In a letter to the editors - in which I am surprised she did not write "I want my country back!" - Kristen Atkinson writes things that make me snicker.

Dear Wonkette editors,

I posted a very serious article recently in Townhall.com about witchcraft in the White House, and later realized that your website had made a farce out of it.

"Very serious article" and "Townhall" are not two things that go together. That is like Cheetos and spaghetti noodles.

I saw that your staff and readers made a lot of extremely cruel comments about me and my story. Why are you people so rude? Does anybody take anything seriously anymore?

You haven't been on the internet long, have you?

Do you really, truly, seriously think it is OK for a president to use a forged birth certificate?

B...

Do you actually believe it is appropriate for a man who was raised a Muslim to pretend he is a Christian and go to a church for 20 years with an anti-American preacher?

I, N...

Do you really want a president who was brainwashed by communists since he was a child, up through university, to hate America to be our president?

G, O!! BINGO! I need a fresh score card! Oh wait, she's not done?

Do you think that it is fine if a family member of the president defiles the White House with voodoo?

I'm sure far worse has gone down in the Lincoln bedroom.

Don't you know what fate could befall our nation as a result of allowing Satanic forces to gather over the White House?

Umm...we join their side to ask for protection against Lord Voldemort? I'll trade that devil we don't know for the devil we do...

After 8 years of a president sent by God to lead the American people

Hmm...I'm not really religious but I do recall something about false idols? Did the golden calf thing have big ears?

and rescue us from the horrors of 911 and Islamo-fascists,

So we can resume screaming about a woman bearing her legs in shorts.

it now boils down to this? How incredibly tragic. You folks don't really seem to understand the extreme peril that our nation confronts.

Obviously, we're residing on different nations. Different planets even!

Stop making fun of me.

Or I'm telling my mom! GAWD!

Take off your blinders! Wake up!

Nah, I think you need to stop mixing up your red pills and blue pills.

I need a political detox, so I've decided to have a sing-along. Today's selection will be "Santeria," by Sublime:

(Wait a minute? Deebo's in this video?)

Sing with me!

[Michelle's Momma] Don't Practice Santeria
She Ain't Got No Crystal Ball
[Obama planned] a [trillion] dollars, but I
I'd spend it all
If I could find some [health care]...

Alright, y'all finish this up, I'm going to grab a Scotch.

What a week.

Is Barack Obama's Mother-In-Law A Black Witch? [Wonkette]
After 8 years of a president sent by God to lead the American people and rescue us from the horrors of 911 and Islamo-fascists, it now boils down to this?' [Wonkette]
Redpill [Wikipedia]
Santeria [Youtube]

Earlier:

They Think They're Mad About Healthcare?
Sarah Palin Calls Out Death Eaters to Deal With Fake Death Panels
Michelle Obama Seen Wearing Shorts - Newsreel at 10

MOE: Well you can do that here.
MEGAN: No, because I have a rule that I only tune into the Today show for NKOTB.
MEGAN: Oh, the McClellan interview, they've been replaying that ad infinitum on MSNBC.
MOE: Which I can't watch. I'm practically dead from some ailment with its origin in cigarettes and insomnia
MOE: Anyway we need to have a sincerity summit
MOE: A sincerity evaluation summit.
MEGAN: Ha, I was gonna say!
MEGAN: Also, wtf is up with us having attacks of insomnia at the same time?

MEGAN: I have to say, watching this interview, I'm far more convinced by him today than anything he did in his 3 years as press secretary. And he seems far less bumbling and stupid.
MOE: Yeah, he's convincing but um not slick.
MEGAN: If overly made-up. Oh, make-up artists, you failed him! (Although, I understand it may have been deliberately).
MEGAN: Oh, God, no, not slick at all. I mean, he says he still has a "great deal of affection" for GWB, he's obviously not particularly capable of slickness.

MOE: Oh man and I still haven't seen the most-buzzed video "Lohan's sapphic smooch"
MEGAN: It's on video? Also, why do we care that she's a lesbian or bisexual, if she is?
MOE: We care because SAMANTHA RONSON COULD TURN ANYONE GAY. And um... speaking of... did you see Anderson Cooper last night?

MEGAN: Whoa, I totally did not. Also, sniff, I remain sad that Anderson plays for the other team. Such a loss that one. Wait, is Samantha Ronson what happened to Anderson Cooper? That bitch!
MOE: Dude now I am going to have weird SamRonAnderson sex dreams. Oooh did you catch this passage?

A page later, he recounts what he perceived as a moment of doubt by a president who never expresses any. It occurred in a dimly lit room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a room where an injured Texas veteran was being watched over by his wife and 7-year-old son as Bush arrived.
The vet's head was bandaged and "he was clearly not aware of his surroundings, the brain injury was severe," McClellan recalled. Bush hugged the wife, told the boy his dad was brave and kissed the injured vet's head while whispering 'God bless you' into his ear.
"Then he turned and walked toward the door," McClellan wrote. "Looking straight ahead, he moved his right hand to wipe away a tear. In that moment, I could see the doubt in his eyes and the vivid realization of the irrevocable consequences of his decision."
But, he added, such moments are more than counterbalanced by deceased warriors' families who urge him to make sure the deaths were not in vain.

Uhhhhh, what was that Heller book…that became a cliche…describing situations like this…didn't that involve war?
The other person, or their software, refused the request.
MOE: Dude now I am going to have weird SamRonAnderson sex dreams. Oooh did you catch this passage?

A page later, he recounts what he perceived as a moment of doubt by a president who never expresses any. It occurred in a dimly lit room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a room where an injured Texas veteran was being watched over by his wife and 7-year-old son as Bush arrived.
The vet's head was bandaged and "he was clearly not aware of his surroundings, the brain injury was severe," McClellan recalled. Bush hugged the wife, told the boy his dad was brave and kissed the injured vet's head while whispering 'God bless you' into his ear.

MOE:

"Then he turned and walked toward the door," McClellan wrote. "Looking straight ahead, he moved his right hand to wipe away a tear. In that moment, I could see the doubt in his eyes and the vivid realization of the irrevocable consequences of his decision."
But, he added, such moments are more than counterbalanced by deceased warriors' families who urge him to make sure the deaths were not in vain.

Uhhhhh, what was that Heller book…that became a cliche…describing situations like this…didn't that involve war?

MEGAN: Can someone please ask those fucking families, then, what would be an acceptable outcome to justify the deaths of their children?
MOE: Dude who is ronaldpagan? Reading his comments alone is like reading…a book? A very long New Yorker piece about the shifting views regarding violence within the jihadist movement, but actually finishing it?
MEGAN: I don't know, about either RP's identity of the shifting views on violence in the jihadist movement. But can we please, please talk about the male liberal blogospheric hard on for Jim Webb? Between Attackerman and Ezra Klein, it's starting to get a little uncomfortable all up in here, especially as neither one of them talks to any degree about his shitty record on women's issues, like Kathy G does and nobody but Politico gets into the 3 obvious female choices, none of whom suck and all of whom have great records.
MEGAN: Because, really, Jim Webb? Is going to corral Hillary supporters? What we need on the Obama ticket is a thrice-married former Republican with a shitty history on women's issues just because he's got a military background? That's why McCain's neck and neck with Obama in the polls? Bish plz.
MOE: I preach general ignorance on this one. But it's cool Kathy G named her blog the G Spot. I do think Obama should pick someone with military experience. I have no fucking clue who that is though. Who do you think he should pick?
MEGAN: Well, A. I voted for Jim Webb despite his record on women's rights because I wanted George Allen out of office. I think, however, with Obama already facing charges of sexism he's not going to do well on the trail and the argument that the seat goes back to the Republicans is rather apt.
MOE: And I don't really care about this shit:

Stepping away from all that high-minded rhetoric, I'll add that, in practical terms, selecting Webb would be a slap in the face to the Hillary Clinton supporters. I'm not saying that Obama has to pick Hillary as veep (and indeed, I think that would be a bad idea). I'm not even saying that he needs to pick a woman.

But Hillary was the first woman to ever have a serious shot at the presidency, and she came so close. So the Hillary supporters (of whom, to be clear, I am not one) will feel frustrated enough that their candidate didn't win.

MEGAN: B. Wesley Clarke is an idiot.
MEGAN: Well, I agree with that. Maybe not the "slap in the face" part, but the people that are pissed at NARAL for endorsing Obama ain't gonna be pleased with him picking a guy who said the Naval Academy was a "horny woman's dream" either.
MEGAN: Hell, I won't be.
MOE: On B. we concur. But okay, of course you voted for Webb. George Allen was a tool machine. And egad, when did he say that? I'm just getting my coffee now.
MOE: I just don't want to talk about gender ANY MORE. We know Obama doesn't want his daughters to be punished with babies. ISN'T THAT ENOUGH?????
MEGAN: Egad, he said that in 1979, more than a decade before he defended the dudes who assaulted women at Tailhook. It's all the feminists' fault, you know, that those Great Men's careers were ruined by a little drunken tomfoolery that the women totally took out of context.
MEGAN: Also, keeps divorcing his wives.
MEGAN: I mean, whatever, obviously Virginia wasn't going to elect a Senator that doesn't make me slightly sick to my stomach with his opinions on things, and great that he's spent his term so far appropriately sucking up to the left wing that got him elected (hello, unions!) but, I'm sorry, he is a shitty VP choice. He doesn't bring Virginia, he doesn't bring the South, his presence as the stooge in the short chair doesn't counter McCain on foreign policy and, frankly, this election stopped being (for most people) about the war or foreign policy for the swing voters when the economy went in the tank and their houses got repossessed.
MOE: Just throwing out a link to an uplifting Frontline on Tailhook. Maybe I'll clip it later! So yeah, he is not the guy. I think Obama should choose someone with military experience in spite of what the election is about. The president has immeasurably more influence on a war than he does the economy.
MOE: But perhaps that line of thinking is a little audacious.
MEGAN: I just don't think military experience matters, cough, Bush, cough, Cheney, cough, Clinton, cough, Gore.
MEGAN: It's part of this whole fetishization of our military that we insist on engaging in.

MEGAN: Can somebody, please, show me one of the so-called Reagan Dems that voted for Hillary in Ohio, PA or West Virginia who is saying they'll otherwise vote for McCain (and not the pissed off women) who would be like, oh, hey, he picked a virtually unknown first term Senator from Virginia with some military experience for his VP, so now I'm totally voting Obama?
MOE: Well sure, agreed, but matters for what? Like, I think more than three highly uneventful years in the Navy might have done Rumsfeld some good; well actually, that point is rhetorical because being a HUMAN might also have done Rumsfeld some good. And, yeah, you've got it: the biggest reason Jim Webb is a bad choice is because no one really knows who he is. To depart for a second: here is a piece from the New York Review Of Books on the ideas of Obama's economic adviser confidante types. They are…um…less socialist than I'd like.

MEGAN: Well, at least they're not Keynesian?
MOE: Oh dude my BROWSER just crashed. I thought I was having a heart attack.
MEGAN: Dude, my other computer is totally fucked, I'm going to finish transferring files today and then reformat that bitch.
MOE: Did you check Dan Bartlett using our favorite SFW term for feces?
MEGAN: Wait, you can say "crap" on TV? It's not as good as Jon Stewart getting away with calling Tucker Carlson a dick, but it's pretty good. Yeah, the Administration has its PR efforts together pretty good on Scottie this week, from Dana's saddened "This isn't the Scott we know" to "total crap," they're running the gamut.
MOE: Okay, so what I would really like to know is 1. How did Scott McClellan come to the realization that this was the book he wanted to write 2. Was it an agent? It had to be, right? 3. Who was the ghostwriter? How long did they work together? I thought I might get some of that from this interview with his publisher but uh…not really. We learn that Mike Allen did, in fact, as he specified in his initial story on the subject, bought the book from a bookstore. I'm pretty sure he did the same thing with the Bernstein Hillary book. So Mike Allen has a "source" at Politics & Prose, who cares. How did this thing actually come about? Why don't we know this yet?
MEGAN: Well, I mean, someone on MSNBC had a good theory this morning (obvi not Joe Scarborough). I mean, dude spent 3 years defending the indefensible and looking like a doofus only to get ousted in 2006 as everything started to suck and he (apparently) got to realizing that everyone figured they could lie to him and he's never figure it out.
MEGAN: Does he have a cushy sinecure somewhere? No.
MEGAN: He's still on the lecture circuit, but everyone knows he's a shit public speaker that didn't know anything.
MOE: I hate how everyone's like, "unbelievable." Dude, have you ever lived with someone who just got fired?
MOE: Midlife crises have been known to spawn from less.
MEGAN: Dude, I've been fired. I sucked. I got drunk for the better part of a week, stayed in bed, and the dude I was seeing dumped me because I got fired.
MEGAN: So, I stayed in bed for like another week after that.
MOE: Yeah, now just imagine Nick Denton had spent six years brainwashing you!!!!
MEGAN: To the point where I still held great affection for him!
MEGAN: Then I'd have to turn on Noah.

MOE:MOE: Dude remember Scott Ritter? What's he doing these days? I don't usually buy this whole "You can't change your views after 30" silliness but that guy's epiphany was a little weird.
MEGAN: Apparently, he's a talk show commentator.

