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July 31, 2003

Bedfellow payoff

I wonder if there are better uses for 30 million American dollars than paying Iraqi gangsters to turn rat.

This won't be good for morale. Jessica Lynch didn't get $30 million. Neither did any of the hundred-thousand sweating grunts who won't be having Lifetime movies made about them. Neither did the guys who actually waxed the Torture Twins.

There's no telling how many $30-million-dollar prizes we'll have handed out in the end, but I doubt if any of the recipients would be declared "good guys" by a jury of their peers. Anybody who can finger Saddam Hussein or his family has to be compromised in some way. But then, we're used to having their kind on the payroll.

Maybe the prizes are coming out of President Bush's primary-campaign warchest. Maybe that's what he meant when, asked how he could possibly spend it (since, you know, he's not running a primary campaign), he said, "Just watch me." After all, there aren't sufficient Treasury funds to extend the child tax credit to poor families, so that can't be where the bag money for Iraqi turncoats is coming from.

In other news: Poindexter is out. That's only "good" news in the sense that it's no longer bad news. The question remains: Why the fuck was Poindexter ever allowed back in?

Posted by pk at 10:13 PM

July 29, 2003

Squawk, Cluck. There: I've Been Outraged

The obvious jokes involve William Burroughs and a special "floppy head Joan" accessory, but I'm not gonna make 'em:

kerouac_bobble.jpeg

That's a Jack Kerouac bobble-head doll, alright.

Says a UMass Jack Authority: "Kerouac appeals to people of lots of different ages and backgrounds, just like baseball does."

His final years certainly match the temperment of the times, anyhow.

(Heard this morning on NPR, found on me-fi.)

Posted by mph at 4:45 PM

July 25, 2003

Map Blog

The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps turned up in the logs today. It's the kind of blog I'm all for: focused, detailed, and it looks nice. It's also focused on got an occasional GPS link, and I'm thinking my belated b-day present is going to be one of those nifty Garmin Gekos, so into the subscription list it goes.

Posted by mph at 8:57 AM

July 24, 2003

Hope Springs Eternal

"The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed legislation today to block a new rule supported by the Bush administration that would permit the nation's largest television networks to grow bigger by owning more stations."

Complete story at Yahoo! News.

Relevant from the PuddingTime! Archives:

The "cause for hope" graf from the story:

"Only a few weeks ago, support for the F.C.C.'s move by House Republican leaders had been expected to counter the Senate uprising. But many House members from both parties have evidently taken note of the vocal resistance to the F.C.C. action by many members of the public and a broad spectrum of conservative and liberal lobbying groups from the National Rifle Association to the National Organization for Women."

Posted by mph at 7:26 PM

July 23, 2003

What About "Support the Spooks"?

I'm not of a mind to debate the Yellowcakegate issue much if only because I thought even the neocon war cheerleaders had already slid into "it wasn't ever really about weapons of mass destruction, it was about FREEDOM" equivocating months ago. If the collective memory hole has enough room to fit the displacement of "facts" and rhetoric that change in tack requires, then God help us all and please, by all means, get back to your shopping.

A sidenote story from that affair, though, is threatening to get my dander up. As documented by The Nation's David Corn and now by Newsday, "senior administration officials" leaked the name of an undercover CIA operative to get even with her husband, who represents an embarrassment to the administration thanks to his contribution to discrediting the President's "sixteen little words" on Niger. (Claire at "What If?" has a few followup commentary links.)

It's good to read that an investigation may soon be underway. Whoever the feckless little bureaucratic thugs behind the whole thing were, I hope they're found out and hung high. If Ann Coulter, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds felt like saying anything on the whole matter, I'm sure they would, too.

Posted by mph at 5:53 PM

Spare the Child

Tonight's 'net crawl led to Project NoSpank and another hair-raising teen gulag story. Lots of files to go through, and all sorts of perspectives on spanking.

Posted by mph at 8:27 AM

July 22, 2003

New Toy

Blog Change Bot makes this happen:

Get IM'd when this blog updates

Whee!

Posted by mph at 5:57 PM

Pass the Decon Gel

Here's a scene from an upcoming episode of Star Trek prequel series "Enterprise":

"The bazaar is filled with an assortment of weird and wonderful creatures, including one alien which speaks with bubbles, instead of words, a different tone emanating from each bubble as it pops; another huge alien appears to be imposing until she speaks in a meek, feminine voice. And this is all before the away team passes a shop with body parts hanging in the window."

