Yes, it’s time for the hot, new, cheap, summer reality show where contestants compete to become the next Kaye Grogan, Pastor Grant Swank, or, if they have the hubris to aspire to become the Ultimate Wingnut, Hindrocket.

Today’s contestants hail from ChronWatch, a site which doesn’t get as much attention as your RenewAmerica or MICH News. But it’s a feisty up-and-comer that deserves to be spotlighted on a slow news day such as today.

Our first contestant is Gabriel Garnica, Esq, a lawyer, educator, and Latino conservative from Long Island.  For his dance routine, he will do a tango-for-one entitled  “Old Liberals Don’t Die: They Just Get What’s Coming to Them.” It’s about Dan Rather getting his comeuppance for being old, thus proving that the liberals, who control the media, are heartless bastards who eat the elderly; it’s also about how Ann Coulter is getting lots of media exposure lately, thus proving that she has triumphed over the liberals, and that conservatives are kinder, gentler points of light.  Or something.

It is only fitting that now CBS is doing to Rather what Rather has done to conservatives since he was playing with a rattle.  I have always said that liberals will use you until they do not need you, and then they will blow you off like a mosquito on their shoulder. 

I find that a rather odd thing to have always said, in that I have never heard anyone talk about blowing mosquitos off their shoulders.  But I guess Gabriel believes in using a handgun to deal with all of life’s inconveniences.

All too often we see liberals being reminded of just how trivial and insignificant they really are despite their self-perception as saviors of the world.  Every time a liberal finds out he or she is nothing but a speck in the universe the devil gets a headache.

Say, that’s a much more better saying than “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings”!  I think it comes from the heart-warming classic film, It’s a Conservative Life, So Die, Liberal Scum!

If the plight of Rather and the triviality of Couric are not enough to bring a smile to conservatives, the sight of the road kill MSM under the wheels of Ann Coulter’s Godless locomotive should do the trick.  One gets the image of Al Franken, Jeanine Garofalo, Hillary Clinton, and Barbara Walters running in front of a truck ordering it to stop only to be obliterated in a cloud of smoke. 

Sure, Ann USED to smoke like a locomotive, but we have it on questionable authority that she’s quit!  (If you consider using 20 nicotine patches, 12 packs of nicotine gum, and several nicotine martinis every day to be going tobacco free.)
But we’re running out of time, Gabriel.  Can you wrap things up for us?

Conservatives are human beings and therefore we are vulnerable to losing sight of why we are here and not grilling burgers at Barbara Boxer’s house.  Moments in time like the present come once in a while to remind us of what we stand for, what we believe, what we do not stand for, and why liberals are twice as whatever they call us.

Thanks, Gabe.  That was great. You made a really good point about conservatives not really being evil space reptiles, and, um, grilling.

Our second contestant for today is Robert Klein Engler, “an adjunct professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and a versatile writer of op-ed articles, poetry, and philosophy.”  He also really, really hates immigrants.  His dance number is called  “Why the Minute-Man Project is Important.”

The border between the United States and Mexico is flat and desolate along much of its 2,000 mile stretch.  There is hardly any place high enough to get above the terrain where you may look down and see the larger picture that makes up the panorama of illegal immigration.

Yes, that’s why our nation is having such a hard time coming up with immigration policy that everyone can agree on: because the land along the border is too flat to allow us to see the larger picture that makes up the panorama.

But it seems that we are out of time, so can you cut to the chase, Bob?

A real solution to the nation’s immigration problems will include deportation of illegal immigrants from the United States.  Good citizens will settle for nothing less.  The fact that neither the left nor the right, neither the socialists nor the capitalists, want deportation of illegals is a sure sign that deportation is part of the moderate solution.

Yes, when everybody hates something, it’s a sure sign that it’s the moderate solution, and therefore the right thing to do. 

Well, everybody except the Minutemen are against deportation, but the MM are, as Bob informs us, different from you and me. (“Members of The Minuteman Project are different. They occupy the high ground where there is very little high ground to be found.”)

Anyway, let’s all give Bob a big hand, because he can see panoramas (they’re everywhere)!

Now, vote for the contestant whom you think is wingnuttier, and eventually, if we feel like it, the winner may get invited back for another round of “So You Think You Can Wingnut?’  Or, just do your best Simon Cowell impression, and cut these wannabes down to size.