MEGAN: HA! He was also arrested in 2001 but never charged for trying to fuck an underaged girl he tried to meet on the Internet.
MEGAN: So, he either spend a lot of time on his computer or virtually none, I'm guessing.

MOE: can you check real quick if any of the other major newspapers (besides the times) had anything bad to say about mcclellan
MEGAN: Howie Kurtz entitled his column "Turncoat Time" and said "We all may have underestimated how he felt about being dumped in a White House shake-up."
MOE: Oh by the way how hilarious is it that Bush pretended not to remember if he'd had cocaine??? DUDE YOU REMEMBER IF YOU HAD COKE THAT IS THE POINT
MEGAN:

The question is inescapable: Now he tells us? McClellan had deep qualms about Bush using propaganda to sell the Iraq war, about being misled on Valerie Plame, about the president being in denial on Hurricane Katrina, and he utters not a peep of public protest until he's ready to sell his book?

MOE: OH like he was really going to miss that job so much
MOE: I'm just saying the Editorials though
MEGAN: Novak's column is, hilariously, about Clinton.
MEGAN: Um, weirdly, neither the WaPo, Boston Globe, LA Times has anything one way or the other thus far.

MEGAN: So, do you want to start with the slideshow of hotness that is Obama's personal aide? I mean, the article's nice, blah blah blah, but really, I think its purpose should just be to allow us to ooh and ahh over the dude.
MOE: Dude the hottest dude today is the Marine on the fucking front page of the Times and I fucking CAN'T FIND IT ONLINE.
MEGAN: This guy?
MOE: It should go with this story…do you see a picture there? Mine's not loading. I may have to scan. To support the troops, you know. Did you get through any of the New Yorker piece I sent on Fadl vs. Zawahiri?
MOE: And yeah, that guy! He just defeated the Taliban or something!
MEGAN: By the way, for the amusement of all, by Gchat banner ad is now this: "Dictionary.com Word of the Day - ribald: characterized by, or given to, vulgar humor."

MEGAN: Well, I think in the grand tradition of good friends, it's a great thing that you and I have very different taste in men. You can have your Marine, and I'll take the aide and we can both be happy!
MEGAN: Though I think we can all agree that any ladyboner can most easily be killed with this, which greeted me on the top of the New Yorker's site when I went to look for that article.
MOE: How was your weekend? I'm trying to think of some ribald conversations that transpired but 1. I don't really know what constitutes "ribald" when I just volunteered my fear that I had genital warts and 2. I actually ended up having a weirdly serious drunk conversation with a friend about God, and how he thought the Left was going to reclaim Jesus, and then I read half this piece about the jihad movement's ongoing internal debate over just how violent they really need to be and…uh…got a sunburn. Through a pair of black jeans.
MOE: It's…um…
MOE: Not Timid, that shot.
MEGAN: Yes. Not Timid is a good way of phrasing it.
MEGAN: Um, my weekend? Pretty relaxing, not much happened, you know, just had this little piece published in a minor news outlet.
MOE: So what's the deal? Do you want to read about Roger Stone while I examine the future of jihad?
MEGAN: I mean, want is probably a strong word since the article starts in a swinger club and one is thus forced to consider the thought of that man fucking, but yes, I'll do it as I think I'll garner more of an understanding out of that than the jihadist piece before coffee.
MOE: In the meantime China's not forcing fines or abortions on anyone who decides to get pregnant after losing kids to the earthquake. (To be fair: China stopped forcing abortions three years ago, I think, but it still happens sometimes?) Bill Clinton said a lot of idiotic things about how there's some vast elitist conspiracy to cover up the fact that Hillary is the inevitable next president and McCain asked Obama to visit Iraq with him, which I think is an excellent idea since he's not exactly safe here, as Hillary so saliently pointed out the other day.
MEGAN: Ok, well, now, my gag reflex has woken me up.

Not long ago, Stone went to the Ink Monkey tattoo shop in Venice Beach and had a portrait of Nixon’s face applied to his back, right below the neck. “Women love it,” Stone said.

Ummm, we're all women, right? Because I think we can all give this a resounding thumbs down.
MEGAN: Also, by the way, the fact that Reps Anna Eshoo and George Miller endorsed Obama really just means that Nancy wants to because obviously they only do what they're told. And while that phrase sort of pisses me off, I also sort of wish that Pelosi was that steely and puppeteery because then she might get more shit done.
MOE: Oh Jesus at this point any Democrat who endorses Obama should just not bother me with their headlines. I'm trying to focus on the brotherhood here. Also dude I have to get that pic of that marine who is totally hot
MEGAN: I'll need it, too, to wash the Roger Stone stench out from under my nostrils.
MEGAN: Things like this quote, from a Democratic strategist:

He once said to me, ‘Are you black? Are you Hispanic? Are you gay?’ When I said no, he said, ‘Then why the fuck are you a Democrat? You should be with us.’

This guy should be denied all access to pussy, seriously. Pussy boycott.

MOE: Um, someone in my house whose name will go unmentioned is eating one of your Christmas cookies.
MOE: That's neither here nor there.
MEGAN: The pumpkin ones, or the nutmeg ones?

MOE: Lawrence Wright describing the changes in Cairo since he taught English there in the seventies reminds…me of China without the economic growth:

When I lived in Cairo, the population was about six million. Now it is three times that size. The unbearable congestion reflects the ungoverned quality of life in the city; pedestrians plunge into the anarchic traffic, their faces masked by fright or resignation. The virtual absence of any attempt to impose order—in the form of street lights or crosswalks—is characteristic of a government that has no sense of obligation to its people and seeks only to protect itself.

One day during my visit, I went to Cairo University, whose buildings are practically crumbling from neglect. There are nearly two hundred thousand students, a good many more than there were when Zawahiri and Fadl studied there. Although the campus was quiet, the mood of the students was troubled, if subdued. Their professors had been on strike because of low pay; in Cairo’s poorer neighborhoods, riots had broken out over the cost of bread, and, in a middle-class area, residents had marched against pollution. The government’s response to the desperation had been to round up eight hundred members of the Muslim Brotherhood and throw them in jail.

MEGAN: Is it a bad thing that I snorted at the last sentence? Because if it is, I don't wanna me good.
MOE: I was going to blockquote another paragpraph but that feels lazy so I'm gonna summarize: Egyptians, like a lot of Middle Easterners, were psyched about 9/11 bc they thought it would force Americans to reexamine their support of their corrupt autocratic regimes and help eke out a middle path that embraced neither the status quo nor Islamism. Sadly that did not happen. Turns out we are not so good with "middle paths." Oh and btw Iran has nukes it's a grave and serious and urgent threat!
MEGAN: Oooh, way to bury the good tidbits! So, Charlie Black who is the Big Bad Lobbyist in McCain's camp, until very recently worked for the firm that Stone helped found, which was bought by the firm that Mark Penn helps run.

“So what that means is that Mark Penn is Charlie Black’s boss,” Stone told me. “And they said I was sleazy.”

MEGAN: Ha, the Egyptians thought that having he crap bombed out of us would make us re-examine our support of corrupt and autocratic regimes? I guess their knowledge of history is at least as bad as most Americans'.

MOE: Holy shit. Okay, so the Lawrence Wright story profiles some of the jihadist movement's foremost dissenters, namely a doctor named Sayman Imam Al-Sharif aka Dr. Fadl who met Ayman al-Zawahiri in med school in 1968 — hey! another awesome thing that happened that year, alert the boomer era hagiographers — but became estranged from him in the nineties and went off to practice medicine in Yemen and last May tried to call the whole thing off in a letter to a newspaper.
MEGAN: Oh, so, he's like an idealist? One Op Ed can stop a jihad or something?


9:45 AM
MEGAN: Pen is mightier than the sword?
MOE: Etc. etc. ... well, I guess he is like the William F. Buckley of Jihad, you know? The intellectual center of the movement apparently. And so he had a lot of followers. One was a guy named Karam Zuhdy. The rift sort of began in the nineties and Zawahiri tried to preempt it by holding a mass shooting in Novemeber 1997 in the ruins of Queen Hatshepsut’s temple and 62 people died. ANYWAY, Zudhy and his pals would minister to prisoners and try to get them to first renounce terrorism, then extremism, etc…gradually try and reform them etc. etc.
MOE: Most poignant passage so far:

Many of these Islamists had fantasized that they would be hailed as heroes by their society; instead, they were isolated and rejected. Now Karam Zuhdy and other imprisoned leaders were asking the radicals to accept that they had been deluded from the beginning. It was an overwhelming spiritual defeat. “We began going from prison to prison,” Ahmed recalled. “Those boys would see their leaders giving them the new conception of the revisions.” Ahmed recalls that many of the prisoners were angry. “They would say, ‘You’ve been deceiving us for eighteen years! Why didn’t you say this before?’ ”

Despite such objections, the imprisoned members of the Islamic Group largely accepted the leaders’ new position. Ahmed says that he was initially skeptical of the prisoners’ apparent repentance, which looked like a ploy for better treatment; however, several of the participants in the discussions had already been sentenced to death and were wearing the red clothing that identifies a prisoner as a condemned man. They had nothing to gain. Ahmed says that one of these prisoners told him, “I’m not offering these revisions for Mubarak! I don’t care about this government. What is important is that I killed people—Copts, innocent persons—and before I meet God I should declare my sins.” Then the man burst into tears.

MEGAN: Wait, so, like, there's Reconciliation in Islam, too?
MEGAN: Also, it's sort of heartwarming that they learned that killing people is bad, though!
MOE: Yeah well if they can get the memo maybe even someone like Doug Feith could reject his old…haha no.

MEGAN: Wait! Wait! Maybe the secret is that you have to go to prison? Because I could be down on running that experiment with good ol' Dougie.

MOE: I got till 10:30 incidentally and scanned that picture and I'm pretty sure not even I expected that 30% of the auto sales in California are made with home equity loans…especially since it would appear that California also holds claim to the market with the highest average price-to-rent ratio, a pretty good barometer of how inflated a real estate market is. A place in East Bay, California costs — or cost past tense, anyway — 51 times its annual rent. 42.5 in San Jose. That is, just for the record, insane.
MEGAN: Yeah, my sister lives out there and in Palo Alto these cute little bungalows that are barely bigger than my condo or your apartment are, like, $1 million and people rent them out and I don't see how you'd have the money to pay that kind of rent and not buy the place.

MEGAN: On the other hand, 18% of Americans believe the sun revolves around the Earth.
MEGAN: Oh, hey, btw, weren't you asked what happened to Aung San Suu Kyi last week? The junta's decided to extend her detention by another year despite laws there that you can't be detained without trial for more than 5 years. Apparently, her being free while they're fucking up the country more is a bad thing.

MOE: I guess we need to start this now. Peggy Noonan

And they were on the right side, connected to the one making the breakthrough, shattering the glass. They were going to be part of breaking it into a million little pieces that could rain down softly during the balloon drop at the historic convention, each of them catching the glow of the lights. Some network reporter was going to say, "They look like pieces of the glass ceiling that has finally been shattered."
I know: Barf. But also: Fine. Politics should be fun.

MOE: This could sorta be an R. Kelly song:

You want to say "Girl, butch up, you are playing in the leagues, they get bruised in the leagues, they break each other's bones, they like to hit you low and hear the crack, it's like that for the boys and for the girls."

MEGAN: My dad's nickname is Butch. Also, wtf is with the overwrought imagery today, Peggy? And why is there a crazy loud motorcycle idling outside my window?

MOE: I'm sure at this point, Peggy Noonan has a programmable robot supplying her with the day's overwrought imagery but that glass ceiling line seems like it might have come old school from her own pen…and I suppose we could talk about Hagee although if it's not newsworthy enough to occupy a minute on the fair and balanced network…
MEGAN: I love, by the way, that calling the Catholic Church the "great whore" and suggesting that Katrina was punishment for not being assholes to gay people was totally acceptable to the campaign, but suggesting that Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews to Palestine which is needed to bring about the rapture is the thing that gets Hagee the boot. Jews in Florida that don't like Obama? This one's for you.

MOE: One thing I wondered reading fucking Michael Gerson (why did I do that?) this morning is whether the Republicans, when they are skewering Obama's ability to win over these guys:

Tough hill-country men voted for her, men so backward they'd give the lady a chair in the union hall. Tough Catholic men in the outer suburbs voted for her, men so backward they'd call a woman a lady. And all of them so naturally courteous that they'd realize, in offering the chair or addressing the lady, that they might have given offense, and awkwardly joke at themselves to take away the sting. These are great men. And Hillary got her share, more than her share, of their votes.

…ever stop mid-sentence and say to themselves, "Oh yeah…Reagan Democrats…we sure rendered those guys economically extinct!"
'
MEGAN: Oh, wait, and while he's making his point he gets to make an offhand slap at all us snotty little feminists, too, who think that men that give up seats for us are terrible human beings. Actually, Mikey, I wouldn't take the seat because that guy's probably been on his feet all day (and I worked in a factory, so I know how much that sucks even when you're 19) and he's probably as old as my dad and I would think it rude of me to accept even though it would be nice of him to offer. And I'll bet my dad, a union member who occasionally attends Catholic church with my mom and lives in a rural area, voted for Obama.
MOE: Eugene Robinson quotes the Talking Heads today.
MEGAN: Is it sad that I saw that headline and my reptile brain started singing "What a Girl Wants"?
MOE: Oh sorry that quote was from Noonan, who was actually writing about sexism.