Far out! Y'mean . . . the alien's really big, but it has a woman's voice!? Nutty!

Hopefully this way-kooky bazaar scene will be followed up with a liberal slathering of decon gel in the skivvies-only blue-lit pr0n decon chamber.

"Star Trek" has been good to me over the years, but I think it's time to let this particular cat go behind the neighbors' wood pile and do what cats do when they know it's their time.

Posted by mph at 8:12 AM

July 21, 2003

Under "B" for "Bloody-mindedness"

I suppose we should commend the Greens for having the courage to live out their convictions as they agree to support the Bush reelection effort.

Posted by mph at 7:48 PM

Dude, There's My Car!

Via MetaFilter we get the USGS Seamless Data Distribution System Viewer, which allows for crazy levels of detail of just about anywhere they've gotten around to mapping, including the street I live on.

That'd be my silver '87 Volvo in the driveway of that house, dead center of the image. (Click the pic for an enlargement). I had to park it off the street when the neighbors called it in for having expired out-of-state plates sometime the first year we lived here, but I hate blocking the sidewalk otherwise.

Posted by mph at 7:48 AM

Science Project

This weekend was science project weekend around the ranch.

Some time early in the week my wireless access point gave up the ghost. It was a Linksys WAP11, for what that's worth. It gave me just shy of two years of decent service, and on Monday it died (in the form of blinking yellow lights that weren't supposed to be blinking) before really dying on Tuesday (in the form of not a single lit light, blinking or otherwise). Bummer.

Wireless connectivity isn't mandatory to the good order of the household, but it matters a little because it's nice to be able to work out in the living room now and then. Replacing the access point won't be in the cards for another week or so, so I fixed on a Dell Inspiron laptop that's been gathering dust in the closet since an airplane trip smashed its screen about a year ago. It still works, though, and can be run connected to a monitor or even headless as a server (it was serving Shoutcast last summer for a while, as a matter of fact). So I found the the Linux Wireless Access Point Howto and NoCatAuth and sat down with the laptop and some Red Hat 9 discs I had on hand to turn the laptop into a wireless access point that routes inbound wireless traffic from the wireless NIC to the interface connected to the LAN and serves DHCP

The main difference between the current setup and what I had with the WAP11 is a little finer control over the services permitted to run over the WLAN and a dedicated wireless network segment (as opposed to the WAP11's full membership in my LAN, which isn't such a hot idea). It's also necessary to open a browser window and login before getting the connection.

Some things I noticed on this excursion:

Posted by mph at 7:21 AM

July 18, 2003

Wallpaper for my head

Took Windows XP back into the home for some work, and that meant Acid Music came back, too, which means a revival of my sonic wallpaper project from last summer (funny, Al's away again this week, too). Here's one minute of this year's "minute after minute of noise that won't distract Michael" (with some problematic joins left unsanded):

thursdays_wallpaper.mp3 (>1mb)

Might as well toss out the longer one (now with flute solo!):

thursdays_wallpaper_long.mp3 (~2mb)

And while we're at it, here are the loops and the Acid project file for the whole thing (remixes and changes always welcome): thursday_wallpaper.zip (it's about 11MB: please don't download it unless you've got Acid Music and want to get at the loops and project file for purposes besides seeing how fast I can send you 11MB over this connection.)

Posted by mph at 1:36 AM

July 17, 2003

Denial

Hey, thanks, glad to be back.

It's almost more depressing than exhilerating that now, NOW the media have jumped on this single shred of evidence of the Bush administration's perfidy, when even the most rudimental armchair investigation (like the one I've lazily conducted) could have turned up this gem and a half-dozen others weeks and months ago.

It feels like you've got this friend in an abusive relationship, and she catches her partner in some trivial lie and calls you up, in a rage and eager for someone to share her righteous indignation, except you just can't get that worked up about him saying he was going to the mall and instead being seen at a bar. For months you've been pointing out the punched walls, the unpaid loans, the excessive drinking, the unexplained absences.... It feels like your friend is using her anger as a justification: "See, I do get mad at him!" You just feel sad, and you say, "I'm sorry, but I'm not surprised. Don't you see there's a pattern here?" Because he just might have an excuse or some wiggle room this time, but the pattern will remain and continue after he's been forgiven for this small infraction. At bottom, you know she still believes in him.

