Jenni Williams and Magondonga Mahlangu formed WOZA (the acronym is also a Ndebele word for "come forward") in 2002 after Robert Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980, claimed victory in an election that many believe was fraudulent. The group has held more than 100 peaceful demonstrations since 2002, many of which resulted in arrests and beatings for WOZA members and founders. Together, Williams and Mahlangu have been arrested more than 50 times. They have been subjected to beatings by Mugabe's policeman, held in overcrowded cells, and repeatedly strip searched, all for their participation in nonviolent protests. But WOZA continues undeterred, and only asks that its members come to demonstrations prepared for jail, leaving any children and medication at home.

More than 70,000 Zimbabweans consider themselves members of WOZA. Williams and Mahlangu estimate that more than 3,000 of their number have been arrested for demonstrating. However, the central tenant of WOZA is nonviolence, and the founders insist that no matter what happens, WOZA members must not strike back. They explain that their movement has been modeled after the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. Says Williams: "We do it for social justice."

Their most recent struggle began a year ago, when they were attacked and jailed for leading a sit-in to demand food for starving Zimbabweans, the Record Eagle reports. They also asked that Mugabe share power with Morgan Tsvangirai, who ran against Mugabe in a controversial election last year. They ultimately hope that Zimbabwe will be able to write a homegrown constitution, which could lead to real elections not determined by government intimidation and corruption.

Tonight Mahlangu will be at the White House to receive an award from the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, which honors individuals who have made a significant contribution to human rights in their country. Winners are selected by an independent panel of experts. According to Monika Kaira Varma, director of the Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, the award is intended to show support for WOZA at a particularly difficult time: "When they are doing the most difficult things, we want to let them know that we stand in solidarity with WOZA. This is about the people."

Zimbabwe Women, Receiving Rights Award, Speak Out [Record-Eagle]
President Obama Presents Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award To Magodonga Mahlangu [Examiner]
Zimbabwean Rights Organization To Get Kennedy Award [Washington Times]

Betty Makoni is amazing. Herself a victim of rape - she was assaulted at 6, and told to keep quiet by her mother - she says she realized the "potentially deadly consequence of a woman's silence" when she watched her father murder her mother three years later. And this culture of silence and abuse has helped to facilitate the dissemination the "virgin myth" that's grown apace with the AIDS epidemic. As an adult, Makoni has devoted her life to ending the culture of systemic abuse, and the ensuing shame, that affects so many women in her country.

The virgin myth - a widely-held superstition that sex with a virgin will cure a man of HIV or AIDS (and, pre-AIDS, a range of mortal illnesses; this isn't a new idea)- has led to a rash of child rapes in sub-Saharan Africa (most notably in South Africa) and the ensuing pregnancies and AIDS infections are a little-addressed source of shame for the victims.

Makoni, who says she's seen baby girls as young as one day old raped as a result of the myth, became aware of the scope of its consequences as a teacher. The increasing absences of female students - and what she found when she looked into the cause - led her to found the Girl Child Network (GCN) ten years ago. The GCN started as a support group, a safe place for victims to talk about their experiences without judgment or shame. Now there are 700 GNC clubs throughout Zimbabwe, and their methodology has been replicated in Swaziland, Malawi and South Africa. It's become an important public forum and an invaluable resource - Makoni estimates that the GCN's three "empowerment villages," which provide asylum, medical care and counseling, have helped to rescue some 35,000 girls from abusive sitautions, both "virgin myth"-related and otherwise. Some ten girls per day report rapes; given the pervasive culture of silence, one can only imagine how many go unreported.

While Makoni's amazing work, chronicled in the documentary Tapestries of Hope, is inspirational, it's hard not to fear for the GCN's future: last year, Makoni was forced to leave Zimbabwe for the UK after her life was threatened. She now runs the organization from England in concert with the DOVE project, a domestic violence organization, and is trying to raise GCN's international profile. But while Makoni's relief work is crucial, we wonder how the "virgin myth" - and a culture that allows for its perpetuation - can be discredited: surely hundreds of experiments - i.e., rapes of young girls which have not resulted in the curing of AIDS! - should begin to rob it of its potency?

