This isn't university apparel: this is the Ivy League as metaphor. Harvard Yard is about turning the university's hard-earned but ephemeral reputation into a more useful kind of coin — the licensing deal, though of unknown value, lasts 10 years, covers the entire globe, and also gives permission for women's and children's apparel collections. Kit Walsh, an executive at the Collegiate Licensing Company, says "The idea was to create a line of clothing where Harvard represented not just a university, but a style, too."

And what a style it is.

We think this guy's definitely majoring in Advanced Mud Sculpture. The floral shirt speaks to a certain subversive aesthetic/isation of the American heterosexual male experience, but the rolled up sleeves say, "Baby, let's work this clay together."

This guy, on the other hand, is clearly majoring in Old World Inferiority Complex Studies. Notice the striped blazer, an homage to the classic English boating jacket, and the attempt at keeping it cas' in white plimsolls. A not unusual reaction to feelings of geographic insecurity among the wealthiest classes.

Here, a Harvardite majoring in Cool Juice. Run — don't walk! — to class, Steve Urkel. You'll transform into Stefan Urquelle one day.

This guy's majoring in Young Republicanism with a minor in Sockless Living — Avoiding Blisters. Roger Stone dreams of taking him shopping for a real suit.

And here lurks the soulful Studio Art/Independent Studies major. Look at him gaze into the middle distance as he contemplates with exquisite melancholy how everyone around him is like totally a late-capitalist consumer clone, man, while his forebrain wonders if perhaps he can justify charging another ribbon belt this month.

Harvard Yard apparel will retail for $165-$495, and will be available in stores next spring.

Rich Harvard, Poor Harvard [Vanity Fair]
Harvard University Launches Men's Collection [WWD]

• One of Annie Leibovitz's Louis Vuitton ads with astronauts Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin, and Jim Lovell is out. (Gorby was busy that weekend.) [WWD]
• Karl Lagerfeld: "Ballet is an extraordinary art: this torture of the body to make something so graceful. All this hard work, to look effortless."

