The clip below includes footage of Dr. Tiller, rendered chilling by his recent death. According to a story that went up late yesterday on the AP, Tiller became a lightning rod for Kansas anti-abortion forces not only because he performed late-term abortions but because, unlike many abortion providers, he was publicly visible and highly outspoken. This much is clear from the clip: Tiller says, "if a stake has to be driven through the heart of the anti-abortion movement, I want to have my hand on the hammer."

Unfortunately, plenty of people felt this way about Tiller. He was in many ways the center of the Kansas abortion debate, which has been, in turn, the center of Kansas politics in general. In the book What's the Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank said the presence of Tiller's clinic made anti-abortion activists dub Kansas "the abortion capital of the nation." The issue is a highly polarizing one, dividing far-right, often evangelical Christians from more moderate Republicans and from Democrats. Political science professor Burdett Loomis says,

When you get down to the heart of the split among Kansas Republicans, it always comes back to abortion. It may pop out in gun laws, homeschooling, evolution - but it starts and stops with abortion.

Frank tells stories of several Kansans who have switched political parties solely because of their views on abortion. One is a friend's father, a teacher and former McGovern Democrat. Frank writes:

These days he votes the farthest-right Republicans he can find on the ballot. The particular issue that brought him over was abortion. A devout Catholic, my friend's dad was persuaded in the early nineties that the sanctity of the fetus outweighed all of his other concerns, and from there he gradually accepted the whole pantheon of conservative devil-figures: the elite media and the American Civil Liberties Union, contemptuous of our values; the la-di-da feminists; the idea that Christians are vilely persecuted — right here in the U.S. of A. It doesn't even bother him, really, when his new hero Bill O'Reilly blasts the teachers' union as a group that "does not love America."

Taken together, the documentary and the book make yet another case that the assassination of Dr. Tiller was not "an isolated act,"
but a particularly tragic skirmish in a long, broad war. A woman's right to choose is at risk in Kansas, as are the lives of those who uphold it. For anyone who has gotten complacent about abortion rights, What's the Matter With Kansas? is a disturbing reminder that many people in this country desire — passionately, crazily, and sometimes badly enough to kill — to take those rights away.

What's The Matter With Kansas? [Official Film Site]
New Documentary Spotlights Tiller [Broadsheet]
What's The Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won The Heart of America [Amazon]
Kansas Is Deadly Battleground In Abortion Debate [AP, via Yahoo News]

MOE: Hi, what's going on. I'm tired. Your boy Mark Penn and Karen Huges sure look like the match made in Hell, no?
MEGAN: What is it they say about when lions and lambs lay down together? I'm not sure whether the rapture has already happened and I just didn't notice what with living in D.C. and all and no one going missing, or if the apocalypse is starting, or if D.C. is really just purgatory.
MEGAN: Also, the Clinton camp: pissed and somehow surprised that Obama's big donors haven't given them more money to pay off the debts they accumulated after winning became a mathematical impossibility. Also pissed that Obama won't give them his small donor email list to spam with requests. Like, for real. If you have him $5, she wants your email address to be able to ask for for $100.
MOE: Better idea: Roger Ailes! Sean Hannity! Get Bill Kristol to write about in his column! And surely Rush can afford to pitch in what with the four hundred million dollars and everything. He's got some listeners too I have heard.

MEGAN: I mean, it only seems fair. His minions supposedly help keep her in the race, he wouldn't want the small business people (who probs vote Republican anyway, or will now that the Dems are dicking them around) to not be able to feed their families!
MOE: Hey, this guy looks like he's got some pull with the plutocracy, maybe hit him up too. Don't click if you don't want to stab yourself. I actually might write a letter to the WSJ on the breathtaking inanity of this argument.
MEGAN: Did you know I used to work for the nonpartisan Tax Foundation?
MEGAN: I doubt Scott crunched those numbers, but hey Gerald! Hope your wedding was beautiful!
MEGAN: Also, don't know if you missed this yesterday, but Obama's Social Security funding plan is probably a good part of what's got their knickers in a twist.
MEGAN: So, like, you (and your employer) pay Social Security on the first $102,000 of your income
MOE: Hahahaha what he says, it's soooo nuts! It's like an argument you'd find in a time capsule from 1978 you'd look at and go, "Well, I suppose back then it sounded like he had a point, but the thing they didn't quite realize then is that when rich people pay fewer taxes they don't really generate economic growth outside themselves, and maybe the Caymans and a bit of Shenzhen."
MEGAN: And everything after that is SocSec tax free. Obama thinks that between the cap (adjusted yearly for inflation) and $250,000 (probably not adjusting for inflation, though that's not clear), you wouldn't pay more. After that, if you made more than $250,000, you would resume paying Social Security taxes of 2-4% on those earnings — and so would your employer, creating a small disincentive for paying you more.
MOE: Tom Frank's tilting yard is up your alley, on the corporate push to actually draft some legislation for once, so Comrade Obama can't immediately draft a 5 Year Plan.
MEGAN: Well, I would disagree slightly with the assertion that all the Republican Congress members are retiring just to cash in as lobbyists (they'll have to wait 2 years, except for Trent Lott who only has to wait out this year because of when he retired). I actually think it's because they're a bunch of whiny little idea- and idealless babies who are taking what remains of their balls and going home because they don't like playing if they're not on the winning team.
MEGAN: Other than that, that's an excellent analysis.
MEGAN: So did you want to talk anything about James Baker and Warren Christopher saying there needs to be a new War Powers Resolution, not that the one we have has ever been invoked?
MEGAN: Or would you prefer to fuck any further serious discussion and skip straight to the Formula One guy's Nazi sadomasochistic sex scandal? Because, I can't lie, I read one of those articles more thoroughly than the other.
MEGAN:

In arguing that The News of the World was guilty of a “gross and indefensible intrusion,” he has spoken candidly of his passion for sadomasochism, which he has told the court has lasted for 45 years.