Worryingly, increasing AIDS education has not stopped the epidemic of child-rape in South Africa; as AIDS rates rise, child-rape stats have risen accordingly. And it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation; as the "virgin myth" proliferates, so too can child and sexual abuse generally, and rising rates of frustration, alcoholism and financial desperation - all on the rise along with AIDS rates - can work in horrifying concert. Depressing? Oh, yeah. And sometimes looking at the systemic nature of the issue, some epic form of cultural headdesk can seem like the only viable option. But if Makoni can keep the faith in the face of its daily reality, the rest of us can profit by her example.

Get Involved: Girl Child Network [Official Site]
Child Rape Survivor Saves 'Virgin Myth' Victims [CNN]
Tapestries Of Hope [Tapestriesofhope.com]
HIV/AIDS, The Stats, The Virgin Cure And Infant Rape [Science in Africa]
Zimbabwe: Profile On Betty Makoni and the Girl Child Network [UNGEI]

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

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

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

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

MOE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MEGAN: So, once again, you're officially the world's most reliably friend and Crappy Hour replacement and I owe you drinks and probably Moe does too.
SPENCER: what happened to Jezebel's own Nancy Spungeon this morning
MEGAN: She is stuck in a never ending bureaucratic nightmare that involves queues and, apparently, no email access.
SPENCER: well there is hope
because what that describes has taken place at guantanamo bay for the past 7 years
and yesterday it came to an end
MEGAN: Well, sort of. I don't see them shutting it down today.
SPENCER: somewhat.
right you are!

U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey says the Supreme Court's decision on Guantanamo detainees won't affect military trials against enemy combatants.

Mukasey, speaking Friday at a Group of Eight meeting of justice and home affairs ministers, said he was disappointed with the decision.

but there's absolutely no legal rationale for the camp anymore
MEGAN: God, it's so disappointing when you have to stop raping the Constitution.
SPENCER: one of my favorite pieces of Bush-era memorabilia
MEGAN: Mukasey's got a case of Constitutional abuse blue balls.
SPENCER: are two memos, both by John Yoo, about GTMO from early 2002
in the first, Yoo says that we need to stash detainees at GTMO in order to circumvent the Federal Torture Statute, which governs actions by Americans abroad — the rationale being that GTMO is American soil
MEGAN: John Yoo, who can safely proselytize his own special brand of "constitutional analysis" from his chair at UC Berkeley's law school.
SPENCER: as anyone who's ever been there — and i'm still hungover, that place is one huge party — can attest
but in the next memo, he says that the virtue of GTMO is that detainees won't have any rights in federal court, because GTMO is outside American soil
put that in the time capsule
savor it first, with its flinty-yet-rich aroma
MEGAN: Mmm, yummy, it's like sheep crap in the midst of a hot summer.
SPENCER: hey, look, i wrote about getting yoo kicked off the Berkeley faculty
there's an effort afoot by former Clinton official & Berkeley prof Brad DeLong
in the comments of this piece "ufred" asked if DeLong was really "as zealous as the fool he condemns"
"ufred" is MY DAD
my dad is one of my comment trolls
anyway
MEGAN: Speaking of shit, we should probably briefly discuss Mark Penn's insane rantings about the campaign.
SPENCER: oohhhh yeah i LOVED that piece
MEGAN:

So who didn’t listen to you?
Well, look, it’s not that people didn’t listen. It’s that people had a different idea of how you win against him. I had the idea that the best way to win against him would have been to go against him like any normal candidate as early as possible, because, as I often say, once the cat’s out of the bag, you really can’t put the cat back. It becomes a ten-times-harder task. And so we fundamentally disagreed on whether to take him on, on Iraq, you know.…
When you say “we”—
[laughs] Well, me. And President Clinton sided with me throughout this. The rest of the campaign… Look, their views were honorable views. It’s what they felt. I just think—

So it was you and the president against the rest of the campaign?
Me and the president thought, Take him on, take him on early. You know, bring out the fact that he gave these interviews saying that his views now were about the same as Bush and that his votes were the same as Hillary’s. And you know, therefore, take away a lot of the myth that’s brought up about his Iraq position. If you were to go through all of the strategy memos and all the preparations, it was always about, “What’s the difference between us and Obama? How can we illustrate that? How can we make that clearer?”

So, guess who Mark Penn is really actually loyal to? Hint: it's not Hillary. Seems like that might've been part of the problem.
SPENCER: well, let's take this up for a second
let's say penn's argument carries the day and HRC went into Obama's Iraq record
how is that a net plus for her? all it does is remind voters that she backed the war
no?
MEGAN: No, he's got an answer for that, too!
SPENCER: even if she was able to highlight some earlier, less-strident opposition on his part?
MEGAN:

Why do you think the rest of the team was afraid to go after him?
I think they thought that her position on Iraq wasn’t strong enough to sustain a debate on Iraq.