Where to begin? One wants to be sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton at this point, if for no other reason than to show one's range. But her last weeks have been, and her next weeks will likely be, one long exercise in summoning further denunciations. It is something new in politics, the How Else Can I Offend You Tour.

MEGAN: Um, ok, well, I take it back about Mikey.
MEGAN: But if she was actually saying that, I'm saying it to Peggy now. Also, the How Else Can I Offend You tour made me snicker a little.

MOE: "If only to show one's range" was pretty good.
MEGAN: So, is that what Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh have been doing? Showing their range?
MEGAN: Oooh, ooh, Parsley's got videos in which he's all spitting angry mad and bringing The Crazy, and they showed them just now on MSNBC, but I'm sure we'll never see them again
MOE: Oooh ooh tell me more about Parsley I'm too lazy to Google.
9:40 AM
MEGAN: He endorsed McCain like ages ago.
MOE: Also dude I think Coulter showed some range with the Hillary thing. Conservatives really do fucking hate McCain. Limbaugh was just being himself. Also a reader wants us to discuss Hillary as VP. Um…what's to discuss: maybe a "dream"…but not a pleasant one
MEGAN: He's totally crazy, and McCain just rejected him and his endorsement.
MEGAN: Oh, for Chrissakes, why would she give up a Senate seat? I get that Bill wants to be the VP's husband or something because he'll be more prominent and he lurves him some Executive Branch (having never served in the legislative one), but that would be stupid, to give up a lifetime Senate seat for VP. Al Gore showed it's no guarantee to the Presidency

MOE: It sounds horrible and bad to live through, like a piano fallen through a roof or something, but then there's also the part of me that perceives the election through some internal amiable-but-reflexively-anti-"Liberal" angry white man Obama Needs To Win and he just hates it on basic "What the shit, a black guy running with a woman now? What are we trying to prove here?" terms. It's illogical, because she's actually just about the most qualified candidate and on some level not picking her to be VP might be sexist, but it's also not why she would be a nightmare running mate.
MEGAN: She would be a nightmare running mate because she wouldn't be a running mate, she'd garner as much if not more media attention. It would be a co-ticket, or certainly perceived that way, and I can't imagine her wanting to be second banana so I can't think that she'd allow herself to play that role (and good for her).
MEGAN: And, by that role, I mean, she wouldn't allow herself to recede into the background even a little bit.
MEGAN: And she shouldn't, and she shouldn't be asked to. She'll be far more powerful in the Senate than she'll ever be as VP.
MOE: Hahaha McCain just promoted Obama to "young man" from his previous status of "boy."
MEGAN: Oh, good, someone finally explained to him that other people get the racist implications of that. Congrats, McCain staffers.

MOE: Well some "old hand" named Jim Johnson is apparently running Obama's veepstakes but you didn't hear that from me:

Democratic officials on Thursday discussed Mr. Johnson’s role on condition of anonymity because Mr. Obama had demanded that the process be kept secret and they did not want him to know they were talking about it. Advisers to Mr. Obama declined to discuss the search or any elements of the process.

Disciplined campaigns are totes boring.
MEGAN: Hahaha, I love how they're like, don't tell him we're talking about him, press!! I wonder if those "Democratic officials" are the same ones that inspired the story about Bill wanting Hillary to get it...

MOE: I meant to bring it back to the Jews again but now I've gotta post this fucking thing:

If Jews do flock to John McCain this fall, Obama would be in some trouble (assuming, of course, that Hillary Clinton doesn't win the nomination through a miracle more impressive than the one commemorated every year at Hanukkah); a strong majority of Jewish voters has gone Democratic in presidential elections since 1924. Jews have favored the Democrat in 21 straight presidential elections, and by an average margin of 3-to-1.

MEGAN: Well, but we've never had a Muslim running before.
MOE: WHAT I WAS GONNA SAY! Ooooh guess what percentage of Florida is Jewish?
MEGAN: Well, since my grandparents moved back to upstate New York, can I say 100?

MOE: Five.

But a Gallup poll last month — in the midst of the Wright drama — found Obama beating McCain 61-32 among Jewish voters, a far wider margin than among the population as a whole. While that's lower than John Kerry's 76 percent margin among Jews (and 5 points lower than the 66 percent Hillary Clinton got in the same poll), Obama's campaign isn't worried about making up the difference by November. "If we're beating McCain 2-1 after 'Obama is a Muslim' scares and a month of Rev. Wright, then we're doing pretty well," one aide said.

MEGAN: So he needs to get 75% of 5% of the population to win the state or something? Jesus Christ, people, this is what happens when nobody votes, stupid shit like this matters.

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

MOE: Did you check out Geraldine Ferrarro giving Shep Smith a beej? How could someone be SO HYPER AWARE OF anything even remotely construable as "sexist" still be saying things like "black journalists who are Obama surrogates like Bob Herbert." Because yes, Bob Herbert is so simpleminded, so singlemindedly focused on electing one of "his own" that — oh yes, and the only reason he has his New York Times platform is surely tokenism in the first place — why would a progressive white woman even read him to begin with?
MOE: You know he doesn't have anything worth saying about misogyny

MEGAN: Like Shep wants a beej from a girl...
MOE: Dude
MOE: I'm shaking from anger.
MEGAN: Also she wants an "independent group to do a study on media." Like Media Matters?
MOE: Yeah maybe they should check out that Obama surrogate Bob Herbert who hasn't had anything nice to say about Hillary in the past six months because he's so sexist

MOE: OH EXCEPT WELL THIS FIVE MONTHS AGO

If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America

MEGAN: Also, so, can we check her crazy hair? She's got a tuft sticking up in the back. How did that happen?
MOE: Okay, I can't handle it anymore, let's just have a moment of silence for Ted Kennedy's brain. I had dinner with Jennifer Gerson last night and she said that as an intern for MSNBC she was once charged with escorting him up a platform and he was outraged to find that he had to climb steps. "There were literally two steps," she said. My kind of septugenarian! Although…not if I stay in this apartment!!
MEGAN: Well, I think his knees are shit. But, yes, it doesn't surprise me. But brain cancer sucks. I'll bet he thought his heart would get him.
MOE: Okay, in another window SinisterRouge is calming me down. (Imagine if Geraldine Ferrarro was a commenter! She'd get put on notice, and then she'd just go crazy and her last comment would be something like "Hang that darkie from a tree!" and then she'd claim it was a joke and then no one would pay attention to MY brand of "controversy" anymore.)
MEGAN: I love that she's the one calming you down today. I mean, Ferraro just makes me sad. I'm sad that's she's turned into this caricature of a nasty old woman whose racism shows and who is so concerned with her supposed victimhood that she dismisses the claims of others. She was the first female candidate for the vice presidency of the United motherfucking States of America and she's stomping all over the legacy of that. I realize that not everyone reading this would remember, but I remember 1984 and I remember thinking it was, like, totally normal that a woman be running and then realizing it wasn't and thus how cool she was. Only now she's not cool. So I'm more saddened than outraged.

MOE: Uh, in other news Hillary won Kentucky by a 30-point margin. Um, dumb question: are there no black people in Kentucky or something? What's up with that? Also oil went above $130 a barrel, another new record.
MEGAN: I have deliberately avoided looking at gas prices while in New York, a situation helped by the fact that the only times I've passed any have been in a cab and I've been intoxicated. I'm sure they're high.
MOE: A friend of mine asked me the other day why oil prices were so expensive and I was like "1. China 2. India 3. The market tends to overreact 4. no exploration or real incentive for exploration." But I forgot to add "the dollar." And seriously regarding the exploration thing I'm not sure whether that's still true.
MEGAN: Also, Obama barely campaigned in Kentucky. I think despite his crazy fundraising skills, he's conserving his money at this point to get through the convention and Pennsylvania sort of proved that sometimes its just a waste. He doesn't need Kentucky, so he didn't spend so much to make that margin tigihter.
MOE: Kentucky is only like 7.5% black.

Gross reports having students of his at the University of Kentucky tell him they had never seen or talked to a black person before coming to Lexington, a college town of nearly 300,000 people. In some areas of Kentucky, Gross says there's perhaps only one or two black families there.

MOE: Also Kentucky declared neutrality during the Civil War…
MEGAN: I actually met someone once in her forties who had never seen a black person until she left her state. It was, um, interesting. I'm amazed it still happens.
MOE: Though it was a slave state and in the early 1830s slaves comprised a quarter of the population. They just never had much of a plantation economy…Is it possible my perception of Kentucky has been skewed because some huckster from Indiana decided to dress in "stereotypical Southern gentleman type clothing to promote his restaurant chain"?? Um why yes it may be!
MOE: Oh in other news Hezbollah has veto power over everything the Lebanese government does now.
MEGAN: Oh, well, that's great. I love how having the power to scuttle stuff is important.

MEGAN: Kentucky was an okay state. I drove through it once. It was sorta pretty, plus, obviously, bourbon.
MOE: OBVIOUSLY
MOE: So, here's something else. I was on the train yesterday with this lady who was really nice and let me use her phone. Her computer said "Property of the World Bank" and she told me how she was coming up to New York to present a new survey on economic development and by George it would appear she was not pulling a fast one on me! And check this:

But departing from free-market orthodoxy, the panel also said that governments had a far greater role to play in development than was recognized in the markets-are-king 1980s and 1990s. To boost growth, the panel urged developing nations to spend heavily on infrastructure and endorsed, with some reservation, government subsidies to build local industries.

MOE: You don't say!

Among the findings that are bound to stoke the most controversy: democracy isn't essential for growth. Autocratic governments that allow "vigorous debate" internally on economic policies are sufficient, the report said. Free trade isn't a prerequisite either. Some fast-growing economies kept barriers high to imports, even as they promoted exports, the report said.

MEGAN: Oh, wait, someone noticed China! Cool!
MOE: Well yeah and who did China notice? Why…Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia and also Thailand!
MOE: But what I really love is this:

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers praised the commission's focus on government-led growth policies, but said its emphasis on economic winners didn't fully take into account how industrial policies deepened corruption in many countries and failed to ignite growth there. "It's like looking only at those who made fortunes in the stock market without diversifying their portfolios" to figure out the best way to get rich, he said.

MEGAN: Indonesia's kind of a hot mess, though, and has oil/natural gas, so I think that's a little different. But otherwise, I agree with your list.
MOE: Um, actually, looking at the United States economy is what that is like.

MOE: Well yes, Indonesia is an incredible mess, which is why China managed to grab so much manufacturing business from them as Suharto's government crumbled.
MEGAN: Indonesia is one of those places I'd really like to visit. I don't know why. I wish I was like my friend Tim, who parlayed a Masters in theology to a job as an investment banker, saved a shitload of money and bailed on life to travel the world for a year. I am really jealous of him right now, and not just because I keep looking at his flickr account.
MOE: Which speaks to Larry Summers' point, but the fact is that Korea and Taiwan both paid close attention to Japan's climb up the "economic value ladder" into more sophisticated manufacturing. When you manufacture computer chips, for instance, which are by definition very small and shrink in size every 18 months, the cost of sending them down the Insatiable Consumption Esophagus toward the US is not that great. So your population can eventually see much more of the cost! But semiconductor plants are incredibly expensive and sophisticated to operate, so while they're harder to transplant in other countries — though the Taiwanese have certainly been doing just that in China despite the fact that you still can't get a direct flight between the two countries — they also require a lot of PLANNING. INVESTMENT. An educational strategy.
MOE: And then! Much to the chagrin of shareholders…semiconductors are a highly cyclical business! So while the demand keeps growing, sometimes you have to sell them at a loss!
MOE: It can be painfully low-margin…again something the market doesn't reward!
MEGAN: Oh, God, stop, visions of grad school case study horrors dancing in my head!
MOE: BUT. Your countrymen will thank you!
MOE: Sorry, it just completely kills me that you mention how we need better economic and industrial planning in this country to some people and they act like you're fucking advocating the next Great Leap Forward.
MEGAN: I mean, the problem with industrial planning is that you take the concept, throw in 20,000 businsess lobbyists and 535 Members and Senators and you come up with a bullshit plan that won't help anyone that really needs it and will help whomever has the political capital to get help. Ahhh, democracy.

