Nobody's Business

That's Teh Funny

I'm not a fan of Move On, to put it mildly, but this customizable video is a brilliant way to get the vote out. Plug in the name of a friend or relative who you think needs some encouragement to go to the polls next week, and he or she will receive a link to a seriously personalized faux-news segment.

[thanks, Jen!]

Quote of the Day

From Obsidian Wings, a propos the McCain-Palin campaign:

[O]nce you've made a narrative choice, you do have to stick with it — you can't just keep bouncing around, or people become confused. If you are telling the story of a scary vampire, you can't decide in chapter 2 that he's also 500 feet tall and radioactive and bent on destroying Tokyo, in chapter 3 that he is actually a giant man-eating shark, and in chapter 4 that he is all this and a super-terrorist trying to plant a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles.  All of these things are, indeed, scary, but taken together they add up to a muddle.

This is the problem. It's not just the McCain campaign's problem — although their inability to pick a narrative and stick to it is a special kind of inexcusable — it's a problem for the entire wingnut noise machine. Obama is a Marxist Muslim Arab Jesus Black White Terrorist Technocrat Racist Do-Gooder Liberal FDR Stalin Hitler [me: Chamberlain!] Commie Fascist Gay Womanizing Naive Cynical Insider Noob Boring Radical Unaccomplished Elite Slick Gaffe-Prone Pedophile Pedophile-Seducing Liberation Theology Atheist Etc. & Anti-Etc. with a bunch of scary friends from — wait for it! — the Nineteen Hundred And Sixties. It makes no sense. It's a jumble sale of fears and scary associations.

I'd guess that for every person won over by the boundless and honorless scaremongering, there's a previously fence-sitting voter wholly put off (and pissed off) by it all, to the point where he'll pull the lever for Obama a week from today.

Even if McCain wins the presidency — a proposition that now calls to mind snowballs and hellfires — he has forever lost something that most ordinary people value higher: integrity. I've always found him a likable, in many respects admirable guy. That opinion no longer holds up. The McCain campaign has taken a low road not seen since Bush's political operatives push-polled the Arizona senator out of the 2000 race with that nastiness about him having fathered an "illegitimate black child." Eight years later, McCain hired the very same lowlifes who orchestrated that smear, to help give him the edge against Obama. I've rarely seen a man squander his credibility quite so spectacularly. The McCain campaign — and the Palin nomination — has been a slow-motion car wreck. Can't look. Can't look away.

In one week, the rubbernecking will be over. The foul taste, though, might linger for a bit.

Cornhole Cops

Justin Volpe, meet your compadres of the 71st precinct, whom you've evidently inspired in their rectum-wrecking ways. [h/t: Radley]

Marc Randazza has more on when our lords and masters engage in a little assplay.

Hey, Good-Looking!

John Edwards and his stupid 400-dollar haircut pale by comparison:

Who was the highest paid individual in Senator John McCain's presidential campaign during the first half of October as it headed down the homestretch? ... It was Amy Strozzi, who was identified by the Washington Post this week as Gov. Sarah Palin's traveling makeup artist, according to a new filing with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday night. Ms. Strozzi, who was nominated for an Emmy award for her makeup work on the television show "So You Think You Can Dance?", was paid $22,800 for the first two weeks of October alone, according to the records. The campaign categorized Ms. Strozzi's payment as "Personnel Svc/Equipment."

In addition, Angela Lew, who is Ms. Palin’s traveling hair stylist, got $10,000 for "Communications Consulting" in the first half of October.

Extrapolating, that works out to about 64,000 dollars a month to keep Ms. Palin nicely blushed and well-coiffed. For that kind of money, I'd imagine you could cover Marge Simpson's beehive in fresh Swarovski crystals every day, but what do I know?

Of course, the 64K-a-month price tag doesn't include the $150,000 wardrobe the McCain campaign bought for her recently.

Despite it all, the Joe-Sixpack-worshiping hockey mom (seen here driving with her eyes closed, as she will be doing with the country if she ever makes it to the Oval Office) ain't copping to any excess, and says of her dipping into the campaign slush fund:

"Oh, if people only knew how frugal we are."

Yes, if only.

At least Cindy McCain's $300,000 getup at the Republican convention wasn't paid for (one would assume) with Joe the plumber's contributions, nor by the tens of millions of dollars that McCain has received, collectively, from every single one of the nation's taxpayers.

Anyway, remember, the Obamas are the elitists here. That's the GOP's story, and they're sticking to it.

The TSA Charade

Jeffrey Goldberg calls bullshit:

I've amassed an inspiring collection of al-Qaeda T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir Arafat dolls (really). All these things I've carried with me through airports across the country. I've also carried, at various times: pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji Water (which is foreign), and, of course, box cutters. I was selected for secondary screening four times — out of dozens of passages through security checkpoints — during this extended experiment. At one screening, I was relieved of a pair of nail clippers; during another, a can of shaving cream.