Or popular enough.
Right. But her position, remember—we went through the early discussion of “Was it a mistake? Should she apologize?” Of course, the rest of the team wanted her to apologize. [laughs] And you know, she weathered that extremely well. She didn’t apologize, because she had given a speech outlining her position. On that day. And that speech held up. It actually explained why she voted for Iraq and why it was a sincere vote at the time.

SPENCER: HAHAHAHAHA
here's where Hillary really was victimized by the one-two punch of Mark Penn and sexism
MEGAN: I love how he's right and everyone else is obviously wrong. I hate this guy.
SPENCER: the interview makes clear that penn really does believe that HRC needed to vote for the war

People who try to dissect your role say, “Everybody wanted to humanize her, and Mark Penn wanted to prove that she was capable of being commander in chief.” Do you regret that?
No. No. The basis of people being able to support her is the belief that she could be president of the United States.

see there he's indisputably correct
HRC or any woman will always, unfortunately, have a harder time of this than any man
and that's one of the reasons, in 2002, Mark Penn was telling her — not that he acknowledges this in the interview — to vote for the war
the implicit premise being that if she opposed the war, she'd never be able to pass the CINC test
and the honest answer to that? we'll never know
MEGAN: Wow, I never thought about it like that.
SPENCER: but it's clear over the last couple days of retrospectives
that while sexism was indisputably a massive obstacle for HRC's campaign — "iron my shirt," etc etc, you guys on jezebel know this much better than i possibly can — if HRC hadn't voted for the war there would have been absolutely no rationale for Barack Obama's campaign
none at all
he probably wouldn't have either wanted to run, or would only have run to raise his profile for a future presidential bid, or in any event wouldn't have gotten much traction with Dem voters
MEGAN: But, I think you're totally right, he says the whole time that it was about proving her capable, as though people really thought she wasn't. Like, the premise is the idea that people would question a woman as CINC, and I don't think that was ever really part of the debate, not when it came to her. I didn't like her, but I never questioned that she was capable of doing the job, I just figured she wouldn't do it the way I wanted it done.
SPENCER: and the sad truth is that men, and even some women, see this differently than you
MEGAN: I agree that it was definitely an early, obvious difference on which Obama was able to hang his hat and garner a lot of support.
SPENCER: even if they don't want a war they still want to believe that she would launch one if necessary even if the one she voted for was unnecessary
MEGAN: But couldn't she have countered that argument with Bosnia and Kosovo? Afghanistan, even?
SPENCER: and if she recanted her support for the war, you would have seen McCain or whomever saying that you can't trust these flighty menopausal women with matters of life and death because who knows when they'll change their minds
ask Howard Dean.
and, as much as he's a pussy, he's not even a woman!
MEGAN: Howard Dean has been the ball-less wonder of this primary season.
SPENCER: the public, i'm sorry to say, doesn't give a shit about Afghanistan, which is both more important to us than Iraq and descending to nearly the same level of hell
MEGAN: I just get the sense that Mark Penn didn't get Hillary, he got Bill and rather than providing her with objective advise based on her needs as a candidate, he chatted with Bill (not an unbiased guy) and did his polls and fought with people he didn't like and fucked it up and is now blaming everyone else and I hope no one ever pays him again for a campaign but there's no justice in the world so he'll continue being rich as sin the end.
SPENCER: the next time we have a woman candidate for president, she'll either have to not been a part of the iraq debate; vote against it from the start; or support a current/popular/justified/successful war
MEGAN: And, yes, Afghanistan is fucked.
Anyway, so on to other fucked things. UMass have Mugabe an honorary degree once but finally yanked it this week.
Oh, and Britain's "reviewing" his knighthood.
SPENCER: my friend Samantha "Monster!" Power once wrote a great Atlantic piece about why you might be able to credibly consider Mugabe a genocidaire
he's a knight???
MEGAN: An honorary one, apparently, yes.
SPENCER: whoa
didn't he just re-imprison Morgan Tsvangirai?
MEGAN: I know, I mean, do you get to call the Brits all the crap he's called them in the last few years as he's tried to desperately hold onto power by starving and killing his own people
SPENCER: did the brits ever even revoke his commonwealth travel privileges? i don't remember
MEGAN: He re-arrested him yesterday but they're charging another, less internationally-known party official with genocide.
SPENCER: now here's a task for the next president
MEGAN: Yeah, they revoked his privileges the last "election"
SPENCER: as part of the U.S.'s reintroduction to a durable international order
shepherd our entry into the International Criminal Court
MEGAN: Tendai Biti, if he's found guilty which he will be if they want him to be, will probably face execution.
Isn't the Pentagon totally opposed to that, though?
SPENCER: and seek to bring war-crimes charges against Mugabe
oh yes
MEGAN: I thought I remembered that from grad school. Good to know nothing's changed.
SPENCER: but it's a groundless fear cynically stoked by the right
no one is bringing any charges against any american service(wo)man
or general
the court would be 99.999999999% more likely to focus on criminal heads of state
oh speaking of, another one for our Bush-era time capsule
way way back in 2003
MEGAN: Well, it's not that I thought it wasn't a groundless fear. But, yes, Mugabe should face something but he probably won't. Besides, he's still got Mbeki's support I think.
SPENCER: one of the favorite activities of the Pentagon's Doug Feith
MEGAN: Besides masturbating to gay beastiality porn?
SPENCER: was to force countries to renounce their Article 98 rights to refer foreign countries to the ICC if they wanted in on lucrative Iraq contracting
why?
because Feith knew we were torturing motherfuckers in Iraq
which is a war crime
indictable by the ICC
so, spiting the Iraqi people and foreign allies, that's exactly what he did
in the interests of Bush/Rumsfeld/Feith's declared right to torture Iraqis
MEGAN: So, but would they be indicting soldiers or the ones who ordered them to do it? Like, say, Feith.
SPENCER: the honest thing to say is that the ICC's so new it hasn't been tested
but the Nuremburg-era principle of command responsibility PRESUMABLY holds
and you only saw top regime officials prosecuted, right, my german-scholar friend?
MEGAN: Indeed, but there was also a de-Nazification program, sort of copied in Iraq less successfully, as I recall
SPENCER: oh much less successfully!
MEGAN: So, like, the idea was to blame command, let everyone else off the hook to restart the society and kind of pretend like it was all Hitler's fault and no one else's. Ahem. People who voted for Bush in 2004.
SPENCER: to which Doug Feith, like Mark Penn, blames... everyone else
that is a compromise i will take for now
MEGAN: God, it's like a fucking sport in Washington, the CYA-lympics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOE: So you feel guilty cheating on me? I gotta confess, I didn't read Crappy Hour. Well, I didn't read the site actually. But I avoided Crappy Hour in particular because the last time I brought Spencer into it, it ended up being 337 lines long or something. That's why I had to bait everyone with the "date" thing, because I figured that even the die-hard CH readers would give up around line 54.