Not that I'm not mad. I actually can't decide if I'm more angered by the dishonesty or the incompetence. But I feel like this nation is still mired in a dysfunctional relationship with Mr. Bush, clinging to the illusion that he's a decent guy, a good provider, and these fights he gets into, they're not his fault, and he had to mortgage the house to pay off his debts. He's doing it for our future!

Look at Iraq. Look at the soldiers bearing the burden of the administration's poor planning--of a war that wasn't necessary. Look at the staggering deficits real and projected--which do not include Mr. Bush's current and future military expenditures. Look at the rewards of those adventures accruing to Mr. Bush's corporate sponsors. Look at the disproportionate tax cuts for the wealthy. Look at the burden being thrown back on the states, and their commensurate cuts in education and social programs.

I want our future back.

Posted by pk at 11:06 PM

July 16, 2003

The Hardest Hunt of All

Why bother with HuntingForBambi.com when you can set your sights on the tastiest game?

woman_hunt.jpg

Posted by mph at 8:41 PM

July 13, 2003

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah

Back, as Phil noted, from a week on vacation in assorted places including Yellowstone National Park. Part of my first day back was spent running road-trip conversation topics to ground on the 'net, including Walt Disney's "Song of the South," which appears, for good or ill, to be disappearing off the face of the earth, except at songofthesouth.net, which seems to be home base for people who'd gladly pay $159 to get the movie on tape.

More writing on the trip a little later.

Posted by mph at 7:08 AM

July 10, 2003

vacation time!

I've been at the controls this week while Mike's been on vacation, and now it's time for my own long weekend. I think Mike will be back over the weekend, and I'll be back on Tuesday. Maintain extra vigilance until our return.

(If Mike asks, these dents happened while we were parked, remember? We were in the bar, and this is how it looked when we came out.)

Posted by pk at 10:50 PM

Speechifyin'

Those politicians sure say some krazy things!

"[T]there's no doubt in my mind, when it's all said and done, the facts will show the world the truth." -- President Bush

I think I agree with that, unless it doesn't actually mean anything.

"I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are." -- Ari Fleischer

What the--! That guy's messin' with our heads!

"Imagine a world in which this tyrant had a nuclear weapon." -- President Bush

Yes, and if you're still not scared enough to believe anything,

"Imagine a world in which an evil race of super-intelligent space-lizards enslaved humanity." -- pk

I think the burden is on those who think it can't happen to tell the world why it hasn't already.

(Quotes probably available lots of places; I got them from the New York Times. Go read the story--it's knee-slappin' fun!)

Posted by pk at 10:08 PM

July 9, 2003

Well, this is interesting

CRUEL MEDIA HOAX! UPDATE FOLLOWS ORIGINAL POST!

POSTED 7/9: Make what you will of this, but Capitol Hill Blue has an on-the-record quote and a name:

An intelligence consultant who was present at two White House briefings where the uranium report was discussed confirmed that the President was told the intelligence was questionable and that his national security advisors urged him not to include the claim in his State of the Union address.

"The report had already been discredited," said Terrance J. Wilkinson, a CIA advisor present at two White House briefings. "This point was clearly made when the President was in the room during at least two of the briefings."

Bush's response was anger, Wilkinson said.

"He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn't prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could," Wilkinson said. "He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country."

Thanks to Bob Harris at This Modern World.

UPDATE, 7/10: The above quotes can now be attributed to Keyser Soze of Vandalay Industries. Doug Thompson, publisher of Capitol Hill Blue (which I'd never even heard of before yesterday), has apparently been scammed for the better part of 20 years by this "Terrance J. Wilkinson," who chose this moment to go on the record--and then vanish. Unless Mr. Thompson is scamming us. Either way, I sure am glad I put a modest qualifier at the top of the post. You did see that I qualified it, right?

"Bobby, it's not nice to tease your brother. You know how much he wanted that pony."

Thanks to alert reader Brett for the tip, though I'm sure I'd have found this top-of-desk over at This Modern World soon enough.

