me anywhere with my mom, but I keep trying.
MOE: I'm adding a new brand of McCain scandalette to "says idiotic and inaccurate but predictably hawkish thing about war" and "parts ways with adviser who is also shill for the interests of evil so as not to look like a hypocrite" and that is "says something idiotic but predictably hawkish that completely refutes something he said six months ago so as to look like a hypocrite all by himself"
MEGAN: I assume that you're talking about Charlie Black lobbying for Iran? Ah, the sweet smell of hypocrisy in the morning. That guy is just fucking McCain all over the place on his "I'm not close to lobbyists, I swear," there's like one awesome story a week about some other shady concern he represented! Atta boy, Charlie! Keep at it!
MOE: Chuck Shumer thinks we need to stop so openly mocking Russia's plans to restore regional hegemony and get them to impose trade sanctions upon Iran with us. The Iranian regime will topple! They've got that "growing" middle class!
MEGAN: Please, Iran has oil and Russian expat scientists, right? Russia's not gonna dance with us on this one, Chuck, but good luck with that!
MOE: And re McCain I was just talking about…I guess there was the Burma pair, the Dougs Goodyear and Davenport, and then the guy who quit because he represented energy companies, and the guy who shilled for Saudi Arabia, and then, wait, I didn't notice this one:

Craig Shirley was forced to quit when he was found to be behind an independent group attacking senators Clinton and Obama on the internet.

MEGAN: Well, the attacking Clinton and Obama wasn't the problem, it was shilling for the group which is a 527, and McCain hates 527s because his campaign finance law was supposed to get issue groups, like, out of campaigns but didn't. But, yes, the rest of that shit is kind of hilare.
MOE: Oh Good lord, good lord:

The group maintains a website that ran animated parodies of Clinton, and now parodies Obama, recently imagining a visit by Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the Obama White House. Shirley’s work was to promote the website and spread the word about its other promotional activities, including airplanes trailing “Stop Her Now” banners over Democratic presidential debates.

One recent anti-Obama cartoon features an Oval Office exchange between President Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Obama summons as his “spiritual advisor.”
“How may I serve you my brother?” asks the animated Wright.
“Is love black and white?” asks the fictional Obama.
“No - it is black,” shrieks Wright.
“Really?” asks Obama.
“Goddam right,” the minister replies.
"That's what I'd thought you'd say," says a reassured Obama.

MEGAN: Yeah, I mean, I'm not defending the 527, but it's not even that shit that got Shirley fired even though one might hope that it would be.
MOE: Well there was that other dude who got fired, the one whose facebook account we posted. Remember, the guy who got fired over something on his TWITTER?
MEGAN: OH, he was pimping some YouTube mashup thing about Wright, yeah, I vaguely remember that. It made McCain look bad and he wasn't Charlie Black, so he was out!
MOE: So what do we think? Is he going to pull through tonight? Is she going to fold?
MEGAN: Well, everyone this morning was looking at her plans to speak in NYC tonight despite probably winning in South Dakota, and the fact that she's invited all her major donors and supporters there and asked that staff turn in all outstanding expense reports by the end of the week as her planning a concession, but there's been a wave of Hillary surrogates on TV denying it this morning, saying she's just putting together a superdelegate phone back or something.
But given the likely margins tonight, Obama will only need like 25 superdelegates to endorse today and he already had Congressman Clyburn (D-SC) on the Today show this morning, so...
MOE: It's one of those things where you just know Mandy and Maggie and Harold and Bill and everyone has totally been at one another's throats fighting over whether she should concede or stay in, and it's going to take Chelsea to say, "Why don't we ask what my mom wants?"
Anyway, all the deep-seated racism and misogyny revealed by this campaign has made poor Richard Cohen depressed. Which is so typical of Washington. Like, really? This campaign made you depressed? Have you ever covered crime? Or even like watched The Wire? What about reality TV?
MEGAN: Dude, he was on Morning Joe this morning talking about this and Pat Buchanan was all "Well, white people look at black people voting for Obama because he's one of theirs, so it's just white people voting for one of ours" and I almost swallowed my tongue.
I was incoherent with rage. It was like, Pat Buchanan just said black people shouldn't've voted for Obama if they didn't want white people to vote for Clinton.

cMOE: Dude I don't want to forget this so I'm just showing you now. From Dick Morris's column on how McCain can beat Obama:

If the GOP nominee were Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee, independents and Democrats might not vote Republican even if they became convinced that Obama is some kind of sleeper agent sent to charm and conquer our democracy.

MOE: um no kidding!
MEGAN: Why doesn't Dick Morris go back to sucking prostitutes' toes and leave the rest of us alone. Have you seen his teeth? He ain't stopped sucking stanky feet yet.