MOE: Please tell me more about the F1 guy. I never could quite follow that one and the Jalopnik guys seemed to be all over it. Also, what is even up with sadomasochism? I'm so ignorant. And innocent! Whatever it is sounds better than Ashley Alexandra Dupre's reality show .
MEGAN: Dude, for REAL, I do not understand reality TV.
MOE: I love the TNR homepage link to book review: Have Freakonomicists Actually Revolutionized The Way We Think About Happiness? Or just the Hackness To Which We Will Stoop In Our Headlines?
MEGAN: Ok, so, like Max Mosley is an important guy in Britain and his parents were, like, British gentry but also really into Hitler back when Hitler was still alive and stuff. And then a Brit tabloid got video of him participating in a really, really long S&M session with 5 women that played on prison fantasies but apparently also had some Nazi overtones (the word Aryan was used!) and now he's suing them for invasion of privacy and in the trial everyone is like, I like pain! With sex. The end.
MOE: Neither do I, for the record. I just don't get it. Interestingly, even Tracie, the other night when we were hanging out engaged in one of those deep intellectual conversations we have all the time, was like, "I'm over it. I never thought I'd say this but it's possible for something to be too stupid for me to watch."
MEGAN: Also, only in wealthy Britain would your husband of 40 years like getting caned to the point that it leaves marks and draws blood regularly (or enough for him to differentiate between caning, whipping, beating and spanking) and you not notice the marks. Like, for real. Did they sleep bundled?
MEGAN: As for the deal with S&M, I mean, I'm no afficianado, but I think it speaks to the reality that the brain really is the only true sexual organ.
MOE: Can braindead people get off? I don't really think I believe it. Re reality TV it looks like some guy from the first season of the Real World is running for Congress, which I suppose is just another sign of our generation passing the Pointlessness baton to the Youngs. I suppose I ought to give mine up too but first I want to write a post on whether Charlize Theron is actually smart.
MEGAN: Um, I think all I can say after reading that is: Brooklynites, please vote for Ed Towns.
MOE: Have you been reading any of these space dominance stories? Because I keep meaning to and not. Are we worried China's space program is going to find a place to launch excess emissions before we do and leave us to be dessicated by the global warming Dick Cheney is still maintaining does not exist?
MEGAN: I'll confess, the last story I bothered clicking on about space travel was this one about fucking in space.
MEGAN: But, no, because we're going to pump all our carbon dioxide into the empty pockets under the sea from whence we will be extracting oil, so it'll all be fine. Once we, like figure out how to do it.
MOE: Here's another headline I like: "Meet Huzaifa Parhat, who personifies the absurdity of U.S. policy in Guantanamo Bay." Uh, yeah, as opposed to all the other victims of U.S. policy in Guantanamo Bay. I saw that post on drudge. What's with the headlines today? "For Better of Worse, Sex In Space Is Inevitable." That's better than this post I saw on TNR the other day, "6 Reasons The Border Fence Is A Bad Idea." I am guiltier than anyone here but Jesus CHRIST I feel like building a border fence around the internet.
MEGAN: Maybe all the good headline writers took the week off and are vacationing with Jon Stewart?
MOE: No, they all took buyouts silly! My mom has been railing against the buyouts at the Washington Post. It's really odd to remember things like READERS ACTUALLY NOTICE.

