Love Don't Live Here Anymore

Okay, okay, I know that this URL has only been bookmarked in your browsers for a week, tops, but we're already packing up the treehouse and moving to my swingin' bachelor pad! Tonight's posts will go up at the new place, so meet me there. Hit the buzzer and I'll throw you down the key.

Hopefully, you guys will find the text a little easier on your eyes over there.

And I'll try not to sing the Jefferson's theme all night. You have my word on that.

With Helen Thomas as the Bionic Woman

Dana Perino won the two-out-of-three game of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" when Tony Snow resigned and now she thinks she's All That.

Q Why should we depend on him?

MS. PERINO: Because he is the commander on the ground, Helen. He's the one who is making sure that the situation is moving —

Q You mean how many more people we kill?

MS. PERINO: Helen, I find it really unfortunate that you use your front row position, bestowed upon you by your colleagues, to make such statements. This is a — it is an honor and a privilege to be in the briefing room, and to suggest that we, at the United States, are killing innocent people is just absurd and very offensive.

*Skrrrrrrrk!*, *bzzzzzzt!* "Return on Success...Commanders on the Ground...Time of War!" *Bzzzzt!*

Yes, Dana Perino, Helen Thomas should get down on her wizened knees and thank Jeebus every day that after all her years of trail-blazing reporting in Washington, she gets to come to work and be blandly lied to by some half-bright protocol droid with a degree from Booger Holler Bible College. What. An. Honor.

Where do they find these people?

I Was Tired of January, I Was Tired of June

Every now and then I just have to crank the music and dance around the apartment and have a little five minute dance party. This song is great for that.

The Love That Won't Shut Up

(image by darkblack)

Any lingering thoughts that you might have had regarding the "Boy Genius" status of Karl Rove can safely be put to bed now. We're apparently two down in the three repetitions it takes to turn a lie into truthiness:

Former White House aide Karl Rove said yesterday it was Congress, not President Bush, who wanted to rush a vote on the looming war in Iraq in the fall of 2002, a version of events disputed by leading congressional Democrats and even some former Rove colleagues.
(...)
The fresh clash over the five-year-old vote made plain how political leaders on all sides are trying to shape the history of that moment.

You know, the supposition that the "history of that moment" is up for interpretation at all, actually, is proof positive that our media establishment has jumped the rails. To tell you the truth, the fact that a slimy little human virus like Karl Rove is considered a "genius" of any kind by anyone anywhere is reason enough to collapse into despond.

The man has one strategy: Attach, replicate, destroy. He is the Bush administration's own little strand of mutant RNA in the body politic, but even some of them seem to be a little sick of him.

Former White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. was asked on MSNBC yesterday about Rove's comments but told only that Rove asserted Democrats pushed Bush into war. Card laughed and said that "sometimes his mouth gets ahead of his brain."

But then of course, no sooner were the words out of Andy Card's mouth than somewhere out in the Washington night, a Blackberry sprang to life, possibly a file cabinet opened, and copies of some negatives were couriered to Andy Card's Georgetown townhouse et voila!

After being sent Rove's comments, Card said he did not want to argue with him. He said he recalled much discussion in the White House about whether it was wise to seek a congressional vote before deciding it would demonstrate American unity. But asked if the White House opposed having the vote before the election, he said, "I don't remember that. I don't remember it being done in the context of the election."

Imagine that. He "doesn't recall". Apparently every last administration official in the White House was staggering around in a Xanax blackout between 9/11 and, oh, an hour ago.

Actually that would explain a lot.

Gone Dancin'

Kids, I'd love to hang out, but a friend of mine's band is playing and it's payday. Here's a bit of classic house music for your chair-dancing pleasure.

Holy Shit

A man claiming to have a bomb strapped to his chest has taken hostages at Hillary's campaign office in New Hampshire.

An armed man has taken people hostage at Hillary Clinton's campaign office in Rochester, N.H. Police said a man in his 40s, with salt-and-pepper hair, is in the building and has what appears to be an explosive device strapped to his body, TV station WMUR reported. Witness Lettie Tzizik told the station that she spoke to a woman shortly after she was released from the office by the alleged hostage-taker.

"A young woman with a 6-month or 8-mont-old infant came rushing into the store just in tears, and she said, 'You need to call 911. A man has just walked into the Clinton office, opened his coat and showed us a bomb strapped to his chest with duct tape."

Let's all say a prayer for the people trapped in there and their families.

As we saw in last night's video selection, Hillary brings out the frothing hate-machine in wide swaths of the Right Wing population. I'll bet you twenty bucks this guy is some Tim McVeigh type. (It certainly doesn't seem like the Obama campaign's style.)

We'll probably be seeing more home-grown Right Wing jihadi if we win a functioning Democratic majority in 2008. Just one more thing we have to thank our corrupted, dysfunctional media for, talk radio Rwanda style.

UPDATE: Hostages released. Still no word on the hostage taker.

Joe Klein: Still Putting the "Ass" in Embarrassment

Glenn Greenwald alerts us to the fact that even Joe Klein's friends and allies are appalled by his miserable showing on the FISA bill and multiple desultory "corrections".

Lawyer Scott Horton of Harper's, a qualified Joe Klein fan, has also weighed in on this affair, concluding:

I am a compulsive Klein-reader, and I read this [column] when it went up at the Time website. I winced immediately. Not only was the substance of [Klein's] description factually inaccurate in almost every respect, it was the very core of the piece. Moreover, what Time ran was a shameless mouthing of talking points that had been circulating on Capitol Hill by Republican spinmeisters through the prior week. . . .

But when Joe's bad, he's awful. And this was the worst thing I've seen emerge from the Klein pen in quite sometime. And the worst thing about it -- the unforgivable sin, and the one to which all writers-facing-imminent-deadline are vulnerable, is its lack of originality. It's always so tempting to take some pre-packaged product from the partisan PR masters of Washington and print it. And that's just what Joe did, to the great chagrin of his faithful readers. . . .

And disappointing as that discovery was, what followed was even worse. Time's follow-up to the well-deserved criticism has been defensive and its concessions of factual error grudging. And all of this reflects not so much an error on the part of Klein as the Time editors.

This has been an extremely bad week for Joe Klein.

The trouble with Klein is that he's probably perfectly oblivious to the fact that he's had a bad week at all. I mean, so what? Some "partisan far-Left critics" have called him out. It's our fault for not accepting his opinion as the Final Word. He's too busy sipping single-malt scotches with Peter Hoekstra to devote any "time or legal expertise" to finding out if what he's printing up in Time is actually a steaming pile of hooey or not.

I guess we all have our priorities.

At least the Chicago Tribune saw fit to append a real correction to Joe's wholesale recitation of GOP propaganda:

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS

A Time magazine essay by Joe Klein that was excerpted on the editorial page Wednesday incorrectly stated that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would require a court approval of individual foreign surveillance targets. It does not.

Thank you, Chicago Tribune. Was that so hard? Too bad Klein's employers at Time don't care enough about their reputation (or anything else, apparently) to do the same.