MOE: So there is too much to write about today but anyway Iran is still building a nuclear program, treaties be damned and we can't do anything about it, Burma is still letting its people die and Asian governments won't do anything about it, Hugo Chavez is supporting FARC and by any standard probably now qualifies for our state sponsors of terror list but we probably shouldn't give him the satisfaction, and now they're saying it's the end of American Superpower. For realz?!
MEGAN: Wait, wait! The NY Times is reporting this morning that Myanmar/Burma is going to let ASEAN help. I'm skeptical but maybe they actually will?

MOE: Ah, so their "soft approach" did work!

In a clear departure from the usually secretive style of the military junta, state television in Myanmar on Sunday showed video of the leader, Senior General Than Shwe, touring a refugee camp, checking supplies, patting the heads of babies and shaking hands with survivors. Some of the cyclone victims, surrounded by neat rows of blue tents, clasped their hands and bowed as the general and other senior military officials walked by.

MOE:

"Are we going to continue to cover the earthquake?" the Guangzhou-based reporter asked in an instant message to his editor, a day after China's deadliest earthquake in three decades struck Sichuan province."Of course," replied the editor, surnamed Yang. "Why not?"
Then, the reporter said, he forwarded to his boss the text of the latest edict from the propaganda department of the Communist Party Central Committee, ordering domestic news media not to send any more journalists to Sichuan.
Yang wrote back, "If everyone pays no attention to this, then it won't really be a ban."

MEGAN: Oh, she's probably still under house arrest. Like the regime wants to allow her ot be showed doing good work?
MOE: 40 years of mind control, propaganda, a string of incomprehensible, and incomprehensibly destructive political campaigns combined with severe rationing and poverty followed by 15 years of steady marginal increases in living standards and the appearance of openness will...do that to a citizenry!

MOE: I guess we should talk about how the crowd that showed up for Obama was like 1/8 the population of Portland? And maybe we should talk about how tiny his advance for Dreams From My Father was?
MOE: Oh and how a place as shit poor as Yemen manages to hide a guy with a $5 million price on his head. And also we should talk about oil prices. And McCain's continued purge of his aides who love lobbyists, which is getting like New York politicos with whores. And Anthony Shahid's fucking depressing story on Lebanon.

MEGAN: Ok, well, I can speak to the continued purge of lobbyists. Because there's one guy who isn't getting out. He's McCain's Mark Penn only potentially slightly less stupid. He's practically consolidating power in the campaign by getting rid of the other guys with lobbying ties, so that in November-January when clients are looking for someone with a good relationship to McCain that hasn't been accused of fucking him, he's the only one left. It's all very wonderfully Machiavellian.

MEGAN: Also, I think it's fair to say that Republican lobbyists understand the least about why people think they're shills out to destroy America and don't love McCain that much anyway, so it probably never occurred to anyone that it might be a teeny tiny problem to the electorate that the guy writing McCain's energy policy was an active lobbyist for energy companies. Because, hey, that's how this Administration has run things for 8 years anyway.
9:15 AM
MEGAN: As for the Yemen thing, it's actually a little funny because here, more and more people are tipping off their neighbors to pay their electric bills and shit and the economy goes into the toilet. So either the Yemenis are more loyal, or we're just that more desperate? Either way, my position has always been that I would totally turn in criminals for money, which is probably why my friends are all nerdy-upstanding types. One year at college there was a $1200 reward for a serial fire alarm puller and I was dying to know who it was because that was like, half of the money I'd make all semester otherwise.

MOE: Which reminds me of a point that I hope that Obama can make fairly. Re the "eight more years" thing. I think anyone who goes out of his way to say that a McCain administration would be "another eight years of the same" is doing a disservice to history. I think it's safe to say it would be historically impossible for another Administration to match this administration's singleminded dedication to the pursuit the interests of such a tiny group of corrupt people in all blatant disregard of democracy. I think we would be ill-advised to cheapen George W. Bush's "Worst President Ever" stain that way. No matter what happens in the general election January 20 will be a relatively good day for this country.
MOE: And regarding Yemen, I think it's safe to say we are less desperate.

MOE: And don't let me forget to bring up this fucking depressing story on the end of the era of cooperation between First and Third World countries that SOMEHOW begat the Green Revolution on the basis of a basic shared interest in the end of human suffering and not ADM profit margins.
MEGAN: Um, I don't thing McCain will be bad in the same way, but I think he's spent the last 8 years selling his soul to the Rovian devils in order to secure the nomination, and that doesn't make me particularly happy. There won't be a ton of turnover in terms of the kinds of people in middle management and shit because they're all working on his campaign and will be "owed"
MOE: This is pretty stark.

Adjusted for inflation, the World Bank cut its agricultural lending to $2 billion in 2004 from $7.7 billion in 1980.

MOE: Well, but what does McCain need with the Rovian devils now? Karl Rove is dispensing him free advice via his various punditry positions now.
MOE: There is just something that chills me about the "eight more years" refrain.