Posted by pk at 10:37 PM

Grab bag

Yesterday I had an individuality crisis when I finished up my morning's blogging then did some browsing and saw that I'd essentially mirrored the day's content on Tapped at The American Prospect. So today I'm not going to pretend to be a smug little pundit.

Did anybody else catch Hardball last night? I'm not a regular scanner of the cable yaps, but I tuned in for a bit last night since it was such a big news day, and I must say, Chris Matthews was all up in the Bush White House--or, rather, on the poor Republican back-bencher sent to flack on their behalf. Matthews used all the tricks: sharp interruptions, staccato repeating of charges, sarcastic hypothetical explanations, grandstanding defenses of democracy--it was beautiful! Rahm Emmanuel, batting for the D's, could just chill out and watch, knowing Matthews would give him plenty of time to make his points. For a moment I understood what conservatives must feel watching O'Reilly. I nearly swooned! Then...I felt rather ashamed. Then, I felt strong and cocky again! I cautiously tried a fist-pump...Yes! I might've even gone "Woot! Woot! Woot!" but I didn't want to wake the baby.

So, I said I was going to provide a running commentary on this season's Real World. And I have been watching, but either the cast is just very stupid or the storyline editors are really at sea. It's not that, like, I'm so mature, because I was reasonably roped in to the Vegas cast (eventually), but right now, it's stuck in neutral. Oh, sure, there's CONFLICT: How could there not be, with a bunch of spotlit American kids so stuck on gettin' respect that they don't know how to converse or compromise. But who's interesting? Adam might have been, but so far our entree to him is watching him net ladies' phone numbers with all the suave sophistication of Flounder in Animal House. Chris (C.T.) may be the most misunderstood, but he's so stuck on being an obtuse boor that we may never know. Leah and Christine are all about letting these two boys know what their problems are--and not much else. As for Simon, Mallory, and Ace, who knows? Simon hovers over the computer occasionally, Mallory and Ace are too freighted by the baggage they left at home to hook up with each other--or even live. Oh, and they're bad at their job.

Can anyone tell me what the actual name is for the radio format that isn't Classic Rock or Alternative Metal or Teen Pop or Teen Punk or Oldies or Eighties or Country; the one that, like, purports to be "alternative," but isn't actually rock, or even any fun? You know the one: They play Tori Amos, Tom Petty, Bonnie Raitt, Sarah MacghLacghlacghn, Warren Zevon, Tracy Chapman, U2, some very uptight blues, various dull-earnest alt-country acts, and a bunch of anonymous, vaguely cranky, highly literate "singer/songwriters" who've been hepped to drum machines and the paradoxes of modern life. What is that radio format? Because, frankly, I think it's the one I hate the most. If you're still wondering what bobos are, listen to said station in your area. Bunch of self-satisfied, politically correct softies wearing hemp clothes and sandals, drinking decaf lattes, reading novels.

How is it that there's a radio format for every slice of every genre except what's actually Good?

Posted by pk at 6:02 PM

July 8, 2003

Oh, and uh, they lied

But it was someone else's fault, and they're very, very sorry:

"Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech," a senior Bush administration official said last night in a statement authorized by the White House.

As part of his case against Iraq, Bush said in his State of the Union speech on Jan. 28 that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The International Atomic Energy Agency told the U.N. Security Council in March that the uranium story -- which centered on documents alleging Iraqi efforts to buy the material from Niger -- was based on forged documents. Although the administration did not dispute the IAEA's conclusion, it launched the war against Iraq later that month.

It subsequently emerged that the CIA the previous year had dispatched a respected former senior diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson, to Niger to investigate the allegation and that Wilson had reported back that officials in Niger denied the story. The administration never made Wilson's mission public, and questions have been raised over the past month over how the CIA characterized his conclusion in its classified intelligence reports inside the administration.

Seems to me there's only one question for the CIA: Was the president munching pretzels and unable to hear you say the documents were forged, or did he say, "Hell, let's go with it--I bet only 23% of the voters will give a shit"?

How Mr. Bush's statement made it into last January's State of the Union address is still unclear. No one involved in drafting the speech will say who put the phrase in, or whether it was drawn from the classified intelligence estimate. That document contained a footnote — in a separate section of the report, on another subject — noting that State Department experts were doubtful of the claims that Mr. Hussein had sought uranium.

