It seems like everything about the news is making me angrier and angrier this week. Nothing is more infuriating than the overexposed blondes Paris Hilton and Ann Coulter, whose very presence on the tube proves yet again that news networks don’t give a shit about anything but ratings. CNN bumped Oscar-winner Michael Moore who was planning to talk about the nation’s healthcare crisis from Wednesday’s show to make room for an exclusive interview with a rich girl who spent less than a month in jail for crimes she committed. MSNBC gave a full hour to Ann Coulter and only generated headlines because they took the unusual step of putting her in a position to defend her ghoulish views for five of those sixty minutes. Just what you should expect from the network that kept Don Imus on the air for so long.

And this is from the channels that we’re supposed to be getting out information from. We’re so screwed.

- Number of minutes spent watching The Dove Awards, a Christian music awards show, from the treadmill at the gym : 30

- Number of times I laughed to myself thinking they should call this “The Jesus Grammy’s” : 4

- Ratio of number of laughs at “The Jesus Grammy’s” to laughs at the premiere episode of “Flight of the Conchords” : 1 to 1

- Time elapsed during the premiere of “John from Cincinnati” before dismissing it as an “artificially quirky snore-fest” and concluding that the title character is little more than a “retarded Jesus” : 10

- Episodes of the “retarded Jesus” show I’ll watch before giving up on it completely : 3

- Average number of times per week I think “Just when I thought Giuliani couldn’t get any worse…” : 3

- Percentage of the 2008 Presidential coverage wasted on the same “Will he run?” story (or so it seems) : 75%

- Money you’d waste on an iPhone data plan assuming a $29.95 cost and the 2-year minimum contract : $718.80

- Number of times watched the “Dramatic Chipmunk” video this week : at least 25

- Number of times watched without laughing out loud : 0

Atrios thinks he’s got it all figured out when it comes to torture…

We shouldn’t torture. There should be no procedures in place for torture. Everyone should understand this. But if the Joker does in fact have a nuclear bomb ready to go off underneath Gotham, and vigilante crime fighter Batman needs to employ a little force to learn the magic code needed to stop it before the timer counts down to zero, then I imagine that if Batman does in fact manage to stop the destruction of the city that no jury would convict or that a presidential pardon would likely take care of things if they did.

…but let’s not forget what happened the last time the Caped Crusader saved our fair city.

What those flat-foots in the Gotham P.D. don’t realize is that torture is perfectly fine when it’s done by the good guys.

Anti-climaxes are all the rage these days :

Ohhh…I get it. Hillary Clinton was just killed by Johnny Sack. Seems like an odd way to end the campaign, but whatever.

As far as the choice of campaign song, picking “You and I” by Celine Dion is weak. Putting aside the fact that Celine Dion totally sucks (which is hard to do, I admit), does it strike anyone as strange that the campaign would choose a song by a French Canadian singer? It may be a petty complaint, but no more so than John Edwards’ haircuts.

On top of that, the lyrics of “You and I” are ridiculous :

High above the mountains, far across the sea
I can hear your voice calling out to me
Brighter than the sun and darker than the night
I can see your love shining like a light
And on and on this earth spins like a carousel
If I could travel across the world
The secrets I would tell

What the hell does that have to do with anything? Compare those lyrics to her husband’s much better campaign song, “Don’t Stop” :

If you wake up and dont want to smile,
If it takes just a little while,
Open your eyes and look at the day,
Youll see things in a different way.

Dont stop, thinking about tomorrow,
Dont stop, it’ll soon be here,
Itll be, better than before,
Yesterdays gone, yesterdays gone.

Yeah, it’s cheesy baby boomer bait, but it does a good job summing up the theme of the campaign. That is, unless the Clinton ‘08 campaign theme is that “this earth spins like a carousel”.

Are you guys really drinking this “Vitamin Water” shit? If you are, please stop. Despite the marketing that would suggest that you’re drinking regular bottled water that’s been “enhanced”, it’s really just Kool-Aid with a multivitamin in it. Take a look at the ingredient list for “Charge” :

Vapor distilled, deionized water and/or reverse osmosis water, crystalline fructose, citric acid, monopotassium phosphate (electrolyte), ascorbic acid (vitamin C), natural flavor, dipotassium phosphate (electrolyte), magnesium lactate (electrolyte), gum acacia, calcium lactate (electrolyte), niacin (B3), ester gum, pantothenic acid (B5), pyridoxine hydrochloride (B6), b-carotene (color) cyanocobalamin (B12)

Just like any other soft drink, the first two ingredients are water and sugar. Here’s what the trade group “The Sugar Association” says about “crystalline fructose” :

Crystalline fructose is produced by allowing the fructose to crystallize from a fructose-enriched corn syrup.

Now if that corn syrup were of the “high fructose” variety instead of being “fructose-enriched”, would it stop being a health drink?

