LATOYA: Where do you want to start this morning? We've got a piping hot plate of hot mess to go through.

MEGAN: Well, being as this is a women's blog, we should do something woman-y, and I nominate the news that the McCain campaign spent $110,000 on hair and make-up for Sarah Palin in 10 weeks and $180,000 on clothing and accessories for the Palin clan — which is $30,000 more than initially reported.

LATOYA: Oh, I forgot to tell you.

MEGAN: That, by the way, means they spent more on hair and make-up and clothing and accessories than my condo is worth.

LATOYA: I have personally instituted a ban on discussing anything to do with Palin. As far as I am concerned, she is irrelevant. If she manages a resurrection and comes back to haunt us in 2012, so be it.

MEGAN: What are you going to do when she opens up an exploratory committee in 2010?

LATOYA: But until then, I'd love to see her fade into obscurity. She should be remembered, fondly, like Ross Perot.

MEGAN: Ok, but can we discuss that kind of money?

LATOYA: Thanks for the memories of shout outs at VP debates, but you need to mosey along now. Take your folksy ways and return to the ice cave. I mean, we can discuss the money. But somehow, I can't muster up indignant outrage.

MEGAN: Like, I will guarantee that there's no way on God's green earth that I have spent $110,000 on hair and make-up in my lifetime, even though I've been highlighting my hair for about 6 years.

LATOYA: Maybe if I had bought that whole "salt of the earth, of the white people, heartland of real America" tripe they were selling. Homegirl was just an opportunist. Cindy McCain was rocking nice clothes — why shouldn't she?

MEGAN: Totally. Look, if RNC donors want to give me $180,000 in clothes, I will totally run for office as a Republican. They can even call me A Maverick over and over again because of my support of reproductive choice.

LATOYA: And it's obvious they had the money. If the first card maxed out and they let her keep going, I say get what you get. Credit Cards come with limits.

MEGAN: But Republican money never ends!

LATOYA: That's why they're Republicans. They're supposed to have money, want to keep money, spend their money the way they want, and tell the gov't to mind their damn business. That's what I expect from Republicans. It's comforting that way.

MEGAN: Yeah, I get that. So, moving on, want to talk about NOW and the Feminist Majority Foundation going metaphorical balls to the wall to promote Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy for Clinton's Senate seat?

LATOYA: Why not? Obviously, the dice are lucky.

MEGAN: Because I don't like the idea that a woman's seat ought to be filled by a woman, but McCarthy does have an established record on women's rights issues and is generally cool. But, mostly, I wish to continue pressing the point that Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is an unmitigated casual racist not deserving of elected office but certainly not deserving of an appointment to a lifetime Senate seat by David Paterson, the state's first African-American governor.

LATOYA: Hmm, well, I am not so sure about Cuomo. Then again, I'm only thinking about his record at HUD.

MEGAN: Well, then, there's a question. If you have a good record of doing decent things for the community as a whole while tossing around the phrase "shucking and jiving" in reference to an African-American candidate for the Presidency, followed by a steadfast insistence that it is actually not a racist term after the world notices that you said it, what should a politically active person do? Because I choose to call him a racist and think that he should go fuck himself.

LATOYA: Oh, I wasn't sure about the appointment, not your comment on casual racism. I think his HUD record proves he doesn't care about black people.

MEGAN: Then, yeah, fuck that guy.

LATOYA: But back to the original point, I understand what you're saying about not wanting to do this tit for tat seating thing. But I can understand where NOW is coming from, especially with the whispers of sexism around this bailout committee.

Frank credited the current resistance to doing more about foreclosures to ruffled male feathers. “I think part of the problem now is that, to be honest, Shelia Bair has annoyed the Old Boys Club.” He likened the situation to several regulators “up in the treehouse with a ‘No Girls Allowed’ sign.”

MEGAN: I know! I could not believe that shit when I heard it from Moe. I was like, wait, the new Democratic Treasury Secretary is mad about the (technically independent) FDIC chair telling Bush to go fuck himself while she's trying to save Real Americans?

LATOYA: Pretty much. Just call it the "Fuck that bitch" doctrine. She is showing people up so she has got to go.

MEGAN: Also, I think saying that she has to go is akin to when McCain said he would fire Chris Cox at the SEC. I mean, it's their fucking government, you think they could learn who is supposed to be independent — and therefore given a term — and who is supposed to be a sycophant. Tim Geithner either needs to say a bunch more stupid shit so Obama withdraws his name, or get his head screwed on straight. Yo, Tim, you can throw all the money you want at Wall Street and get them to lower interest rates, but if no one has a fucking house in 2 years, the economy is still going to be fucked, and that's what Sheila Bair is trying to prevent, you dumb cunt.

LATOYA: I think prevention is a dirty word to some people. Kind of reminds them of socialism.

MEGAN: But the Republicans promised that we were electing a dirty socialist! They promised!

LATOYA: The Republicans are promising a lot of stuff, but one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing. Like this rift between the religious right and the ...um...regular right.

MEGAN: This part is kind of awesome.

Ponnuru acknowledges that social conservatives “could present themselves more attractively,” and “pick their spokesmen more wisely.”

No, asshole, at the end of the day, you're still advocating for a fucking theocracy and I am gonna notice no matter how much you pay for Sarah Palin's stylists.

LATOYA: She even used the term Oogedy-Boodgey.

First, to the origins. “Oogedy-boogedy” was bequeathed to me several years ago by my dear, departed friend, political cartoonist Doug Marlette. We were doubtless talking about our shared Southern heritage, about which one does not speak long without mentioning religion.

And, you betcha, oogedy-boogedy.

Marlette, whose childhood was spent among Pentecostals, Baptists, and other passionate believers, had religion in his bones and forgot more scripture than most preachers can recall on a given Sunday. He also won a Pulitzer Prize for his lampooning of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker (peace be upon them) and their “PTL Club.”

If Jim and Tammy Faye put you in mind of oogedy-boogedy, you’re getting warm.

Now, I'm going to be saying Oogedy Boogedy all day.