Wingnuts | 16 Comments »

Okay, you were right — our Mystery Author WAS Ann Coulter. (The first quote was from an interview she gave to Human Events Online, the second was from her latest column.)

So, yeah, when Ann called the 9/11 widows “witches”, and said that they were taking pleasure in their husbands’ deaths, she was motivated by her Christian faith.  And when she added “And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren’t planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they better hurry up and appear in Playboy,” she was just doing it for Jesus. 

Anyway, as a reward for your fine efforts in identifying Ann despite my attempts at misdirection, here are a few quotes from a very annoying  Esquire Feature Story. (The piece is a valentine to Ann from one of those ”lifelong lefties” who doesn’t believe in any liberal positions, and who thinks Ann makes a lot of good points.  The middle-aged author takes Ann to a ball game, and claims to find Ann funny, intelligent, charming and hot.  I guess Esquire, having lost the horny young guy market to Maxim, is trying to capture the old, right-wing, crazy guy niche.)

But on to the quotes:

 

I’ve brought a single pale-pink rose for her. And I’m nervous as hell.“A rose!” she squeals. “Oh, thank you!”

She seems honestly tickled. Her voice is girlish, her smile wide, her eyes bright and blue-green. She’s wearing tight jeans, a light top not far from the shade of my rose, and a small cross on a chain ’round her narrow, well-scrubbed neck. Into her forties now, she looks a smooth ten years younger.

Personally, I was kind of touched by the mention of Ann’s neck being “well-scrubbed.” I guess Ann tried to wash away her Adam’s apple for this “date.”

“You know, if I wrote about how all sex is rape, if I were Elizabeth Wurtzel writing about Prozac, or Naomi Wolf, I would have been on the cover of every one of these magazines. They pretend to write about serious things while putting chicks in short skirts on their covers. I’ve written three nonfiction best-sellers and I’ll put on a miniskirt for them. But no. No. I don’t exist.” 

If only. 

And yes, it really is sad the way the media totally ignores Ann and her serious, profound works, and so she only gets the cover of TIME — while super models who actually look good in their mini dresses get to be on the covers of the men’s magazines.

“You’ve never been married, have you?” I ask.

“No,” Ann says. “I want to, but it has to be the right guy.”“

“And even then,” I say, “it’s never a walk in the park.”

In the glum, awkward silence that follows—unless you’re either Dr. Phil or planning to propose, talking about marriage with an unmarried forty-year-old woman is not a good idea—I fish a Commit lozenge from my pocket and pop it.

“Nicotine,” I explain.

She fairly shrieks.

I’m sure she does.

But let’s take a moment to reflect on that glum, awkward moment that arose when the Equire writer mentioned marriage within the hearing of sad old-maid Ann (who is, BTW, closer to 50 than 40). Yes, let’s all shed a tear for poor Ann, who really, really wants to get married and get out of the spotlight, and devote her life to having babies and making cookies and such, but she just hasn’t found the right guy.  THAT’s the problem.

“I have two patches on right now—and Nicorette gum in my purse! I quit last October and I don’t feel any better—no better whatsoever. Plus, it’s like a miracle drug. When you’re upset, it calms you down.”

“That’s the fundamental problem with the war on drugs,” I say. “They work so well.”

“I keep haranguing doctors, demanding that they admit to me that this is just another Alar scare. Remember Alar on apples? This is going to pass, and then they’ll admit it was never bad. I keep cigarettes around—in case there’s a nuclear attack and I know I only have a few days to live, I’m just gonna sit there and smoke.”

And then after she dies, she’s gonna sit there and smoke for a really long time.  (As the title of a novel put it, Everyone Smokes in Hell.)

But I think that Ann should hook up with John Stossel (in a professional sense, I mean — I don’t want to gross you out this early in the morning) and write a book about how smoking is actually good for you, but the medical profession, in league with the liberal media and government, don’t want you to know this.  They could do it for Jesus.  

Wingnuts | 26 Comments »

In his LA Times column, Jonah Goldberg cements his role as a public intellectual by treating us to a history lesson which proves that, as far as revolutionary means of instantaneous communcation goes, the internet is actually a step back from the Babylonian woodcut technology William F. Buckley used in the early years of the National Review. 