Even more revealing is how Glaceau (and parent company Coca-Cola) use the oldest trick in the book to blur the drink’s nutritional value :

Serving size: 8 fl oz, Servings per container: 2.5; Amount per serving: Calories: 50;

Which, assuming you aren’t one of the few who only drinks 8oz of the 20oz bottle, gives you a calorie count of 125 (barely more than Coca-Cola’s 140 calories per can).

On their website, Glaceau’s slogan is “hydrate responsibly”. Good idea. You can start by avoiding this over-hyped sugar water.

Bob has gone through the Sopranos finale Zapruder-style and concluded that Tony Soprano was whacked. If you’re a Sopranos geek, you don’t want to miss this.

During the first Democratic debate, Mike Gravel mentioned that of his fellow Democratic candidates, “some of these people frighten me”. Well, you know what frightens me? This video released by his campaign (via TPM Cafe):

Oh my god…Presidential candidate Mike Gravel is trying to penetrate my brain. My mind is slowly beginning to melt….



It’s starting to hurt now….



The tiny pieces of my brain still left can only concentrate on one thing….



“Psst…hey buddy, wanna vote for Mike Gravel?”

There’s a new over-the-counter weight-loss drug hitting the market today, but you might want to think twice before rushing to Walgreens :

The new pill is called Alli. Taken three times a day with a low-calorie, low-fat diet, doctors said you’ll lose weight. But if you eat food high in fat, you’ll feel it.

“It’s conditioning. It’s like if you eat this stuff, you’re going to have an unpleasant toilet experience,” Dr. Konoy Mandal with Research Medical Center said. “It’s not going to sound good, it’s not going to look good and you’re not going to be very popular in public.”

Alli works by preventing fats from being absorbed in your body, but doctors said it can leave you with some very embarrassing bowel movements.

“Buy some extra underwear,” Dr. Mandal said. “You’re gonna have some events.”

Under the drug facts on the back of the package, the manufacturer said gas with oily spotting and loose stools are part of the treatment effects.

“Genius marketing,” Dr. Mandal said. “Treatment effects…instead of like farting and pooping explosively.”

One of the nice side-effects of the drug is that it also acts as an appetite suppressant. All you have to do is read the warning label before eating.

Steve Benen writing at Crooks & Liars links to this weak Dennis Miller monologue noting that conservative blogs consider it “the most devastating take-down in the history of political monologues”. Really?? Let’s ignore the irony that the conservatives who shunned John Kerry for his verbosity are in love with a “comedy” rant that takes two and a half minutes to say “Harry Reid is a pussy”. The real sad part here is that this “devastating take-down” is lame. If you want to see what a real stinging rebuke looks like, check out Matt Taibbi’s profile of Rudy Giuliani :

Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days — like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a “stuck pig,” and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn’t even bother to conceal the fact that he’s had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can’t have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who’ll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That’s Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.
. . .
Like Bush’s, Rudy’s career before the bombing was in the toilet; New Yorkers had come to think of him as an ambition-sick meanie whose personal scandals were truly wearying to think about. But on the day of the attack, it must be admitted, Rudy hit the perfect note; he displayed all the strength and reassuring calm that Bush did not, and for one day at least, he was everything you’d want in a leader. Then he woke up the next day and the opportunist in him saw that there was money to be made in an America high on fear.

For starters, Rudy tried to use the tragedy to shred election rules, pushing to postpone the inauguration of his successor so he could hog the limelight for a few more months. Then, with the dust from the World Trade Center barely settled, he went on the road as the Man With the Bullhorn, pocketing as much as $200,000 for a single speaking engagement. In 2002 he reported $8 million in speaking income; this past year it was more than $11 million. He’s traveled in style, at one stop last year requesting a $47,000 flight on a private jet, five hotel rooms and a private suite with a balcony view and a king-size bed.

While the mayor himself flew out of New York on a magic carpet, thousands of cash-strapped cops, firemen and city workers involved with the cleanup at the World Trade Center were developing cancers and infections and mysterious respiratory ailments like the “WTC cough.” This is the dirty little secret lurking underneath Rudy’s 9/11 hero image — the most egregious example of his willingness to shape public policy to suit his donors. While the cleanup effort at the Pentagon was turned over to federal agencies like OSHA, which quickly sealed off the site and required relief workers to wear hazmat suits, the World Trade Center cleanup was handed over to Giuliani. The city’s Department of Design and Construction (DDC) promptly farmed out the waste-clearing effort to a smattering of politically connected companies, including Bechtel, Bovis and AMEC construction.
. . .
Did Giuliani know the air at the World Trade Center was poison? Who knows — but we do know he took over the cleanup, refusing to let more experienced federal agencies run the show. He stood on a few brick piles on the day of the bombing, then spent the next ten months making damn sure everyone worked the night shift on-site while he bonked his mistress and negotiated his gazillion-dollar move to the private sector. Meanwhile, the people who actually cleaned up the rubble got used to checking their stool for blood every morning.

Now Giuliani is running for president — as the hero of 9/11. George Bush has balls, too, but even he has to bow to this motherfucker.