MEGAN: Well, and let's not forget that part of the problem with the IRRI's budget and people not working there is the fact that they were a proponent of biotechnology to get certain properties out of rice (salinity resistance, vitamins) that simply could not be bred in by convention means, and they were shit on by the world and the environmental movement, targeted for eco-terrorism and a lot of their developed-world money dried up over it, even though the Gold Rice project could've had serious benefits for the malnourished people of the world. I kept waiting for the article to mention that and it didn't.
MOE: Fuckin ecoterrorists. Anyway here we see shades of the pharmaceutical industry.

The insect is not a new problem. In the 1960s, the rice institute, nestled between jungle and the bustling town of Los Ba os, pioneered ways to help farmers grow two and even three crops a season, instead of one.

MOE: You talk to guys who develop drugs at pharmaceutical companies and they think it's absolutely shameful that if they want a drug to come to market these days they have to go to work on the next generation of lipitor or abilify or the drug that finally cures metabolic syndrome when there are still so many infectious diseases to be cured. At one point there was a Nature article suggesting the industry establish a non-profit pharmaceutical company to address diseases whose cures would not be money makers. The same should go for agriculture, you'd think. I don't really understand why all the philanthropy targeted at making life-improving technology more available to the third world seems to focus on hand-cranked laptops and stuff like that.

MEGAN: I think it's because a lot of philanthropy is corporate, it's designed to make companies look good to their consumers and stock holders, but those decisions are made by people within the company. So, of course that's the kind of corporate philanthropy they would engage in. And the pharmaceutical companies will pay tons of money to run those Prescription Partnership for America commercials and send out the buses and take a hit on giving medicines to a small subset of people who can't afford it rather than risk price controls, and they'll give away some AIDS medications in developing countries to keep patent rights.
9:35 AM
MEGAN: And Monsanto will spend millions of dollars spraying RoundUp on farmers fields to see if they're cheating on licensing rather than donating to the IRRI or developing drought-resistant wheat or something.
MEGAN: And everyone will give Bill Gates $1 million to research a cure for malaria or AIDS or whatever and claim that they're doing great shit and then go back to making money.
MEGAN: Anyway, if we're going to take today to be depressed about injustice, how about if you're taking medical marijuana while waiting for a transplant, you're pretty much not eligible for the transplant anymore?
MOE: Well I actually have a better answer to my own question that is not QUITE as cynical. The culture of Silicon Valley and the rapidness of the wealth creation that's happened there, the "open source-ness" of ideals, the existence of Microsoft monopolistic practices as a sort of anti-standard...the newness...the fact that the scientists in the case of the technology industry WERE the business founders and ARE the wealth holders...this swirl of factors makes electrical engineers and software engineers more idealistic and philanthropic I think. Whereas in pharmaceuticals and agriculture a lot of the scientific talent is still being managed by corporate shareholder-driven assholes because the barriers to entry are so much higher.
MEGAN: So, geeks think computers really can save the world, and everyone else is just faking it like I said? I'd buy that in moderation.
MOE: The thing is that: there are certain classes of people you might to run their businesses more ethically, less greedily...more thoughtfully...Hasidic-founded Kosher agriprocessing plants are no longer among them. (Did you read this story?) (Holy shit.)

MEGAN: I would be more surprised and outraged that this Administration is targeting illegal immigrants for arrest and deportation and doing virtually nothing to the management that hires them if I hadn't been living in this country for 30 years, probably.
MEGAN: And/or hadn't read that series in the WaPo last week about how unethically and illegally we treat supposedly-illegal immigrants while in custody.
MOE: And on that note I'll leave you with this from George Packer's New Yorker piece on conservatism:

MOE:

Nixon was coldly mixing and pouring volatile passions. Although he was careful to renounce the extreme fringe of Birchites and racists, his means to power eventually became the end. Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum—"A little raw for today," he warned—that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading "Dividing the Democrats." Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in "the Old Roosevelt Coalition," it recommended that the White House "exacerbate the ideological division" between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon's policies; highlight "the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party"; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare.

Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. "Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country," Buchanan wrote. "We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention." Such gambits, he added, could "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."

• After last night's fellatio-esque interview of John McCain, reporters ask Jon Stewart if he's a real journalist and if he should've tried harder to ask a real question. No, and yes. [Comedy Central, Time, Rolling Stone]
  
• No one really cares, though, because Hillary might not actually stay in the race until August. [NY Times]
  
• And there is one economist who agrees with her gas tax plan, but only because this example of blatant electoral pandering is the method of blatant electoral pandering likely to do the least harm of all the harmful ways to blatantly pander to the electorate. [NY Times]
  
• Oh, and some New York Congressman got his mistress pregnant three years ago and has a secret love child and is a drunk driver. Even married Republicans lose when it comes to abstinence-only education. [NY Times]

• That pedophile Interpol was searching for? He was a store Santa from Jersey and found fucking little kids "euphoric." Gross. [Associated Press]
• And some people still buy that shit about Obama being a Muslim. [Wired]
• And some dude used to drug and rape women at his office parties, but the law firm he worked at didn't sack him for it or warn anyone even after 2 women got drugged and reported it. Dudes, don't lawyers know not to fuck with lawyers? [Boston Globe]
• Mark Penn is so dumb that he didn't know about proportional representation in the primaries when Hillary hired him, but she'll still have to pay him the $10 million or so she owes him. Asshole. [HuffPo]
• And, for my girl/fellow alum SarahMC, check out the disaster porn of a mega car crash in Allston right by the Shaws on Comm Ave. [Boston Globe]
• Speaking of disasters, Burma is still fucked. [NY Times]
• And the Prime Minister of Israel has likely been taking bribes from foreigners. [Washington Times]
• God I need a fucking drink.