• "Swans, they are the meanest animals in the world, you know. I had problems with them as a child. They hate children. I was caught by one, so I know. The idea of swans is lovely, and they have a beautiful shape, but they seem more romantic than they in fact are. I don't think really they die like this. They just drop dead, hmm? But who wants to see that?"[Guardian]
• Christian Lacroix has vowed to keep his 22-year-old label alive even as it has declared bankruptcy, but its July couture presentation is in doubt. [WWD]
• Miranda Kerr is nude on the cover of the June Rolling Stone — in Australia. Because she cares about the environment. [News.com.au]
• Whichever "fellow student" told the Daily Mail "The end of year exams are a big deal at Cambridge University and we've all spent weeks revising. I don't know how she has managed to fit any revision into her busy social life," is certainly no "friend" to model/student Lily Cole. But then, if Lily Cole didn't want tabloid attention, she might not walk around London with her boyfriend wearing a gold ring on the ring finger of her left hand. [Daily Mail]
• Everybody you might care slightly about is getting a new fragrance this year. Kate Moss is naming hers "Vintage." [WWD]
• Kind of like the departed Mr. Blackwell — or Republican trickster Roger Stone — but only for hats, Luton, England milliner Philip Wright releases an annual list of the best celebrity hat-wearers. This year, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy topped it, for her "neat, chic, pill box hat" which "was a supreme example of classic simplicity at its best - a stylish understatement which captured the attention of the world's media." She beat the Queen. [Times of London]
• I've always thought that custom-made clothing, at the right price point, could and should be a bigger part of the apparel market than it is. Because all of us have issues with the fit of standardized sizes — who doesn't have a wardrobe half full of shirts that are tight in the shoulders but loose at the waist, pants with the wrong crotch depth, and skirts that don't move quite right when you walk. But all I want to know about this Ryan Taylor, aka "Taylor the Tailor", of Los Angeles, who supposedly takes his clients' measurements and turns out custom-fitted clothing in a couple days at prices "competitive with brand name department stores" is: where does he manufacture? (A question which, funnily enough, CNN seems to have no interest in.) Because everything I know about fashion leads me to suspect that level of service is only possible if you're e-mailing those customer measurements to a guy in Malaysia. Or Hong Kong. [CNN]
• A lone man pulled off an $8.5 million jewelry heist at Chopard in the Place Vendôme in Paris. [CBS]
• A study in the U.K. found that while women make up 52% of the fashion industry's workforce, they are paid 15% less than their male counterparts, and have only 37% of the top jobs. In New York, anecdotally, I've heard from many a design assistant toiling in the trenches of a major brand that, even though here as there the industry is largely female, things like on-site daycare are nonexistent. [Independent]
• Gilt Groupe, the members-only sample sale site, sponsored Zac Posen's resort show, which is happening tonight. Interesting. [WWD]
• Shares in the national mall chain Wet Seal fell 17% in Friday's trading, following the announcement of poor first quarterly results. Same-store sales fell by 7.3%, and even though it beat analysts' expectations by turning a $5 million profit during the quarter, news that the company does not expect to meet profit forecasts in the next quarter was enough to set the stock price sliding. [The Street]
• Lord & Taylor is closing one of its 47 stores nationwide. The Landmark Mall in Alexandria, Virginia, will no longer boast a Lord & Taylor as an anchor tenant after July 12. Both Landmark Mall and its parent company, General Growth Properties, have filed for bankruptcy protection. [WSJ]
• The U.S. division of Dutch brand Oilily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and closed its Madison Avenue store. This follows the bankruptcy of its parent company in Hollard nearly two months ago. [Crain's]
• A statement from Wells Fargo, the principal creditor of the bankrupt Hartmarx company, which owns the menswear brands Hickey Freeman and Hart Schaffner Marx, has put Hartmarx's potential deal with private equity firm Emerisque in doubt. Emerisque's bid of $119 million for the business had been accepted by Hartmarx last week, but Wells Fargo, which is owed $114 million, said that with only $70 million of the bid being cash it "fails to provide adequate value to Hartmarx lenders." Wells Fargo also objects to the bid on the grounds that the offer "does not even ensure that Emerisque will continue running Hartmarx's business operations after the acquisition," something which Emerisque had pledged to do. The bankruptcy court is scheduled to hear objections to the bid today. [Chicago Tribune]
• Mango might do most of its business in Spain, but that won't prevent it from opening a store this September in Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish region of Iraq and the country's third-largest city. [Times of London]
• Benetton's seven stores in Georgia closed in protest and Georgian politicians voiced thunderous objections to the chain's decision to open an outpost in Sukhumi, the capital of the disputed Black Sea region of Abkhazia. Tbilisi regards Abkhazia as a breakaway province; the EU and NATO concur; Russia recognizes its independence; 1.5 million Russian tourists visit Sukhumi every year. No doubt lured as much by the thought of all those rubles as by the international goodwill it advertises, Benetton has nonetheless been forced to abandon its plans to open the store. [WSJ]

• Olivier Theyskens is holding true to the fundamentals. “When the economy changes, it’s not like you want to start eating bad-tasting chocolate,” he said, after showing his pre-fall collection for Nina Ricci. [WWD]