MEGAN: I think we successfully kept it short, though we got kind of tanget-y, which you and I naturally know nothing about,

MEGAN: But can we maybe have a moment of silence for Mark Penn, who jeopardized the $10 million he took off of Hillary's campaign for a $300,000 1 year contract to push for the Colombian FTA? F'idiot.

MOE: Okay yeah I just want to lay it all out there. Mark Penn has extraordinarily bad hair. Then there is the exciting news that Condi Rice has been actively pursuing Dick Cheney's job, which is wonderful news for all Americans. And then there is that crazy polygamist shit and a think piece in the NYT Mag about Levittown, Pennsylvania that I sorta read and a think piece on Guantanamo Bay in the New Yorker that I sort of didn't read, but you brought up the $10 million dollar thing which is I think a good segue into the Clintons' centimillion dollar tax returns and the inspiring news that being a CEO is as ludicrously lucrative as it has ever been despite the credit crisis, wait, no, scratch that, it is more lucrative than it has ever been.
MEGAN: Well, naturally, it's more lucrative than it's ever been! We obviously need to pay the best and the brightest as much as we can afford to keep it from happening again!

MOE: OH fuck, but you know what my favorite part of the fucking
weekend was? Reading the Wall Street Journal edit page slam Obama for not being sufficiently invested our ponzi scheme of a stock market.
MEGAN: Capital gains is also what you pay if you sell your house and don't reinvest all the proceeds in your next house, but trust the rent-babies at the WSJ to ignore that detail.
MEGAN: Also, you don't pay cap gains on your 401K or IRA if you don't withdraw early, which you might need to do if you make less than $50,000 a year and that's in effect your entire savings.