MEGAN: Your mom might be the only one, though! The real question is whether Americans will notice the scaled-back convention coverage that's supposedly to "offset" the costs of Obama going to a bigger venue for his speech but is really just an excuse for the networks to do what then have been dying to do for years and cut back on boring convention coverage that no one watches anyway. Plus, they can't do it for the DNC and not not for the RNC so it's like a bonus.
MOE: I think w/r/t this War Powers Resolution act I would be part of the problem because I can't really finish the story and I know it has to do with the fighting over powers among the various branches of government and probably Dick Cheney knows best anyway right? But like, what does this resolution say? It was passed in pre-Watergate Nixon times…is it just really scary?
MEGAN: I mean, the thing is, that Constitutionally, to declare war on anybody, the President has to go to Congress to ask permission. But, like, that's haaaaard. So that's why Vietnam wasn't really a war and this isn't really a war, etc. And basically, since WWII, Congress and the Administration have tried to come up with a way to bypass Congress's Constitutional powers in the matter, because just like Americans supposedly all believe they'll be rich someday and thus supposedly don't want higher taxes on rich people, everyone on the Hill thinks they'll be President someday and thus is enamored with executive power, which is the thing our Founding fucking Fathers tried so hard to control.
MOE: Oh, and Osama Bin Laden's evildoer son looks young enough to be the son of OBL's other son, you know, the one with the British cougar wife who looks like she writes soft sadomasochistic erotica…ANYWAY, that made me think, when was the last time someone had a kid at the White House? What if the Obamas had another kid? I bet Rush would send the nicest presents.
MEGAN: So the War Powers Resolution sucks, and hasn't been used, and gives Congress very limited oversight and the Administration a lot of war-declaration power but it's never been used and Administrations have continued to drag us into armed conflicts that aren't "wars" by just going around it. Baker and Christopher suggest writing a new one with a robust role for Congress (thank GOD) — at least on the surface — as well as powers to the President but it requires oversight and consultation for any military action lasting more than a week, requires Congressional approval of military actions within 30 days (but exempts covert actions and response to terrorist attacks, SIGH, which just gives a reason for the next Bushie to declare that Iran is part of the War on al Qaeda or whatever but something is better than nothing).
MEGAN: And I love how the kid is against us, Britain, France... and Denmark. Denmark's probably all like, what the fuck, kid? We've got Danishes and beer and shit.
MOE: Anyway apparently this 16-year-old Hamza Bin Laden is Osama Bin Laden's "likely heir." Or, that is, according to the lofty source that is the Sun. OH, and I loved the Denmark thing too. Like, I bet we could write a comic book and get added to their terror list. Or maybe a YouTube video. Yes, that, exactly. Although, on second thought, I feel like I sort of know what it's like to be on a terror list. I'm back to joining the Iranian resistance if you're in.
MEGAN: Do I have to dye my hair dark like Ashleigh Banfield? Because I look really gothy with dark hair, even without the makeup. Not that I, uh, have any experience with that or anything. Nope.
MOE: Oh shit how did I miss this haha Republican convention planners want him out of town before McCain even gets there? Like, if you thought McCain's temper was reserved for Sandinistas and his wife you have no idea how he gets around his actual enemies.
MEGAN: Also, I love how they're floating that to see what the backlash will be to it.
MOE: I will say this, too: I was at this thing, the other night, called "Shoot The Messenger," and before the evening took a turn for the, er, interesting, the comics had a funny segment about who registered Republicans think John McCain should pick as a running mate, with 45% choosing John McCain 2000 for his appeal to the independents and 35% choosing John McCain 2004 for his appeal with supporters of the war. Anyway, it made me laugh. That is all.

MOE: Hahaha see I still have a soft spot for McCain 2008 God bless him'
MEGAN: You know, my grandmother (who I saw a week ago) said that she had been a huge Hillary supporter and was really disappointed that she lost, but no way in hell would she vote for 2008 McCain. She said she thinks he's senile and an idiot, and that it's his creeping senility that makes him so different in 2008 than he was in 2000 when she would have considered voting for him. My grandmother, by the way, is 81.
MOE:

"You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran?" he said, then sang "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" before discussing what he considered Iran's serious threat to Israel and international security.

MOE: There is a storied history in the Tkacik household of cracking senile jokes as early as age 10, for which we ended up coining the blanket rejoinder "Yeah, grandpa." So like, I have a total weakness for the Grandpa humor. I could write a book of tasteless Grandpa jokes throughout history even. Anyway, just a thought. Not that I don't love the crowd here! I feel like the news is BORING today. Is it me?

MOE: Ralph Nader thinks Obama is "acting white" to hone in on "white guilt" which doesn't even make sense but white people are eating it up blah blah blah asbestos. Thought 1: I would really love to hear him discuss all this with Karl Rove. Thought 2: Ralph Nader is supposed to be Arab; where does he get off making payday loans and asbestos his thing???

MEGAN: Nader is Arab, though Christian Arabic. My question is whether he went and, like, looked at Obama's plans on predatory credit or mortgage fraud or Obama's agenda on agenda on poverty before he opened his maw and called him "half African-American" as an insult.
MEGAN: Oh, and payday loans are in there, too, Ralphie.

MOE: And Efraim Diveroli reminds Thomas Frank more of Jeff Spicoli than Andy Samberg. He advises Obama to launch a reverse Grace Commission to examine the "sordid history of privatization in all its details." That would, like, make my crappy hour every day. And yeah re Nader, it's not like he spent his political career in Vermont, move on…the antipathy he inspires from the old guard sanctimonious left is kind of amusing.
MOE: See, why can't all those California lefties be like these guys???

MEGAN: I could see you volunteering to staff that commission, dude. Did I ever tell you my dad's old job was "privatized" when Pataki took office in NY? They contracted out his whole department at the university to get people off the ostensible payroll (though mostly people were just shifted around into departments that were led by the friends of the Republican overseers), and in my dad's case, his boss went to the Powers That Be and showed them that the entire department, salaries, benefits and supplies, cost less than the outsourced gig and pointed out the contract they were about to sign would leave the university without technical support after 4.5 months if the number of calls remained the same. The PTB signed the contract anyway, the contractor met his service quota by the end of the 3rd month and stopped providing service at his initial rate, the university ended up quietly re-insourcing the contract and the Republicans got to claim "credit" for "getting" 10,000 people off the state payroll. Good times.
MEGAN: Re: the George Bush Sewage Treatment plant, a synchronized flush is a waste of water, people. Also, Republicans can't talk about wasting money renaming stuff after Republican Congressman now Libertarian Presidential Candidate Bob Barr's little crusade to name a building in every state after Ronald Reagan, which cost millions and millions of dollars. They can suck a ballot-initiative treatment plant and I can call it NATIONAL airport, fuck you very much.
MOE: Tell it to the Disgrace Commission! And yeah everyone calls it National Airport. Was it Chris Hitchens who was once interviewed and the whole time he spent blusterfully refusing to call it Reagan? Anyway that's something we can all agree on. Here is something else: Irish Catholics in the media really fucking how to embarrass themselves.