• Serial rapist Anand Jon, the former celebrity designer, is scheduled to be sentenced today. The penalty for his 16 counts of sexual abuse against models, including 7 counts of forcible rape of women aged 14-21 is a mandatory life sentence, with earliest parole eligibility in 2075. Regardless, his mother was apparently overheard approaching wealthy guests at a hotel in Chennai, India, asking for money for an appeal. Jon's website greeting page opens with a quote from Gandhi: "Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth." [NY Post]
• Nixonite dirty trickster Roger Stone — subject of an excellent Jeffrey Toobin profile last year — apparently thinks himself a fashion maven. Taking up the mantle of the deceased Mr. Blackwell, Stone inaugurated a new annual feature on his website, a worst- and best-dressed list. Though occasionally wacky ("Lobbyists are the only elegant men left in America"), his advice isn't all off the mark: Obama and Carla Bruni tops the men's and women's lists, respectively, and he says Tom Wolfe "looks like he's a cross-dressing character in a lesser Dickens novel." [The Stone Zone]
• Designer Vivienne Tam held a fashion show in Beijing to raise money to save the panda habitat destroyed in last year's Sichuan earthquake. The five one-off outfits she auctioned featured panda motifs. Adorable. [Reuters]
• As part of his prize for winning the 2008 CDFA/Vogue Fashion Fund award, Alexander Wang gets one year of professional mentoring from none other than Diane von Furstenberg. Runners-up Vena Cava and Albertus Swanepoel are to be mentored by Patrick Robinson and Andrew Rosen, and Andy and Kate Spade, respectively. [WWD]
• Ellen Tracy has inked a licensing deal for intimate apparel. Expect to see "sleepwear, at-homewear, robes, foundations, shapewear and lingerie" everywhere Ellen Tracy is sold as soon as this fall. [WWD]
• WWD has a good round-up of the status of designers' venue preparations for New York Fashion Week, just one month away. IMG is not introducing a fourth, off-site presentation venue this season, as had been floated, meaning rental at the Bryant Park Tents proper will cost $28,000-$48,000. Many designers are opting for cheaper locales. Calvin Klein is moving its show to the ground floor of the company headquarters, Vera Wang is holding hers in her new SoHo store, smaller labels are banding together for shared shows, and others, like Thakoon and Philosophy di Alberta Ferretti, are showing in Chelsea gallery spaces. Meanwhile, Tommy Hilfiger is back to the tents after a multi-season absence. Marc Jacobs, as usual, intends to use the Lexington Avenue Armory. [WWD]
• Sass & Bide are down for the count entirely. Although they intended to return to fashion week this season, co-founder Sarah Jane Clark's third pregnancy means the Australian duo will stay home. What a happy event to spur such a sad occurrence. [Fashionista]
• High dudgeon at a retail bigwig confab: J. Crew's chief executive Mickey Drexler reportedly took Neiman Marcus' chief executive Burt Tansky to task over luxury markups. Drexler told Tansky the days of the $800 high heel are over. “Wall Street is over,” he continued, and “more wealth has been created on non-productive [financial] transactions” than ever before. When the market comes back, Drexler said, consumers will not be tricked into paying department store margins again. “There’s a whole reset button that has been pushed," he said. Tansky responded by saying “It’s premature to start denigrating what the affluent customer will want.” This fight sounds like it was awesome and very, very awkward. [WSJ]
• The man behind the "Save Anna" t-shirt has a new thing for you to wear: A Rachel Zoe "bananas" shirt with a Warhol-esque screenprint of the stylist-approved fruit and the phrase "I die. Bananas." underneath. Eating disorder, tanning club card, and giant hippie dress optional. [The Cut]
• NY Mag has a sweet video of Marc Jacobs in bed talking about the Stephen Sprouse graffiti collection, which was recently relaunched. "I have a lot of Stephen's clothes and the thing is every time I look at them, they never feel old-fashioned to me, they never look out-of-date. I don't originate or create anything, I'm just here putting things together or re-putting things together, and I like it that way," says Jacobs. [The Cut]
• Wait, what? Stephen Alan for Uniqlo? Please let this not be like that time Amy Winehouse said she was doing a clothing line. [The Cut]
• Dolce & Gabbana's new campaign, shot by Steven Klein, is being proudly trumpeted as a potential source of controversy. Inspired by the Visconti film The Leopard, about a Sicilian aristocratic family at the time of Italian unification, the ads will feature images of male models praying. "For sure they will say we are offending religion," sighed either Domenico or Stefano, reports Reuters. "Instead it could be read as a return to values. And there is a need for that at this time." Yes. For "values," and, presumably, for valuable clothes. [Reuters]
• Remember how Domenico Vacca and John Varvatos both claimed to have dressed Jeremy Piven for the Golden Globes? Turns out it was a tie. The actor's publicist says he wore a Domenico Vacca jacket and John Varvatos pants. Which might be true, or it might be her trying to stay on both companies' good sides after pledging separately to each to wear its clothes and screwing that up royally. How much you want to bet pissed reps for both labels are poring over photos trying to tell their lapel notches from the competitor's as we speak? [WSJ]
• Nonetheless, expect more of the same as award season wears on through the grim retail market. The thin consumer dollar means designers are even more eager to get their gears on a red carpet. Katie Holmes' Golden Globes stylist even received personal phone calls from several solicitous designers. "That never happened before," said the stylist, "usually I just hear from their publicists." And cows walk upright and eat manburgers in this strange opposite world! [WSJ]

ME: Ok, so, thanks again for filling in on ultra-short notice despite having a real job.
SPENCER: bffffft it beats reporting on afghanistan
JUST KIDDING BOSS!
ME: Want to trade? You can talk about pubic hair and I'll be all serious and shit.
SPENCER: well speaking of being all up in your snizz
my internet friends are buzzing about this RCP piece about why HRC's women voters should learn to love John McCain

A big sticking point for wavering Democrats will be McCain's position on reproductive rights. Clinton's backers are overwhelmingly pro-choice, and they'll want to know this: Would McCain stock the Supreme Court with foes of Roe v. Wade? The 1973 decision guarantees a right to abortion.