MOE: I love this slight:

With apologies to economists Buffett and Obama, the history of this tax isn't on their side. The capital gains rate is crucial to investment decisions; higher rates make capital more expensive, dampening incentives to invest and reducing economic growth.

MEGAN: Gah, everything in there pisses me off. Not that I want the cap gains rate to go up, but, still, it's like citing statistics without really explaining it.
MEGAN: I'm guessing like, Poland or something. Not the Czech Republic, but maybe the Slovak?

MOE: I think the cap gains rate should go up, not just because I have no stock market holdings, except this 401K from my last job I don't know what happened to. It just sort of disappeared. Maybe it's there for me somewhere. Hm. Whatever. I bought a Swiss army knife over the weekend and read books. I've decided to join this new survivalist movement I've been hearing so much about. Also, commenters who would like to recommend aggressive accountants: moe@jezebel.com.
MOE: Yeah, the Slovaks, we're the slackers. The slacker-ovaks.
MOE: My people know the farce that is this myopic focus on incremental economic growth.
MEGAN: Well, your 401K isn't subject to cap gains, but if it's lost track of you they have to hold onto it forever, it's awesome like that.
MEGAN: Figure out where it was and call and make them track it down.
MOE: Okay but seriously we should probably discuss Mark Penn right?
MEGAN: Oh, hells yeah.
MOE: If you'd taken SinsisterRouge's advice six months ago, Hills, we might not be in this spot.

MEGAN: Except that Hunter Walker just sent me this link in which Hillary asks for credit because it takes her longer to do her hair and make-up. If this is what Maggie Williams hath wrought, I sorta want Mark Penn back.
MOE: Oh Jesus, HILLARY. You know what is so annoying about that? Michael Kinsley wrote that first. And like, it was cool of Kinsley to point that out; hey, give the lady some credit, being a woman is tough because you need to apply all sorts of consumer products to your face and hair and match your clothes to your eyeshadow and stuff and as a result, get less sleep than men. Right. So it's stating an obvious feminine truth, which is cool if you're Michael Kinsley, but you're Hillary Clinton and your campaign is — let's face it guys — really in its final hours, being read its last rites...is that what you want your last words to be? Actually never mind, I take that all back.

MOE: "You gotta give me credit, I applied some really pretty looking eye-shadow, and that shit ain't easy."
MOE: "They construct entire reality shows around MUCH LESS."
MEGAN: Way to strike a blow for feminism, Maggie.
MOE: "Now, onto my second career as the celebrity judge of Make Me A Superdelegate!"
MEGAN: Like, really? I mean, I know you and I have similar beauty regimens: sit around in our own filth until we have to leave the house, wash, put on clean clothes and minor make up and then leave.
MOE: Okay, so seriously, also, back to Mark Penn. You know, when all this was starting, the Clintons did not need to remind America how creepy Clinton pollsters tended to be
MEGAN: Yeah, what is up with that? And how hilare is it when Penn is the less creepy one?
MOE: I actually showered this morning but applied no makeup. Oh, here's some sad news: the guy who makes my egg sandwiches at the deli? Not the guy that owns the deli — that would be aiming too high but the guy who makes the sandwiches —- well I apply lipstick for that guy. Anyhow, so, Mark Penn. Why so long, and at such a tremendous cost? What sort of deal did they have? Is he friends with Ron Burkle and Anne Hathaway's boyfriend? What is the deal there?

MEGAN: I mean, if you're politically and personally committed to someone, do you need $10+ million? He was shilling for the Colombians for $300K. Campaign staffers and Hill staffers work for peanuts. Hell, White House phone answerers work for practically minimum wage. What the hell did he need $10 million for?
MEGAN: I'm guessing she just felt sort of dependent on him and a little lost without him and he took advantage, plus Obama already had Axelrod.
MEGAN: Who, by the way, totally cracked a "the pen is not mightier than the 'rod" joke on MSNBC this morning and I switched channels.
MOE: Well that's just the thing. What if he had some top secret classified GPS-enabled brainwave-reading software hacked straight from Karl Rove himself that promised to deliver the coronation swiftly and bloodlessly? It like, didn't work, guys. And wait a second, AXELROD made that joke?
MOE: Hahahahahahahahahahaha that's aweosme.
MOE: I keep meaning to turn on the TV but it hasn't happened and as you may recall my MSNBC is still muted.
MEGAN: Axelrod totally did. Even Scarborough groaned. Axelrod claimed he'd made it up while on hold but Joe was all, dude, we all know you've been waiting to say that for months and it was the first time I wholeheartedly agreed with Joe Scarborough.