My conservative instinct is to believe that there’s really nothing new under the sun.

 Although he stole this belief from Ben Domenech.

Technology almost by definition is developed to solve problems (necessity, recall, is invention’s mommy). But, as conservative philosophy teaches us…

Isn’t it cute when Jonah pretends to have a philosophy (other than nepotism)?  The effect is similar to when my four year old nephew points his finger at me, pretending to have a gun, and says, “Bang!”

…the “problems” of the human condition are permanent.

Excess adipose tissue, for instance.  That ain’t goin’ away…

Boosters of the brave new World Wide Web and mourners of “traditional” media alike share a common view that the way the news media has operated over the last half a century is the “normal” way. Both sides think the Internet is more unprecedented and revolutionary than it is. In reality, the crumbling status quo was always an aberration.
For various reasons, the post-World War II generation was unusually trusting of big institutions and elites.

This would be the Baby Boomer generation; you remember, the one that launched the counterculture and drove the anti-war movement.  Poor trusting saps.  If only they realized that they were merely disposable cogs in the vast machinery of Big Hippie.

It grew up with the first real national media outlets.

Given that the Boomer generation comprises those born between 1946 and 1964, and that the “first real national media outlet,” was the NBC radio network launched in 1926, Jonah’s assertion doesn’t make much sense.  Fortunately, this temporal disparity can be easily reconciled once we factor in the rogue activities of a time-traveling cyborg. 

Following on the heels of radio, TV further united the nation. Network news anchors had what CBS News executive Jim Murphy calls “the voice of God.”

In that they were all dubbed by Cecil B. DeMille.

A handful of media outlets, almost all of them based in a few square miles of Olympian Manhattan, dictated the terms of the national conversation.

Because even though there were local TV and radio stations, and often several competing newspapers in most cities, Chet Huntley’s very breath was law.

This was the era of the “vital center,” when the establishment was marked by an astounding level of consensus. Polarization is actually the American norm.
Lionel Trilling famously summarized the conventional wisdom of 1950 when he declared that “it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”

I guess it would have been different had there been–oh I don’t know–say a Red Scare that followed the Soviet test of an atomic bomb in 1949, or the Korean War, or the Iron Curtain, or anything that was happening in the world that might have driven a culture of fear and reaction here at home.  Fortunately, Walter Cronkite’s Saddam-like ability to crush the centrifugal energies of America’s restive tribes and mold them into an uneasy union with his iron-fisted avuncularity prevented a civil war.

The media reflected this consensus, reporting the news based on a host of moderate, liberal assumptions about everything from foreign policy to economics. Reporters believed in their duty to be objective even if they didn’t always understand that their biases were quite obvious to those, on the left and right, residing outside the elite liberal consensus.

That was the problem with the Fifites.  Too damn liberal.

Instantaneous technology — photography, radio, television — allowed people to feel like “you are there.”

Oh-oh, a Murrow ref.  Jonah better back off or the break room wedgies are going to start coming fast and furious again…

Of course, the reality is that such technology does not communicate objective truth so much as give the viewer the visceral sensation that it does.

Phew!  That was close.

The Rodney King video is a good example of how misleading “reality” can be, in that a snippet of video caused riots.

Actually, wasn’t it the not guilty verdict in the trial of the police officers that caused the riots?

When the video was shown at trial, the jury saw something very different.

 Yes, the white jury in the phosphorescently white suburb of Simi Valley saw white police officers dealing out a bit of street justice to a deserving member of the underclass which infests that teeming urban dystopia to the south.  It’s a good thing they weren’t misled by “reality,” or they might have voted to convict, and then Jonah would be forced to question their impartiality.

I’ve toiled in the cyber-fields for close to a decade now (I was the founding editor of National Review Online), and what fascinates me is how the Internet is allowing the nation to return to its historical relationship with the media, not how it’s changing everything.

In the 19th century, newspapers played a different role from the one we think they’re “supposed” to play.

They didn’t realize they were supposed to serve as a vector for “Ziggy.”

American newspapers were never as unapologetically and uniformly partisan as European ones were (and still are), but they were still mostly creatures of specific political biases. There were Republican and Democratic newspapers, populist and communist newspapers, union and anti-union newspapers. These publications served as vehicles for partisan education and crusading personalities, in much the same way leading blogs do today.