MEGAN: And, Republican dudes, if you can't figure out what it means, I don't think you get to call me an Un-Real American anymore.

LATOYA: Rick Warren, talking about capping foreign leaders because the bible says so? Oogedy Boogedy!

MEGAN: Also, how is the world not fucking scared of that shit? Spencer said it best: if it was a Muslim preacher saying on national TV abroad that the Koran says they need to suicide bomb us, we would be flipping the fuck out. But a white guy? No, that's cool.

LATOYA: Selective memory. Side effect of the oogedy boogedy.

MEGAN: So, is the oogedy-boogedy something you catch from the Bible, or from other Jeebus-freaks?

LATOYA: Apparently, the bible is OK. It's the freak part that leads to the oogedy boogedy. There have been other strange happenings as well, outside of religion. Like Michelle Malkin talking sense.

MEGAN: Michelle Malkin has been talking some sense on and off again all year and it is sort of freaking me the fuck out in general.

LATOYA: She's done this a couple times before. I'm always kind of shocked, because I can't reconcile a sensible column with the author of "In Defense of Internment." I don't know whether to read or avoid. On her worst days, she makes me want to put my eyes out, Oedipus style, so I do not have to see what senselessness has wrought. But on other days, I wonder if I should move her and Kathleen Parker into regular rotation.

MEGAN: Is it terribly condescending to think that Malkin grew up a little? That after wallowing around in all that scary, informed-only-by-fear filth she sort of looked around at her compatriots, commenters and ass-kissers and thought to herself, damn, these people are crazy?

LATOYA: Then again, we both now she is one "banana cream pie"column (that link is NSFW) away from being in they "why did I ever think we could hang" category. And speaking of even more crazy shit — do you know they are trying to challenge Obama's citizenship?

MEGAN: I am hoping the problem is not just that other wannabe columnists have not decided to out-Malkin Malkin by being crazier, thus making her seem less insane in the process. Yeah, dude, that is some crazytown fucking shit. There are suits claiming the birth certificate is fake, and others claiming that because his father wasn't American, he doesn't qualify.

LATOYA: Remember that Colbert Report segment on Obama going to this crazy foreign nation of Hawaii? Yeah, someone must have forgotten the Colbert Report isn't real news.

MEGAN: Dude! If only! Actually, they are claiming that his mother actually gave birth to him in Kenya but faked that it happened in Hawai'i.

LATOYA: I mean, damn, the birth certificate is online. Hawaii published a column announcing it. WTF?

MEGAN: In this alterna-universe, claiming Hawai'i doesn't count is actually less cray-cray than what they are really claiming. They claim that all that stuff has been faked, as though he's an actual Manchurian candidate.

LATOYA: Oh wait, are you talking about that guy who is suing "the "Peoples Association of Human, Animals Conceived God/s and Religions, John McCain (and) USA Govt." The plaintiff previously sought to sue Wikipedia and "All News Media." Or is he just some fresh crazy? And Clarence Thomas picked up this lawsuit, to presumably dismiss it, which is making blogger like Karynthia get pissed off for having to defend him.

MEGAN: Dude, Alan Keyes filed one of the lawsuits. There are multiple strains of crazy at work.

LATOYA: I expected that. Do you want to talk about terrorism crazy now, or international government crazy?

MEGAN: Oh, it's so hard to decide. I was going to say that we should read what the nanny of the Jewish toddler said about rescuing him because it's sort of awesome in a We-Are-The-World kind of way that transcends race, but we can stick with crazy.

"First thing is that a baby is very important for me and this baby is something very precious to me and that's what made me just not think anything — just pick up the baby and run," Samuel said.

"When I hear gunshot, it's not one or 20. It's like a hundred gunshots," she added. "Even I'm a mother of two children so I just pick up the baby and run. Does anyone think of dying at the moment when there's a small, precious baby?"

LATOYA: I applaud that woman. I am also giving a half-hearted applause to Condi for calling out Mugabe and his general douchbagginess toward his people. The applause is half hearted because we only selectively seek to remove dictators that are screwing with us. Or, rather, standing in the way of something we want.

MEGAN: Right, although, if we're giving Condi a golf clap, we probably have to shout out Raila Odinga, the Kenyan PM, who sorta beat her to the punch on that.

LATOYA: He gets full applause.

MEGAN: I mean, Odinga even beat South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, who probably could have done it as his first act in office or something.

LATOYA: Meanwhile, our neighbors to the South have crazy drug war drama and our neighbors to the North have crazy Parliament drama. Is it just me, or are global current events starting to read like The Days of Our Lives?

MEGAN: OMG, Latoya, seriously, I used to watch Days of Our Lives sort of obsessively. And by sort of obsessively, I mean, once upon a time I stood in line at the mall to get an autography from and picture with Matthew Ashford. That I still have.

LATOYA: And your verdict is?

MEGAN: Days of Our Lives once featured a plot line in which Marlena, possessed by the actual devil wreaked havoc on Salem. I think it's a valid comparison to world events.

LATOYA: Hahahahahahahha — true! I'm about to go get some breakfast (Mocha Hut!) but I did want to leave with this gem. The ignored truth about Iraq is contained in an old ass booklet.

Republished in 2008 by Dark Horse Publications, the tiny booklet for troops heading to protect the Persian Gulf’s oilfields and supply routes is a pronunciation, cultural and religious survival manual whose wisdom applies to Iraq (i-RAHK) during the era of the Toyota pickup truck and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as much as to the age of the camel and the Luftwaffe.

“Show respect to all older persons,” writes the anonymous author.

“American success or failure in Iraq may well depend on whether the Iraqis (as the people are called) like American soldiers or not. It may not be quite that simple. But then again it could.”

MEGAN: Sigh.

LATOYA: The book is so old that Muslim is still spelled Moslem and Israel doesn't exist yet (while Iran is a footnote) and yet, the advice is still kind of pertinent.

MEGAN:

“You aren’t going to Iraq to change the Iraqis. Just the opposite.”

LATOYA: Alright — I am out. Pumpkin chai and salmon cake on a bagel, here I come. Thanks, Megan for a fun week, and thanks Jezzies, for the fun conversations. (And pics! Loved that!)