MEGAN: Um, wow, it's actually kind of hard to offend me but the person (people?) who wrote that have managed. Irish-Catholics are a "gang of kooks"? They have "the obsessiveness of their ethnic/religious culture"? Irish Catholics at NBC are "a gang of such perfect crackpots"? Patrick Buchanan is "the sane one of these three."?
MEGAN: Dude who wrote that: go fuck yourself.
MEGAN: For real.
MEGAN: With a spiky acid-tipped dick.

MEGAN: Instead of me just being angry, why don't we soothe my ruffled feathers by talking about Russ Feingold and why I really think he should've made Obama's short list. The man's a liberal's intellectual wet dream, a civil liberties god, etc.
MOE: Dude, maybe I am just too Irish Catholic, but I read that whole thing and thought - as I laughed — GUITY GUILTY GUILTY. All the oversharing! The demons! Using the romantic notion that the Irish Catholic are some scrappy disadvantaged minority in the Washington news media as an excuse to look out for the interests of Maria Shriver?? No, that's just kind of funny. But Maria Shriver repeating that story? As Kathleen Matthews said "All of us who are Irish say, Let's purge the dark side of our Irishnessand let's hold on to the good positive side of it." Which I think means get me a drink and I'll tell you the story of this one time a guy shaved off my pubic hair before we fucked and I thought it was really funny at the time because I was on Vicodin but not so much when it grew in. He was Catholic too, but Italian or Portuguese or something. Dark.

MOE: All of which is just to say.

MATTHEWS (6/16/08): So let me ask you about the ethnic piece of this. Why do Irish Catholics make some great cops, such great prosecutors? Michael, I mean, they are!
…
BARNICLE: I think it begins—as just Pat referenced, I think it begins with so many Irish Catholics of a certain age, of a certain generation, with their parochial school education, and they come to life later on with a missionary zeal for the truth because it begins in parochial school.

Maybe when I die you and Slut Machine can have an IM about being Irish and use some of these exchanges as a guide!
MEGAN: I used to have a Irish Catholic boyfriend shave my Bush regularly. But I don't think it had anything to do with us being Irish or him being Catholic or me being formerly-Catholic. I just don't like being called a kook or a wackjob because of the religion that my mother chooses to practice. Like we're all some crazy cult or something? I don't have a lot of lines, but that dude crossed it.
9:25 AM
MEGAN: I mean, a lot of NY and Boston cops are Irish. I don't know that I'd call them all great, though. It's more like a family business for a lot of people, like the military but with less moving.
MOE: It just appealed to my missionary zeal for the truth I guess. The "cooks" part was just a joke pretty much. Okay, so what else? Ralph Nader is also profiled in the Post today. Such charisma that guy:

When an aide relays a young woman's request to stop for a picture, Nader has had enough. "No!" he snaps, walking away. "It's always 'one more'!"

MEGAN: Such a nice guy, that Nader. Can you believe people hate him? They've just been brainwashed by the two-party system! It's not because he's an egotistical, self-centered asshole who doesn't care what actually happens to this country as long as he gets on the teevee.
MOE: Oh god and the media is doing its best to make me squirm today…like did the Obama campaign really have to release his iPod playlist? I mean, sure, it's cute when Meghan McCain does it but…wouldn't it have just been cooler if some girl had been using his same Wifi signal and clicked on "Barry's LimeWire Tunes" and then the world got to know the only natural way how Obama was listening to pirated Ludacris tracks?
MOE: Musical interlude

MEGAN: Well, he totally had to prove that 99 Problems wasn't on it! Also, if I find out that the shitty new Sheryl Crow album is on his playlist, I'm out.
MEGAN: Is is sad that I sort of fucking love Roll Out? The summer that song was out, I was working in Bethesda and driving to work, and I used to blast it in the car with the windows down singing along, even though Move Bitch is a better D.C. traffic song.

MOE: God I fucking love YouTube. And no, "Roll Out" is just fucking irrefutable. My friend Don actually has these games, "The Irrefutables" where you take one artist, and you say totally arbitrarily, "Okay, there are nine irrefutable Billy Joel songs, NAME THEM." And then what ensues is part-race, part-debate over whether "Always a Woman" is indeed irrefutable or whether you should be hanged for even suggesting as much. And then there's another game called "You think you're so cool, but you can't deny…" And that's where you take a cheesy song or artist and then the debate is over whether you can, indeed, deny the merits of, you know, "Maybe I'm Amazed."
MOE: Or in the case of the Obama playlist, "My favorite Mistake"
MOE: You can also do it with other things, such as you think you're so cool, but you can't deny…TIM RUSSERT.
MEGAN: This is probs an Irrefutable.
MOE: Dude that movie was fucking irrefutable. The Stones are a band you never want to get into the Irrefutables with though because everyone's drunk and you can't count that high. You have to break it up with bands like that, like maybe Stones songs set in train stations…

MEGAN: Sorry, I'm now totally distracted by the Stones, damn you
MOE: Also, a final thing, you can't get into Irrefutables unless you have a certain amount of distance from the artist. Like I wouldn't personally attempt it with Neko Case or obviously the Replacements or Pavement, and you probably wouldn't want to get into it with Barack Obama and Stevie Wonder and to that end fucking yes, it is summer
MEGAN: Or, we could bring it all back to Tim Russert, yet again, since I'm a narcissitic Irish Catholic.

MOE: So today Obama is a country club snob who sips a martini and alternately peddles a fruitcake version of the Constitution and makes snide comments about passersby while ignoring the beautiful date he brought for some new chick from out of town…ummmm is the whole campaign going to be this incomprehensible a tantrum? Why don't they go after the fact that his Christian outreach program consists of hosting things called "American Values House Parties"? That could at least make for some fun photoshop work.