That's from the New York Times story. Earlier quote and link are from the Washington Post.

Posted by pk at 7:42 PM

Dodge, parry, thrust

Sticking with the Wall Street Journal--and why not; if they say it, it must be true--here's a piece on how the White House has blocked and befuddled the so-called 9/11 Commission as it works to meet a May '04 deadline that its Republican chair, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, says he has no intention of extending because "the White House has made it known they don't want it to go into the election period." Highlights:

President Bush successfully opposed the creation of the commission for more than a year. He said publicly that an independent investigation would distract leaders from his newly-declared war on terrorism.

[snip]

While the law establishing the commission requires it to build on a classified, nearly 900-page report of a Congressional inquiry into intelligence agencies, the White House blocked the commission's access to that report until two months ago.

[snip]

The commission's work also has been hampered by disagreements over its budget. ... In late March, Mr. Kean warned that the commission would soon go broke. He visited the White House to request an additional $11 million, he and others say. The White House told him to expect that an appropriation for the commission would be included in the president's supplemental budget for the Iraq War, according to Mr. Kean and others.

But in March, when the White House announced that budget, there was no allocation for the commission. Members of the commission and Congress complained publicly, as did families of victims. Within a week, the White House offered to come up with $9 million, $2 million less than what Mr. Kean had requested. But Congress appropriated $11 million for the commission instead.

There's more--and remember, it's not from some liberal rag, it's from the Wall Street Journal.

Posted by pk at 7:22 PM

A Hard Right to the Chin

Hey! Even the Wall Street Journal slams the new Ann Coulter jeremiad. Strengthening the blow, they assure us they haven't gone soft on "liberals" with a gratuitous slander of Maureen Dowd: They equate the two in the subhead. (Take it for the team, MoDo.)

Also making today a good day is news that the clearly disturbed Michael Savage has been dismissed by MSNBC. Somehow a discussion about airplane tedium abruptly plunged into a vicious and seemingly unrelated attack on the caller's orientation:

"Oh, you're one of the sodomites," Savage said. "You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it."

Good riddance, Mr. Savage, you sick, pathetic man. May your audience wander the wasteland evermore. I'm especially looking forward to the apologia that Andrew Sullivan will craft in defense of yet another martyred conservative.

AFTERTHOUGHT: I didn't realize that the part in the Savage story where what the caller said becomes unintelligible is apparently where the caller called Savage out in some crude fashion, which caused the savvy media professional to lose his mind and violently regurgitate his unhinged bigotry on the air. I stand by my earlier comments.

Posted by pk at 6:09 PM

July 7, 2003

Do you feel a draft?

As reports of rock-bottom morale roll in, military service is clearly not the attractive option it used to be--and not just because the odds look good that if you join, you will fight.

Maybe the support Mr. Bush has enjoyed among average Americans will finally be drained away by the bitterness and attrition among their uniformed children in Iraq. We can't expect young people to keep enlisting in sufficient numbers to keep our increasingly busy military all-volunteer--not when the present administration is so bad at understanding, defining, and implementing a sound mission for our soldiers.

Posted by pk at 4:38 PM

July 5, 2003

Happy Indefensible Day

Maureen Farrell unlocks a veritable arsenal of smoking guns in a long piece bristling with excellent links at BuzzFlash.com: Intelligence President Bush ignored in the weeks and months before September 11; President Bush's cronies' profiteering in two wars (and counting); President Bush's disingenuous and often false arguments for war in Iraq; President Bush's efforts to hamstring the investigation into the failures that allowed the 9/11 attacks even as he fuels and capitalizes on the resulting fear and patriotism for his own political ends ... and the confounding public complacence and apathy that continues to reel out the rope for President Bush to hang us all with.

You may know much of this already, but it's an excellent one-stop resource if you're looking to create a dossier, maybe some hard data to take along to the family picnic and whip out when you're struck dumb by Uncle Ron's empty-headed American chauvinism. President Bush doesn't serve you, me, or Uncle Ron, and self-satisfied armchair hawks who gloat over his feckless, tough-guy one-liners had best wake up. The greatest irony of President Bush's administration is that he is betraying most grievously those whose trust and patriotism are his sole source of political capital. (AFTERTHOUGHT: Financial capital is, of course, something else entirely--the straw that stirs the drink in this chapter of history.)