Because if you’ve never experienced the electricity and charisma of a Glenn Reynolds’ “Heh,” the flood-tide inevitability of a Malkinian “Newsbusters has more,” or the plangent clarion of a Jonah Goldbergian “Does anybody know who Thomas Hobbes is?  Can you email me?  I’m supposed to write a book…” then you’ve never experienced the blood-thumping rapine of an online crusade.

Take another look at the most flagrantly partisan websites today: the liberal Daily Kos and its conservative doppelganger, Red State.  What you see are media outlets trying to serve the same function as newspapers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.   A work in progress, they often screw up.

Unlike genuine newspaper columnists, such as myself.

The recent clunker by Truthout.org, which reported that Karl Rove was to be indicted when in fact he was cleared…

I missed the press conference were Patrick Fitzgerald cleared Karl Rove, apologized on behalf of the people for his long, unjust nightmare, and presented him with a crisp double sawbuck and a new suit.

…is nothing compared with the 19th century press’ routine manufacture of events great and small, typified by William Randolph Hearst’s “yellow journalism” to cook up the Spanish-American War.

Or the New York Times invention of the Whitewater scandal, or their manufacture of widespread Chinese infiltration of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, or their conjuring of WMDs to cook up a war in Iraq, or…

There will always be a need for serious, professional news-gathering organizations.

We should look into getting some.

But there will also always be a need for the politically committed to form their own communities.

This is how Jonah coped with the neighborhood kids kicking him out of their treehouse.

The Internet is allowing the United States to have both once again.

Thus ended the history lesson.  Thanks for the course credit, Jonah.  I’ll be eagerly watching the mailbox for my diploma from Adam Smith University in Saipan.

UPDATE

Doghouse Riley, in a masterpiece of grumpy elegance, flenses Jonah for further high crimes against historiography.

Wingnuts | 6 Comments »

Okay, I’ve had my three hours of sleep, and am now well into the morning from hell.  Highlight so far: Flossie stole the kittens’ bottle of milk and chewed it up.  End result: a ruined bottle, milk all over the carpet, and a dog who is going to be spending six months in the county lockup for grand theft milk (that kitten milk replacement is expensive!) 

So, since I am up and cranky, I am providing you with another quote about Christianity from our mystery author.

Liberals were afraid of a book that told the truth about IQ (“The Bell Curve”) because they are godless secularists who do not believe humans are in God’s image. Christians have no fear of hearing facts about genetic differences in IQ because we don’t think humans are special because they are smart.

Yup, Christians think that blacks are genetically inferior to white, and it’s okay to say so, because that’s just the way that God made his dusky children (stupid)

I think Jesus is now pounding his head against one of the heavenly walls.  Either that or filing an injunction to get our Mystery Author from infringing on his trademark and destroying the good name of his product.

NOTE:  I know that you all think that our MA is Ann Coulter, but come on; would she seriously be claiming to be a Christian after saying how much she hates widows (and presumably orphans too), the very people to whom Christ repeatedly instructed his followers to show love and concern?

Wingnuts | 12 Comments »

I want to thank Scott and Mary for getting the site moved — I know it took a lot of effort to get it up and running, and I really appreciate all the hard work they put into it. 

Seb from Sadly, No! also deserves my thanks for reasons which can’t be disclosed due to national security concerns.  I should probably send him an imaginary cake or something.

I hope you like the new, improved site, and that you will find it to be everything that a World o’Crap should be.  (If you are disappointed in any way, we will not only cheerfully refund your money, you can keep the wingnuts as our free gift to you!)  

Anyway, here’s a quote – try to guess who said it:  (Come on, guess — I dare you!)  For extra credit, explain what this means for Christianity.

Although my Christianity is somewhat more explicit in this book, Christianity fuels everything I write.

Now a word from our sponsor | 12 Comments »

Sorry about the sudden and baffling disappearance of the entire blog.  We signed up with another host on Monday, and I foolishly chose their Brigadoon package.  Big mistake.  We’ve since upgraded to the Pompeii package, so service should be considerably more stable from now on.