The answer is unclear but probably "no." While McCain has positioned himself as "pro-life" during this campaign, his statements over the years show considerable latitude on the issue.

so, ladies. had enough of those reproductive rights?
ME: That's bullshit. Like, a month ago he was telling Republicans that he wouldn't push this time to add anything to their anti-abortion plank, like how he's spent years trying to get an exception for the life of the mother, rape or incest. Apparently now that he wants to be President, it's cool .
WHERE ARE MY FLIP FLOPS??
SPENCER: i love the cynicism of that concession to mccain's stance on the issue
other politicians have "positions"
StraightTalk McSurge has "statements"
ME: And statements can't contradict each other, it's just what he was thinking at the time.
SPENCER: oh and let's not forget this awesome Weekly Standard piece from the height of the GOP primary

Arizona senator John McCain, currently a bit behind Rudy Giuliani as Republicans' favorite presidential choice for 2008, is far and away the most consistently anti-abortion of all the top contenders. During his 20 years in the Senate (plus four in the House), he has never failed to cast his vote in favor of whatever abortion restrictions are arguably permitted under Roe v. Wade: bans against partial-birth abortion, abortions on military bases, transporting minors across state lines to obtain abortions behind their parents' backs, and government funding for abortion both in the United States and abroad (all but the transporting-minors bill have become federal law). In addition, McCain has voted to confirm every "strict constructionist" judge (that is, disinclined to find, à la Roe, a right to abortion and related activities enshrined in the Constitution) appointed by the various Republican presidents who have served during his tenure, including Robert Bork for the Supreme Court.

i don't really believe that HRC's voters would actually vote for mccain
ME: But he's practically an enemy of the anti-abortion crowd because of McCain Feingold, so, it's cool.
SPENCER: the harriet "inadequate black male" christian lady from the DNC meeting? my guess is she's paid by Roger Stone
she sounds like my dead bubbe
no NYC jewess of that advanced age has "Christian" for a last name
ME: Didn't you see Ferraro's thing yesterday? Apparently, they're sophisticated enough to know that a Democratic Congress will keep their rights totally intact, so they don't care what you say.
SPENCER: i think we talked about it but i didn't see it
ME: Also, they'll just write in Hillary, that's, like, totes not a vote for McCain, just like Nader wasn't a vote for Bush at all.
SPENCER: you know who made that argument?
oh you beat me to it
ME: Occasionally, I can type fast and even accurately!
SPENCER: ps i got an email yesterday from a nader flack (they still exist!) saying nader was up to 6 percent in some poll
it can't POSSIBLY be true
ME: Yeah, Nader's been polling strangely well.
SPENCER: but seriously megan
let's discuss
how could any HRC voter actually vote for a pro-life republican
ME: They are really, really mad. I mean, let us be frank here, some people don't mind cutting off their noses to spite their faces. I come from a family of such women. I struggle every day to remember that what I want to get out of an argument or a situation is more important than acting on my raw emotions.
SPENCER: if what you're saying is correct
then we're really in a situation straight out of Nixonland
where the politics of resentment trumps everything
do you think we're at that point? or are we talking about such a small minority of HRC voters that to focus on them is to miss the point
ME: When doesn't the politics of resentment trump everything? How many people vote for a candidate and not just against the other guy? Witness all the overtures McCain's been making to disaffected HRC voters.
Do I think it's a small percentage? Polls say it's like 17% of her supporters, and 22% are saying they'll stay home.
Even if it's half of that, or ten percent of that, you and I just watched Recount, Gore lost, in the end, by some 350 votes.
SPENCER: ah but take a look at the characterization of such outreach
here's chief mccain douche michael goldfarb — formerly of the WS, now McCain's dep comm dir & blogger — enticing HRC voters with... McCain's love of ABBA.
now i am not a woman
but if i were condescended to like this, i'd be pretty fucking pissed
ME: Plus, is it universal for women to like ABBA?
SPENCER: i am on batting 1.000 on ABBA-agnostic-to-hostile women
ME: I think "Take a Chance On Me" is a crap song, though I did literally have a guy queue it up on my stereo in college to ask me to fuck him. It didn't work.
SPENCER: hahahaha you told me about that.
ME: But I will admit to a long-standing weakness for "Waterloo."
SPENCER: so if i called you a cunt in between verses of waterloo, you'd vote for me?
ME: The only person who gets to hang out with me during "Waterloo" is my best friend, JC, and only then if we're drunk. But, John McCain is no JC Johnson. Or any guy I would hang out with, let alone vote for.