KAY: Hi.

MEGAN: Good morning, sunshine!

KAY: Ugh. Last night I stumbled into an event where they kept giving us top-shelf liquor, not that I'm complaining.

MEGAN: I truly feel that the top shelf stuff makes the hangover far more bearable.

KAY: That's true, but there was a LOT of it. Especially since I've been on a beer and wine diet these days.

MEGAN: Just think how much worse your head would feel if you had been drinking rail liquor. Or, rather, don't right now, but consider it later... Anyway, how's Denver?

KAY: Right.
Oh you know. High altitude. I actually met some real-life PUMAs yesterday.

MEGAN: Really? I'm intrigued. What did they say? I saw them at the DNC protests in June and it was all I could do not to shake them and stuff.

KAY: I hate to use Mark Penn language, but they were totally national security moms. They thought Hillary Clinton's hawkishness was a good thing, while Obama would be "thinking about" what to do. Because apparently "thinking" is a bad thing.

MEGAN: Ugh, well, I guess we know who will be voting for McCain in the fall, then. No thinking, just bombing!

KAY: Right.

MEGAN: I'm sure in the midst of the whole thing, you missed the fact that Madonna kicked off her world tour this weekend. Or that she used the opportunity to compare John McCain to Hitler and Mugabe. Did I ever tell you how much I love Madonna?

KAY: I saw that this morning.

MEGAN: Video of the offensive video display is here. And what's even better is the shots of her are very Human Nature, which I love so much.

KAY: Weird, so Madonna isn't dormant anymore. She kinda dropped out of sight for a while.

MEGAN: Well, she and Guy Ritchie are supposedly on the outs! It's okay, you don't have to love Madonna as much as me. We can talk about how Chis Matthews says he didn't call Clinton a "she-devil" — he was saying Republicans did. That didn't work for E.D. Hill, buddy, but nice try.

KAY: I like Madonna I just always cringe when liberals use the Hitler references. It gives more moderate people an excuse to make fun. Bad as McCain is on issues, he doesn't appear to be plotting mass genocide. But I guess it's never too early to speculate...

MEGAN: Well, I mean, with McCain's video showing Germans chanting Obama's name over shots of Berlin, I think it's fair to say that McCain went there with the references first.

KAY: So true. The Hilter references are so tired, though. Anyway, I saw the thing about Matthews. I always love when people on television try to claim they didn't say something.

MEGAN: I prefer when the bluster and say they didn't say it, and then when they argue it was taken out of context. Like, just admit that you're an unthinking asshole, buy Hillary some apology flowers or something and commit to hosting a documentary on sexism in the media.

KAY: That seems like a reasonable response. I mean, when you've already had to make a public apology to someone, it seems that maybe it's time to just admit that you say stupid things.

MEGAN: I admit, I say stupid things! See, it's really not that hard!

KAY: Chris Matthews could learn so much from Megan Carpentier.

MEGAN: If nothing else, I'll bet I have better taste in cheap wine! Okay, one last think, can we discuss this new bullshit meme where Republicans like Bill Kristol and John McCain pretend they give a shit about the glass ceiling and sexism because they think we're dumb enough that if they pay lip service to it for 45 seconds we'll vote for them?

KAY: Ugh, this is ridiculous. I hate it when conservatives try to claim that they're more into affirmative action than liberals. Don't worry, though, they wouldn't want to promote policies that try to try to address gender equity or anything. I hear I just need more "training" and then discrimination will just disappear.

MEGAN: Oh, right! Silly me! If I were just smarter, and worked harder and were more aggressive, if I put off getting married and having children and just focused on my career, I'd totally be in the same position as a man my age would. If I weren't a blogger, that is. But, still. If all men were that much more aggressive than me, we wouldn't really have a civilization.

KAY: Right, but be careful with becoming a "career girl." You wouldn't want to become some kind of frigid bitch that never has children. That would be the worst thing in the world.

MEGAN: Right, if I never breed because I'm too aggressively pursuing my career and my "training" so that I can be equal with a man, no man will want to ever marry me or seed my uterus, and I will live a life of misery forever. Being a girl is so hard. Not as hard as getting up at 6:30 local time to do Crappy Hour with me after a night of drinking, though!

KAY: I get the feeling it's gonna be like this all week.

Doris on her Nobel win: "If I may be catty, Sweden doesn't have anything else. There's not a great literary tradition, so they make the most of the Nobel."
Doris on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe:"He's a monstrous little terror."
Doris on being called the "epicist of the female experience": "Well, they had to say something…I can just see somebody sitting there thinking, 'What the hell are we going to say about this one? She doesn't like being called a feminist so what'll we say?' So they scribbled that."
Doris on Doris: "I tend to speak my mind, which is not necessarily a good idea. I do not think I am the soul of tact."
[Time]

• OMG remember Efraim Diveroli, the 22-year-old Andy Samberg lookalike from Miami with the $300 million defense contract to sell ancient Chinese ammunition to the Afghan insurgency via Albania? Apparently the US Ambassador was involved in covering up the scam, probably because Efraim was also Albania's leading supply of whores. [NYT]
• And speaking of…people we haven't thought about in a few months, Ashley Alexandra Dupre updated her MySpace! [People]
• 92% of Americans believe in God or something Godlike that doesn't sound quite as lame. But there are ways to combat this! 10% of people raised without religion describe themselves as atheists, and that likelihood goes even higher if you raise your kids Jewish. [LA Times]
• Rich people are actually less happy because they spend so much time doing the unpleasant things required to become rich, such as laying people off and outsourcing business functions to Bangladesh and actually like "working." [Washington Post]

