MOE: Hi I IM you today from Brooklyn! I got locked out of my house.
ME: Oh, dude, no way! So, does being in Brooklyn change your perspective on politics? Do you feel more yuppified, or is that just Park Slope?
MOE: Um…primarily it changes the quantity of uppers I can access at this time. There is a coffee shop a few blocks down (I am not in Park Slope) but as for ADD drugs I am fuuuucked. Actually I should go check if there's like some coke somewhere or something. Even though a coke has less than one tenth the caffeine as a Starbucks, as I learned from the week's New York.
ME: Usually about halfway through Crappy Hour (except when I'm as hung over as I was yesterday), I'll get a craving for coffee and yet I am so committed to finishing that I never do anything about it until it's over.
MOE: Oh god Noonan today …can't disagree with her, am sure as hell not going to stir shit up by blockquoting her. Anyway she calls Hillary a bullet dodged.
ME: But at least she uses a nice picture!
MOE: Which is more than we can say for Peggy's publication!
ME: True. Also, I love that her basis for claiming that Hillary is a bullet dodged is that she's "drama."
Way to not play into any stereotypes about women that drive me crazy, Peggy.
MOE: Hahaa they just drive you crazy because you're a woman. So did you pay attention to this Air Force resignation thing? Because I keep forgetting to. What happened? (With apologies to Scott McClellan)
ME: Ha, ok, so, like this is a good but long piece. I'm pretty sure we discussed a while back how we mistakenly shipped some classified nuclear components to Taiwan? When they'd ordered, like, batteries. And then they opened the boxes and were all, dude, these aren't batteries! And we were all like, oh fuuuuuck.
Well, so, then, obviously we investigated. And it turns out that the one dude that got fired was also in the middle of some Thunderbird contracting scandal and, oh, that's right, at the same time, he was in charge when we "mistakenly" sent 2 nukes to Louisiana so the two top guys are both out on their asses and some more people will be in trouble later. But, yeah. Nukulr sekurti, we can haz it?
MOE: Okay, 1. How idiotic is this? I mean, what does a nuclear fuse actually look like? How big is it? How tough is this sort of thing to fuck up?
ME: They look like this, only with more nuclear-ness.
MOE: Oh, and that one dude = Chief of Staff Michael Moseley. God what an idiot.
ME: And it should be tough, but it apparently wasn't. And, yes. I think he is a whole toolbox.
MOE: Well, to be fair, you don't necessarily look at that and think, "wow, a nuke." Although i don't know what I would say it was. I would probably check before sending it to Louisiana. I have more trust for Taiwan.
ME: Especially when they'd ordered batteries.
I've never gone to the store to get batteries for my vibrator and mistakenly ended up with fuses of any variety. Counterfeit batteries that go dead in a day, sure, but never fuses.
MOE: Ooooh, oooooh, some good nuke news. Some international agency based in France just called for the construction of 1400 nuclear power plants over the next few decades. Pretty soon misguided fuses are just going to be part of everyday life. God I need coffee.
ME: 1400?? Where are they going to put 1400? Also, by the way, almost all of France's nuclear power plants are on the German border. Gotta love those prevailing Westerlies.
Oh, damn, Angry Johnny has reportedly definitively rules out running for VP.
MOE: I love how all these VP candidates act like it's their choice, they're the ones with some hard thinking to do. And…speaking of hard thinking, I'm…not sure what this David Brooks column about Abraham Lincoln taking mercury pills to ward off syphilis is trying to say to me.
Ah! We should have voted for Hillary.

All this suggests a maxim for us voters: Don’t only look to see which candidate has the most talent. Look for the one most emotionally gripped by his own failings.

ME: Wait, so, how did Lincoln supposedly get the dreaded syph? I find the whole thing confusing, but at least Brooks got this right:

Candidates get elected by telling people what they want to hear, leading them by using the sugar of their own fantasies.