MOE: This story is almost too wonderful.

MOE: Gene Weingarten reads blogs and listens to talk radio and watches five television sets for 24 hours and it gives him a brief appreciation for Rush Limbaugh.

MEGAN: The WaPo site has been trying to get me to read that story for 2 full days but I have been resisting its lure because I don't want to know my future.

MOE: Okay, I'll send you some excerpts. First

". . . the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." — Umberto Eco.

MEGAN: I read The Name of the Rose in high school. I was mad, upon seeing the movie, that there was not more of Christian Slater's bare ass. I think this would not be an opinion I would hold today were the movie to be made today, with today's Christian Slater.

MOE: And speaking of ...the down there zone, remember when Jane Fonda said "cunt" on TV?

Fortunately, the gaffe is all over the Web in streaming video, and, yes indeed, here she is, Hanoi Jane herself, the bete noire of right wing radio, flagrantly uttering the unutterable. Clearly, Rush and Bill are courageously willing to address this shocking and distasteful subject even at the risk of driving their audiences into multi-orgasmic rapture.
Limbaugh joyfully eviscerates Fonda and moves quickly on to other things, but O'Reilly is in high dudgeon and is all over this reprehensible event. He's morally outraged, and seems to want to wring all he can get out of it, as though it were, say, a luffa sponge.
As someone in the broadcasting business, he says, he doesn't want to become "the scold police," but he wonders just the same if someone ought to call the FCC and demand punishment.

(Later at night, on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor," he will devote an entire segment to the issue, practically sputtering in exasperation when he can't persuade his guest, lawyer Anita Kay, to agree with him that heads must roll. Kay will point out, reasonably, that Fonda wasn't using the word in a hostile manner; she was simply stating the actual title of one of the monologues from the play "The Vagina Monologues," which is, ironically, about how the word should be destigmatized.) B-b-but "this is the most vile word in the lexicon of obscenity!" O'Reilly protests. Laughing, Kay basically tells him to calm down and grow up, that the average 12-year-old girl has heard this word, and it's no big deal. It's my favorite moment of the day. (Anita Kay, the cure for the common scold.) The peril of listening to Limbaugh and O'Reilly at the same time is that you tend to compare them, and these are dangerous waters for an unapologetic, unreconstructed New Deal liberal like me. The comparison makes you actually like Rush. He's funny; O'Reilly is not. Limbaugh teases and baits his political adversaries; O'Reilly sneers and snarls at them. Limbaugh is mock-heroic; O'Reilly is self-righteous. So, when Limbaugh speculates that the Democrats in the House committee went after Roger Clemens because liberals hate cherished American institutions such as churches, the Boy Scouts and baseball, you know he's sorta kidding. When O'Reilly says liberals who oppose torture of prisoners just don't care how many people will die in a terrorist attack, you know he's as serious as an aneurysm.

MOE: I can only listen to Fox News, on account of my mysterious muting problem. Although I was thinking of switching to CNBC this morning. Here we go. The Dow is possibly up because JP Morgan might be raising its bid for Bear Stearns. Wait, the market is not open yet, that is just what the futures betters are betting. They are talking about something called fractionalization creating a lot of possibilities for arbitrage in these securities. I am not really sure what this means. Do regular CNBC viewers really engage in "arbitrage"? Whatever. Ooooh, someone called Wisdomtree.com is pushing an exchange traded fund that tracks India's economy. Good idea. All right, back to the meme of the day. What is it? A lot of things happened this weekend, including the publication of the Peggy Noonan column that finally pushed me over the edge into the realm of begging Peggy Noonan for an interview.