• It's one thing to hope for another terror attack when you're among friends but when you're a McCain adviser talking to a reporter from a major national magazine you're going to get some shit. [TIME]
• That discount retail chain that brought the world the Sarah Jessica Parker clothing line is badly needs $30 million quick, I know you feel soooo bad for them. [WSJ]
• Why I love this country: when a candidate breaks a promise that was a centerpiece of his early base of support because, after all, all the late-adopters to the cause wouldn't be giving him so much money if they expected him to give it back, we call that bad for the "brand." [ABC News]
• The Economist discusses plans for a 100% Ron Paul supporter-occupied residential community in a story that invited me to wonder what it would be like if there was a 100% Jezebel commenter-occupied compound. Would you guys have a sex shrine like the Mormons? Would SinisterRouge be the first evicted? Would I, like Ron Paul, be afraid to visit? [Economist]
• America might try to open an "interest center" — sort of like an Embassy popup store, or an Embassy Lite — in Tehran, which I think is a good idea as long as they still get to sell alcohol. [Wash Post]
• Morgan Tsvangirai is hiding out at the Dutch Embassy and everyone else involved on the anti-Mugabe side of Zimbabwe's little flirtation with "democracy" got arrested so I guess that's the end of that. [Washington Post]

MOE: Morning Megan! Nice weekend? Good thing I already know the answer to that question because there are like ninety things we need to discuss this morning, and like, none of them is George Carlin! We should maybe start with how they abandoned that whole election idea in Zimbabwe after Mugabe made the truly salient point in a speech that "How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?" And Mugabe has so much more than a gun, and he's been wielding them liberally to assassinate pretty much everyone with the combination of courage, integrity, idealism and purposefulness to openly oppose him.

MOE:

One such target was Better Chokururama, a 31-year-old activist with an appetite for bravado and fisticuffs, nicknamed “Texas” for both the cowboy hats he favored and the moniker of a torture camp from which he once escaped. He was abducted on April 19, and his legs crushed by his captors with boulders.
He said in an interview afterward, as he lay with both legs in casts, that he had told his captors “that beating people would not change anything because the opposition had beaten the governing party, ZANU-PF, in the elections.”
“They laughed loudly,” he said, “then threw me out of the moving vehicle.”

MEGAN: Ah, Zimbabwe. Is it sad, or accurate that I wonder if his statement was coerced? Because he only just got back to the country, and I can't imagine that Better Chokururama (or the 86 people killed, or the 10,000 who've been injured or the 200,000 refugees) would prefer not to cast their vote for Morgan Tsvangirai right now than wait for... something. Mugabe's death or whatever, not that his hand-picked successor will likely be any different.
MEGAN: It almost makes me wish I'd watched the end of Last King of Scotland only when the white dude fucked Amin's wife I was like, ok, seriously, I don't really need to see how this ends, it ain't gonna be good.

MOE: I'm not reading you re whether the statement was coerced. "Beating people will not change anything" or "They threw me out of the moving vehicle." The rest of his story, which I omitted, has him getting captured again with some other activists whose bodies showed up a few days later. But there's some other news that I kind of want to get to starting with how the chairman of the chief financial regulatory agency was about as worthless during the whole Bear Stearns debacle as…the old CEO of Bear Stearns! He missed most of the conference calls for birthday parties and went on vacation with his family. Guess that's what you get for expecting someone to police people making nine figure pay packages on a six figure salary!
MEGAN: Well, I meant whether Morgan Tsvangirai was coerced to drop out of the race. He got back from exile to avoid being coerced and dropped out within hours. It seems suspicious to me.

MOE: Ugh, what the FUCK is a former Orange County congressman Reaganite lose doing fucking regulating our financial sector…Oh Morgan Tsvangirai's statement that the election was a violent illegitimate sham of a political process and that he didn't want to start a civil war?
MEGAN: And re: Chris Cox, that's what you get for hiring a guy stupid enough to be a conservative Republican in New Jersey who wasn't exactly known for being hte most go-to Congressman ever to run a regulatory agency when his political ideology is based around smaller government i.e., not regulating. The only good thing about Chris Cox at the SEC is that he's not in Congress anymore.
MEGAN: And by Jersey, I meant California, sorry.
MEGAN: Well, I mean, they already have a civil war. They also put another top party leader in prison and charged him with treason, not that anyone's seen him since.

MOE: Yeah a fucking Reaganite knownothing donothing, God I fucking can't stand those ideological free marketeers whose understanding of the financial sector begins and ends at best with some P.J. O'Rourke essay.
MEGAN: Do people really still read O'Rourke?
MEGAN: Also, he was a Congressman. I'll bet he thought the SEC gig was a step up with fewer actual responsibilities because he has more staff to hold his soft, white hand and do everything for him. Why would he miss a birthday party for regulating anything? He never did in Congress I'll bet you.

MOE: But in the wake of the internet bubble which was followed by the corporate malfeasance fest which was followed by the options backdating debacle how the fuck does someone like Cox get that job? And can Obama make hay out of this? Because I'd rather that than make um oil out of corn but that's neither here/there!
MOE: If anything it makes Obama look less hot to the Brazilians:

“We made a series of mistakes by not adopting a sustainable energy policy, one of which is the subsidies for corn ethanol, which I warned in Iowa were going to destroy the market” and contribute to inflation, Mr. McCain said this month in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de São Paulo. “Besides, it is wrong,” he added, to tax Brazilian-made sugar cane ethanol, “which is much more efficient than corn ethanol.”

MEGAN: But it's the market! The market! Market failures will be regulated by the market and so regulation just damages the ability of the market to correct itself which it will do if you don't overregulate it and so Chris Cox is just doing his job by not regulating the market because regulating it would damage it!

MEGAN: Well, it's a tariff, not a tax, and it's not just on sugar-based ethanol it's on all imported ethanol but McCain's point remains valid. It's incredibly ineffecient and not environmentally sound policy to put tariffs on imported ethanol as a way of additionally subsidizing the construction of ethanol plants in the Midwest that can only be used for corn instead of whatever plant is cheapest. But that's US ag policy: those little family farmers that hardly exist anymore need your tax dollars, dammit, and if a few hundred million or more need to go to multinationals to make sure that a couple farmers won't sell out to them anyway, well, that's the trade-off we all accept to continue fetishizing the family farm.
MOE: Yeah and just to put a number on that…the last agriculture bill was $370 million, yes?