Delays were further exacerbated by my complete and utter ignorance of php, pvc, spf, and other incantatory internet abbreviations.  Many thanks to maryc, who stepped in and storted out the bollixed files for us.  She wins a Manos wife diaphanous nightgown with crimson front-and-rear modesty panels, and the right to be worshipped as a goddess for five nights and four fun-filled days.

Oops | 6 Comments »

To commemorate the occasion (the kittens turn 21 today — and man, it’s been the longest 3 weeks of my life), I thought I’d update you on all of the pets. Hey, while it could just be a Lileks-esque exercise which will bore you silly with the mind-numbing minutia of my life, it might also possibly serve as a welcome break from scary news stories like White House seeking resolution to Iran nuclear standoff, and Rice Calls DPRK Missile Threat “Provocative,” not to mention such horros as Bruce Willis Files Suit Against Paparazzi. Plus, it’s a cautionary tale about seemingly cute and loveable animals that just might teach you a thing or two.

• Anyway, let’s start with the pets who cause the least amount of trouble, the goldfish Blinky and Glitter.They are perfect pets, in that they have never caused me a sleepless night, never needed costly trips to the vet, and have never, ever peed on my carpet. They come when I call them (which I do by sprinkling fish food on the water). They haven’t bitten anyone. And, so far, they haven’t died. So, they win our highest rating. Of course, they don’t do much besides eat, sleep, swim around their tank, and poop, but they still win the honor of Pet of the Week, and all the other pets are encouraged to learn from their example.
• Next on the least-trouble scale is Bitey the hamster. He has gotten big and fluffy, and is really cute. And mean. Well, he’s gotten nicer to me, in that he doesn’t bite me anymore, but he still has a taste for human flesh. Let me recount the incident concerning Bitey and my ten-year-old nephew Dallin to illustrate my point.Last month my youngest brother and his kids came to visit. Young Dallin, apparently mistaking Bitey for the late Hamster (whose epitaph was, as you may recall, “He never bit anyone, ever”) went over to the rodent cage and took off the cover. I got there in the nick of time, warning him that this hamster, named “Bitey,” bites. I added that Bitey had bit lots of people, would bite anyone who tried to touch him, and basically was a biter.Dallin seemed impressed with my warning … or so I thought, until a minute later he asked how hard Bitey bit.

  “REALLY hard,” I replied.”So you shouldn’t put your hand in his cage. Got it?”

  Dallin said indignantly that he wouldn’t bother the hamster, but then asked conversationally, “But if you were going to pick him up, how would you do it?”

  “I WOULDN’T do it, because he would bite,” I stated forcefully.

  Dallin nodded thoughtfully. And then, not a minute later, I saw his hand go into the cage.

  Later, after all the shrieking and the blood, when Dallin’s finger had been cleaned and bandaged, I asked him why he tried to pick up Bitey despite all my warnings.

  “I didn’t think he would bite ME,” he said in a tone of betrayed trust.  

• After a minute he brightened up a bit and added, “You were right — he did bite me really hard. He made me bleed a whole bunch. I am going to tell everyone about it at Show and Tell tomorrow.”
• Bitey hasn’t bitten anyone since then, but he has encouraged several kids to change their minds about wanting a hamster for a pet.
• The cats (Andy, Jet Jaguar, Tibby, and Zigra) are all fine.Andy, who is 17 now, underwent a “Senior Checkup” at the vet’s last month. Cost? No one can say.Okay, it cost $200. It included a kitty EKG, “stool floating,” and the option where they send the blood tests to the really good lab for results.

  The bottom line is: he’s fine, except that there was some anomaly with his EKG results that could mean nothing, or could mean something really serious is wrong with his heart. But since he exhibits no symptoms (and since there is little they could do even if his heart were failing), I declined the offer of further expensive tests (a kitty heart X-ray, diagnostics conducted by Dr. House for cats, etc.) at this time, instead telling Andy that he should take the “Run for Your Life” approach to life, and try to cram 20 years of living into the next two or three.

  Jet Jaguar has gotten enormous. (He must weigh 20 pounds or so). But in his favor, he does have big bones. Plus, his namesake had that option of growing in size when he needed to fight monsters, and then shrinking when the encounter was over, I’m hoping that Jet will reduce when the time is right.  Plus, since he can still jump from the entertainment center to the 15-foot-wall that divides the living room from the kitchen, he can’t be in too bad of shape.