MEGAN: Also, he wants to be President soooo bad, he's made up his own seal. But, to answer the question, yes, I think for the foreseeable future the campaign will just be one incomprehensible temper tantrum.
MOE: Do you think Karl Rove is trying to evoke a sort of Greg Germann image re Obama? Because Karl, I know you don't need me to tell you this, but it would be a lot easier to just play to the whole "latent racism" thing. But not nearly as fun!
MEGAN: People say they want clean campaigns, but they only pay attention and change their minds when it gets dirty, so it'll get dirty. Plus, you know, you've got pissed off PUMAs and the media is all sad that their golden boy refused to take public financing and so it's their disappointment that drives the coverage right now because they are literally 90% of the total population of people that understand what public financing is on a basic level and what it means that he didn't take it (and they're probably still mad that 99% of their viewers/readers didn't give a fuck about it).
MOE: oh my Goddd just when you thought David Brooks was sticking to his meds…

MEGAN: Whoa:

Every personal trait that led Bush to make a hash of the first years of the war led him to make a successful decision when it came to this crucial call [to have a surge]

I don't think that qualifies as "off his meds" as much as "on hard drugs this time."
MOE:

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.
Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence he never would have overruled his generals. Bush is also a secretive man who listens too much to Dick Cheney. Well, the uncomfortable fact is that Cheney played an essential role in promoting the surge. Many of the people who are dubbed bad guys actually got this one right.

Ha ha, yes, dubbed. Oh for the rest of the world to be so attuned to the selflessness and idealism at the core of all Dick Cheney's actions.
MEGAN: Dick Cheney's just a peach! He knows what he's doing!
MOE: Anyway, I must confess, I think of stability in Iraq right now and I think not necessarily "failed state" or "fragile state" but honor killings and virginity checkups and the like. In that vein I don't think of coal consumption and "a distinctly American problem, as opposed to that of oil" automatically but according to this guy, James Hansen, I should. Do you sometimes wish all these nebulous global warming based arguments for minimizing waste and reducing consumption would do like the ice caps and wash away to reveal to Americans the secret reason everyone's trying to get them to stop driving Hummers and living in exurbs and swilling bottled water and gorging on high fructose nuggets of deforestation and animal cruelty which is to say IT'S JUST BETTER FOR EVERYONE THAT WAY??

MEGAN: Oh, I meant to tell you, HuffPo went out and couldn't find a single economist — not even a right wing shill — that would say that McCain's drilling plan would lower oil prices in the short-medium term?
MOE: Oh but to get to a point I was trying to make earlier coal is burned widely in China and I wouldn't call it "counterintuitive" to want to put an end to that. And yeah if the fucking Fox News booker couldn't find one I don't know how they were supposed to.
MEGAN: Two-thirds of our energy in this country comes from burning coal, and although the coal we burn is of high quality (and thus less environmentally unfriendly in terms of SOx emissions, if I recall correctly) than the higher-sulfur coal which is burned in China, it still ain't good. Someone on MSNBC yesterday, I wasn't looking at the TV so I didn't see who, said that we should try to become the Saudi Arabia of coal. I thought it was a bad talking point.

MOE: Did you read all the latest on our boychik Efraim Diveroli and the ambassador and the coverrup etc.

The day after the November meeting, the embassy’s regional security officer, Patrick Leonard, wrote an assistant an e-mail message obtained by the committee: “NY Times just arrived today and might be doing a story on this and it might get ugly. Ambassador is very concerned about the case.”
When The Times published its article on March 27, it was quickly forwarded to embassy officials. In an e-mail message to several embassy officials, Mr. Leonard said that the article focused on the arms company’s dealings. “No mention of Embassy involvement — thank God!”

MEGAN: HA! Wow, dude, way to remember that email is forever.
MEGAN: I guess Efraim wasn't the only dumb one in that conspiracy.
MOE: Also: I don't know dick about dick, but HOWWWW again does the expanding influence of an Iranian-backed Shiite cleric who, by the way, isn't opposed to exploding his fellow Shiites by the dozen for the sake of stirring up hostility towards Sunnis = the troop surge is a success? Seriously, Megan? You know me, I don't know much about this stuff, and I never really did trust that David Brooks since he made up all those facts about how you couldn't find a $20 dinner in Franklin County etc., but seriously…
MEGAN: OMG THAT IS THE SAME DAVID BROOKS?
MOE: Um, earth to Megan??
MEGAN: My friend gave me that book for Christmas like 7, 8 years ago and it was soooo annoying I never read it.

MEGAN: Ok, sorry. Wow, that guy's more of an idiot than I thought.
MOE: Yeah the only good thing Brooks ever did to my recollection was this Slate "Breakfast Table" with Thomas Frank that I will dredge up sometime for old time's sake. We could role-play it on Crappy Hour, in fact, but I get to be Tom.
MEGAN: Man, why do I have to be the stupid one?
MOE: David Brooks wasn't as stupid then, maybe he was taking Adderall who knows.
MEGAN: I don't know, that book sort of made me want to gouge my eyes out (sorry, Ed).
MOE: But no on second thought I'd rather be Brooks because I think his writing style would be easier and more fun to emulate. I just have a hardon for Frank.
MOE: Bobos in Paradise?
MEGAN: Yes, it's literally sitting on my bookshelf right now, staring at me.