MEGAN: It was a lot, let's just go with that...
MOE: Because fucking agribusiness is so cash strapped right now the leading corn syrup supplier is only commanding a 31% premium over the market price of its shares Man, take a fucking look at this chart. If only I'd been pissed off about ethanol back when I was busy being pissed off about …oil!
MEGAN: Oh, well, ethanol was a better oxegenate for the environment than MTBE, and it seemed so environmentally friendly when the corn growers were all lobbying for it to be a corn-oxygenate back in the day. I mean, it's whole fucking purpose is to allow us to continue driving the exact same automobiles in the exact same way while marginally reducing emissions.
MOE: Anyway suffice it to say the corn industry hasmore than enough money left over to convince America the corn industry is good for America.

MEGAN: It is good, see, sweet delicious corn!
MEGAN: So yellow, so environment-y!
MOE: Ok check out this segue. So that last story was about the corn industry's public relations push to remind Americans that High Fructose Corn Syrup really isn't any worse for you than sugar…and guess what has HFCS in it? Ensure nutritional beverages…Al Qaeda logistics mastermind Abu Zubayda! Which is just one of the numerous fascinating facts we learned from yesterday's A1 Scott Shane story on the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Did you read that? I highly recommend it.
9:30 AM
MEGAN: Ensure is so disgusting, it's supposed to be a supplement for old people and instead they're marketing it as a meal-replacement solution for healthy people and it's not. Talk about sick PR. But, no, I didn't read the story. I'm sure it's bad.
MOE: Okay, so let me guide you through the important parts of the story: I think the "little farmer guy" who turned in KLS in hopes of earning a quick $25 million and resettling himself and his family under a new identity in the US has to be my fave. Do you think there is some gated community tailored for, like, lottery winners and successful plaintiffs in massive malpractice suits where they could just sort of hide that guy away? Because that could be a fun movie starring Kal Penn.
MOE: But I guess mostly it's a profile of the lead interrogator Deuce Martinez, a wonky egghead analyst who skipped waterboarding classes and played "good cop"

MEGAN: I would snitch on anyone for $25 million, I'm just saying. Didn't we discuss a few weeks ago that the CrimeStoppers programs always end up paying out a ton more money when the economy sucks? I feel like we did.

MOE: Hahaha I really wish I remember what the fuck I read a few weeks ago but I'm just saying I don't think you could interrogate that out of me. Anyway, the whole thing was, well, KLS was waterboarded and subjected to other miscellaneous forms of torture a hundred times, but yeah aren't we sick of talking about the whole torture thing? More weird details! KLS wrote poetry to Deuce's wife! He was captured a few days after the informant sent a text message "I'm with KLS." He was originally transported to Thailand! (Or maybe that was Abu Zubayda) ... Thailand and the US are so close they didn't even have to tell the Thai PM. And Poland is "the 51st state." Really the whole "secret prisons" things seemed to be improving our relations with a lot of foreign countries before Dana Priest discovered them and Bush had them all flown back to Guantanamo.
MEGAN: The Poles just want to be part of the Visa Waiver Program and will do anything to get it. They're the only country in the EU at this point without it, if I recall correctly, but Congress keeps talking about and never passing a bill to let them into it and DHS has no idea.

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: Okay sooooo … you know how I always say I genetically don't have the capacity to get "offended"? Uh, well. Ummmmm…holy shit. And here I thought we could maybe get in some real news today, like about how Mugabe is sort of doing on a mass scale with Zimbabweans what that weird New Jersey couple did with their foster kids and getting a few fat while leaving the less-special ones to starve…
MOE: Or how pirates control the seas off Nigeria or how this Genocide Olympics stuff has finally put pressure on China to ask the Sudanese government to uh “push forward the peacekeeping mission and political process in a balanced manner" or the great Korean Beef Beef.

MEGAN: I was just about to send you the Michelle Obama thing, too. Query: what other potential first lady has been referred to not as "the wife and the mother of his children" but as a candidate's "baby mama?" Because I'm going to say none. I guess it's apparently ok, though, because she's, like, black and that's, like, what "they" call each other, right? No subtext there, let's just make sure to remind everyone that the Obamas aren't white.
MOE: Unrelated: The Boy Scout leader they are interviewing on Fox re some natural disaster is kind of, you know, foxy. But why the open shirt, kid?
MOE: Okay, back to my belle though. Whoever approved that needs to be fired STAT.
MEGAN: Yeah, I'm gonna guess: not. Though E.D. Hill did get the ax for the terrorist fist bump thingie, even though she was, apparently, quoting an overblown story from the crazy right-wing site Human Events which I'm not going to link to.
MOE: One thing that actually really surprises me about all this too is that yesterday I was watching Fox, and O'Reilly had on that guy who made "Hillary: The Movie" — he's made a new movie about the Obamas! — and O'Reilly was all, "Oh just shut up about Michelle's antiamericanism already, she's explained it, that was back in February, she seems like a nice person, why beat up on the guy's wife," etc. etc.
MOE: And dude, that was O'Reilly.
MEGAN: Yeah, for real. But the HTM guy is, like, a total wack job, did I tell you I met him?
MOE: Incidentally he also told the guy to stop kvetching about how the campaign hadn't released Obama's college thesis on nuclear disarmament. "We all write boneheaded stuff in college, get a life."
MEGAN: Oh, and you know why they had to rush "production" of the movie? So they can advertise it without FEC intervention.
MOE: I still haven't watched it but I found it the other day whilst looking for important documents.
MEGAN: I'm just sad no one is trying to read my college thesis. It was like a solid 6 months of my life and in the whole universe, only 4 people read it.
MEGAN: Oh, well, totally get drunk and watch the movie, it's only worth watching altered.
MOE: Seriously dude, though, WHAT THE FUCK MEGAN.
MOE: Oh by the way, readers who were offended by my addressing Geraldine Ferraro "sweetie" in my Hirshman rebuttal; the original line was: "Sweetie, John McCain left his first wife in the wake of a debilitating car accident and called his second a "cunt" in front of reporters."That was a sort of rhetorical device, meant to contrast "sweetie" (representing the Obama's most noted offense against womanity) with "cunt" (representing McCain's.) It didn't work out so well in the edit, because apparently you aren't allowed to use the word "cunt" in the Washington Post, though "sweetie" is apparently passable.
MEGAN: Also, Jesus Christ, people, a little satire?
MEGAN: Oh, wait, I forgot, we're all supposed to be humorless and opinion-free. This is a news outlet!
MOE: This is getting me off-topic, but there is a (very very bronze) Hillary supporter making the rounds on Fox saying Hillary supporters are choosing McCain because they can't tolerate a "less experienced" candidate than Hillary, which I think is a crock of shit, but it was probably smart that they reverse their "sexism" argument in time for Fox to employ the term "Baby Mama." Unless Tina Fey told them it was okay?