MOE: So you feel guilty cheating on me? I gotta confess, I didn't read Crappy Hour. Well, I didn't read the site actually. But I avoided Crappy Hour in particular because the last time I brought Spencer into it, it ended up being 337 lines long or something. That's why I had to bait everyone with the "date" thing, because I figured that even the die-hard CH readers would give up around line 54.

MEGAN: I think we successfully kept it short, though we got kind of tanget-y, which you and I naturally know nothing about,

MEGAN: But can we maybe have a moment of silence for Mark Penn, who jeopardized the $10 million he took off of Hillary's campaign for a $300,000 1 year contract to push for the Colombian FTA? F'idiot.

MOE: Okay yeah I just want to lay it all out there. Mark Penn has extraordinarily bad hair. Then there is the exciting news that Condi Rice has been actively pursuing Dick Cheney's job, which is wonderful news for all Americans. And then there is that crazy polygamist shit and a think piece in the NYT Mag about Levittown, Pennsylvania that I sorta read and a think piece on Guantanamo Bay in the New Yorker that I sort of didn't read, but you brought up the $10 million dollar thing which is I think a good segue into the Clintons' centimillion dollar tax returns and the inspiring news that being a CEO is as ludicrously lucrative as it has ever been despite the credit crisis, wait, no, scratch that, it is more lucrative than it has ever been.
MEGAN: Well, naturally, it's more lucrative than it's ever been! We obviously need to pay the best and the brightest as much as we can afford to keep it from happening again!

MOE: OH fuck, but you know what my favorite part of the fucking
weekend was? Reading the Wall Street Journal edit page slam Obama for not being sufficiently invested our ponzi scheme of a stock market.
MEGAN: Capital gains is also what you pay if you sell your house and don't reinvest all the proceeds in your next house, but trust the rent-babies at the WSJ to ignore that detail.
MEGAN: Also, you don't pay cap gains on your 401K or IRA if you don't withdraw early, which you might need to do if you make less than $50,000 a year and that's in effect your entire savings.

MOE: I love this slight:

With apologies to economists Buffett and Obama, the history of this tax isn't on their side. The capital gains rate is crucial to investment decisions; higher rates make capital more expensive, dampening incentives to invest and reducing economic growth.

MEGAN: Gah, everything in there pisses me off. Not that I want the cap gains rate to go up, but, still, it's like citing statistics without really explaining it.
MEGAN: I'm guessing like, Poland or something. Not the Czech Republic, but maybe the Slovak?

MOE: I think the cap gains rate should go up, not just because I have no stock market holdings, except this 401K from my last job I don't know what happened to. It just sort of disappeared. Maybe it's there for me somewhere. Hm. Whatever. I bought a Swiss army knife over the weekend and read books. I've decided to join this new survivalist movement I've been hearing so much about. Also, commenters who would like to recommend aggressive accountants: moe@jezebel.com.
MOE: Yeah, the Slovaks, we're the slackers. The slacker-ovaks.
MOE: My people know the farce that is this myopic focus on incremental economic growth.
MEGAN: Well, your 401K isn't subject to cap gains, but if it's lost track of you they have to hold onto it forever, it's awesome like that.
MEGAN: Figure out where it was and call and make them track it down.
MOE: Okay but seriously we should probably discuss Mark Penn right?
MEGAN: Oh, hells yeah.
MOE: If you'd taken SinsisterRouge's advice six months ago, Hills, we might not be in this spot.

MEGAN: Except that Hunter Walker just sent me this link in which Hillary asks for credit because it takes her longer to do her hair and make-up. If this is what Maggie Williams hath wrought, I sorta want Mark Penn back.
MOE: Oh Jesus, HILLARY. You know what is so annoying about that? Michael Kinsley wrote that first. And like, it was cool of Kinsley to point that out; hey, give the lady some credit, being a woman is tough because you need to apply all sorts of consumer products to your face and hair and match your clothes to your eyeshadow and stuff and as a result, get less sleep than men. Right. So it's stating an obvious feminine truth, which is cool if you're Michael Kinsley, but you're Hillary Clinton and your campaign is — let's face it guys — really in its final hours, being read its last rites...is that what you want your last words to be? Actually never mind, I take that all back.