MEGAN: Ok, the back cover quotes are like a rogue's gallery: Christopher Buckley declares "The self-loathing yuppie is dead," which, obviously not because Brooks kept writing after this.
MOE: Oh shit, so this girl: just about plain looking enough that…okay but seriously dude, what's up with the jacket? Also, who fucking holds hands? Ah the mystery of that particular specimen of humanity. Which reminds me did you read that New York Magazine piece on how Bill Clinton's speeches were actually written on a more elementary reading level than Bush's? Well that wasn't what it was about exactly obviously it was about Obama but you get what I'm saying.

MEGAN: Aw, I hold hands. I like holding hands sometimes. It's better than talking sometimes, and you know I love talking.
MEGAN: The thing that's amazing about Bill Clinton is his ability to take a speech, like, 10 minutes before he gets it, read it, and then give it with the right tone and everything that it sounds like he just wrote it, but perfectly. I guess it would make a kind of sense that it would be relatively easy language, etc, because most people don't like when you use big words.
MOE: Haha Reagan didn't know the names of many of his speechwriters.... Poor Peggy and her XXXes... did you ever read how she never really got to say goodbye to Reagan in Political Fictions?? It's heartwrenching really. And speaking of …speaking, you ever read this presidential speech? I read it after reading a particularly impressive TR introduction to this book on, of all things, the Mongols. Right now however I'm a little too hungover to parse.
MOE: Oh shit, segue but Charlie Crist: comes off rather well in this Deborah Solomon interview, but why does he look like he raided Tim Russert's closet before the photoshoot?

MOE: Wait, that
MEGAN: Hrm, it seems like we might have wanted to pay attention to this part a little more carefully:

The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals.

MOE: Ah the beautiful and the lofty. Gotta bring back the lofty.
MEGAN: Well, we could just start by having some ideals, that would be good too.

MOE: Anyway The Man in The Arena was quoted by Richard Nixon in his resignation speech. Nixon who ushered in the end of the Meaningful Speech when he formally separated his speechwriting department from his policy analysis department, which sort of begs the question which department wrote his resignation but that, folks, doesn't appear to be on Wikipedia. Oh and Barack Obama referenced Man in the Arena when he brushed that dirt off his shoulder…

MEGAN: Well, speeches aren't about policy, they're about PR. That everyone before Nixon didn't know that was just their loss.
MOE: Well the point of the story was that style and substance are distinguished from one another to an unproductive degree these days in the political arena, which I would argue is actually the opposite of true these days, it's more like style is differentiated from "substance-esque style", but anyway sometimes a speech is just about sticking it to the haters and this is pretty awesome.

MOE: .

Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary.

MOE: Of course this speech is just one long scathing critique of the critics so maybe not that much has changed except that I didn't know "voluptuary" was a word.
MEGAN: Dude, and now I know why voluptuous is sort of insulting: "a person whose life is devoted to the pursuit and enjoyment of luxury and sensual pleasure." is the definition of that! So, like, if I've got curves, then it's all about luxury and sensual pleasure? Dammit, where's my luxury? Where's my sensual pleasure?
MOE: I sense a POST coming on!!! Dude, here's a good paragraph from that New York Mag story
MOE:

M
y relationship to Obama has been a complex cycle of enthusiasm canceled immediately by self-correcting cynical objections, canceled by self-correcting enthusiasm, canceled again by the cynicism, canceled by the enthusiasm. Is he really this good, I wonder constantly, or do we just need him to be? The speech that finally tipped my inner scale decisively toward belief was his least decorative: no refrain, little alliteration, no audience exploding at shouted catchphrases—just the man himself standing there solemnly, neutralizing the hysteria of a potentially career-killing scandal with the naked power of grown-up thought. With his race speech, Obama chose the riskiest path in American politics: to be conspicuously thoughtful. It would have been like Clinton, in 1998, giving a long contextualizing address to the nation about human sexuality, the international status of adultery, etc. It was one of the most encouraging political moments I’ve ever experienced.

MOE: OK now I really have to figure out what picture to use
MEGAN: Enjoy!

• Technology is not our friend today, so we'll make this short.
• Dana Perino used the word "puzzled" to describe the Bush Administration's reaction to Scott McClellan's takedown, which is funny because, as we "reported" earlier, he used the word "puzzled" to describe his reaction to President Bush's puzzlement over the fact that people would get upset about him starting a trillion dollar war for no actual reason. [AP]
• The shitty way economic growth begets famine. [NY Times]
• The thing no one mentions about this "Rock Band" game, which I have only experienced as an observer, is how listening to people playing it is sort of like that time Roseanne sang the national anthem, only for hours because it's so "addictive." [Salon]

• "The strange class war that defined Nixonland renews itself endlessly, with different leaders and different symbols, but always with the same dynamic: the striving squares revenging themselves upon the hip and the snooty. Backlash is a chronic condition now, and one of the reasons is that hipness is chronic, too. The '60s culture that infuriated Nixon and his followers is everywhere today, because hipness and 'revolution' have become a default mode of corporate speech. Youth had nothing to do with it: It happened thanks to the need for ever-accelerating novelty, reverence for a supposedly enlightened cyber-vanguard, and the great god 'creativity.'" Sooooo…basically the primacy of such resilient and defiantly unhip pop cultural touchstones as The Hills and American Idol paved the way for Obama? [WSJ]
• Not that he is necessarily a candidate! [Gallup]