MEGAN: Also, as of this morning, 4,000 soldiers have officially died in Iraq. Cheney would like us to know that the White House mourns every single death but it is, after all, a "volunteer army."
MEGAN: Because there's nothing nauseating about saying that.
MEGAN: They volunteered to die, so it's not as big a deal apparently. Perhaps to commemorate, we can each take a moment of silence today to think about the 4,000 soldiers and then yell "Cheney, go fuck yourself"

MOE: Aiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee. Puppies! Polar Bears! Peggy! Peggy heard the speech and thought "Go America Go." She just thought it was kind of a downer. The first comment goes:

I think Peggy needs to recycle Reagan101 again, and while she's at it perhaps she can read what a real journalist thought of the speech.....Washinton Post writer Charles Krauthammer's article "The Speech, A Brilliant Fraud".

MEGAN: I mean, that sort of a little bit puts the lie to the "all volunteer" army idea. Because definitely some people join despite having tons of other options because it's the family business or they have heroic ideals or just want the extra money or whatever, but some people do it because they don't have good grades, or money for college or career prospects or even job prospects where they grew up. So, yeah, they volunteered to not be even more grindingly poor, to not try to get on welfare, to do something to achieve that American dream thing everyone's been telling them about their whole lives and instead some number of them end up on food stamps anyway and are eking out on existence trying to stay alive in some country where they don't really want us.

MOE: Also, everything that Peggy Noonan said Obama was overly gloomy about can be summed up in this, Maria Bartiromo's response to Tim Russert's query as to what America's biggest economic challenge is.

Well, our biggest challenge economically right now is the tight credit environment.  From an individual standpoint, it is very tough to get a mortgage, it is very tough to borrow money anymore.  From a business standpoint, the same thing.  I would say one of the key representations of what's happening right now is what happened at Carlyle Capital.  Very simple stuff, Tim.  They had $600 million in assets, they borrowed $22 billion. Doesn't work out.  The math just doesn't work.  And that's exactly what's happening.  People have overextended themselves, businesses as well as consumers, and now we're paying the price

MEGAN: Duh, Moe, the $600 million wasn't the only collateral. It was also secured by the fact that 90% of every person involved was an older white man who went to a small number of the right schools and participated in the dinner clubs or fraternities or whatever deemed appropriate by their set and who belongs to a small number of socially appropriate country clubs or whatever. That's the real
collateral.

MOE: DAMMIT YOU AND YOUR FINE PRINT MEGAN

MEGAN: I am a cunt like that.

MOE: Okay does rehashing that conversation I'm pretty sure we already had but for the constant cache-clearing of the 24-hour pundit cycle that we'll come back to a moment because I'm going to tell you about my mom, and also, ask what you did to commemorate Christ's resurrection, about how McCain wanted to switch parties after 2001 just delay the inevitable awesome conversation about the Nixon-tattoed Republican huckster who tipped off the government to Eliot Spitzer's whore habit (because he went to the same whores, duh) and also, printed up those clever Citizens United Not Timid T-shirts that sunk the Hillary campaign?
8:50 AM
MOE: Cunts are such a theme today!

MEGAN: To commemorate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ (no H., thanks), I had brunch that included bagels with lox, champagne and coffee. Then I took a nap. I worked, then I went to dinner with a friend who is having relationship issues, and I came home and worked some more.

MEGAN: And I talked to my parents.

MOE: I got high with a very good friend whose name I am gonna leave off the blog even though he seems to have posted pictures commemorating that on his Facebook profile. It was the first time I have ever 1. bought weed by myself, which I did successfully, along with the first time I have 2. attempted to roll a joint, an endeavor at which I failed miserably.The best part of the evening was buying junk food in anticipation of the muchies. The next morning we walked a mile and a half to Chipotle but it was closed. I got on the wrong subway home and ended up getting out in Williamsburg and walking home over the bridge. I smiled unilaterally at a lot of Hasids and realized it was Easter only when some dudes sitting at the front of the bridge said, "Hey sexy, happy Easter."

MEGAN: It was really good weather, wasn't it?

MOE: And my mother said that she always forgets until she visits my sister in Charlottesville how marginalized and disenfranchised black people are. And the throwing his grandma under the bus line went over well with her. She was like "when he said that I was like, oh my god that is like a universal experience, to cringe over how old white people talk about black people." We have a lot of typical white people in my family as you can probably tell.