MOE: "You gotta give me credit, I applied some really pretty looking eye-shadow, and that shit ain't easy."
MOE: "They construct entire reality shows around MUCH LESS."
MEGAN: Way to strike a blow for feminism, Maggie.
MOE: "Now, onto my second career as the celebrity judge of Make Me A Superdelegate!"
MEGAN: Like, really? I mean, I know you and I have similar beauty regimens: sit around in our own filth until we have to leave the house, wash, put on clean clothes and minor make up and then leave.
MOE: Okay, so seriously, also, back to Mark Penn. You know, when all this was starting, the Clintons did not need to remind America how creepy Clinton pollsters tended to be
MEGAN: Yeah, what is up with that? And how hilare is it when Penn is the less creepy one?
MOE: I actually showered this morning but applied no makeup. Oh, here's some sad news: the guy who makes my egg sandwiches at the deli? Not the guy that owns the deli — that would be aiming too high but the guy who makes the sandwiches —- well I apply lipstick for that guy. Anyhow, so, Mark Penn. Why so long, and at such a tremendous cost? What sort of deal did they have? Is he friends with Ron Burkle and Anne Hathaway's boyfriend? What is the deal there?

MEGAN: I mean, if you're politically and personally committed to someone, do you need $10+ million? He was shilling for the Colombians for $300K. Campaign staffers and Hill staffers work for peanuts. Hell, White House phone answerers work for practically minimum wage. What the hell did he need $10 million for?
MEGAN: I'm guessing she just felt sort of dependent on him and a little lost without him and he took advantage, plus Obama already had Axelrod.
MEGAN: Who, by the way, totally cracked a "the pen is not mightier than the 'rod" joke on MSNBC this morning and I switched channels.
MOE: Well that's just the thing. What if he had some top secret classified GPS-enabled brainwave-reading software hacked straight from Karl Rove himself that promised to deliver the coronation swiftly and bloodlessly? It like, didn't work, guys. And wait a second, AXELROD made that joke?
MOE: Hahahahahahahahahahaha that's aweosme.
MOE: I keep meaning to turn on the TV but it hasn't happened and as you may recall my MSNBC is still muted.
MEGAN: Axelrod totally did. Even Scarborough groaned. Axelrod claimed he'd made it up while on hold but Joe was all, dude, we all know you've been waiting to say that for months and it was the first time I wholeheartedly agreed with Joe Scarborough.

MOE: Hahahahahahaha
MEGAN: By the way, CNN is picking up the "blogging ourselves to death" story. I've got a cold. I've decided these things are related.

MOE: Of course he'd been saving that for months. How could you not? I'm sorry, it's so stupid, but so awesome. Okay, so, um...Pennsylvania! I keep reading conflicting things. Did you get through that Levittown piece? I got halfway through and will summarize: Levittown is a little blue-collar racist town in Pennsylvania in which the author was raised. It seemed aggressively "normal" and "solidly middle-class" then but it is all beer guts and broken dreams now. The Obama campaign headquarters is dominated by an old guy who was a Republican until he read the two Obama books. Black people don't live there.
MEGAN: Yeah, that sounds like where I grew up.
MEGAN: Also, I've been to one of those Obama roundtable meetings where you're, like, invited to testify like it's a religious meeting. A guy brought me there on a date. It's in the top 10 strangest dates ever. Neither of us called the other back. I didn't testify.

MOE: You missed a large inter-Gawker Inc. email-versation about that. I felt inadequate, as I have only one laptop and I sit on my couch all day and really haven't felt that 'adrenaline' feeling since the first week we launched. I certainly feel like I have blogged myself out of a life, but to death? Hmmmm.
MEGAN: I can only imagine the email thread.
MOE: This Condi pursuing the veepship — is that just crazy talk? Also, did McCain do anything else stupid lately?
MOE: I haven't been paying as much attention as I should have maybe.

MEGAN: Well, if he did it's totally been overshadowed by all the bowling and pandering going on in Pennsylvania.
MEGAN: Also, I can't see Condi pursuing it? I think people just mostly want her to and thus it's spawning the stories.
MEGAN: Whoa, CNN has been banned from reporting from Zimbabwe.
MOE: Oh, yeah, Zimbabwe! What's happening with that?
MEGAN: They're pretty screwed. They're going to have a runoff despite the fact that the President definitely lost. They're arresting some reporters and expelling others, bandits are taking over what few white-owned farms remain and armed militias are patrolling the streets for the "safety" of the people.