• Well, someone is looking perky at 37. But who? Dodai likes this cover but I'm against stupid masks being used to conceal the mugs of celebrities I haven't seen enough of. I feel like the last I saw Claudia Schiffer was in her exercise video. [Telegraph]
  
• Celeb stylist Phillip Bloch got a little taste of Abu Ghraib when he got thrown out of a Kanye West concert at Madison Square Garden for hanging out with a bunch of teenage girls who were smoking pot. "They never asked for ID, never asked for my name. It was complete brutality," he says. [NY Post]
  
• "Remember, when our customer tightens their belt, it's generally ostrich or alligator." That's Neiman Marcus CEO Burt Tansky, just echoing Thomas Frank's sentiments on the ruins of the "man-made catastrophe that proceeded directly from the deliberate beatdown of organized labor and the wrecking of the liberal state." [Slate]
  
• Making one's rack look and feel respectable is hard enough without forcing bras to perform additional functions like transporting wine and crap, but leave it to the Japanese to invent a solar-powered bra that can charge a cell phone. [Reuters]

• "The Tailor is designed to be a resource for the man who has a keen sense of style and takes pride in his appearance, but doesn't take himself too seriously," said Bluefly Chief Executive Melissa Payner, on their new "store-within-a-store" concept "The Tailor," which she assures visitors will find to be "authoritative, not pretentious." And yes, she is talking about a website. [Crain's]
• What magazine will snag the Project Runway partnership now that the show is moving to Lifetime and ALL OF MEDIA has been upended? Well, Lifetime is co-owned by Hearst, which owns Marie Claire, which just signed ousted ELLE editor and Project Runway judge Nina Garcia, so...I mean, they could also give it to Cosmo... [WWD]

MOE: Thomas Frank: What exactly is he doing on the WSJ op-ed page? Does Rupert Murdoch have a soft spot for his eviscerations of late capitalism or is he friends with Peggy Noonan? Anyway, I want to have his babies etc. A long time ago I was dating a dude who not only remembered Valentine's Day, he bought me Commodify Your Dissent as a present. He is now married. (Let it be a lesson!) Anyway as presents go it was nice to see Thomas Frank in the papers and Bob Novak glowering in the corner.
MEGAN: Really, really working, If I'm ignoring you, it's because you're not talking about work and thus I am ignoring you.
MOE: Why is Novak always number one on the "Most Viewed List"?
MEGAN: I think Bob Novak lacks the ability to do anything but glower.
MOE: No dude he rules the most emailed list!
MEGAN: I think he hires those Chinese services that will click over and over to drive up your page views. They're really cheap, apparently.
MOE: Hey can you explain to me what Jimmy Carter is doing with Hamas?
MOE: I mean, I guess he is trying to broker some sort of piece but I haven't been able to click any of the links, mostly because of laziness.
MEGAN: Trying to maintain a sense of political relevancy? Fucking with Bush? Helping McCain win the election? Umm, overestimating his own diplomatic prowess?
MOE: Rick Santorum is on Fox News incidentally.
MOE: Warning America that Barack Obama is not a uniter.
MEGAN: Charlie Wilson was on MSNBC.
MEGAN: Like, the real guy, not Tom Hanks. But Rick Santorum is smarmy.
MOE: WHOA holy shit.
MEGAN: Also, I guarantee he's got dentures. And I would not hit that.
MOE: I just scrolled down on the Thomas Frank thing.

He will begin a weekly column each Wednesday in the Journal on May 14.

MEGAN: Wait, so, like, he'll have a weekly column starting in a month? I don't understand newspapers really.
MEGAN: Also, it is apparently a Tom Petty morning on MSBNC.
MOE: Yeah I guess but Thomas Frank? In the Wall Street Journal? Fuck...
MEGAN: Well, it makes more since then Bill "The Joker" Kristol in the motherfucking New York Times/
MOE: Ooooh, quick quiz! How many times since he won the nomination has John McCain been photographed wearing a flag pin on his lapel?

MOE: No takers?
MEGAN: But he doesn't have to because he's a war hero! And he's not a Muslim! And his middle name isn't Hussein! And he's not a Democrat, which means he is, by his very political affiliation, a patriot (if not a nationalist). Being a Republican is like having the American flag tattooed on your soul which is singing along to Proud to Be An American while your heart beats a military tattoo.
MOE: And being Barack Obama is a kitchen sink full of Yellow Peril!

MEGAN: Ooh! Ooh! Did you see? One of her foreign policy advisors, Richard Baum (who I'm gonna guess your dad intellectually opposes) resigned from Clinton's campaign because of her China-bashing?
MOE: Do you understand the subtle subliminal message Obama was trying to summon when he used that esoteric kitchen sink metapor? Because I think all the elitism made it fly over my head
MOE: Yeah Dad? I dare you to economically oppose this:

"Our reasoning was that while China certainly bears a share of responsibility for these (and other) problems, much (if not most) of the blame, at least on the economic issues, lies elsewhere," Baum wrote in an e-mail. He attributed the problems, at least in part, to America's high level of consumption, deficit spending and selective trade protectionism.

On the question of human rights, Baum said he and others in the advisory group believe the Chinese leaders respond better to persistent advice than "self-righteous finger-pointing aimed at publicly shaming and humiliating them."

MOE: So wait, the Pope...the spin seems to be that he's made all those pedophiles the centerpiece of a PR coup! But is it "just words" so to speak?

Anne Barrett Doyle, a founder of BishopAccountability.org, an online archive of the scandal, said that by condemning only pedophiles and not those who kept them in ministry, "it was a signal to us he will take no action. He came here to achieve a public-relations triumph and he did it."