MOE: Is he writing a book on Lincoln or something? Because, like, Obama and McCain have struggled refreshingly publicly, according to the books anyway, with their failings, what with McCain being like "Yeah I was an asshole to my first wife and I need to read more about the economy" and Obama being all "I was a bad husband and I smoked too much weed." I think we should just vote for the candidate who does, you know, not want to continue spying on us without a warrant or that sort of thing.
ME: Dude, Attackerman just made me watch this video of California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher ((R-Crazytown) talking about how putting women's underwear on Gitmo detainees heads isn't torture. Only he just keeps repeating the word "panties" well past the point of cringe-worthiness and into the realm of us wondering what exactly the Gentleman from California was wearing under his suit that day.
MOE: oooooh he's got an ambigunisex name too.
ME: I'll bet he has ambiguous sex, too. We already know he owns at least one wetsuit.
MOE: Do you love reading about Alaska? Do you sometimes forget it's a state? Can you tell me why a state would propose a $223 million bridge to between a town with a population of eight thousand and a town with a population of fifty when they don't even have a road connecting the state with its cultural and population center. Was Alaska in on the construction of the federal highway system? Was it even a state then? Have you ever been there? I had a boyfriend who grew up there once who had never heard of Three's Company. Aren't we so lucky to live in the era of the omnipresent wifi connection?
ME: Actually, I totally loved Alaska, I had to go on a business trip there a couple of years ago and my now-ex-bf came with and we took our only actual long vacation after it was over. They have a road to Juneau, it's just Juneau doesn't, like, have a road to Canada (i.e., "the rest of North America") but during the winter months I've heard the road between Anchorage and Juneau is pretty treacherous.
Anyway, Don Young is also an ass-grabber. He grabbed the ass of a junior colleague of a close friend during a fly-in while she and the folks she was with were all posing for pictures. He named the new highway bill after his wife (TEA-LU) because he could. And the bridge will apparently also incidentally financially benefit some people in his family and totally score him the 50 votes on that island.
MOE: What's the population of Juneau anyway?
ME: I appreciate that some Republicans, even if it is only the Club for Growth (now headed by former Congressman Pat Toomey of PA), are bothering to stand up to him. It's not standing up to Teddie Stevens, but it's close.
Population: just over 30,000.
MOE: jesus christ.
dude
ME: Hey, that's only slightly less than 4 times the size of the village I grew up in.
MOE: So… what do you make of the whole "takes a village" aphorism?
Oh also those French people say global warming is going to cost us 45 trillion dollars.
Just putting that out there
ME: Took a village to convince me I needed to get the fuck out of upstate NY.
MOE: the "Bridge To Nowhere" thing looks like a few grains of rice in comparison.

Moran pleads with women to try out granny panties:

'Why are we starving our bottoms of the resources - like an extra metre of material - to stay comfortable? Why have we succumbed to pantorexia? It is, of course, all a symptom of women's continuing, demented belief that, at any moment, they might face some snap inspection of their 'total hotness,' and have to reveal their underwear to a baying crowd, possibly featuring George Clooney. In this respect, women have communally lost all reason. Ladies! On how many occasions in the past year have you needed to wear sexy pants? In other words, to break this right down, how many times this year have you suddenly, unexpectedly, had sex in a brightly lit room, with a hard-to-please erotic connoisseur? Exactly. On those kind of odds, you might just as well be keeping a backgammon board down there, to entertain a group of elderly ladies in the event of emergencies. It's more likely to happen.'

So how 'bout it, girls? You ready to ditch the thongs?

Coming To A Bottom Near You: Pantorexia [Times of London]
Earlier: Pants On Fire

Japanese Schoolgirl Watch: Pervert-Proof Panties [Wired]
Related: Panchira [Wikipedia]
The Love Machine [Snopes]

The International Medieval Congress heard yesterday that the rural habit of wearing nothing under a rough smock or leggings was frowned on as peasants developed into tradesmen and found themselves running shops with customers of the opposite sex. "As underwear became more popular, so the supply of rags increased significantly," Marco Mostert of Utrecht University told the conference in Leeds. "That in turn increased the amount of paper and brought knowledge within reach of a much wider audience.

Awesome! So that explains the plummeting literacy rate in Hollywood. Now that everyone's going commando, there are no more dirty panties to practice on!
Discarded Pants Helped To Boost Literacy [Guardian]
Earlier: Expert: Paris Hilton Handwriting Conclusive Proof She Is A Retard
Related: The Panty-Free Britney Spears: Allergy Victim, Underwear Throwback, Or Attention Whore? [Defamer]

Some men prefer their cars to smell of panties, not pine trees. One question: Is this panty-smell smell freshly washed or just-worn? [Feministing]

New Mexico may be the next state (Texas was the first) to require young girls to get the new HPV vaccine. [USA Today]

Do birth-control pills make you fat? That and other myths debunked. [CNN]

Young women who undergo weight-loss surgery are more likely to develop a serious neurological condition "most often seen in severe alcoholics". [CNN]

On the other hand, people who weigh more are less likely to commit suicide. We believe it. When we're skinny, it's usually because we're depressed. Hate that. [NY Times]

One woman in the Times' obit section today: Edith d'Addario, former Joffrey Ballet director who, among other things, developed ballet classes for deaf children. [NY Times]