MOE: Oh should we address Charlton Heston and/or the PA primary? Charlton Heston: Michael Moore didn't even look like an ass making you look like an ass.
MEGAN: Charlton Heston: We can have his guns now, kthnxbi

• The McCain strategist who thought it was a brilliant idea to have him give a speech at the Lorraine Motel on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination to apologize for having voted against MLK Day should probably not keep his job. [CBS News]
  
• The advance staffer who gave the world the image of an African-American man holding an umbrella over McCain during the speech needs to go, too. [HuffPo]
  
• Hillary Clinton's speechwriters, who wrote a speech that, for once, actually played to her oratorical skills, should stay. The guy who decided to coin the phrase "Poverty Czar"? Probably not. [NY Times]
  
• Oooh, blind item: which one of you lesbian, bonerkilling commentwhores was dragged out of a Hillary event in Los Angeles? Fess up! [Breitbart]

• Hillary's tax returns are out, and yeah, the Clintons are ridiculously rich. [Yahoo]
• One would think that there'd be no way to make a story about Clinton and Madonna boring. One would think wrong. [HuffPo]
• Even though he took $10 million from Hillary's campaign and then used his position of prominence as a lobbyist to undercut her stance against the Colombian Free Trade Agreement, Mark Penn gets to just apologize and continue raking in that cash. [Politico]
• Speaking of unemployment, it's up, of course. [LA Times]
• But the Michigan do-over is down for the count. [WaPo]
• Not that there aren't bigger election problems other places, like ZImbabwe. [WaPo]
• In case you want a little quiet reflection on events past but always remembered, you can read RFK's words about MLK's assassination, the words of the witnesses to the assassination (who still haven't been questioned by police?) and then a somber piece about why so many people fear for Obama's safety, even today.

SPENCER: we gonna do this?
MEGAN: See, if you were Moe we would totally be discussing the whole people in Pennsylvania might be kind of racist thing, but I don't know anyone from Latrobe, don't drink Rollg Rock (which isn't even brewed there anymore) and I can't really say for Pennsylvania, so unless you've got thoughts, we might want to just talk about the dude who was stockpiling AK-47s because they would be really valuable when Hillary got elected and banned them.
SPENCER: unfortunately, DC's popular coffee shop Busboys and Poets hosts wi-fi so weak that I can't open any links, so I need you to flesh that story out for me a bit
srsly, this is like dial-up or something
and why would you drink rolling rock? yuengling!
If yuengling ever decided to launch a national ad campaign, it should use 'Jingling Baby' by LL
'it's yueng-a-ling, baby/ go 'head baby...'
MEGAN: Well, I don't really drink beer ever, except for that beer I brought to poker night which I found out I liked when I told a bartender I didn't drink beer and he made me try every single one in the bar, and there were 40.
That was a lot of beer. By the end, I sort of didn't care either way, but I liked that one best.
SPENCER: god, you know what was a great band? Catherine Wheel
MEGAN: Oh, right, the story. Um, people in Latrobe never say they're not going to vote for Obama because he's black but they've got all these other reasons that don't sound legit and it makes themm sound like they won't vote for him because he's black. The best quote is this:

In a place like Latrobe, which the census says is 99 percent white, the race issue is almost an unexplored country that people visit like tourists with a phrase book.

His flat delivery often makes him seem bored with his own stories — as he did Tuesday, when he told a crowd of current students at his alma mater, "Memory often accords our high school years the distinction of being among the happiest of our lives. I remember Episcopal in that light."

MEGAN: Good morning! Did you just see Nader on CNN? He smirked when Obama accused him of hubris and threw it right back.

MOE: Wait, was he actually on with Obama?
 
MEGAN: No, but they played video of Obama responding to a question about him yesterday.
(Is it fair to wonder what is up with his left eye and his slightly slurred speech? Was it always like that or have I just been ignoring him that much?)
 
MOE: Ah yes I did read about that.
I totally voted for Nader in 2000. SIGH.
My boyfriend at the time was actually his California campaign manager

MEGAN: I was googling for a picture to figure out the eye thing, and found this picture instead. I like this one better.
 
MOE: Or some title like that that applied to any other candidate would denote some level of importance..

MEGAN: I sort of what to see him debate Cynthia McKinney for the green party nod.

MOE: I think Obama relishes chances to look like a moderate and he doesn't have many what with the Clinton campaign "circulating" shit like this.

MEGAN: He looks like an Ay-Rab! An Ay-Rab!
He's here to destroy our way of life! Ahhhh!
  [commences running in circles with arms waving in the air]

MOE: So...what else. There's an extremely well-timed New York Magazine cover story about Chelsea Clinton... all the columnists are now grousing about how they still have to write about Hillary Clinton as if she actually has a chance, all the universe, ombudsman included, is still grousing about how bad that John McCain story was, and so we are left with... Ralph Nader.
There's also a lot of last-minute hand wringing over whether Obama is good for the Jews including Bernard-Henri Levy who is in town to talk about neo anti Semitism.
  I'm not sure where to begin with this stuff.
It's all so tiresome!
And I'm so tired!
 
MEGAN: I prefer just talking about silly pictures.
Like, whatever CNN producer thought it appropriate to put Ali Velshi in a cowboy outfit on a horse.
And then showed a picture of Yul Brenner in Westworld.
Oh, and they're debating again tomorrow night. Time to stock up on alcohol, people.
  