MEGAN: Yeah, I saw her yesterday! She said she'd really like to see Clinton on McCain's ticket, so, frankly, I don't really think she's concerned with "feminist" issues per se.
MOE: Hot new phrase alert! "Consummate political insider"…spotted in today's Times and Jim Hoagland's column…three makes a trend! As I am the consummate idiot savante regarding the Beltway corporate interest groupies, I am wondering if you'll explain to me whether this Jim Johnson thing is a big deal or like if the McCain thing is that big a deal and whether there is anyone in Washington who is going to survive a campaign that banishes anyone who takes money from the corporations who actually make it or whether we are going to be left with Kucinich as a running mate.
MOE: And speaking of Kucinich, who was on O'Reilly last night as well, WHERE DID HIS WIFE GO. I miss Elizabeth.
MEGAN: I think she's probably somewhere working for peace.
9:30 AM
MEGAN: I mean, I don't think the rich stuff about Jim Johnson is a huge deal. I think the stuff about him getting a special loan from Countryside isn't really good.
MEGAN: But I think the bigger problem is how to integrate what has essentially been an "outsider" campaign with the Democratic party machine.
MEGAN: And the people that go with it, some of whom are sketchy. It's not like all lobbyists are Republican, it's not even like all corporate lobbyists are Republican or all shady lobbyists are Republican. There's plenty of shadiness in both parties.
MOE: Okay, we gotta return to Michelle. I'm cynical, sure, but I find this shit actually chilling. But also: it is sort of fascinating. There is so little range when it comes to public stereotypes of black women. Like, part of them are trying to cast her as a cold imperious vengeful anti-American bitch, and the rest are just like "no man, just call her BABY MAMA." Think of all the illicit sex they must have had that summer with all the Spike Lee movies. I hear they had chocolate ice cream on their first date. YOU KNOW WHAT THAT'S CODE FOR????
MEGAN: mmmm, chocolate ice cream
MEGAN: Oh, wait, right, we were talking about race.
MEGAN: I actually sort of beat MoDo to the punch yesterday, after I'd read a bunch of really good bloggy stuff about it.

MEGAN: Like, where are all the women who were crying sexism two weeks ago? Because all the stuff I've seen about baby mama and Michelle Obama — until fucking Maureen Dowd — in the MSM has been written by men.
MEGAN: It seems like most of them are still crying over Clinton even as the right wingers are re-writing their 1992 attacks about Clinton's fitness to be First Lady because of her baking skills and (gasp) having a career to suit Michelle, with a lovely little side of racial overtones.

MOE: DUDE I AM SO HUNGOVER
MOE: You have to help me today i have the brainpower of a computer that came before the Macintosh IIGS. I have the brainpower of an abacus. Ugh, nevermind I have the brainpower of someone who drank away their ability to construct metaphors. I had guests.
MEGAN: Dude, that sucks. I still dehydrated from the last two days of being hungover.

MEGAN: Um, Calderone asked Bob Herbert about Ferraro.
MEGAN: With predictable results.

MEGAN: Um, Jenna Bush-Hager and Henry Hager cut their honeymoon short to attend his b-school graduation, which I've actually been wondering for months why they scheduled their wedding a week before his graduation.
MOE: I think Jenna just doesn't give a fuck
MEGAN: Well, I mean, who among us does really?
MOE: Not Bob Herbert!... I feel somewhat sheepish now for defending him
MOE: But mostly I feel a headache

MEGAN: Hmm, well, Attackerman is all steamed about Hillary comparing the Michigan and Florida shit to Zimbabwe, and I can't say I blame him. Her comparing it to the struggle for civil rights for African-Americans struck me as a bit of inappropriate overreaching.
MOE: Hahaha like that Phyllis Schlafly line from the St. Louis newspaper. "Whatever your thoughts, she's no Robert Mugabe." God I can't believe she actually said this

saying it is wrong when “people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.”

“We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe," Clinton explained. "Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people,” Clinton told the crowd of senior citizens at a retirement community in south Florida.

MEGAN: She's the MLK of delegate counts and everything. It's sort of annoying, because it's not like she can win anyway.
MOE: Uh here's a story that says some analysts think oil prices are just too high.
MEGAN: Anyway, in a completely awkward segue, Spencer's headline was an R. Kelly lyric, he took great pains to inform me, so it gives me an opportunity to link to a story about the trial and they're actually fucking arguing that the piss might be digital. Dude, R. Kelly's fucking defense team is taking legal advice from Dave Chappelle.
9:20 AM
MEGAN: Wait, you have to be an analyst to think oil prices are maybe too high? Good to know. I looked at a gas station on my way out of NY yesterday and it was over $4/gallon.
MOE: I see your humorous R. Kelly newsflash and raise you a Al Sharpton Dr. Dre blackmail allegation.
MEGAN: I concede to your comic brilliance.
MOE: Oh also I guess the farm bill passed anyway
MOE: I like this graf:

In a statement issued to AllHipHop.com, they say: "The National Action Network and Reverend Al Sharpton were not involved with and did not attend a press conference held by Hip-Hop artists The Game and 50 Cent to announce their truce and donation to charities.

MOE: Hahaha the commenters call him "Al Charlatan"
MEGAN: On the Farm Bill, no, it's totally all fucked up. They passed one, FORGOT to send part of it to the President, so he vetoed a bill that they never passed and they overrode a veto on a bill they never voted for. Somebody would be getting fired if they didn't have an unassailable government job.