  Tibby has grown into a really sweet cat, but I still haven’t been able to convince him to raise the kittens for me.

  Here is a photo of him lying on the cord of the digital camera. (I bet the photographers from National Geographic don’t have to put up with this kind of thing.)

  

  Zigra is even sweeter in temperament than Tibby (but more shy). He is also a very attractive cat, I must say. He is currently rubbing against my legs, trying to get back into my good graces. See, he escaped from the yard on Sunday, and didn’t come back until the wee hours of the morning, leaving me to stay up most of the night calling him, searching for him, and fretting like an anxious parent whose kid may have eloped, may just have lost track of time with his friends, or who may have been eaten by a giant Gila monster. He came back rather abashed and eager to make amends — I guess he’s afraid I am going to send him to military school.

  Scott (who had to hear all my complaints before you did) had this to say about Zigra’s night out:

  I’m glad Zigra learned his lesson (which is just as rare in a cat as shame); sure the bright lights of your small town may seem enticing, but by the middle of the night you’ve been dumped by that doxie who seemed so friendly till she found out you’re all talk (since your walk, so to speak, was last seen in medical waste container at the vet’s), you’re broke and miles from home, and so strung-out and shaking from catnip cut with Vivarin that you can barely hop the fence without impaling yourself on a stave like a carrousel horse.

  That seems to sum up his experience pretty well. Maybe a little TOO well. I wonder where Scott was Sunday night . . .

• The dogs, Yodie and Flossie, are much easier to live with than they used to be. At least, compared to the kittens (who still have to be fed 5 times a day, and wake me up at 6:30 each morning for their first meal).Both dogs are housebroken (under normal circumstances), and spend hours chasing each other, thus freeing me from the obligation of walking several miles a day to exercise them. They are good with the cats, and really, REALLY want to mother the kittens, giving them sloppy kisses through the baby gate whenever they get the chance. (Since the cats have resisted my baby-sitting offers, I am tempted to let the kittens be raised by wolves, so to speak.)Yodie is still mischievous and strong-willed, but he is very smart and loyal, and so will usually do what he’s told, more or less. Or at least, will do something that you can live with.

  Flossie is still very sweet and eager to please. She loves everyone, and is gentle and good tempered … except when Yodie gets too close to her food bowl, when she will bark ferociously. (This happens most often when she’s not even hungry — I guess she’s just trying to hoard resources for the upcoming civil war, or something.) I’m trying to work on this “pig dog in the manger” behavior, but with little success to date.

  However, the big problem this week is that the dogs picked up a bug or something (possibly from the kittens), and I didn’t get much sleep Friday or Saturday nights, what with all the vomiting, diarrhea, cleaning up the vomit and diarrhea, giving dogs baths, washing crates, etc. It wasn’t a pleasant experience for any of us. (BTW, for those of you keeping track, that makes three nights in a row in which I didn’t get more than 4 hours of sleep.)

  But here’s a photo of Flossie giving me her “Pokey Little Puppy” look (or, as Scott described it, “Flossie seems to have the look of that Blue Boyish painting in Progress Island U.S.A. (‘I’M not SPEAKING to YOU…’).”

  

• The kittens are beginning that adorable stage that all kittens go through (it will hopefully last until they find new homes). They still spend most of their time sleeping, but when they are awake and I enter the bathroom where they’re living, they run to me eagerly .. and then claw me in their frenzied quest for food (it’s like trying to feed four of those babies from “It’s Alive”)The bit, fluffy black-and-white male developed congestion in his lungs (either he aspirated milk, or got sick or something), and I thought he was going to die (I spend most of one night holding him upright on my shoulder over steamy water to help him breathe). But started to rally yesterday, and is eating again and regaining weight. He still wheezes, but is every bit as active as his brother and sisters. I attribute his recovery to the power of prayer.The cream-colored male with the gray “points” on his ears and tail, and a white mask on his face is growing like a weed. I was thinking of calling him “Stossel” in the hopes it will get him a big donation from Dow.

  The large tabby female (formerly known as “Squawky”; now called “Celine”) is as loud and pushy as ever, but after her demands have been met, will roll on her back, purr, and look at you adoringly. She will go far.