Do you think that since her new campaign tactic is to be sarcastic and shit the debates will be more interesting tomorrow?
MOE: Uhhhhh, I guess? I mean, I know never to trust the conventional wisdom, but the conventional wisdom is kinda compelling right now!
MEGAN: I'm just sick of them all playing nice. Yawn.
  
Also, the youngest superdelegate guy just endorsed Obama because Wisconsin and young people are going for Obama.
MOE: Yeah, Jason Rae. I am sick of that kid, too. I'm reading this Chelsea story.
Oooh, fun factoid: Obama's secret service name is Renegade!
MEGAN: Boys.
Also, I love the anecdote about Chelsea flirting with the hot jock on the campaign trail. Like, I want to think I would do it, but I know I'm too much of a weenie.
MOE: Hahaha here it is

Approached by a tall model-handsome college jock at the University of Utah, she literally batted her eyelashes at him. "Hell-o!" she said in a Mae West tone before posing for a snapshot with him.

when Gennifer Flowers sold the story of her affair with Chelsea's dad to Star magazine, including tapes of their intimate phone calls, Hillary took her 11-year-old daughter to the supermarket, pointed out the tabloids, and "told her what we heard was going to be in one of them," because she wanted her "to feel she's a part of this," according to Clinton biographer Sally Bedell Smith. Wead said Chelsea's parents "got a lot of criticism for preparing Chelsea like this. During one of those sessions, she apparently left in tears. Rush Limbaugh said it showed just how ruthless the Clintons were, putting their child through this." Limbaugh's concern was disingenuous, of course. On his TV show, he called her "the White House dog." Wead says, "The Ford children told me they wish they'd had somebody to explain things to them. Instead, they were just thrown upstairs in the White House, with the caveat, 'And by the way, don't make a mistake.' "

That fall, Chelsea couldn't resist reading the Starr report online, including the footnotes. When Bill Clinton learned that she'd read the report, he wept.

"There were these girls around her—it was their mission to have Chelsea be their friend," noted a student who knew her. "The mean girls positioned themselves around Chelsea when everybody was deciding who to live with, and I remember they pushed this sweet girl out of the group. She ended up gaining 25 pounds."

MEGAN: I sorta wanted Chelsea to realize that the girls were mean and be nice to the excluded one, but I'll bet she didn't know. Some women are great at hiding their true nature (and, no, I'm totally not saying that because I found something out this weekend that I was probably better off not knowing about one of my "friends," why do you ask?).
MOE: One of my best friends was good friends with one of her friends at Stanford and visited and told me Chelsea was just kind of unfriendly. Which is totally unsurprising. She's incredibly cautious. The excluded girl ... I dunno.

MEGAN: I mean, I think in that position you surround yourself with people you trust and are hesitant about everyone else. I would be. But I am sort of an unfailingly paranoid person for no reason.

MOE: Okay, so that story was boring. But is it as boring as our next task, which is tallying up the major opinion columnists who are calling for Chelsea's mom to quit?
Colbert King of the Washington Post wants her to quit because she's not black or something.
MEGAN: Oh, for Chrissakes. It's an election, people. Hell, even if you want to assume she's just pounding the potential future nominee, she's airing his dirty laundry far enough in advance of the election to practically inoculate him.
  
*innoculate
MOE: Frank Rich wants her to quit because her campaign reminds him of the Iraq war, with Mark Penn as Rumsfeld.
MEGAN: Mark Penn sucks. This is my completely unbiased and slightly uninformed opinion.
  
But he sucks.
 
MOE: Bob Novak thinks she should quit because she's too clueless to even know she is supposed to quit.

 MEGAN: I can't believe they paid him $10 million and dumped Patti Solis Doyle
Bob Novak is the Earl Of Minor, Creeping Despair. He's like one of the ghosts in The Sixth Sense, insofar and his mere presences causes the temp to plummet.
 
MOE: Eugene Robinson, the early bird here, thinks she should quit because she has the gall not to quit.
MEGAN: Because, God knows, it's important the quit in advance of losing.
*to quit.
  Shit, I can't type this morning.

MOE: Maureen Dowd says she should quit because she's too macho and Obama out-girled her. Umm... how is she not tired of writing the same column every other day?

Obama tapped into his inner chick and turned the other cheek.

MOE: Oooooh, another one: Jonathan Alter thinks she should get out because she will only survive if Obama does something completely retarded and that would be bad for everyone anyway.

MEGAN: Oh, ok, so, she should drop out because Obama fucking up and making himself unelectable is a possibility only if she stays in? I fail to see the logic there.
But it's good to know that political columnists can find 10 ways to say the same thing and get paid! That, like, totally bodes well for my employability.