MOE: Hahahahahahaha
MEGAN: By the way, CNN is picking up the "blogging ourselves to death" story. I've got a cold. I've decided these things are related.

MOE: Of course he'd been saving that for months. How could you not? I'm sorry, it's so stupid, but so awesome. Okay, so, um...Pennsylvania! I keep reading conflicting things. Did you get through that Levittown piece? I got halfway through and will summarize: Levittown is a little blue-collar racist town in Pennsylvania in which the author was raised. It seemed aggressively "normal" and "solidly middle-class" then but it is all beer guts and broken dreams now. The Obama campaign headquarters is dominated by an old guy who was a Republican until he read the two Obama books. Black people don't live there.
MEGAN: Yeah, that sounds like where I grew up.
MEGAN: Also, I've been to one of those Obama roundtable meetings where you're, like, invited to testify like it's a religious meeting. A guy brought me there on a date. It's in the top 10 strangest dates ever. Neither of us called the other back. I didn't testify.

MOE: You missed a large inter-Gawker Inc. email-versation about that. I felt inadequate, as I have only one laptop and I sit on my couch all day and really haven't felt that 'adrenaline' feeling since the first week we launched. I certainly feel like I have blogged myself out of a life, but to death? Hmmmm.
MEGAN: I can only imagine the email thread.
MOE: This Condi pursuing the veepship — is that just crazy talk? Also, did McCain do anything else stupid lately?
MOE: I haven't been paying as much attention as I should have maybe.

MEGAN: Well, if he did it's totally been overshadowed by all the bowling and pandering going on in Pennsylvania.
MEGAN: Also, I can't see Condi pursuing it? I think people just mostly want her to and thus it's spawning the stories.
MEGAN: Whoa, CNN has been banned from reporting from Zimbabwe.
MOE: Oh, yeah, Zimbabwe! What's happening with that?
MEGAN: They're pretty screwed. They're going to have a runoff despite the fact that the President definitely lost. They're arresting some reporters and expelling others, bandits are taking over what few white-owned farms remain and armed militias are patrolling the streets for the "safety" of the people.

MOE: Oh should we address Charlton Heston and/or the PA primary? Charlton Heston: Michael Moore didn't even look like an ass making you look like an ass.
MEGAN: Charlton Heston: We can have his guns now, kthnxbi

• The McCain strategist who thought it was a brilliant idea to have him give a speech at the Lorraine Motel on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination to apologize for having voted against MLK Day should probably not keep his job. [CBS News]
  
• The advance staffer who gave the world the image of an African-American man holding an umbrella over McCain during the speech needs to go, too. [HuffPo]
  
• Hillary Clinton's speechwriters, who wrote a speech that, for once, actually played to her oratorical skills, should stay. The guy who decided to coin the phrase "Poverty Czar"? Probably not. [NY Times]
  
• Oooh, blind item: which one of you lesbian, bonerkilling commentwhores was dragged out of a Hillary event in Los Angeles? Fess up! [Breitbart]

• Hillary's tax returns are out, and yeah, the Clintons are ridiculously rich. [Yahoo]
• One would think that there'd be no way to make a story about Clinton and Madonna boring. One would think wrong. [HuffPo]
• Even though he took $10 million from Hillary's campaign and then used his position of prominence as a lobbyist to undercut her stance against the Colombian Free Trade Agreement, Mark Penn gets to just apologize and continue raking in that cash. [Politico]
• Speaking of unemployment, it's up, of course. [LA Times]
• But the Michigan do-over is down for the count. [WaPo]
• Not that there aren't bigger election problems other places, like ZImbabwe. [WaPo]
• In case you want a little quiet reflection on events past but always remembered, you can read RFK's words about MLK's assassination, the words of the witnesses to the assassination (who still haven't been questioned by police?) and then a somber piece about why so many people fear for Obama's safety, even today.