  The small tabby female (formerly known as “Runty”; now called “Lupita”) is a sweet but feisty kitten who can keep up with her bigger siblings just fine, and who is usually the first to stop the frantic meowing for milk and start purring. Here is a photo of her looking all waifish and orphan-like:

  

• Anyway, that’s the story of my pets. They are good company, loving companions, and loyal (to some extent) friends. But man, are they a lot of work. And they do seem to keep finding ways to keep me from getting any sleep. I think it’s part of the brainwashing. (And it must be working, because I’ve spent about a gizillion dollars at PetSmart this month, a lot of it for kitten milk replacer, but a great deal of it for treats, toys, and other non-essentials.)

  Anyway, that’s my story. Please excuse all the errors — I really haven’t had much sleep lately, and it shows. Also, please send help.

  Wild Things | 19 Comments »

The move to a new (and, we hope and whine) permanent host is underway, so we may experience service outtages over the next 24 to 48 hours. As a result, Movie Monday has been postponed, so you have several more days to get your affairs in order before we unleash Zardoz upon you.

Also, our hostess has mug shots of her foster kitties, as well as glamour photos of her regular supporting cast of quadrupeds, and a breathtaking tale of one cat’s daring escape from Stalag S.Z. And possibly a visit from an Old Friend…

So please stay tuned.

Oops | 4 Comments »

I�ve always been dubious about the purported link between pornography and sexual violence, but yesterday�s LA Times reported that Bush has signed an order creating the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Monument, the world�s largest marine preserve; and this action follows previous Bush efforts to lift the less stringent protections granted to the area by the Clinton Administration. So what prompted this dramatic turnaround?

The president saw a Jacques Cousteau movie. As Doctor Forrester once worriedly remarked, �You know how easily Frank is swayed by the moving image.�

But that wasn�t the most startling news the Times offered. In the midst of the Bush�s uncharacteristic spasm of humanity, we get this leaked bombshell from Deep Throat in the third paragraph:

“With a stroke of a pen, the president not only can accomplish the single largest act of conservation in U.S. history, but he can inspire the American public on the broader importance of our ocean and coastal environments,” said a senior administration official who requested anonymity so as to not upstage Bush’s announcement today.

Let me be the first to say what needs to be said here: It�s only through the fortitude and personal sacrifice of whistleblowers like this, who anonymously read Administration boilerplate to reporters over the phone, that our democracy survives. Imagine, if you will, a world in which the media did not routinely shield the identities of White House sources in exchange for a quote about how smart and handsome the president is. Why, we�d either get stories entirely devoid of talking points posing as reportage, or We The People would know which senior administration official is going on and on about the potency of the presidential pen strokes, and then Bush would know how much the source liked him, and he�d have all the hand in the relationship, and would probably be all ignoring him in the halls and at Cabinet meetings, but start making drunken booty calls to the source at three in the morning.

So you can see why our traditions of transparent governance and the free exchange of ideas rely upon the uncompromising principle of source confidentiality.

But now that we know how susceptible the president is to magic lantern shows, which movies and TV programs should we recommend to help him correct other failed policies?

I think he should just start Tivoing the Bravo network. Doesn�t really matter what day or time; after a few episodes of Queer Eye, Project Runway, Top Chef, and Kathy Griffin, I guarantee he will drop his support for the anti-gay marriage amendment, and more profitably spend his time and resources dissing Star Jones.

UPDATE

I see Kevin Drum managed to make essentially the same point, but without dragging porn or Star Jones into it.

My Country Right, Wrong or Decline to State | 13 Comments »

Shorter Jonah Goldberg:

Ramesh Ponnuru does not call the Democratic Party the Party of Death in his new book, The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life. In fact, he’s not even talking about the Democratic Party, just all the people in it who happen to be Democrats. So you should go buy his book because it’s heavily discounted on Amazon, and because a guy from Princeton who thought it was morally incumbent upon Terri Schiavo to continue her liquid brain lifestyle gave a copy to the new Pope as a housewarming gift.

(Okay, Ramesh, you got until March 2007 to get a weekly gig with a major daily, ’cause now you gotta flog my book when it comes out. Yes, it’s coming out, Mother promised…)

Wingnuts | 5 Comments »