MOE: Karl Rove's takedown of Obama'f foreign policy instincts is sorta funny:

I recommend that he read Henry Kissinger's book, "The White House Years." Mr. Obama would learn it took 134 private meetings between U.S. and Chinese diplomats before a breakthrough at a Jan. 20, 1970 meeting in Warsaw. It took 18 months of behind-the-scenes discussions before Mr. Kissinger secretly visited Beijing. And it took seven more months of hard work before Nixon went to China. The result was a new relationship, announced in a communiqué worked out over months of careful diplomacy.

Diplomacy! Now there's a word I haven't heard in…
MOE: There's the link
MEGAN: Well, so, great. Seems like maybe it's time to start those discussions? Or is Karl admitting that the US has been holding secret, high-level discussions with Iran, Syria, Cuba and North Korea the whole time?
MOE: I was wondering what Melissa Block and Robert Siegel were doing at the scene of the earthquake.
MOE: Pursuing our imperial interest I suppose!

at one rescue scene, Block and Hsu had to be escorted away from a mob angered by the presence of American reporters. Both said the reaction probably was a response to Western coverage, particularly on CNN, of China's crackdown on dissidents in Tibet and the troubled Olympic torch relay. Said Siegel, "It's been said that everyone in China can quote Jack Cafferty," a CNN commentator who last month caused a furor in China by calling the country's leaders "goons and thugs."

MEGAN: Ok, but I kind of love Jack Cafferty. How are they more anti-him than anti-Lou Dobbs?
MOE: Maybe for some reason they are unused to people speaking accurately of political leaders? Yeah and on Dobbs I dunno.
MOE: What is happening with Florida and Michigan anyway?
MOE: Ugh Marie Cocco is back.
MEGAN: Oh, nothing right now. The DNC Rules Committee is meeting on the 31st. Clinton wants the whole delegation seated because it will give her 56 delegates more than Obama. The Rules Committee seems likely to give the states some sort of half delegation, which is the minimum punishment under the rules. Michigan's plan that's been presented to the Committee gives some delegates to Obama, so she'd end up with 16 more delegates than him under that scenario.
MOE: But like he WASN'T ON THE BALLOT
MEGAN: Yeah, so Michigan's plan is that they'd come a lot closer to splitting the delegation than the votes prescribe. I'm not totally sure why. Debbie Dingell explained it to me weeks ago on MSNBC.

MEGAN: Anyway, so, Clinton apparently though she had the committee locked up with 13 of the 28 members committed superdelegates to her, but Obama's got 8 and everyone is actually loyal to Howard Dean, so it doesn't seem likely to break her way. I'm calling half delegations.
MOE: Are you still in New York?
MEGAN: Nope, I had to come back for a thing today. I kind wish I could've stayed, but I guess that means I'll just have to go back, preferably when it's not pouring rain and I'm not wearing 5" open toed heels because I have a business meeting and they look good. But they did look really good.

MOE: THIS RAIN WILL NOT END.
MEGAN: Well, it's sunny here
MEGAN: So maybe it will get sunny there later?
MOE: GOD WILLING

MEGAN: Hey, it's Friday. Do we care about anything today or are we just too fucking apathetic?
MOE: Let's play hooky like the Obama kids!
MOE: Anna IMed me like "yeah I was going to send you some links but I figured you had seen them all already."
MEGAN: I never played hooky until college, and rarely then.
MEGAN: Mostly I just skipped my computer science class, which taught me such epic things like how to use MS Paint.
MOE: Oh, my god. i was really good at skipping class.
MOE: In college it doesn't count because if you skip class you are wasting a lot more money
MOE: If you skip class you're a tool.
MOE: In high school I used to skip class to drive to Georgetown and sit in on other classes.
MEGAN: Well, I overloaded to take that required class, so it was like skipping something extra I wasn't paying for. Plus, MS Paint? I think we can all agree I probably didn't need to learn that.
MOE: Oh god. The slayerverse. Will you explain to me what the fuck that means? Never mind, I'll ask Don "Man is the bastard" Malkemes.

MEGAN: It wasn't my idea, I just executed it.
MEGAN: Oh, well, we could talk about what kind of high school kid the candidates are.
MOE: Whoa did you read about McCain's new clueless misguided war on poverty? Oh no you're right we should def talk about high school.
MEGAN: Because, of course, we will never escape high school. Fuck high school.
MEGAN: I left my town to escape high school only to find out that DC is like a really big high school, only slightly more incestuous. Here, it's like Lord of the Flies for nerds all trying to make up for nerdiness in their youth by being the top of some weird social heap.
MEGAN: Anyway, so, Hillary is apparently Tracy Flick according to everyone in the universe, so we need to come up with some other cultural touchstone to start calling her because she's played out. I'm suggesting Elizabeth from the Sweet Valley High books, but I'm open to suggestions.
MOE: I hated high school so much I actually repressed most of the memories as to why I hated it. I've noticed, though, that the alcohol I drink now is better than that of my youth.
9:10 AM
MEGAN: I was so focused on getting the fuck out of Scotia and my parents' house that I didn't hate it as much as I could have. I just kept looking down the hall the whole time. And I never drank or did drugs or anything because there was no fucking way I was getting stuck at SUNY Albany (where my dad works).
MOE: Obviously I'm not too concerned with finding new less fraught cultural touchstones through which to view Hillary. HowEVER. Have you watched the high school newspaper show? The main kid in that, the ed-in-chief, is kinda Hillary.
MEGAN: I mean, is that why so many Jezebelles seem to (ahem) slightly overly identify with her on a personal level? Because she's us? I'm not going to say I wasn't like that. I ran an elderly volunteer program, worked for another, was President of SADD and the German Club, was in drama club, on the school newspaper briefly and took ballet, tap and jazz lessons.
MOE: Oh man, high school was so miserable I completely lost all sense that there was a world outside it. So yes, I drank and did drugs. It was kind of awesome. I love days like this when I remember how awesome it was to wear the kilt with birkenstocks.
MEGAN: I went to public school. I went through kind of a hippie bell bottom phase.
MEGAN: Ok, or we could talk about McCain's Katrina speech, which is totally part of his insane poor people tour.

