To All Future Cowardly and Weak Presidents: Don't Fuck With People Who Are More Serious Than You.

In gw's case, that means don't fuck with The Onion.

The Onion's response:


Hey gw - I know you're gonna wanna hit back at 'em. Don't. Quit while you're behind. They can make a bigger fool out of you than even you can.

Jeb Bush declares that he will not run for re-election....

Or at least he may as well have:

The governor added, however, that people seeking relief should have done more to prepare for the storm.

"People had ample time to prepare. It isn't that hard to get 72 hours worth of food and water," said Bush, repeating the advice that officials had given days before Wilma hit.

Floridians: your Governor hates you.

President Idiot too weak to get away with paying black folks next-to-nothing

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration will reinstate rules requiring that companies awarded federal contracts for Hurricane Katrina pay prevailing wages, usually an amount close to the pay scales in local union contracts.

He's got nothin. He knows he's got nothin, and Scott McClellan is the only one in the world who thinks otherwise.

Fuck hicks are STUPID...

There's just not a lot to say about this one...

SPOKANE — Three Spokane County deputies accused of staging a phony high-speed chase as a prank were suspended without pay Monday, Sheriff Mark Sterk said.... The pursuit ended when city police officers, who rushed to assist, disabled the Mustang with a spike strip on a downtown street. The police officers were not aware that the chase was phony and have been cleared of wrongdoing.

Jackasses.

2nd Thought: There is a little bit more to say about this. How many murders, rapes, sexual assaults, and robberies took place during this prank? If a crime was committed against me during prank-time, I'd consider suing the city for gross negligence or some such thing.

And that's all there is to say about that....

From the Arizona Daily Star:

After a sexual assault one recent weekend, a young Tucson woman spent three frantic days trying to obtain the drug to prevent a pregnancy, knowing that each passing day lowered the chance the drug would work.... When she finally did find a pharmacy with it, she said she was told the pharmacist on duty would not dispense it because of religious and moral objections.

You heard it here first (maybe): That's the end of all asinine pharmacist-cum-moral-arbiter laws. It's done.

Hey republican women: these laws, for which you are partly to blame, are directed squarely against YOU. You may want to reconsider your affiliation.

Ooo I wish they all could be like Alec Baldwin...

... the news media, I mean...

In today's Huffington Post, Alec goes straight for the money question:

Why are contemporary Republicans so full of shit?

Wonderful question. His followup more easily permits an accurate, snappy answer:

How did the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and General Eisenhower get taken over by such lying, thieving, self-serving scoundrels?

Answer: The Civil Rights Act. White folks chose up sides, and republicans got the lying, thieving, self-serving scoundrels.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Here's what the Senate says about Miers:

"I think, if you were to hold the vote today, she would not get a majority, either in the Judiciary Committee or on the floor," said Schumer, D-N.Y.

And here's what we get - albeit second-hand - from the White House:

"I haven't seen anything coming from the White House that says that they're going to pull this nomination," said Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback

Apparently there's something of a communication gap here somewhere...

And just for completeness' sake, let's not lose track of exactly *how* qualified Miers is:

At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued for violating the Voting Rights Act, she said, the council "had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection clause."

But the Supreme Court repeatedly has said that the Constitution's guarantee of the "equal protection of the laws" does not mean that city councils or state legislatures must have enough minority members to match the proportion of blacks, Hispanics and Asians in the voting population.

....Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan...said she was surprised the White House did not check Miers' questionnaire before sending it to the Senate.

Bets on Harriet's ability to spell "Constitution" correctly 2 out of 3 times, anyone?

Snark aside (more fun for me than for you, I'm sure), it seems to me that the White House is in a bit of a sticky wicket. They need senatorial opinion on Miers to change. That change will come in one of 2 ways: (a) She'll WOW them with her intellect, which by the above seems unlikely, or else (b) the White House will twist Senate republican arms into an opnion change by expending some of gw's vaunted political capital. Which immediately raises the question "What political capital?".

Shorter Maureen Dowd...

For those of you who had trouble interpreting MoDo's column in the Times, here's a translation (sorry, I don't link to the Times-pay-for-me crap).

And here's the essence of MoDo (Michael) speaking to Fredo (Judy):

"Fredo, you're my older brother, and I love you. But don't ever take sides with anyone against the Family again. Ever." [The Godfather, 1972]

Yup. The Oil-for-food scandal *was* awful....

... but mostly because it was Americans perpetrating it...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Virginia oil trading company pleaded guilty on Thursday to charges of scheming to pay more than $400,000 in kickbacks to Iraq for oil purchases made as part of the defunct U.N. oil-for-food program for Iraq.

It's a good thing republicans cried out so hard for the prosecution of the American companies that committed these crimes, just like they called for Kofi Anan's head...

At this point, it's good for us to recall outfits like fox news, norm coleman, and the rest of the gang:

NEW YORK — It began as a U.N. humanitarian aid program called "Oil-for-Food," but it ended up with Saddam Hussein (search) pocketing billions to become the biggest graft-generating machine ever and enriching some of America's most forceful opponents at the United Nations (search).

Plus, some evidence suggests that some of the money ended up in the hands of potential terrorists who are opposed to the United States.

And, from the same article:

"There is a lot of smoke," Volcker told FOX News on June 23, when asked if he thinks the Oil-for-Food program was corrupt. "There are obviously big problems, and we want to see how big they were and why did they happen. Why did all this happen, in some sense, under everybody's noses?"

Shays and Sen. Norm Coleman (search) -- leaders of two of at least five federal Oil-for-Food investigations -- have started firing off subpoenas.

Pssst - hey norm: This happened under your noses because you let companies that support you and your party do it. You yourself are complicit in this. Fucker.

Note: Google wasn't able to help me out much regarding the guilty company, Midway Trading - they're privately held. All I was able to find out was that one of their executives contributed $180 to the RNC in 2004. Cheapskate.

With an 82% approval rating, gw breathes a sigh of relief...

Not making this up.

What? What?

Best. News. Day. Ever.

There's a warrant for Delay's arrest. From the AP:

AUSTIN — Today a Texas court issued a warrant for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's arrest, and set an initial $10,000 bail as a routine step before his first court appearance on conspiracy and state money laundering charges.

This is the best pre-Fitzmas gift ever!

What's in a name?

I just found this really great site: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ . It gives long-term statistics on the popularity of baby names in America – wow!

Upon finding it, I did what any ½-way thinking person would do: I compared “William” to “George” over the last 35 years. (The reason for 35 years was to get a “baseline” for each name, before getting to the “interesting” last 10-15 years.)

Without further ado, here are the results in graph form:


Ignore the negative signs on the vertical axis – the numbers themselves refer to the popularity ranking of each name in a given year (so higher is more popular). Red is the Big Dawg, while Blue is, well, you can guess…

The graph is pretty clear, but here’s the upshot: Bill had a slight dip in popularity in the 90s, but has since more than made up for the drop.

George, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well – even in relative terms. George started going downhill steeply towards the end of Poppy’s term, but then had a slight recovery around the time GW got into office. But alas, the recovery was a la The Battle of the Bulge, soon to be swamped by an even more precipitous drop.

End result: practically no-one has the gumption to name their kid “George”, while “William” is more popular than ever. Kind of like real life, I guess. Huh – looky that.