• The good news: there's a female marathon runner in Philly who helped the homeless by starting a running club with them. She seems nice. They also have a job training program. [CNN]
  
• Onto the bad news! There's yet another female KBR contractor coming forward to say that she was raped in Iraq. Same old story, really: a violent gang-rape followed by intimidation, the run-around, no consequences for the perpetrators and a non-disclosure agreement she was basically forced to sign to get anyone to investigate anything. [The Nation]
  
• Oh, and in case you weren't pissed off enough, a public health database funded by the federal government has decided to make it all-but impossible for the average library user to find information about abortion. [Women's Health News]

• Katie Couric hosting a Presidential debate? Do. Not. Want. [WaPo]
• Speaking of that oh-so-uncontroversial race for the Democratic nomination, March fundraising numbers are out today. Obama bested Clinton 2-to-1 in dollar terms, and about half of his donors were newbies. [Fox News]
• John Edwards has put his well-shod foot down and refused to be the Veep candidate this time. Oh, Angry Johnny, there are definitely a couple of Jezebels in hell now. [WaPo]
• The other pissed-off Johnny though isn't scared of nuthin', and he'll be damned if any earpieces are going to follow him around any sooner than they have to. Of course, if we're taking bets about whose nutcases are more likely to shoot which candidate, McCain doesn't top that poll either. [WaPo]
• Oh, but the men with guns? Yeah, they're on the streets in Zimbabwe tonight. So much for a peaceful transition! [CNN]
• And you probably don't want to get on a plane any time soon, but you already knew that. Guess we spent so much time messing around with shoe bombers that we forget that airplanes can actually crash on their own. Whoops.

MEGAN: So, did you hear? The DNC allowed Puerto Rico to switch from having a caucus on June 7th to having a primary on June 1st. This could be the first time candidates actually visit/give a crap about our remaining colonies. I have always been uncomfortable knowing we have colonies whose citizens are less than fully represented in our federal government. It seemslike that's why we had a war with England way back, right?

MOE: Yeah I grew up in DC so I'm kind of used to it.
I put it in the news roundup though.
The news roundup no one read because everyone was too busy watching THE HILLS.

Also the Puerto Ricans get that parade.

MEGAN: OMG, Ali Velshi on CNN likes doing stories about Facebook because then tons of people friend him afterwards.

MEGAN: I'm a little scattered this morning, I can't decide whether I should provide her with the attention by asking if you've seen the new Obama girl video in which she asks Hillary to stop attacking her man or if you've been reading Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's blog. The last entry he patiently explains whhy African-Americans don't trust our government. Also, that picture of Emmett Till always sorta makes me weepy.

MOE: Dude this Obama video is awesome
I stopped watching them.

MEGAN: I thought it was when I saw it last night, but it was 1 am and I'd been drinking. My taste is normally off but I was still kind of amused this morning.

Oh, yeah, I hadn't seen one in a while because it got annoying.

MOE: Right, they took their time on this one though. Also, whoever's voice that is is really good. Like wayyyyy better than Ashley Alexandra Dupre

MEGAN: Actually, it's Leah Kauffman, who is quite cute in her own right and that video I just linked is her asking Ann Coulter to "perfect" her, too, as she's Jewish. She talks about finally growing into her nose. I wish that had happened to me.

MOE: Sorry, I'm actually trying to post the video right now. It's so fun and timely! Um, what else is going on? All I've been hearing about is Sinbad. But here's an embarrassing revelation: I do not know exactly why Sinbad is famous. OR maybe he was never famous, which is why he was in Bosnia in the first place. And also, I was not aware Kareem Abdul Jabbar had a blog. I just feel so BEHIND.

MEGAN: Wait, whoa, like Sinbad, Sinbad?

MOE: Yeah, like, honestly, I always thought of him as that guy from A Different World

MEGAN: Me too!
Also, I'll link that shit.
I think I knew he was a comedian, though. But I feel like those USO shows are always second-string entertainers anyway. Sorry, Sinbad. I'm sure you're still funny. But you were no Dwayne Wayne.

MOE: No I knew he was a comedian, i mean I do not live under a rock, it's just that I ...well do you think Sinbad will plan a comedy tour on this basis?

MEGAN: Dude, this is literally the most I've thought about Sinbad in years. Like, possibly since he was on Hollywood Squares or something. Hopefully his agent is booking him on Larry King or something right now.
Ok, completely off-topic, but I went hunting for the video of that trip on CBS's site, and one of their most popular stories is Top 10 Reasons to Have Sex Tonight. Not one of them is because it's fun or because you want to. Stupid moralists at CBS. It's all like, it burns calories and relieves stress. Well, duh.

MOE: Oh fuck it boosts your immune system too?
And cancer risk, but I think that's the same thing.
Well that settles it.