MEGAN: Actually, that's what totally struck me about everything he said about the pervs. Unless I missed it, and I'll admit that I sort of stopped paying that much attention at some point, I didn't hear him say anything about the pedo-enablers, which were as much a part of the problem as everything. The fact that the Catholics has pervs among their ranks? Forgivable, presumably. The fact that Church leaders decided to fight the slow decline of men entering the priesthood (with the exception of my grad school friend Marcos, which, congrats!) by keeping pervs in the priesthood and moving them around every time they get caught molesting yet another young kid is the problem that strikes at the heart of the Church's relationship with the faithful, IMHO.
MEGAN: It's just another example of the kind of hypocritical, bad-stuff-enabling blind, overly-hierarchical patriarchy that drove me from the Church in the first place.
MOE: Why am I seeing so few quotes from the pope himself? What does he sound like? What did he say actually? Am I the only one who did not know Frank Bruni is a foremost chronicler of the abuse scandal?

MEGAN: I did not know that about Frank Bruni. I mean, I didn't hear a ton of him talking (I skipped listening to the Mass, obviously) but he has a very, very soft voice. Kind of high-pitched. German-mixed-with-Italian accent. Not a great public speaking voice, but perhaps he's more forceful-sounding in German or Italian.
MEGAN: And on the abuse, he said something along the lines of "it was really bad" and then he prayed with the survivors that stayed Catholic and met with him!
MOE: Why is it news that Obama thinks McCain would be better than Bush? Isn't that sort of like saying McCain knows more about foreign policy than Spencer Pratt?

MEGAN: Because, apparently, you can't acknowledge that some people in the other party are better than others or something.
MOE: Ugh did you read anything in the Times magazine? I just remembered it was the green issue. I am pretty sure green issues would do better if they made them some more synthetic color like neon orange. But anyway, the nation's railways are apparently expanding for the first time in ever. No way, right?! But it turns out their fuel efficiency for freight is 3x better than that of an 18-wheeler.
MEGAN: That's what the CSX commercial tells me, anyway.
MOE: Oh my god and file this under CNN reporters you could actually totally see walking through Central Park in a crystal meth haze.
MEGAN: I am sooooo sad about Richard Quest. Meth is bad, people, bad! Its use is correlated in the LGBT community with a rise in the incidences of STIs including HIV.
MEGAN: Also, it's nasty on the teeth. Oh, Richard. Please don't! Who else will I get my breathless Royals coverage from?
MOE: Well aren't we just all PSA today. Yeah, an increase in dumb behavior results in an increase in things that you get from engaging in dumb behavior. And yeah, if your teeth weren't British before...speaking of I have a case of Adderall mouth I should attend to.

MOE: Tomorrow's the primary. I think I'm voting in it. There's supposedly all sorts of horrible negative ads. Have you seen any of them?
MEGAN: You should totally vote in it. Are you going to Philly for it? Did you know I'm there covering it for Glamocracy?
MOE: Peggy Noonan thinks Hillary is finished and her campaign is officially in the red. Peggy loved a speech she gave but thinks she needs four more years to overcome the whole pants thign.

She'll need more than four years to shake off the impression she made in 2008. And this is how you'll know she's making another bid for the presidency. She will wear skirts. Gone will be the pantsuits that made her look like a small blond man with breasts. It's the new me, I wear skirts! Her first impulse is to think cosmetically. A long and weary life in politics has left her thinking this is the way to think.

MEGAN: I try not to watch political ads because I kill enough brain cells with drinking.
MOE: The Bush twins are apparently going to be at the 92nd St. Y tomorrow night, so I might come back up.
MEGAN: She looks like a small blonde man with breasts? Peggy, please.
MOE: I dunno

MOE: I kind of love how carried away she gets:

The other is elitism, a charge that clearly grates on him and unnerves his wife, who has a great deal that would be attractive in a first lady (intelligence, accomplishment, beauty) but lacks placidity, which is, actually, necessary. All first ladies, first spouses, should be like Denis Thatcher, slightly dazed, mildly inscrutable, utterly supportive. It is the only job in the world where "seems slightly drugged" is a positive job qualification.

MEGAN: Well, if you came down tonight, we could Crap on Philly tomorrow morning and you could be back in time for the Bush twins.
MOE: Hahaha you want to come to my polling place?
MEGAN: Wow, so Nooner's a Laura Bush fan? I prefer my political wives be actual humans.
MEGAN: That would be hilarious! Where's your polling place? I could take pictures of Democracy In Action!
MOE: It's at 12th and Federal, a South Philadelphia social club with a name that translates to "Home of the Crazy" I think...um...and speaking of, is all they're talking about on the non-Fox News the Weather Underground?
MEGAN: Sixties radicals play big with the still-think-we-coulda-won-Vietnam Fox News viewership. Pat Buchanan is yelling on MSNBC.
MOE: About the weather?
MOE: Michael Moore just endorsed.

I haven't spoken publicly 'til now as to who I would vote for, primarily for two reasons: 1) Who cares?; and 2) I (and most people I know) don't give a rat's ass whose name is on the ballot in November, as long as there's a picture of JFK and FDR riding a donkey at the top of the ballot, and the word "Democratic" next to the candidate's name.
Seriously, I know so many people who don't care if the name under the Big "D" is Dancer, Prancer, Clinton or Blitzen. It can be Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Barry Obama or the Dalai Lama.