MOE: I gotta get coffee but apparently David Brooks does a 180 on Obama re the farm bill today
MEGAN: cool. i hate the farm bill
MOE: Well speak of the devil! Does David dig the 22-year-olds? Or do you think this young lady was applying for a job?
MEGAN: Do you, can you, apply for a job in white knee high boots? I mean, other than as an actual go-go dancer?
MOE: Kids today totes! She probably wanted to be his research assistant. Or maybe he was just encouraging her not to pursue the wrong way. So should we talk about Iran and Syria and North Korea…just how "serious" are these places anyway?
MOE: We should also maybe talk about oil.
MOE: I'm going to get coffee though I'm off my meds today.
MEGAN: The oil on my face from all the greasy fucking food I ate last night to make up for not eating all day (hello NY Jezzies!) or the black shit in the ground?
MOE: Vito Fossella abandoned his bid for re-election "in a bombshell announcement that brings the curtain down on one of the most storied careers in Staten Island political history," says the Staten Island Advance. They should enlist Method Man to run. I don't even think he has any secret love children.
MEGAN: "Storied career?" Dude, can we talk hyperbole? He wasn't even a Committee chairman. The only thing that's gonna be legendary about his career is how it ended, which is balls deep in his mistress with his illegitimate child in the other room and his wife and other kids sound asleep in New York.
8:35 AM
MOE: Yeah so I have coffee and my Acela ticket now and David Brooks is totally right, the Farm Bill is horseshit, and the only thing I would add to the statement "as the number of small, organized factions in a society grows, the political culture becomes more divisive, the economy becomes more rigid and the nation loses vitality" is that the organized factions don't have to be as small as agriculture. And speaking of which, $307 billion is an astonishing number.
MOE: The question is, I guess, whether McCain get Americans to see in agribusiness the same fatcatism they see in Countrywide Financial and Exxon and Jimmy Cayne.
8:45 AM
MEGAN: Well, I don't have coffee yet but if my nose does not deceive me, my friend whose house I'm at in NY has made me some for when I get done here and that's one of 100 reasons why he's awesome. Also, this farm bill is additionally a huge fuck you to the WTO and the developing countries that stymied progress in the Doha Round in order to achieve progress in terms of reduced subsidies. Fuck you, African nations. Fuck you Bangladesh. Kiss our collective asses, Brazil and Argentina. Enjoy that global food shortage thingie and that poverty thingie because we wanted more market access for our artificially cheap foodstuffs.
MOE: Hey, look, the EU is rethinking its own farm subsidies!Theirs are only $75 billion annually though. What if we proposed to just cut our bill down to Europe's level?
MEGAN: Actually, at the WTO, we wanted them to cut theirs more than we cut ours and vice versa. No, seriously.
MOE: That sounds like something we would do! And here's an unfortunate news analysis to which Drudge is linking that credits the increased use of ethanol to the breaking of our foreign oil addiction.
MEGAN: As though ethanol has to come from corn.
MOE: Total digression but GOP Senator Bob Corker rejected/denounced the Michelle Obama ads.
MEGAN: Same way he did the Harold Ford/white girl ads no doubt.
8:55 AM
MOE: Apparently ethanol consumes a third of the US corn output. Just one reason USDA economists are expecting a 5% increase in food prices this year…ugh, this topic is so obvious and boring though. Ethanol subsidies = BAD IDEA. There is just no good alternative case to be made there! While he tries to figure out how to articulate a plan for The Rest Of The World That Resents Us, just where is the harm in adopting the one position that happens to both be held by the Republican front runner and the world's poor??? I guess it's in alienating his Iowans. I wonder, though, how often something like "unwavering support for agribusiness welfare" came up during those caucuses.
9:05 AM
MOE: Especially when four out of every five Americans want the country to move in a different direction!
MEGAN: Also, like, we could eliminate the ethanol tariff, which is really high and effectively keeps out ethanol imports from places like Brazil, where it is not made from corn.
MEGAN: We could also rejigger the current subsidies to reflect the chemical reality that one can make ethanol from things other than corn, and push investment in that direction rather than encouraging the construction of more corn-based ethanol facilities but, yeah, Obama's got to win Iowa, so...
MOE: Annoyingly, ethanol is nowhere to be mentioned in today's Bob Herbert "Let's Be Serious" column. But thanks for alerting us to this:

The Houston Chronicle did a long takeout on Sunday on the suicide in March 2007 of an Army recruiting sergeant, Nils Aron Andersson — just one day after his marriage to Carry Walton. Sgt. Andersson, 25, had spoken of the many horrors that he had encountered in Iraq and was deeply depressed. He shot himself while sitting in his pickup in a parking garage. Distraught, Ms. Walton bought a 9-millimeter handgun at a sporting goods store the next day and killed herself.

MEGAN: Hooray for a lack of a waiting period in Texas.
MOE: Before I try to summon the will to check out that uplifting story I'd like to draw attention to an obvious but important Page 1 story in the Journal about how the American auto industry's manipulation and systemic inflation of demand via aggressive rebating, employee discounts, predatory lending, large-scale offloading to employee fleets, over the past ten years has finally been deemed unsustainable! The American automakers who embraced waste as a business model for so long are now finally accepting that auto demand might never fall back to where it was…maybe because it was never really "demand" in the first place!
9:20 AM
MEGAN: Wait, but I liked 0% financing. Goddammit. Does it mention that what is also sustainable is negotiating with the UAW to determine production levels years in advance is also probably a bad idea? Because that's not exactly market forces, people.
MOE: Well right but market forces, at least the way we think of them, absolutely DO NOT GOVERN DEMAND in this country. It's one of my pet peeves. There's a very good Harper's reading this month further probing this.
9:25 AM
MEGAN: Well, but what are market forces and what is demand? I mean, they do to a degree, it's just not the absolute that our college professors and some on the ideological right think it is (or know it's not but try to tell us it is).
MOE: Right and the problem with the ideological left is that they just don't engage with the issue enough.
MEGAN: I think because it's too complex to really explain to people. I mean, hell, I TA'd economics in grad school for other grad students and getting them to understand microeconomics was like pulling teeth sometimes and they were all smart people. It was like this insane mental block for some of them to the point I truly wondered if I was, like, speaking German and not noticing or something.
9:30 AM
MOE: Well I don't even understand microeconomics. I think it's fucking stupid. Macro is where it's at.
MOE: hahah I being, of course, an authority on such matters.
MOE: I got a C
MEGAN: Micro is like a really simple way to start understanding how the stock market works at a very basic level. I assume you work up from there but I didn't because I wanted to get a real job. HAHAHAHA.
MOE: Hey here's Jonathan Chait saying we should ignore everything John McCain and Barack Obama say about foreign policy, which I'm sort of down for.
MOE: Did you happen to catch George Will on Sunday btw?
9:35 AM
MEGAN: I mean, why don't we just all accept that every policy proposal ever made by a candidate is prefaced by "In a perfect world, where I and I alone got to decide, we would do this...." and ends with "But it's not a perfect world, so what eventually happens will look nothing at all like this but it won't be my fault but vote for me because I had a good idea."
MOE: (Oh and speaking of economics not being a real job Floyd Norris slyly agrees with you:

According to the C.P.I. numbers, gasoline prices in April were 13.7 percent higher than the were in December. Or at least they were before the seasonal adjustments were factored in. With seasonal adjustments — the numbers that are prominently reported — gasoline prices were down 1.6 percent.
I have not troubled to try to figure out how this could be, but Robert Barbera, the chief economist of ITG, gathered data and constructed spreadsheets. He figures that the May number, seasonally adjusted, will be up 5 percent for the month. Presumably, those sounding comforting words about inflation now will have less to say then.
Only a Ph.D. in economics would think he needed to spend a couple of hours to prove that gasoline prices are not declining these days.

MEGAN: Dude, we get to "seasonally adjust" what things cost?
MOE: Well certain things always cost more in certain seasons and certain months are more consumptive than others so…I can hazard a guess as to why this was but the point was just that data ≠ reality in a lot of areas in economics, which is scary
MEGAN: Yeah, like everything other kind of reality, economics is just a subjective reality. Shadows on the wall, etc.
MOE: lol you ALWAYS FALL BACK ON THE GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
MOE: I'm on to you lady
MOE: You probably have a secret Nietzsche sig file of your own
MEGAN: Yes, but it's in the original m'fucking German.
9:45 AM
MEGAN: Because that's how I roll. Quoting dead white German guys. I'm sofa king cool.
MOE: I am bringing this back to George Will and baseball btw.

In America, however, nothing ages as fast as novelty, and efforts to encourage Clinton to pack it in are heartening evidence that the novelty has worn off: The female candidate is like all other candidates. This is what equality looks like — life as an equal-opportunity dispenser of disappointments.

MEGAN: I love how George Will's theories on life are so similar to my own. He just forgot to add "never-ending" there at the end.
MOE:

When, in 1975, Frank Robinson became major league baseball's first African American manager, with the Cleveland Indians, that was an important milestone. But an even more important one came two years later, when the Indians fired him. That was real equality: Losing one's job is part of the job description of major league managers, because sacking the manager is one of the few changes a floundering team can make immediately. So, in a sense, Robinson had not really arrived until he was told to leave. Then he was just like hundreds of managers before him.

MEGAN: Well, unless you get fired for Working While Black. Then it is actually not equality.
MOE: What I love is that it seems that Hillary's own staff would agree. Sexism: why, they don't blame it for sinking her campaign either! Indeed, because they are too busy blaming one another. But Geraldine Ferrarro's reality is different..
MEGAN: Geraldine Ferraro should be president of the society of women who are so damn angry that their candidate didn't win that they'll fuck over the rest of us out of spite.
MEGAN: Also, ahem, it seems like they're trying to blackmail the superdelegates and the remaining states and shit, which is not a good tactic.
MOE: Well that society shares a reality of its own. It's just not mine. Or George Will's. And any society that claims us and George Will as a member is not a particularly exclusive one
MEGAN: I mean, I'm happy to create my own reality, I just realize that I have to function in the collectively shared reality.
10:05 AM
MOE: And I'm out with this, because I didn't want it to go unnoticed:

Is Lebanon viable anymore?" he asked. "Is Lebanon really viable?"
"Frankly, 40 years of my life have been wasted. Fifteen years of civil war, 15 years of Syrian domination and now we've come to something worse," he said, growing angry. "I've lost 40 years of my life in this stupid country. It really is a stupid country. I have nothing good to say about it anymore. I'm disgusted by what's taken place."
He dragged on his cigar, as he sat in his stately villa in Zqaq al-Blatt, enveloped by a scourge of concrete cluttering the neighborhood. Light reflected faintly from stained-glass windows of red and blue, resting under graceful Levantine arches.
"I wish I was born in Syria. Or that I was born in Egypt. Can you imagine living in a country that has gone through 30 years of this? What kind of country is this?"
He shook his head, his anger giving way to dejection.
"There's something wrong here," he said, "something wrong."

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOE:

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

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

Like Barry, Mara has dabbled in youthful radicalism. Here, her "the only Bush I trust is my own" pose.

In recent years she has been accused of being too refined, elitist.

But that belies her red-blooded agrarian roots!

And it's a little too, uh, "raw" for us but here she displays her willingness to bend over backwards (or anyway, bend over) to serve the people! (What are those people doing there anyway?

Former Topless Model Joins Berlusconi's Cabinet As Equalities Minister [Daily Mail]
Berlusconi's Pin-Up Ministerin [Stern]
Related: Italiy Embraces Silvio, Again And Again [Economist]

MOE: I'll be back in 10. If you have any ideas about what the fuck we should talk about (besides IT'S FRIDAY) I would be stoked
MEGAN: This?
MOE: I actually did read that. It reminded me of BangieB.
8:30 AM
MEGAN: Oh. My. God. Apparently, the New Kids on the Block are performing live at Rockefeller Center today?
MEGAN: Right the fuck now!
8:40 AM
MEGAN: This may be the first time I've ever seen this many women our age in one place since I went to see the anniversary of Dirty Dancing. Also, there's no "background" track and they, um, kind of suck and are playing a medley. No, I take it back, Joey's pretty good. The background dancers outfits were pretty inexplicable except that they looked like they were from when NKOTB was popular. [This mini recap provided possibly solely for the benefit of my childhood friend Caroline]
MEGAN: Wow, Marky Mark is the much more talented brother.
MOE: Um understatement sorta? Although did you ever see that VH1 special where Donny was talking about how he thought he was Liberace? It was kind of priceless.
MEGAN: No, but now I totally want to. Also, that was 2.5 minutes of my life I will never get back.
MEGAN: Ok, so, other serious stuff? The people that owe the copyright to Curious George are going to due over those monkey T-shirts.
MOE: To due?
MOE: haha
MOE: Kidding!
MOE: Sorry I'm still trying to locate my keys.
MEGAN:

"We find it offensive and obviously utterly out of keeping with the value Curious George represents," said spokesman Rick Blake. "We're monitoring the situation and weighing our options with respect to legal action."

The headline Wednesday on Drudge, from Politico, said, "Republicans Stunned by Loss in Mississippi." It was about the eight-point drubbing the Democrat gave the Republican in the special House election. My first thought was: You have to be stupid to be stunned by that. Second thought: Most party leaders in Washington are stupid - detached, played out, stuck in the wisdom they learned when they were coming up, in '78 or '82 or '94.

They never guessed, back in '86, how government would pay off! They didn't know they'd stay! They came to make a difference and wound up with their butts in the butter. But affluence detaches, and in time skews thinking. It gives you the illusion you're safe, that everyone else is.

The party, Mr. Davis told me, is "an airplane flying right into a mountain."

Could the party pivot from the president? I spoke this week to Clarke Reed of Mississippi, one of the great architects of resurgent Republicanism in the South...Is the Republican solid South over?
"Yeah. Oh yeah." He said, "I eat lunch every day at Buck's Cafe. Obama's picture is all over the wall."