During one secondary inspection, at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular, only-in-America device called a "Beerbelly," a neoprene sling that holds a polyurethane bladder and drinking tube. The Beerbelly, designed originally to sneak alcohol — up to 80 ounces — into football games, can quite obviously be used to sneak up to 80 ounces of liquid through airport security. (The company that manufactures the Beerbelly also makes something called a "Winerack," a bra that holds up to 25 ounces of booze and is recommended, according to the company’s Web site, for PTA meetings.) My Beerbelly, which fit comfortably over my beer belly, contained two cans' worth of Bud Light at the time of the inspection. It went undetected. The eight-ounce bottle of water in my carry-on bag, however, was seized by the federal government.

Read the whole thing. It's nauseating for all the ineffectiveness it exposes. What the TSA does at our airports is all windowdressing, right down to the fancy new uniforms that don't do a single fucking thing except cost you and me twelve million dollars.

Palin Talking the Talk

Sarah Palin the Reformer. The Maverick. The Tireless Fighter Against Corruption and Waste.

Here's how that's working out. Before she became McCain's running mate,

Gov. Sarah Palin charged the state for her children to travel with her, including to events where they were not invited, and later amended expense reports to specify that they were on official business. The charges included costs for hotel and commercial flights for three daughters to join Palin to watch their father in a snowmobile race, and a trip to New York, where the governor attended a five-hour conference and stayed with 17-year-old Bristol for five days and four nights in a luxury hotel. ...

On Aug. 6, three weeks before Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain chose Palin his running mate, and after Alaska reporters asked for the records, Palin ordered changes to previously filed expense reports for her daughters' travel.

The Palins stayed in hotel rooms costing upwards of $700 a night. Of course, Michelle Obama probably spent at least as much for the same thing, especially factoring in the caviar and lobster she ordered up to her Waldorf Astoria roo— oh wait, that was just a lie to try to dust off the "Obama's an elitist" meme, as the New York Post has now acknowledged. (And if she had ordered pricey, fancy foods, so what? What do Limbaugh and Hannity and their army of disaffected, bitter henchmen want her to order — a bucket of fried chicken and some watermelon perhaps?)

Back to Palin. Remember this?

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a "per diem" allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business. ...

She wrote some form of "Lodging — own residence" or "Lodging — Wasilla residence" more than 30 times at the same time she took a per diem, according to the reports. In two dozen undated amendments to the reports, the governor deleted the reference to staying in her home but still charged the per diem.

I don't know if that qualifies as repeatedly falsifying expenses reports, but the post hoc amendments and deletions — done, in some cases, after reporters started asking question — sure make it seem like she's trying desperately not to get caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

Quote of the Day

From the comments section below this story:

Using taxpayer dollars to broadcast a religion report is as ludicrous as teaching unicorn anatomy in schools.

How Humiliated is a Boiled Potato?

And other questions that arise now that plants — plants — turn out to have a "right to dignity."

Religiosity Update

From the land of the wonderful Bikini Team:

A church minister from Strängnäs in central Sweden has resigned from his post after his porn-surfing habits led to the spread of a virus that knocked out the local church network.

If you think that members of the clergy porn-surfing in church might be a bit beyond the pale, you ain't read nothing yet. A couple of months ago,

A church minister from Stockholm [was] charged with assaulting his wife after an amorous threesome spiralled out of control.

More creative still:

A pastor in Gothenburg recently came under scrutiny for moistening post-it notes with his penis and sticking them up in an office.

But we all know that atheists are perverts and weirdos.

Bloomberg: "Disgusting Idea. I Like It."

New York mayor and part-time dictator Michael Bloomberg wants a third term in office. 

The decision to challenge the term limits law, which was twice approved by New York voters, represents a remarkable about-face for Mr. Bloomberg. He has repeatedly said he supports such constraints on elected leaders, dismissed the idea that anyone is indispensable, and once called an effort to revise the limits "disgusting."

New Yorkers voted for term limits in 1993 and affirmed the decision in another round at the polls a few years later. Bloomberg's view now seems to be that important decisions ought to be made not by voters, but by a legislature that depends on him for favors. And now he's calling them in.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is strong-arming City Council members to support his plan to change the city's term-limits law so he can run again, the city comptroller said Sunday. Comptroller William Thompson said some council members had been threatened with losing perks such as committee chairmanships or funding for programs in their districts. He did not say who they were. "Undue pressure has been placed on them," Thompson said.

The mayor's spokescritter denies it. That's her job, of course. The job of New Yorkers would be to make sure to toss the bum out when his second term is up, something Mr. Bloomberg specifically agreed to — and advocated — when he took the position. It's a clear deal, and only a craven hypocrite would attempt to weasel out of that pledge.

P.S.: For a few days in the fall of 2001, Rudy Giuliani openly toyed with the thought of seeking a third term on the same grounds — to wit, that his steady hand would be much-needed in times of crisis. He didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell, of course. Let's see if Bloomberg possesses even more arrogance and chutzpah than his infamous predecessor did.