MEGAN: We should have more sex?
I mean, not us together, but in general.

MOE: I am going to go get really desperate on behalf of my immune system. Tonight. Fuck intimacy issues; fuck celibacy in the name of mental well-being etc. etc. Masturbation is not going to save me from cancer.

MEGAN: Well, but only good sex. Bad sex makes you go, well, masturbation would've been a better call.
Masturbation saves you from really, really bad sex.
Sometimes.

MOE: Sad admission: I've been too lazy to masturbate lately. I'll get all revved up talking to some friend about, you know, the fallacy of a "soft landing" and the future of the dollar and the numerous problems the market can't solve, and I'll be on some sort of roll, and I'll be like, DYING to have sex, but there's no one around, and by the time I get all the way up my stairs I collapse on the couch and watch Jon Stewart. And it's kind of sad that even after watching Jon Stewart I'm not in the mood, but I'm not. I fell asleep on the couch instead. In my coat. I actually slept in my coat. Maybe it's just too cold to masturbate. Another good reason to have sex. Oh god, uhhhh, maybe we should address the troop surge right now? Like how the whole 4,000 deaths thing has put a damper on its "success"?
And by the way, Kareem Abdul Jabbar's blog about Emmitt Till is really sad. I didn't even know about that.
Or maybe I did; I have not had enough coffee. Again with the roommate.

MEGAN: Well, but, like, obviously, Moe, duh, most of those people died before the surge. And they volunteered, so it shouldn't really put a damper on our warmongeriness.

MOE: OH wow, an election in Zimbabwe. I think 900 troops have died post-Surge.

MEGAN: I am drinking my official beverage of hangovers: Crystal Lite.
Coffee will come later.
Well, I mean, there's elections, and then there are "elections" in Zimbabwe under Mugabe.

MOE: Yes. And RealClearPolitics linked to some commentary about what it means in the FT but I'm not a subscriber, although I suppose I ought to be. Shoulda taken the meds I guess. Is it a slow news day? Because this linking Bill Clinton with Joe McCarthy thing is kinda old, and yet it's apparently still a top meme, which I think means we're scraping the bottom of the barrel. Yesterday on CNBC they were talking a lot about the Taiwan elections, whose results were not at all a surprise nor did they have anything approaching the economic ramifications they were suggesting, but I'm thinking it was the same problem. When will we get some fucking news?

MEGAN: About Taiwan? Or in general?
The problem is that Obama's sunning himself in the Virgin Islands right now. It's hard to make big news in a media blackout, i guess.
On Zimbabwe, Mugabe raised the salaries of all the government employees to get them to vote for him but since they're broke and sanctioned, he's just printing the money. Who says no one will learn anything from the Fed bailout of Bear Sterns?

MOE: The big stories in the Post are the fact that the Indiana primary is now what everyone's got his eye on. It could be a fair fight! Okay, and then there's some noise in the Times as to whether Obama is too liberal to be a unifier. I'm gonna have to go with "if McCain is what represents the GOP right now, then yes; next question." And hahahaha re your Mugabe joke but oh, good lord, did you read about this book?

MEGAN: Um, that writer guy's kinda sexy. Also, it's probably not a universal African tribal myth New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani.
Zimbabwe's been a cluster fuck for years and it used to be a nice, relatively stable place until Mugabe thought he'd lose power and decided white Zimbabweans were the devil. Also, I hope his parents are still ok.
Godwin's, I mean. Because it's really not a safe place at all right now and the elections aren't going to help probably.

MOE: Wait! I forgot! We haven't talked about how David Paterson could get soooooooo much money for his memoir at this point OMG WTF his life just keeps getting more interesting.

MEGAN: A middle aged man did drugs in the 70s. The fact that such a thing is news means either there aren't a fuck of a lot of glass houses around or that people really like throwing stones anyway.

MOE: Huh weird, and on a final note, maybe Rev. Wright was right? In the spirit if not the letter of what he says. Some reader just sent this in, with the message, "don't let the haters get you down babe." Aw! The haters are actually what get me up in the morning! Well no, actually, coffee is what gets me up in the morning. AHEM.

MEGAN: Dude, I'll get on Ebay and have you a new grinder in a week.

Editor's Note: My roommate just went to Starbucks to buy me some coffee. She is a wonderful person to whom I am eternally grateful. Also, she took our commuter mugs so as to reduced our carbon footprint etc. I love coffee, and my roommate. And the Earth, we both love it.