MEGAN: So, want to talk a little about the hotness quotient of Obama and Edwards on stage together? Because it was hot. I actually watched the speech, and usually I just listen while typing on my computer but Edwards looked so damn cute. He had this look on his face when he got on stage like, whoa, this is a big rally and these people are screaming and I'm not used to it but I think I like it.

MOE: Yeah, I think I sufficiently reveled in that yesterday evening. Apparently it cut off a discussion of my friend Ben's book on NPR. I'd love to hear what Elizabeth has to say though. It's so crazy to think that they've been this political partnership for his entire career and they can't see eye-to-eye on this one. Was that 41-point gap in West Virginia what finally dragged him in? I've been reading, like, other stuff this morning.

MEGAN: I'm not sure why she's not on board except that maybe she really likes Hillary Clinton more than Obama? But someone other than me hit the nail on the head yesterday — if he waited any longer, he wouldn't have been any big deal to the campaign, and I think he wanted it to be high profile when he did do it. I mean, he did it in Michigan, so it's a way to endorse that, in his mind, doesn't affect the remaining primaries.

MOE: For instance by some achievement of sheer "clicking on new tabs" fatigue I got through Matt Bai's epic Times Magazine cover story on John McCain's foreign policy beliefs. I also read most of this profile of his wingman/ghostwriter Mark Salter in today's Journal. Here is what I learned: some people think John McCain doesn't hate war enough because the whole time they were romping around the country trying in vain to tell the difference between VC from "South Vietnamese civilian ally" he was at torture camp learning to channeling his hate for, to paraphrase Glenn Beck, all those small people who were different from him.
MEGAN: Ah, yes, torture makes you love the war, check.
MOE: But Matt Bai seems to think he learned his foreign policy in...academia! At the National War College after he got home from torture camp. He looks at David Petreaus as the modern-day Creighton Abrams, who John McCain thinks might have won the war if they hadn't spent the first fifteen years or whatever fucking it up.
MOE:

"It's a little bit eerily reminiscent, in that search-and-destroy is basically the same tactic that Rumsfeld, Casey, Sanchez, et al. employed," McCain told me, referring to George Casey and Ricardo Sanchez, the two previous generals to command coalition forces in Iraq. "Go out, kill bad people and then go back to base. That's basically what search-and-destroy was. We obviously failed to learn that lesson in history." In McCain's war, then, David Petraeus, the more innovative general who took over in 2007, is now playing the part of Abrams, pursuing a winning strategy that needs only the patience of the American people and their government to ultimately succeed.

MEGAN: I think I'm more of a pessimist about human nature than you in general.
MOE: Like, I think you genearlly have to be really poor and really bored.
MOE: Well you know how the astrology works on that.
MEGAN: So, since we're not really poor by world standards, does that mean the US is really bored?
MOE: Well, who are most of our homicide victims/perpetrators? They're not the plutocracy, you know?
MEGAN: Well, but the ones who make the decisions about going to war are...
MOE: They're the disposables generally. I mean, I've covered cops. And yeah, there's a lot of boredom there.
MOE: Well sure. I mean, remember how it used to thrill Rumsfeld to say the word "kill"?
MEGAN: Yeah, I can see that. I thought about being a cop for a while, but then I would've had to have gotten into really good shape or something. Plus I don't like wearing a uniform and my parents didn't think someone with my temperment should have a gun on them.
MEGAN: Do you remember how the dude refused to have a chair in his office? Craaaazy dude.
MOE: I mean, that's another thing. Our troops: 4,000 have died. According to this Forbes story the national homicide rate was 5.7 per 100,000 people in 2006, and that's probably risen slightly. How many is that? I can't do math. Meanwhile a million Iraqis have died since the war began, and a lot of that has been us — not generally Haditha or Eggnog massacres but just basically air strikes and shit, but a lot of that has also been sectarian violence, and that is only exacerbated when people have no money, no job, a ton of fear, and shit all to do.

MEGAN: It's like 15,000 people, given the population of 280 million, I think, but I suck at math when hungover.
MOE: Economic development, as much as I like to say "yeah fuck that whole scam", can be a very positive thing. That said — god this is a depressing IM — as the this story about how the dearth of Good Samaritans and/or any sort of civil society in China is kind of part of the reason a government can't really rely on economic development alone.
MOE:

For the first few hours, Mr. Deng called for help. He spoke from under a deep pile of broken concrete slabs to his mother and his wife, Qin Ke. "I told him I would get him out," says Ms. Qin, whose legs were gashed as she dug in the debris. "But he said he was too badly hurt. He said he wouldn't make it. He told me not to wait for him." Overwhelmed by the scale of the damage, China's emergency workers have engaged in triage, focusing resources on flattened schools and other places with large concentrations of casualties. That has forced many in the quake-ravaged region such as Ms. Deng largely to fend for themselves, relying for assistance only on that bedrock institution of rural Chinese society: the extended family.

Internal government records show that most sedated deportees, such as Ade, received a cocktail of three drugs that included Haldol, also known as haloperidol, a medication normally used to treat schizophrenia and other acute psychotic states. Of the 53 deportees without a mental illness who were drugged in 2007, The Post's analysis found, 50 were injected with Haldol, sometimes in large amounts.

Haldol gained notoriety in the Soviet Union, where it was often given to political dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals. "In the history of oppression, using haloperidol is kind of like detaining people in Abu Ghraib," the infamous prison in Iraq, said Nigel Rodley, who teaches international human rights law at the University of Essex in Britain and is a former United Nations special investigator on torture

Last Thursday, he came out swinging against Sen. Obama after the Democrat said Sen. McCain was "losing his bearings." Mr. Salter complained publicly that the Democratic front-runner's comment was a "not particularly clever way of raising John McCain's age." The jab, he said, was "typical of the Obama style of campaigning."
The Obama camp fired back at Mr. Salter. "Clearly, losing one's bearings has no relation to age, given this bizarre rant that Mark Salter just sent out," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

MEGAN: And voting for McCain over Obama would be a terrible mistake says Hillary, so all you HRC supporters should listen to your candidate and pull the lever, or else the rest of us will be blaming you in November.

I'm sick of fine presidents and good presidents and mediocre presidents. I'm sick of Rutherford B. Hayes and James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce and Millard Fillmore. We got Barack Obama! Barack Obama, for crying out loud!

MOE: Ok I guess we should start this now. I heard a commentwhore war broke out in the comments last night so uh...thanks bro, for caring enough to defend my glib assertions that West Virginia's margins have something to do with the stuff like how "Two in 10 white West Virginia voters said race was an important factor in their votes. More than 8 in 10 who said it factored in their votes backed Mrs. Clinton, according to exit polls," according to the New York Times
MOE: In other news the someone else on the McCain team has worked to burnish the image of global democracy underminers who are worse than Bush.
MEGAN: Oh, Moe, haven't you learned? There is no racism in this race, it's all just who is a better candidate. Which the 65% of people in West Virginia determined through a thorough analysis of the two candidates' positions on a variety of issues, including health care, the War in Iraq, their economic stimulus plans, their divergent opinions on the gas tax holiday and not even a little bit based on emails saying that he's a Muslim who hates this country and, oh, by the way, belongs to a church that excludes white people so that they can better plot against us.
8:50 AM
MOE: Assuming you saw Pareene's clip re this meme.
MEGAN: Yeah, shit, Alex, dammit, we don't want them back. We already fucking carry Richmond and Hampton Roads and shit, we don't need Charleston and whatever the other towns in the state are called.
MOE: I have gotten to the point where I cannot even have this argument drunk at a bar but some black people too sense a conspiracy afoot in those overwhelming margins. Not just like, "hey, a first black president, cool," but CODE WORDS FROM MALCOLM X
8:55 AM
MEGAN: I feel dirtier having read that, actually
MEGAN: Like, wow, viscerally dislike anyone much based on nothing more than your own personal taste?
MOE: In other news, your Day In Disaster: Burma is getting another storm and China's earthquake is
exposing a widening wealth gap. Because now that the poor are all buried under their crappy communist construction there seem to be a lot fewer people.

Incomes in rural areas, for example, averaged 4,140 yuan a person last year, or about $590 at current exchange rates. That represents an increase of 91% from a decade earlier, not adjusted for inflation. Urban disposable incomes, by comparison, rose by 150% during the same period, to an average of 13,786 yuan last year.

"Terry McAuliffe raised some serious expectations for Hillary's speech on MSNBC.

"You're going to see a great speech tonight from Hillary Clinton. Talked about it on the way down. I saw it. It's going to be a great speech. One of the greatest speeches, Chris, ever given," he said.

"Better than the second inaugural of Lincoln, perhaps," Matthews said after he got off the air.

"Better than stuff in the Bible," said Olbermann.

* Style
* Barack Obama
* Belle and Sebastian
* Gwyneth Paltrow
* The Arcade Fire
* Twee

I confess that I am fascinated by the mechanics of this huge social reconfiguration - in the same sense that I am fascinated by the industrial procedures of a slaughterhouse, or by the strategies that enabled small Confederate armies to win victories for slavery over much larger Union forces...Aside from the outsourcing, offshoring, and firing-at-will that make up the best-known weapons in the corporate arsenal, Mr. Greenhouse reveals how managers extract unpaid work through an array of ingenious tricks, from eliminating bathroom breaks to electronically erasing hours from workers' records.

It is, in other words, a political disaster, with tax cuts, trade agreements, deregulatory measures, and enforcement decisions all finely crafted to benefit one part of society and leave the rest behind. Few of the voters who gave Ronald Reagan his landslide victories, it is fair to say, intended for this to be the outcome. They wanted their country to stand tall again, certainly; they wanted the scary regulators off their backs, maybe; but I can recall no conservative who trumpeted those long-ago elections - or any of the succeeding contests, for that matter - as a referendum on plutocracy.

MOE: Okay so what's going on. I'm feeling especially incompetent today.
MEGAN: Oh, people are voting in West Virginia. Some polls have her ahead by, like 40 points
MEGAN: Wait, I take that back, like, they all have her ahead like that.
MOE: How many delegates? Is this all part of her verisimilitude strategy?
MOE: Logically her candidacy is dead but on a visceral level it seems so obviously winning?
MEGAN: Twenty-eight pledged delegates at stake.
MEGAN: I think that she wants to go out on a high note.

MOE: Okay here's another thing: we just dropped charges against a supposed "20th hijacker" named Mohammed Al-Qahtani whose coerced confession turned out to be less real than Hillary's chances of winning the nom. But I thought Zacarias Moussaoui was the discredited "20th hijacker".... What's the deal with this guy?

MEGAN: I know, I read that and I was totally like, wasn't that the crazy French guy? I love how we convicted that guy when some other prosecutor knew he was just, like, a poseur.
MEGAN: Which is basically was, he's, like, the more attractive, less effective shoe bomber. I recall it coming out that al Qaeda had records where the leaders all laughed at what an idiot he was.
MOE: I love how this new guy has been in Guantanamo for six and a half years! Did he have 20th hijacker overlap with Moussaoui? Moussaoui is still in prison right? He was nuts. And crazy. But not much of a terrorist!
MOE: Oh fuck check this 20th hijacker is just a metaphor
MEGAN: Yeah, good old Zed will be in prison forever.
MEGAN: No, it's not a metaphor, it's a way to keep charging various terrorist guys when we don't have any evidence of what they're really done in order to evoke the American boogeyman and keep American sentiment on the side of continued tribunals. I don't think that's a metaphor by definition.
MOE: I know I always thought that too but look that's what WIKIPEDIA SAYS.
MOE:

The term is somewhat misleading, as there is no evidence that al-Qaeda ever planned to have exactly 20 hijackers. There were many variations of the 9/11 plot, with the number of terrorists fluctuating with available resources and changing circumstances. In the end, there were 19 hijackers: three of the planes were taken over by five members each and the fourth was hijacked by only four people. One plane, United Airlines Flight 93, had fewer hijackers than the rest, thus the idea of a 20th hijacker came to be widely discussed.

The 9/11 Commission concluded that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed intended to have as many as 25 or 26 hijackers for the plot. It was also reported that 14 members of al-Qaeda, in addition to the 19 known hijackers, attempted to enter the United States to participate in the attacks.

MEGAN: But, hey, speaking of terrorists, someone asked Obama about Hamas and Israel. He likes Israel, doesn't like Hamas and has told the Palestinians that waiting to get a President that will be on their side about their damn olive trees is pretty dumb.
MOE: Earthquake update: more than 18,000 people are buried in the city of Mianyang, which is near the city of Jiangou, neither of which I'd ever heard of before. China has a lot of cities though. Looking through the Xinhua pictures yesterday I found a lot of orderly pictures of relief preparedness but none, I don't think, from Mianyang. I also love how CNN gets this eyewitness account from an expatriate "business consultant" in Beijing. He said he was at a hotel and he'd never felt anything like it. Tell that to the city of Mianyang, asshole! 30 seismic tremors seems a bit gratuitous.
MOE: The man, he is a fucking genius:

You know, when I think about the Zionist idea, I think about how my feelings about Israel were shaped as a young man — as a child, in fact. I had a camp counselor when I was in sixth grade who was Jewish-American but who had spent time in Israel, and during the course of this two-week camp he shared with me the idea of returning to a homeland and what that meant for people who had suffered from the Holocaust, and he talked about the idea of preserving a culture when a people had been uprooted with the view of eventually returning home. There was something so powerful and compelling for me, maybe because I was a kid who never entirely felt like he was rooted. That was part of my upbringing, to be traveling and always having a sense of values and culture but wanting a place. So that is my first memory of thinking about Israel.