Posted by pk at 5:27 PM

July 3, 2003

Let Your Fingers Do the Learning

Issued by someone at the University of Wisconsin, this may be the best search query I've ever read in my own logs:

"'discuss in the 'counterculture capitalists' how brooks feels the contemporary american business world has been transformed. what is the nature of this transformation and what are the principles of what he calls the'official ideology'."

Hope we were able to help.

Posted by mph at 8:34 AM

July 2, 2003

Court to Bubble People: Tough Noogies

Dot-Com Lawsuit against Merrill Lynch Tossed, but I really just like this quote:

"Seeking to lay the blame for the enormous Internet Bubble solely at the feet of a single actor, Merrill Lynch, plaintiffs would have this Court conclude that the federal securities laws were meant to underwrite, subsidize, and encourage their rash speculation in joining a freewheeling casino that lured thousands obsessed with the fantasy of Olympian riches, but which delivered such riches to only a scant handful of lucky winners."

Posted by mph at 8:48 PM

July 1, 2003

Welcome to the occupation

A BBC account (6/28/03) of a hit-and-run incident in which an 11-year-old Iraqi boy was apparently killed by a vehicle in an American convoy.

A Yahoo! News general story (6/29/03) that among other things describes an incident in which a U.S. soldier at a checkpoint shook down an Iraqi citizen for 600 bucks. (See "The shaky relationship," about halfway down the column.)

A This Is London story (6/19/03) describing the disturbingly brutal mindset combat brings ordinary soldiers down to.

A Washington Post story (6/27/03) about how a few more soldiers died, and a remembrance from a friend of one of them (6/26/03, on, of all things, Howard Dean's Blog for America).

Say what you will at this early moment about how right it was to invade a country based on selected reports, allegations, hearsay, and forgeries. It's possible that those of us who opposed the war will one day eat our words. In most respects, I would be happy to do so. But for now, such outcomes appear a long way off. Americans and their representatives were lazy about examining Mr. Bush's lazy arguments for war, and military and administration officials appear to have been lazy about planning the phase in which we are now bogged down. Now we're slowly, steadily, unavoidably learning again what war is: Bad men dishonoring their uniform; regular men making mistakes; average men becoming killers; good men dying; and everywhere, everywhere, families suffering.

I am not a sunshine patriot complaining because this war is not a cakewalk. I opposed this war because I knew it would not be, and because our leaders dishonestly claimed that it would. Even if the American fantasy version of Iraqi Freedom is somehow, someday sold to and established by the people there, this administration's inability to properly articulate its reasons for going to war made concerns about its ability to properly finish it entirely justified. I am anxious to be proven wrong.

Thanks to Billmon at Whiskey Bar for a lot of these links.

Posted by pk at 10:13 PM

The Last Angry Man

Another speech by Senator Robert Byrd. Go, read it.

Posted by pk at 8:03 PM

Muckrakers, we hardly knew ye.

Good piece by Eric Boehlert on Salon this morning, detailing the pro-Bush media tilt as it continues into another election year. Boehlert and the items he links to offer a neat compare/contrast of the 2000 media's manhandling of the straw man it made of Gore's supposed "exaggerations" and its currently delicate treatment of Bush's blustering distortions on Iraq's WMDs and the tax bill. Highlighted are examples of tough-on-Gore, soft-on-Bush pieces in the supposedly arch-liberal New York Times and Washington Post. Also put side-by-side are Tim Russert's 2000 pilgrimage to Austin to kiss Bush's ring and serve up a few meatballs, and his chest-thumping mano-a-mano with Howard Dean on "Meet the Press" last week.

I'd be sick of whining about this if conservatives didn't still complain with straight faces (actually, with pouting, tear-stained faces) that the media is against them. Speaking of which, Ann Coulter has yet to surface on "her" blog. The minute she does, I'm going to begin studiously ignoring it. Really.

UPDATE: The Washington Post's Richard Cohen on Coulter's new shitbag of insults, lies, distortions, groundless accusations, inanities, banalities, idiocy, and knee-slapping self-parody--I mean, "book."

Posted by pk at 6:15 PM