MOE: PATTI SOLIS DOYLE. I wish I knew more about her other than she looks like Rachel Ray and according to Drudge is Latina. I guess he's saying she's outlived her usefulness since all Latins were already too racist to vote for the black? I know I read once in More magazine I think about the travails of being Patti Solis Doyle and ... how it's tough to be a working mom etc. etc. Other than that I'm drawing a blank. Always more distracted by the sight of Huma Abedin. What do you have?
MEGAN: I got nothin'. I guess I had sort of assumed that, given the incestuous nature of politics in DC, that she was related to Congresswoman Hilda Solis, but wikipedia tells me I'm wrong. She's actually from Chicago AND worked for Mayor Daley's campaign... and Michelle Obama used to work for Mayor Daley. And her strategy has definitely been kind of hit-or-miss this campaign. But, stupid to fire her 2 days before tomorrow's primaries, I think. Your campaign manager should never be the story.
MOE: Oh, my brother came up with an interesting theory he just emailed to me. It just started to make sense now. He thinks Romney helped Obama by "making McCain the sure-thing for Republicans." Now, independents who would have gone to the Republican primaries to vote for McCain are instead going to the Democratic primaries to vote for Obama. He said this is what is happening with his friend's dads — all Virginia guys.
It's the faith of my fathers/dreams from my father thing. I'm telling you, this campaign will turn out to be about Manhood yet!
Oh yeah and I guess we should also discuss whether it was, like, "expected" that Obama would win all those states by those insane margins? And was Nebraska the biggest surprise? I always thought of Nebraska as being pretty much like Oklahoma.
MEGAN: Well, but Nebraska and Maine were both closed primaries/caucuses, as is Maryland's and DC. It might make a difference in VA tomorrow, though.
Nebraska's a weird state anyway. It has a unicameral nonpartisan legislature.
MOE: Who's favored in Maryland? I imagine that a huge percentage of MD Dems have worked w. the Clintons but that's not necessarily an advantage for their campaign.
MEGAN: As for Washington state, a friend from Seattle told me this weekend that Barack's events attracted at least 3 times the people's as Hillary's events last week.
The last 3 polls in Maryland show Obama leading by an average of 21 points.
According to The Sun, it's because of the strength of black voters in the state, but Governor Martin O'Malley (whose doesn't think superdelegate vote is currently committed to the Hills) doesn't think it's an issue for the Democratic party to put forward a candidate that a majority of African-American voters in his state (and many others) didn't support because they'll still vote Democratic in November.
MOE: Okay so I actually just read one of those Solis Doyle stories. They are blaming it on the cash crunch; Patti didn't tell Hillary she was running out of cash etc. etc. ... sounds like some sort of spin. But on the other hand, who was letting them ride around in private jets if they were burning through dough that way? Have you seen any stories on, you know, places the Clinton campaign might have saved $$$ ?? In other news she apparently clashed with Bill. I dunno, I realize this strategy worked for McCain, but that was last summer...
And dude?! Mark Penn got FOUR MILLION DOLLARS??!
MEGAN: Oooh, I guess we know who walked Patti out, eh?
All those campaign consultants are bigger blood-suckers than lobbyists, imho
MOE: Srsly! And I mean, honestly, for what? So that fucking Terry McAuliffe can go on teevee and say "Are you suggesting we DISENFRANCHISE THE VOTERS OF FLORIDA Keith? Surely you don't suggest we DISENFRANCHISE THOSE VOTERS!!!"
MEGAN: Penn is getting paid twice as much as Axelrod is getting paid by Obama, who's raking in way more cash right now.
But she did jump on the flat fees for media consultants bandwagon ahead of Obama, which was probably a money saver, since those people bilked Kerry for $9 million last time. They get paid a fee per ad, btw, for how many ads air. They're the ones I blame.
MOE: It's funny. I vaguely remember the Cinton administration seeming like an old diesel powered station wagon, or like Pig Pen, w. like, a big cloud of internal strife and dissent wherever it went, in stark contrast to Bush and his sorta hard shiny coat of loyalty and mind control, where the only option for a rank-breaker would be to go unload to Ron Suskind.
Anyway HAPPY MEDIUM. THERE'S GOTTA BE A HAPPY MEDIUM RIGHT?
MEGAN: There are no mediums in politics!
Happy or otherwise.
They pay shitty, whether it's for a campaign or in the government, so they only attract the TRULY COMMITTED who aren't really the types of people who swim happily in the grey areas.
MOE: It also seems like maybe Patti failed to wrest an endorsement out of John Edwards and that did it?
MEGAN: If Hillary herself couldn't do it, how was Patti going to?
MOE: She has such a nice face! She seems so breezy and approachable! Maybe they got along!
But not well enough. When is Edwards supposed to come out + endorse somebody?
He is "said to be torn."
MEGAN: I think having not yet done so, he's not really going to until he absolutely has to. Why would he? He probs isn't a superdelegate, so it's his only real vote.
MOE: Okay and just in case you forgot about the Bush administration still like running things and all, six lucky Guantanamo detainees are finally going to get their day in "court." The Pentagon seeks to kill them all. But what of the rest of the guys in Guantanamo? That's for the next administration to deal with!
And Mike Huckabee...persists.
MEGAN: Because The Jesus will help him prevail against that McCain guy.