JG: Go to the kishke question, the gut question: the idea that if Jews know that you love them, then you can say whatever you want about Israel, but if we don't know you — Jim Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski — then everything is suspect. There seems to be in some quarters, in Florida and other places, a sense that you don't feel Jewish worry the way a senator from New York would feel it.

Sometimes I'm attacked in the press for maybe being too deliberative. My staff teases me sometimes about anguishing over moral questions. I think I learned that partly from Jewish thought, that your actions have consequences and that they matter and that we have moral imperatives.

I want to solve the problem, and so my job in being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth and say if Israel is building settlements without any regard to the effects that this has on the peace process, then we're going to be stuck in the same status quo that we've been stuck in for decades now, and that won't lift that existential dread that David Grossman described in your article.

I want to make sure that the people of Israel, when they kiss their kids and put them on that bus, feel at least no more existential dread than any parent does whenever their kids leave their sight.

So that then becomes the question: is settlement policy conducive to relieving that over the long term, or is it just making the situation worse?

MEGAN: I think, like Angela, we're ignoring his significance to the region. Think he'll call us out, too?
MEGAN: I speak German, I must be a descendant of Hitler, too. And you're Slavic and stuff, I'll bet you're descended from bad people, too. Chavez alone is clean of bad historical associations and speaks for all the peoples in all the countries in Latin America.
MOE: That is just the thing, I'm always concerned my life isn't masochistic enough for how it will eventually be, but when I am as miserable as I intend to be later on in life after the revolution and the famine and the war and the ice caps etc. etc. come I will be too cold and unmotivated to go ahead with the suicide. I should actually just move to Israel right now I think. The weather is so nice.
MOE: No, Chavez is one of us. Look, he too anticipates the consequences of his actions. Like the Jews!

"Maybe I'll say something to her and she'll get mad and say 'why don't you shut up?"' he said, referencing Spanish King Juan Carlos' 2007 admonition of the loquacious Chavez that touched off a bilateral dispute with Spain.

MEGAN: The king? Oh, yeah, it was sort of awesome.
MOE: I thought it had touched off a ringtone.
MEGAN: The techno remixes, though? Even fucking better.
MOE: Did it ever occur to you we could blog all day about the news and NEVER RUN OUT OF NEW LINKS and update it CONSTANTLY AND CONTINUOUSLY and some people would ACTUALLY READ IT but at the end of the day none of it would matter???
MEGAN: Aren't I the one that just said that life is a suicidal act?
MOE: Speaking in that realm Obama leads the non-race to amass unsolicited campaign songs!
MOE: Dude I want to hear the "Jamaican reggae tribute"

MEGAN: Um, I'm not sure you do.
MOE: And also in the realm of unsolicited Obama tributes is this thing a Time Inc. creation? Oh, or does Hillary have a superhero too because duh it is an easy pun?
MEGAN: At this point, wouldn't she be, like, a villain? Spoiler, etc?
MOE: Oh man this is so fucking cheesy.
MEGAN: Yes, I hereby apologizing for assaulting the ears of anyone who clicked through.
MOE: Readers: Porque no te callas is a much better audio accompaniment.
MEGAN: Or Barack O'Bollywood.

MOE: Okay I cannot tell you how much I read and forgot last night while trying to get to sleep. And then a fucking earthquake came and toppled a thousand cell phone towers and trapped 900 high school students in school and if it's anything like the 1976 earthquake of a slightly lower Richter 240,000 people stand to die.
MOE: Did you also read how in Burma they are counting the survivors because it's easier than counting the dead? I guess the death toll there is supposed to reach 100,000...
MOE: But the Most Emailed story is this thought provoking Tom Friedman column.
MEGAN: That was last week, before the military decided that all the food was for them. So, I think we can safely assume that the total survival rate will be about equal to the members of the junta, the military and their families, since apparently everyone else is just supposed to die quietly and let the soldiers dump their bloated bodies in waterways so no one knows.
MEGAN: Fucking Tom Friedman.
8:55 AM
MOE:

That restriction has angered local government officials like Tin Win who are trying to help rebuild the lives of villagers. He twitched with rage as he described the rice the military gave him.

"They gave us four bags," he said. "The rice is rotten — even the pigs and dogs wouldn't eat it."

He said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had delivered good rice to the local military leaders last week but they kept it for themselves and distributed the waterlogged, musty rice. "I'm very angry," he said, adding an expletive to describe the military.

"The government told us that school must reopen June 1, if you have a schoolhouse or not," Myint Oo told his visitor. "'Teach under a tree if you have to,' they said."

When he began describing the devastation to the school and village, a portly man in a white T-shirt who also seemed to hold a position of power interrupted.

"Don't tell these foreigners anything," the man said.

Myint Oo replied that he wanted to talk to the visitors in the hope that they could help rebuild the village.

"They will send the facts to the world and show the weakness of the Myanmar government," said the man in the white shirt.

"This is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation...In the omphalocentric process of self-construction and discovery," today's youth "stalks love like a wary hunter, but has no time or target — not even the mellowing Communists — for hate."

MEGAN: Maybe he can talk about how he held the Metro system's budget hostage until they agreed to spend more than a million dollars to change all the signage in the system to reflect the full name of National Airport.
MEGAN: But to guarantee his ability to fuck over the Republican Party and my ability to have something interesting to write about, I would totally make my first political donation to him.
MOE: No Peggy is totes the weird answer to Maureen Dowd. Her prose is kind of hilarious, like the way she seems to go inside a dark room and close her eyes and meditate and return with a Very. Melodramatic. Assessment. Of the feelings and attitudes governing the political awareness of the American populace. I should have Maria do a Best Of Peggy I think. And does McCain really need Bob Barr undermining his campaign when he's got RON PAUL undermining it already?
MEGAN: Scroll down, by the way, for the picture of them standing in front of the Eiffel Tower with a Ron Paul sign. Crazy ass motherfuckers.
MOE: Also: didn't two McCain advisers just step down after admitting to representing the Burmese junta? (That might lose Laura Bush's vote.) McCain is kind of a lousy subject right now.
MOE: Here we go.

Doug Davenport, the regional campaign manager for the mid-Atlantic states, founded the DCI Group's lobbying practice and oversaw the contract with Myanmar in 2002.
"Doug has tendered his resignation and we have accepted it," Jill Hazelbaker, McCain's communications director, wrote in a e-mail.
He joins former DCI Group CEO Doug Goodyear, who resigned yesterday from the post of convention CEO after Newsweek reported that DCI was paid more than $300,000 to represent Myanmar's ruling junta.

The Democratic front-runner's wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party's nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility.

A procedural hearing on Fossella's drunken-driving arrest - which ultimately exposed his double life - is slated for a Virginia courtroom Monday.

MEGAN: Ah, that's the brilliant thing! When he got pulled over for running a red light drunk, his excuse was that he was on his way to a friend's house, after which he admitted he was going to see his sick kid.
MEGAN: Only his official kids were in NY with his wife. And, OMG, they've been having an affair since at least 2003? Five years? Dude, what the fuck. Even Kennedy got a divorce.
MOE: Even Prince Charles got a divorce! Dude did we learn anything over the weekend about this minister who officiated the Jenna wedding?
MEGAN: He's an Obama supporter who also does weddings?

Image via Young Manhattanite

MEGAN: I had a dream the night before last that Dolly Parton was having a three-way with two guys on a helicopter maneuvering to escape enemy fire. And I was watching. What does this say about our psyches?

MOE: That's a rhetorical question right? Good.

MEGAN: Yeah, I don't want to know either

MOE: So let's see. I sort of feel like it's a snow day because Obama's turnout in Indiana actually kept rising after I fell asleep. Also, I'm taking off the rest of the day so there is that. And because I've been watching Fox I've been hearing nothing but "Clinton is going to pull through, she's our girl; she's a working class hero; he's arugula-class Hegel" blah blah so this was really fun. Last night Shep Smith was outright rolling his eyes dramatically at anyone who said she still had a chance.

MEGAN: Shep does a lot of things very dramatically

MOE: Unrelated: Michelle and the persimmon color: hot! I wanted Shep to weigh in on that but he didn't.

MEGAN: I switched channels around 10:30 or so when they did a whole piece on McCain and conservative judges and I couldn't take it anymore.
MEGAN: Yes, actually, I liked the colors of both Michelle's and Hillary's outfits last night. I particularly appreciated Hillary's jewelry choice for once.
MOE: OH I don't notice jewelry because I don't really do jewelry — I'd say because I am trying to do that whole "urbane tomboy aesthetic" thing but actually just because I will lose it — what did it look like?
MEGAN: It was like, simple and silver, rather than a huge chunky thing. Check it out.
MOE: Even Fox & Friends, which this morning was like "It's a big day for Obama, it's a big day for Hillary; it's a big deal for the host of Fox & Friends because it's his birthday..." Uh, happy birthday right wing conspiracy!
MEGAN: Doocey? If you emerged fully formed from the gaping mouth of hell, do you get to call that day your birthday?
MOE: Oh my god right now on Fox News they're blowing their outrage wad on the fact that some American Idol contestant last night didn't remember the words to the Byrds song he was performing. HOW COULD HE NOT REMEMBER THE WORDS TO THAT SONG IT'S LIKE THE FUCKING NATIONAL ANTHEM FOR CHRISSAKE.
MEGAN: Hey, it's no Proud to Be an American.
MOE: AAAAAH
8:45 AM
MEGAN: Sorry, couldn't resist. I didn't watch American Idol because the future of our democracy was at stake or some shit.
MOE: Okay now there are lots of kids on the Fox & Friends. The guy whose birthday it is is Brian. He has a Goodfellas unsinister bad guy face. And now here's Mike Huckabee! And he's chastising Brian for having such a big birthday cake!!! Is this what happens when Fox is temporarily forced to try and clear its viewers' mental caches so they forget how forcefully they've all been claiming things were the way they provably as of yesterday aren't?
MOE: Hey, here's a birthday cake! Here's a folksy governor! Here's some protest music! Kiddies!
MEGAN: Is there a clown?
MOE: Is there a clown...
MEGAN: I know! I was trying to throw you a joke softball.
MEGAN: Have you ever watched all of Obama's surrogates on TV and wonder why they are all so Midwesternly white?
MEGAN: (Sorry, some communications guy just came on MSNBC and he looks like a young Karl Rove only without the red glowing eyes)
MOE: I told you I don't have sound.
MOE: On my other news stations.
MOE: They haven't really had many Obama surrogates on Fox.
MOE: I'm switching to CNBC. Let's see what the market is saying about this.
MEGAN: Ah, ok. Well, they are. It's like they're coming to all of us and being like, no, it's cool, he has white friends. I'm honestly trying to remember a senior campaign official of his or national surrogate who is a person of color.
MOE: Oooh, weird, the first commercial was for something called Salesgenie.com and it is entirely in Mandarin.
MEGAN: Ok, so, the markets have decided that none of us have any money to buy anything anyway? Great.
MEGAN: I mean, in my case it's true, but still.
MOE: That's true I can't think of any black Obama surrogates. I feel like I've seen other minorities but not black surrogates and that's a very salient thing that hasn't been pointed out. I'm thinking this was incredibly calculated and it's entirely to blame for the entire Jeremiah Wright Al Sharpton rage thing. And maybe that is why this Wright scandal didn't cast the terrible "shadow" all the headlines were saying it would cast. Because if there is one thing I have learned recently it's that Boomer Fatigue is not just something White People Like. It's color bline.
MOE: blind
MEGAN: Ok, so, we could talk about something else because I totally have primary fatigue. Hey, look, Putin's buttboy/puppet just got inaugurated in Russian. That's vaguely interesting.

MOE: Sorry I had to get the door
MEGAN: No worries, I just thought you thought Russia was boring. The new guy is cute for a dictator.

MOE: We've discussed how Medvedev was sort of Putin's protege at school, when Putin was a KGB agent...but he was really a narc...I know we've discussed him before. Oh yeah and he's the former chairman of Gazprom. In other news Burma accepted storm aid.
MEGAN: Now just let's hope that the junta can keep their sweaty palms off of it, though I'm not that hopeful on that point.
MOE: Perhaps we should incorporate the sassy exchange from last night's CNN that a reader just implored us to excerpt.

So stop the divisions. Stop trying to split us into these groups,
Paul, because you and I know both know we have been in more campaigns.
We know how Democrats win and to simply suggest that Hillary's coalition
is better than Obama's, Obama's is better than Hillary's — no. We have
a big party, Paul.

BEGALA: That's right.

BRAZILE: Just don't divide me and tell me I cannot stand in
Hillary's camp because I'm black, and I can't stand in Obama's camp
because I'm female. Because I'm both.

BEGALA: That's — Donna -

BRAZILE: And I'm wealthy so I might go with McCain and sit with
Bill Bennett, Paul.

BENNETT: That's funny.

BRAZILE: Don't start with me, baby.