MOE: Yeah I touched on that in yesterday's news roundup. And then I went out for about six hours of drinking —it's just like a juice fast if you stick to beer! — during which the food crisis was clumsily discussed. And I promised I would find out whether the United States, like China, has formidable reserves of food.
MEGAN: I don't think we have a food reserve like we do an oil reserve.

MEGAN: But we also don't have $1 billion+ people and haven't had a widespread famine.
MEGAN: By the way, the cops in NY that shot up that groom in Queens a couple years ago all just got acquitted. Hunter Walker, who's blogging on my other sofa, thinks that's kind of bullshit.

MEGAN: Oh, hey, so the Zimbabwe police have raided the offices of independent election observers and the locked down the offices of the opposition party. Guess those Chinese weapons actually weren't all that necessary after all.
MOE: Right Anna just emailed me about this. Damn. Decisions like this are so weird. I can never tell if they're just indicative of a total ignorance about the nature of police misconduct or ... plain racism or whatever.

MEGAN: Well, as they just discussed on MSNBC, two of the officers involved were themselves African-American. Hunter, who feels much more strongly about this, has seen video from the JFK Air Train of the security officers up there hitting the ground because the officers were firing so many shots and so wildly. Also, the commentator (who sided with the cops) said the reason that they fired was that the undercover guy at the strip club supposedly heard one guy tell another to get his gun, but white pro-cop lady said they said "Yo, go get my gun" and we think it's a little fucked up she threw in the "Yo".
MOE: Yeah, it is a little fucked up. Undermining an entire national referendum on your corrupt multidecade tenure in the autocracy fucked up, not quite. But fucked up. That said, I add a few too many superfluous "Yo"s to my conversation at times. I blame Philly, where the features section of the first newspaper I worked for was called the "Yo! Section"

MEGAN: To skip back to Zimbabwe, this picture accompanied the article I linked to but in case they change it, I wanted people to see it.
MOE: Oh thanks! What an eye-pleasing range of color!
MEGAN: The little girl breaks my heart as much as all the men in the picture do my looking so nonchalant about pointing that big ass gun at a little girl.
MOE: hahaha she doesn't look scared though.
MEGAN: Yeah, just sort of annoyed and uncomfortable, which is so much worse. I practically crap my pants when I see the dudes at the airport or on the subway with the submachine guns.
MOE: See, to me that picture is the classic "everyone hanging out with guns" kinda picture you'll get in places where there's some sort of military rule. And also: don't go to Israel then. Or maybe that would have been an ideal natural cure for the constipation I suffered there.
MOE: Okay I know other shit happened last night. LIke seriously breaking developments that will affect the outcome of the election or the future of the global commodities markets or something. But I can't for the life of me find any decent links.
MEGAN: Yeah, well, I go to Germany and they have the machine guns, too, and are sort of scary about it even to me. I think it's just, like, now it's here and that's what I don't like.
MEGAN: Wait, I didn't think the Abercrombie boys calling into Larry King was that important.
MOE: Wait they called into Larry King? Link please. I totally missed it. I'm too busy getting whatever my new substitute for "mad" is at Chuck Krauthammer. I would also point out that in their most recent polls Obama wins a McCain matchup by 1.9% and HIllary wins by 0.4% so seriously UTSHAY THE UCKFAY UPHAY about electability kthanks.
MEGAN: Also, can we just sort of admit that "electability" is all "poor white folk won't vote for the black man" and that polls like this are a non-racist, non-elitist way to say that? That would be cool.
MOE: Oh and just as I'm like "nothing's fucking going onnnnnnn" the Dalai Lama scores a meeting with China.
MEGAN: Speaking of people you worry about and hope won't be assassinated, that's kind of fucking epic.

• Mariah Carey has officially had more #1 hits than Elvis, not that the whole math of hitmaking is really what it used to be, and speaking of math she explains her whole theory of relativity thing thusly: "It's like emancipation of Mariah Carey to the second power and beyond." [WSJ]
  
• The man with the uterus is supposedly appearing on tomorrow's Oprah. I am so, so sad I'm taking the rest of the week off. [People]
  
• A bunch of new polls say Obama is gaining on Hillary in Pennsylvania. This is confusing, because just two hours ago I got an email from my friend, a Hillbot, claiming that the opposite was occurring, and I shot back that blah blah blah I don't believe polls ever, and that is particularly true right now. [Philly.com]
  
• A human-cow embryo was created in Britain and it survived for three days. Somehow this sort of advancement is supposed to actually make stem cell research less controversial with religious people and such, although I think the scientific community might be overestimating the religious community's capacity to understand how. [Reuters]
  
• You thought they couldn't find a new a twist on the power figure/prostitute scandal but! The spouse of Michigan's junior senator was fucking prostitutes. Yup, the spouse of (female) senator, Debbie Stabenow, was caught picking up a $150 hooker in the town of... Big Beaver. [Wonkette]

• A couple married for 75 years died within hours of each other. People who knew them were quick to point out that she got really fat and that he stayed terribly thin so I guess that whole body weight-mortality link isn't all it's cracked up to be. [WFAA]
• An unconstitutional law to almost-ban abortion will probably be back on the South Dakota ballot in November, though it didn't pass in 2006 and the past two years have not exactly been awesome for their cause. [Wash Post]
• Wal-Mart, which was always a pioneer in ensuring all its employees were so impoverished they'd always be eligible for federally subsidized health care, is now doing some confusingly contradictory things and my head hurts.
• A new province in Western China is getting angry at the government, only this time — oh noes! — it's the one with the angry Muslims. Who are demanding that the government allow them to wear headscarves. THE BETTER TO HIDE THEIR WEAPONS. [IHT]
• It looks like Robert Mugabe has lost the Zimbabwe parliamentary elections. This by no means means the end of Mugabe's 28-year rule, but it does mean something...Developing. [NYT]
• Bye guys! You won't see me till Monday. Now, to summon the willpower to get the entirety of the rest of my life that is not this blog sorted out before then.