MEGAN: Wow, your mom is cool. I think I might owe her some wine some time.

MOE: But it made me think, you know, the same thought Gene Weingarten had over the extent to which regular voters are completely oblivious to the meme of the moment and thank god for that.
MOE: Now G-d can you do something about William Kristol? And Pat Buchanan?

MEGAN: Word. The whole Gene Weingarten piece reminded me of the conversation I had with my parents about how I do this in the morning and I was like, well, I get up at 7, read 15+ sites and then start typing and they were like, wow, you're the most well-informed person we know and then I realized I was probably fucked and this is why I'm a political misanthrope.
MEGAN: I think Bill Kristol, who, seriously, if you put that man in some fucking clown make up IS THE JOKER FROM BATMAN will take care of his own demise. But someone get Rachel Maddow a spit shield for when she has to sit next to him on MSNBC.
MEGAN: and by "him" I mean Pat Buchanan

MOE: Apparently Michael Smerconish has been defending the speech. He's a much-beloved Pennsylvania conservative radio talker. Ugh, but before I feel click over on one more thing only to rue that here we are, balls deep in the memes again, let me call out this sentiment from Pat Buchanan's most recent blog utterance.

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

MOE: He actually asked, "Where is the gratitude?

MEGAN: So, why the FUCK is he still a commentator on MSNBC? Oh, right, they're trying to out-Fox Fox or something, because that's why they're 3rd in the ratings.

MOE: I'm not sure. I don't know. I think I have heard sentiments from my grandfather who was a typical white person of the first generation immigrant vein that would echo these sentiments. I think William F. Buckley might have echoed these statements. Enough of these statements might give you the notion that racism is endemic in white America, you know? Because implicit in statements like this, I don't have to point it out to you but I will anyway, was that buying and selling and pricing people as commodities is not a grave injustice if they are black. What is interesting is that Judeo Chrisitian rooted humanism is supposed to be the basis for the notion that a person is a person, uniquely different from other objects and organisms, and yet here he seems to be subverting that notion, rendering it backward according to some logic I can barely fathom, except to echo Obama via William Faulkner.
MOE: Via Peggy Noonan.
MOE: The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past.

MEGAN: Like, it's obviously not the motherfucking past if people like Pat Buchanan think that

MEGAN: Seriously? The means (slavery) are justified by the ends (acceptance of Jesus Christ as their savior, forced or not)? Seriously? This is what people think? What country do I live in? No wonder Michelle Obama isn't proud of it all the time.

MOE: Pat Buchanan went to my brother's high school, a Jesuit boy's school in Northeast DC. That is what is scariest but most fascinating about that statement. It is not coming from the progeny of anyone who actually owned slaves. Who actually knows, at all, what he is talking about. Perhaps he ought to listen to Mike Huckabee.

MEGAN: Perhaps Pat Buchanan, too, ought to just go fuck himself.
MEGAN: The list of people who can go fuck themselves seems to be growing.

MOE: You had a little piece of recent civil rights history you wanted to share with the class, didn't you Megan?

MEGAN: I did, in the vein of people that can go fuck themselves. The New York Times reminded its readers (some of whom heard it for the first time because they were too young at the time) that Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi with a nod to the unreconstructed racists of the world.

"In 1980, Ronald Reagan, campaigning on a platform that included "states' rights," opened his general election campaign in Philadelphia, Miss. — a decision criticized because it was where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964.

MEGAN: It was in a story on race in campaigns. Also, the incident was actually chronicled by no less than American chintzy painter Norman Rockwell in an enormous and moving painting that you will find in absolutely no book of his work anywhere (because I've tried) but you can see a bad internet print of it here. It's actually really moving in person.

MEGAN: Also, Lt. Governor Michael Steele? Former Senator JC Watts of Oklahoma? Condoleeza Rice? This is what the Republican Party thought was acceptable when you were joining up. Pat Buchanan's remarks? Still acceptable in the Republican party. If Obama has to explain his allegiance to his pastor and friend of 20 years and should have left him by the wayside to "prove" his love of America, I would like some explanations from you about that shit. Thank you. And go fuck yourselves.

MOE: No, go fuck whores!
MOE: Gay whores!
MOE: Kthanxbai.