MEGAN: Ooh, by the way, the AP is just now reporting that Hillary loaned herself another $6.4 million in the last month, in addition to the $5 million she never paid back.
MEGAN: Despite the $10 million she raised in 2 hours after Pennsylvania
MOE: Yeah apparently she said something along the lines of, "Forget post-racial, the Clinton argument has become post-rational."
MOE: And then there was that amazing appendage comment.
MEGAN: The appendage comment?
MOE: It's referenced here. Regarding the math. You know: Well, if she manages to reason with all the superdelegates, and wins 72% of the delegates in the remaining races, and engineers some strategy whereby Michigan and Florida take on Obama before the Supreme Court, and Operation Chaos ramps up, then she can still... And then some dude was like "And if my aunt had a male appendage, she'd be my uncle."
MEGAN: Oh, right. Also, Hillary needs 72% or so of the remaining vote to retake the pledged delegate lead including Florida and Michigan, according to MSNBC.

MOE: Is this why we are finding this boring now?
MOE: I mean, he couldn't have had a more negative news week.
MOE: Oh shit, and PEGGY NOONAN WAS RIGHT AGAIN
MEGAN: Obama? I mean, I suppose it could come out that he beat someone or had gay tendencies or something, but barring that, it wasn't a good news week.

MEGAN: But I think the beneficial thing about the 24 hour news cycle is that eventually 95% of people tune out and nothing pundits say matter anyway, which is why most people are just happy to not hear about Reverend Wright anymore.

MOE: One thing I didn't quite understand that I learned from the New York Post is that last night Obama picked up 69 delegates to Hillary's 63, which seemed...uh...a little off. But I don't do math.
MEGAN: In North Carolina?
MEGAN: No, I think that's just wrong.

MEGAN: CNN says Obama picked up 64 in NC and 38 in Indiana, and Hillary got 44 and 41, respectively. I can't do math, but I think the NYP is wrong.
MOE: that's 85 for hillary and 103 for obama
MOE: So yeah
MEGAN: Mere bloggers have proved actualy journalists wrong. The world might need to stop turning on its axis.

MOE: So I just had a thought. A strategist on Fox News used the word "fulcrum" and it completely tripped up the blonde, who was like, "I'm still fascinated by that word you used Rich, fulcrum." And then the other guy was like, "Yeah, fulcrum what the heck does that mean?" And the strategist laughed
MOE: And said, "It's physics, Bob, it has to do with the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum."
MOE: Which is not a law I particularly remember but it gave me this theory: I think that smart people become Republicans to feel smarter than all their friends.
MEGAN: Whoa, he even quoted that? I think today is a Big Word day because David Axelrod just used the word "potentate" on MSNBC talking about leaders in the Middle East and OPEC.

MEGAN: Okay, and now Joe Scarborough just called Tim Daly the Grand Poobah of the Creative Coalition.
MOE: What does that even mean?

MEGAN: Not that it's a definitive source, but Wiki says

Grand Poobah is a term derived from the name of the haughty character Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. In this comic opera, Pooh-Bah holds numerous exalted offices, including Lord Chief Justice, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Master of the Buckhounds, Lord High Auditor, Groom of the Back Stairs, and Lord High Everything Else. The name has come to be used as a mocking title for someone self-important or high-ranking and who either exhibits an inflated self-regard, who acts in several capacities at once, or who has limited authority while taking impressive titles.

MOE: Hahaha so it's a more appropriate name for an MC than I knew when I began immediately associating it with this awesome party jam...
MEGAN: Dude, that guy on the TV sorta looks like Kid from Kid N Play...
MOE: Oh dude speaking of amazing segues, apparently Grand Puba holds Nation Of Islam beliefs. Which brings me to Michelle Obama, of whom we now know the same thing thanks to the Grand Puba of paranoid indiscriminate hateration. We should totally form a Hitchens-inspired hip-hop collective. I know some rappers who would dig it. We would get on Stuffwhitepeoplelike IMMEDIATELY.

MEGAN: Oh, Christ, Hitchens takes so fucking long to get to the point, which is him calling Barack, basically, pussy-whipped. Which, obviously, any man that doesn't indiscriminately cheat on his long-suffering wife the way Hitchens does obviously is.
MEGAN: Did I ever mention that I once watched Hitchens leave a party with a really pretty 18 year old? She might've been 20. She had some crazy hero-worship in her eyes, but I'll bet he sweatily fucked that out of her with his stale cigarette smell and tiny British ween.
MOE: Man I was checking TheRoot for some response to the Hitch and the lead story is on "Why The Summer Of '88 Was My Generation's Greatest." The late eighties were so rad in a lot of ways, I'm just remembering. The End of History and the like. But it was also, like, one of the bleakest eras for American cities, which I kind of think represent the future of American pluralism, which apparently Michelle Obama didn't believe in in 1985, which is why we are now wondering if she isn't a radical bitterfascist.

MOE: And that is a very good read on the situation. I was honestly disgusted he chose to go after her fucking college thesis which is basically about how alienated and inferior she felt on account of all the elitist assholes at Princeton.
MOE: And he writes:

To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language.

MOE: Which is true of most academic papers.
MEGAN: Man, I sort of wish I could've written about that for my college thesis. I had to write about the role of ideology in determining women's status in the labor market in Germany before and after reunification.
MOE: But not even of hers.
MOE: I dropped out, yay. I don't think I wrote a decent paper ever in my life after my treatise on the collapse of the Weimar Republic in tenth grade. After that it was all an alcohol haze. I wrote some good stories for the Journal that were better researched than any of my papers, however.
MEGAN: I picked a graduate school based on where I didn't have to write another thesis, which is why I ended up chucking my completed SAIS application in the garbage rather than sending it.

MOE: : This was Christian's take on Hitchens which sort of nicely unpeels the layers of disingenuousness:

What he's really saying is, I, the Hitch, know that people must necessarily allow contradictions into their lives, especially politicians, who typically do so cynically, but I am cynical enough myself to pretend that I don't know that, and so I can write a column that honestly admits that Obama really has nothing in common with his Reverend (did I mention that I, the Hitch, hate all churchees—I know politicians are only pandering to them, but it's fun to pretend they're not) but that his wife is a menace.
7:14 PM asserts that his wife is a menace anyway.

MEGAN: Also, I am not going to click that again because it is more than I can handle imagining Hitch having his taint waxed AND NOW I HAVE IMAGINED IT AGAIN and I think I might hate you a little, give me a second to wash the taste of bile out of my mouth and then let's change the subject.
MEGAN: Here, let's talk about Clinton saying that OPEC can no long be allowed to exist so she's going to file a WTO complaint even though, like, she's not so keen on free trade policies or something and I'm pretty sure there's no way it would succeed.
MOE: Ah, yeah so there is a bill to amend the Sherman Act to make oil-producing and exporting cartels illegal.
MOE: God, remember the fucking Sherman Act?

MEGAN: Which means, what? That we won't buy oil from OPEC anymore? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
MOE: Well, if the Heritage Foundation and major trade unions can agree on something...

Indeed, the only serious challenge to the organization came in 1978 when a U.S. non-profit labor association, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), sued OPEC under the Sherman Antitrust Act, in IAM v. OPEC. But the case was rejected in 1981 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. OPEC, the court affirmed, could not be prosecuted under the Sherman Act due to the foreign sovereign immunity protection it claimed for its member states. That decision was wrong. Government-owned companies that engage in purely business activities do not warrant sovereign immunity protection according to prevailing legal doctrines

MOE: Apparently the effort was led by William "Wimpy" Wimpsinger. I like that he took that "wimp thing" and sort of owned it. Do you think Hitchens cynically wants the Clintons back because it makes his job easier?

I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: "Are we getting two for one?" And don't be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it's too late to ask.

MEGAN: Wait, so white man Christopher Hitchens would like Black America to know that the Obamas will... what exactly? Betray them like the Clintons? I think this is why I only read stuff he writes about him waxing his back, sack and crack.
MOE: Oh man hip-hop reference segue time #2 of the morning. Let's give a shout-out to Khia. Dude, the Hitchens inspired DJ collective is a total gold idea. I know these dudes Plastic Little who could get into it. They're biracial like Obama. But I think we've gotta address the notion of Burma, and how this cyclone hit just as Hollywood celebs were getting in on the action.
MEGAN: So, am I right that the appropriately white guilty thing to do is not talk about the oppressive government for a bit?
MOE: Here's the latest "That's So Jane's!" on the matter, God I love this graphic...Apparently you likened Burma to Katie Holmes.
MEGAN: Oppression shows its face in all kinds of dark ways.
MOE:

It's an Orwellian nightmare that makes China look like a liberal paradise by comparison. For twenty years there has been nothing on this scale and when protests have been staged they have been in the order of hundreds and have been easily dealt with. The monks posed a huge dilemma for the military since they initially felt that they could not simply resort to smashing skulls and opening fire indiscriminately. Buddhists believe that what you do in this life will determine how you come back next time. So massacring a few monks is more likely to see you come back as a cockroach than achieving nirvana.

MEGAN: Well, but they'll be born in China or India more often than not, so it's like they get reborn into a less oppressive regime?
MOE: Okay here's another thing. The last sentence of that Times story.

If you talk to Vaclav Havel, he'll say that Lou Reed's support for human rights in Czechoslovakia was very important to the cause."

MEGAN: Um, I guess the cool factor is really important?

MEGAN: But neither Ellen Page or Jim Carrey is Lou Reed.
MOE: Okay so there's a primary tonight and I'm sick of primary nights but I suppose we ought to address it. Hillary Clinton will win in Indiana because she's "not going to put my lot in with economists." Obama will win North Carolina because Petey Pablo is from there. Oh man, hip-hop foray part III. Do you remember when Petey Pablo did that remix of "North Carolina" on the USA after 9/11? I'm sure you won't, but some commenter might. I think he also went to Afghanistan. Okay. Any predictions?
MOE: Terry McAuliffe is on Fox right now. His prediction is that "people will be saying she did better in both states than they thought she would." Jesus Christ.
MEGAN: I predict me and a lovely bottle of Petite Sirah will be blogging it tonight for Glamocracy. And that I hate being wrong so I don't make predictions but it does seem like the polls are saying that Hillary will take Indiana and Obama will take NC.
MEGAN: Whoa, talk about managing expectations there, Terry Boy. I didn't think the polls in Indiana were that close, plus she's been standing in pickup trucks! Pickup trucks are like electoral gold in Indiana.
MOE: I'm going to leave us with a passage from David Brooks, because I found it calming, sort of like certain candidates.

This wasn't just shameless spin, it was shamelessness with a purpose. Clinton signaled that she wasn't going to concede even an inch to the vast elitist conspiracy. She wasn't going to feel guilty about ignoring the evidence. She was going to stomp on it, flay it and leave it a twisted mass of jelly quivering on the ground. She was going to perform the primordial duty of an alpha dog leader — helping one's own....But, as Sunday's contrast made clear, Obama still seems like a human being. He still seems to return each night to some zone of normalcy where personal reflection lives.He wasn't fully candid when answering questions about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but there are some inner guardrails that prevent the spin from drifting too far from the truth. Thoughtful and conversational, he doesn't seem to possess the trait that Clinton has: automatically assuming that critics are always wrong. Obama still possesses his talent for homeostasis, the ability to return to emotional balance and calm, even amid hysteria.

MOE: So Megan. Would you like to have a discussion of the gas tax holiday? Because you aren't the only person who is riled up about

"That might not mean much to my opponent, but I think it means a lot to people who are struggling here, people who commute a long way to work, farmers and truckers," Clinton said. She has called for a windfall tax on oil companies to pay for a gas tax holiday.
"Senator Obama won't provide relief, while Senator McCain won't pay for it," Clinton said. "I'm the only candidate who will provide immediate relief at the pump, with a plan."

"At best, this is a plan that would save you pennies a day for the summer months; that is, unless gas prices are raised to fill in the gap, which is just what happened in Illinois, when we tried this a few years ago," he said.
Meanwhile, unless you can magically impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies overnight to pay for the holiday, it could imperil federal highway funding, and cost Indiana more than 6,000 jobs.

MEGAN: I mean, it's just SO STUPID that I am dumbfounded that people buy this. Like, so, so stupid. So, she's proposing a permanent tax increase on the oil companies to fund a temporary gas tax holiday — even though, hello? Raising oil company taxes means that they will raise gas prices because gas demand is practically inelastic. Also, a gas tax holiday (were it to actually do anything to lower prices) would benefit the people that can afford to have really big, gas-guzzling cars and live in big houses in the suburbs more than those of us who have small, fuel efficient cars that we hardly drive even when we have real jobs. Plus, it takes away money from highway spending, busts the budget, yadda yadda and it's like a preview of Clinton II because no one panders to Reagan Republicans quite like a Clinton (cough, welfare reform, DOMA, don't-ask-don't-tell, cough).
MEGAN: Also, ethanol subsidies, like ethanol tariffs, are going nowhere. But, it is amusing that the corn growers trumped the oil companies (and their favorite oxygenate, MTBE) in Washington due to the stupidity of the oil companies.
MOE: Sing it, sister! What about this new poll saying Americans don't really give a shit about Jeremiah Wright, proving once again that Peggy Noonan, who does "not feel a sense of honest anger or violation at his remarks"can channel the public sentiment of America sort of like ...Bobby Jindal's old platonic girlfriend can channel Satan! (How is that for a segue???)
MEGAN: I don't think one can ever have a good segue into a story about exorcism, but that's as good a one as any. Also, reading that story I actually thought, Hmmm, wow, no wonder everyone is talking about him as VP. He seems so normal but he brings that delish Christ-y crazy that the righties love.

MOE: SRSLY OMG
MOE: OMG OMG.
MOE: First of all I have to credit Christian for noticing that on the Wikipedia and sending it to me and I have to thank you for paying the $1.50 since I, for the second time in the past fortnight, lost my credit card.
MEGAN: I love the word fortnight. Also, a former roommate with a similar habit made up for it by always memorizing her card number.
MOE: Today Bill Kristol examines the Bobby Jindal phenomenon. Apparently "no fewer than four" — does that mean possibly more than four? Or was that just no fewer than three excess words added to the word count Bill? — but anyway, no fewer than four McCain staffers are hyping the 36-year-old Louisiana governor, who converted to Catholicism from Hinduism as a youth, as a possible veep. He is old enough to be too old for Meghan McCain and young enough to be too young for Cindy. Oh yes and he was a Rhodes scholar like Bill Clinton. But let's not bury the lede here. He once had a very good friend named Susan...
MEGAN: Who had a tumor, but it was really a manifestation of her demonic possession.
MEGAN: Because, really, what tumor isn't just a symptom of possession by demons brought on by a roommate whose relative is a Hmong healer?
MEGAN: Or a mother who left something at a non-Christian shrine 30 years ago.
MOE: Right her mother prayed to a PAGAN SHRINE.
MEGAN: Also, if I can be Barack for a minute — you know, elitist — only in Louisiana would this guy be elected governor. No wonder he published this shit somewhere that one has to pay $1.50 to read it.

MEGAN: Also, Morning Joe wants us to know that Bill Clinton made 2 people faint at rallies this weekend. Maybe he's the devil, too?
MOE: Okay so there's this story in the New Oxford Review — which is, I guess, affiliated with Oxford University, and to which he has contributed numerous pieces about his faith over the years. The New Oxford Review's mission statement reads thusly:

HAVE YOU THE GUTS? Yes, many hate us. Ah, but they also fear us. That's why many others love us. If you hunger for the red meat of Catholicism, subscribe! (No bozos or sissies, please.)

MOE: Here's how it starts:

Though she had not said anything, I knew something was wrong. Susan and I had developed an intimate friendship; indeed, our relationship mystified observers, who insisted on finding a romantic component where none existed. I called her after the University Christian Fellowship (UCF) meeting — UCF is an Inter-Varsity Christian group composed of undergraduate and graduate students. Though the interdenominational group's weekly program of songs and prayers had produced the usual emotional high among most members, Susan had left the meeting in a very sullen mood. I asked her to join a group of us who were attending a Christian a cappella concert to be held on campus that same evening.

When we finally reached her dorm room, I promptly sat Susan on a bed and placed myself in a chair located several feet across the room. This physical arrangement was hardly conducive to the love and support I was supposed to be providing, but I was too scared and unsure of myself to get any closer.

They considered skin cancer a minor affliction, something that affects those whose vanity causes them to tan in the sun too long. The only friend who expressed concern was worried about the possibility of contagious cancerous cells.

MEGAN: But, I love that Mr. Used-to-be-a-bio-major doesn't use the word.
MOE: Okay, so, he touches her and she feels better.

During Susan's next wave of tears, I found myself putting my arm around her to provide both physical and emotional support. We were soon sitting on the bed next to each other, and I told her a fairy tale. Instead of tackling all of her problems at once, we took each individual concern — e.g., upcoming finals — and magically solved it. Her problems began to seem insignificant and our ability to overcome adversity soon assumed heroic proportions. We were soon laughing, and despair was definitely vanquished, at least for the night. We were both startled to find my arm around her shoulder, but she asked that I continue to hold her for just a few moments longer. I happily complied and we embraced her problems away; along with my soothing words, the simple gesture of a hug was enough to bring peace to Susan's heart for one night.

Susan did not show up at the cafeteria at our agreed upon time and made little effort to warn me of the scheduling conflict that caused her absence. This inconvenience, minor under normal circumstances, proved to be the starting point of an intense struggle of wills...Waiting for an apology, I refused to talk with Susan for a week. She decided I was being silly and refused to admit any error on her part. Somehow, we finally searched deep and found the maturity to discuss our differences.

I had recently heard a priest confidently proclaim that the Bible's words on such phenomena were never meant to be interpreted literally; he had historical evidence that incidents involving spirits were merely metaphors for tangible events.

I left the room we were in for a moment, on some flimsy pretense, made the sign of the cross in desperation, and pleaded with God for divine assistance. Seconds after I re-entered the room, Susan angrily lashed out at me, telling me she never wanted to talk with me again since I did not love her, and ran out in tears. I tried following her, to no avail. I did not understand what I had done. All I could think was, "Gee, thanks God. So much for prayer."

MEGAN: Right, I mean, as long as he wanted her to be happy and asked God and shit, everything should've been okay. What a selfish bitch, wanting human interaction rather than a deep and meaningful relationship with God.
MOE: So anyway, a few weeks pass and she's about to have an operation and they're all gonna pray on it etc. etc. etc. when it is revealed that Susan only wants sex with Bobby because SHE IS POSSESSED BY THE DEVIL.

In a voice I had never heard before or since, Susan accused me: "Bobby, you cannot even love Susan." Before I even noticed the sound of her voice, I thought it funny that Susan would refer to herself in the third person. Then the full impact of the words hit me. Forgetting the frantic students around me and even poor Susan lying on the floor, I thought of our conversation the day before. The real argument had been whether I was capable of loving Susan. I needed the answer to be yes, more for my sake than ours. I have always been a closed and relatively unemotional person and needed to know that my best friend felt that I at least could love her, due to some very strong remarks made two years before by my former girlfriend (hardly an objective source), I was beginning to doubt that I had the capacity for feeling.

MEGAN: Well, I would doubt that he has the capacity to express feeling, is that the same thing?
MOE: I love this sooooo so much.
MOE: Okay so at this point we should also point out that they had been smelling the sulphuric odor of the devil in Susan's dormroom but didn't think too much of it. Anyway, so she's writing on the floor and they're all trying to exorcise her, and for a brief beautiful moment Jindal loses his faith in Christ. And then Susan runs for the door and only Alice feels like chasing her.
MOE: It is at this moment that Jindal begins questioning his misogyny!
MEGAN: Also, why the fuck did no one think to call, like, a motherfucking ambulance?
MEGAN: Girl's got a tumor on her head, starts seizing and speaking in voices and no one goes, um, doctor? They all go running for a fucking pastor for an exorcism.

MOE:

Alice's presence countered Susan's recent burst of energy, and Alice's confidence inspired us all. Surely Crusade's experienced leader would be able to rescue us and reaffirm our faith in Christ, the Bible, and everything good. Even I felt confident enough to approach God once again; Susan's lunge for the door awakened and invigorated me. Strangely, I found myself repeating the Hail Mary until it became a chant. Being a recent convert to Catholicism, I had yet to accept the Catholic doctrines concerning Mary and considered any form of Marian devotion to be idolatry. Though I had never before prayed a Hail Mary in my life, I suddenly found myself incapable of any other form of prayer.

Susan stayed in the house of a missionary with experience in spiritual warfare in foreign countries. Her sister thought it best she stay out of her own room. Susan's roommate, the daughter of a Hmong faith healer, had decorated the room with supposedly pagan influences. Other theories explaining the night's events soon surfaced. Susan's mother had once worshipped and offered a sacrifice at a pagan altar in the Far East for her husband's health, though he had been healed, she had been warned not to repeat such practices, but had returned to that same altar in the Far East upon hearing of Susan's illness. The UCF staff member dismissed Susan's affliction as a psychological disorder, precipitated by the semester's stress, and advised her to seek professional help. Susan, who had experienced visions and other related phenomena as a child, thought her intense flirting with guys and straying away from God had led to this punishment.

MOE: OK I guess we gotta do this today like every day but I got nothin but a sharp pain in my right temple.
MEGAN: Yeah, dude, today sort of sucks for news. Where was everyone yesterday?
MEGAN: It's so slow, Politico has a column about what Obama should go dirty about if he went dirty.
MOE: Well the DC madam was en route to... the big brothel in the sky? And NY State Supreme Court Justice Robert Doyle was in the parking lot, arraigning a guy who was too fat to squeeze into the courtroom. I was getting a facial and buying shoes and going to the National Magazine Awards, which were incredibly exciting. Hillary was getting her ass licked by everyone on Fox News for her courage and grace under the pressure of "The master" Bill O'Reilly.
MEGAN: Also, Congressman Vito Fossella got arrested for a DUI in Alexandria. Dude, that's what interns are for,

MEGAN: to drive your drunk ass home
MOE: I do kind of love something about this:

"You're a polarizing personality," Mr. O'Reilly chuckled during the interview. "You're like I am, and I hate to say that," he said.

MOE: Yeah or when you just learn that the "that bartender is TOTALLY IGNORING ME BECAUSE SHE HATES ME" sensation is a very self-obsessed one and that, if you just chill, they will come. Although sometimes at the Magician it can feel like it is taking a hysterically long time for the bartenders to remember there is another side of the bar. But hey people spend three days in line for bread in Venezuela.
MEGAN: And prolly longer for good dirt cookies in Haiti. You know, I will admit that I have in past years done better with male bartenders than female (cleavage=attention getting device) but lately I've been making friends with lady bartenders, too. I have one's card from last Friday night. She was fun. I taught her how to make a new champagne cocktail.
MOE: I don't know why I am talking so much about alcohol on this hangover but I do enjoy a Kir Royale once in awhile. I always figure bartenders respect that I stick to whiskey and the snobbiest ales they have on tap. But I flatter myself. And male or female it doesn't seem to matter in my case. Although making out at a bar you are more likely to be kicked out by females I think.
MEGAN: I've never been kicked out of a bar for making out. Being rowdy, yes. Making out, no.
MOE: Yeah, the Magician again. I guess I have some unresolved hostility toward that place.
MOE: Never kicked out for being rowdy though.
MOE: Oh wait I missed my segue.
MEGAN: Seg away!
MOE: Obama drank crap beer
MEGAN: God. Panderer.

MEGAN: Oooh, a minister asked McCain about the cunt thing! And he wouldn't say.
MOE: It worked!

Obama greeted George L Sheneman, 80, who pulled out a yellowed letter which Obama read and thanked the man for his service. Your pooler chatted later with Sheneman, who was born in North Liberty and who said he is now an Obama supporter. The letter was one of gratitude from President Truman, written in 1947 when he was discharged from Korea. He served there before the war.

"We have a man whose temper can get the best of him," Parrish said. "What I am worried about is his temper. Our country is in a serious crisis. This election is the most significant one since 1860. It appears America is asleep — so I stood up and asked the question."

MOE: Okay, I'm going to say something about Hillary.
MEGAN: WARNING: CONTROVERSIAL PARTISAN CONTENT TO FOLLOW
MOE: Maybe I am glad she has stayed around this long. Because the Republicans who are suspicious of Obama, namely because he breathes new life into Old Liberal Values and is, truly, "transformative" in terms of the ideological battle between left and right in this country, have been forced to reconsider Hillary entirely. And what started as "grudging self-serving respect" seems to have turned into something more genuine. I truly think some of the same Angry White Men who made her ankles and her cookies and her arrogance into such the Machialesbian Menace have changed their minds. I think the respect is more genuine today. I think they are listening to her when she talks. I could be wrong and it could all be a put-on. But hearing Fox News on the subject of Hillary is about the only thing I can really bear to hear them discuss that isn't, you know, celebushit.
MEGAN: I think part of it's put on, but I'd agree that being in it long enough had brought her more respect than she had before.
MEGAN: However, part of me selfishly wishes that the stupid thing was already decided.
MOE: I mean, of course it is. But in the put on I think a lot of partisan right wingers have really been forced to genuinely rethink Hillary. Ann Coulter is 95% satire, but there was some genuine fondness in her various pro-Hillary screeds, and I'd possibly say the same for Rush, and I think it's really fascinating. Because I never understood in the first place how she was so polarizing — I always thought she was just beholden, and possibly too interested in power for power's sake, and I hate Bill Clinton — and Bill O'Reilly's deference toward her I think was something of a watershed.

MOE: Oh also black churchgoers feel the same way we do about Jeremiah Wright
MEGAN: I think that's sort of where the sexism comes in. Plus they hate Bill Clinton, too, for coopting their messages and being a better politician than them. And possibly for fucking their wives/sisters/daughters.
MOE: I think the campaign has forced a lot of sexists to acknowledge their own sexism definitely. also
MOE: This funny blog called Jeremiah Wright an example of "When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong" and I just got a reallll bad case of Chapelle nostalgia.
MOE: Where the Fuck is Dave right now for this election
MEGAN: Aw, Dave Chapelle! If it helps you come back, I'll totally pretend to not find you funny!
MEGAN: Jerking off into piles of cash?
MOE: Yeah I will come see you and bring 9 black people with me!
MEGAN: And I'll pretend to be shocked and slightly horrified by your comedy!