Now that’s a take-down.

Compare and contrast : Rudy Giuliani’s “Twelve Commitments to the American People” and his three commitments to American women. Considering that Rudy is a twice-divorced serial adulterer, I’m not so sure a “commitment” is something he’s able to live up to. Then again, since he’s running for the nomination of the party that prefers leaders that act presidential to ones that can be presidential, maybe Republican voters will be dumb enough to fall for his laundry list of conservative rhetoric so vague that it makes a fortune cookie look verbose by comparison.

I can’t help but be amused by the firestorm kicked up over the comments by Democratic strategist and “rural liaison” Dave “Mudcat” Saunders (thankfully, no relation). To his credit, he’s savvy enough to realize that the best way to get free publicity and respect among the punditocracy is to pick a fight with the liberal blogosphere. So that’s what he did with a post entitled “Go Ahead And Shoot At Me” in which he argues against the “stereotyping of my people and culture” by stereotyping the people he doesn’t agree with. Taking a lesson from his co-blogger Joe Klein, “Mudcat” hides his criticism behind a vague label (the “Metropolitan Wing”) so he can insult a broad swath of his peers without ever having to name names. That way, if he’s confronted for his actions, he can always pull the “I wasn’t talking about you” trick.

But this isn’t about some Dixie-whistling Mr. Smith taking on the intellectual elitists who have taken over his party. You don’t get to write your first blog post at Time.com by being an outsider. It’s about currying favor with the beltway insiders who pay his bills (like the campaigns of Mark Warner, John Edwards, Bob Graham, and Jim Webb). By provoking a firestorm with the netroots, “Mudcat” not only insulates himself from opinionated brutes like us, but he further cements his reputation as the go-to guy to save the Democratic party from coastal elitists, bile-spewing atheists, and any other GOP stereotype of liberals that he can muster. Any criticism of his broad attack on his fellow liberals is just another example of the “arrogance and intolerance” that he’s up against.

Like John McCain’s straight-talking “Maverick”, Dave Saunders’ “Mudcat” persona is the schtick he uses to get work from campaign managers who are stupid enough to believe you can pay a guy to help you simulate a fondness for “the Heartland”. “Mudcat” is a poor-man’s Carville, Bob Shrum with an accent, and he’s just plain boring. The precision with which “Mudcat” was able to inspire controversy within the liberal blogosphere is impressive, even if it does end up feeling choreographed and predictable. Congrats, “Mudcat”, you’ve made all the right enemies, but to end this on a conciliatory note, let me welcome you to the blogosphere by echoing your wish that bloggers who “believe the only way to win an argument is to shot the loudest with personal attacks, you can go to Hell”. Now, what did you mean by “pseudo-intellectual arrogance” again?

Nothing Earth-shattering here, but this is a nice rebuttal to all the global warming skeptics who prefer inaction and endless debate to actually doing something.

I may be in the minority here, but I think last night’s finale of The Sopranos was fantastic. It contained everything I love about the show and had a perfect mix of tension and humor. Sure, it didn’t provide much closure, but ending the show with a bang would have been too obvious.

In the episode “Relationship Ripcord” of the brilliant, but canceled sitcom “Andy Richter Controls the Universe”, Andy and his friends eavesdrop on the therapy sessions of a woman who’s attracted to dumpy, plain-looking guys, but breaks up with them whenever they say “I love you”. Knowing this, Andy starts a relationship with the commitment-phobic chubby-chaser, gushing that he can have all the fun he wants and end the relationship at any time, guilt-free by just saying he loves her.

Having just seen the news that Peter Pace is suddenly stepping down, I can’t help but wonder if working for George Bush works in a similar way. Except in this case, instead “I love you” (which gets you a Supreme Court nomination), the only thing you’d have to say to leave the administration is “Iraq is an unwinnable quagmire and it’s all your fault.” That’s the way it seems to have worked for the majority of the generals that leave.

I know I’m probably the last person to comment on this, but let me add my voice to the chorus of those who think the Democrats’ war funding bill was cowardly. Then again, is anyone really surprised that the Dems have once again revealed themselves to be gutless? The party has proven itself to be unwilling to take a principled stand so often that I almost feel guilty for getting angry about it anymore. It’s like like yelling at a puppy for shitting on the rug. He doesn’t know any better, what did you expect?

To me, the larger failure of the Iraq funding bill is the political incompetence behind it all. Like many have noted, the possibility of the Democratic leadership defunding the war was a pipe dream, but to follow the timetables n’ benchmarks funding bill with one missing any sort of oversight just makes you look weak and foolish. Worse still is what the Dems left in the bill :

The final bill includes $17 billion in unrelated domestic spending, a slight reduction from the $21 billion that Congress added to the first package. The minimum-wage increase would bump the hourly rate to $7.25 an hour from the current rate of $5.15 over the next two years. The wage increase was one of the Democrats’ 2006 election promises, and was attached to the war bill to guarantee that it would reach Bush’s desk.

One of the Democrats’ most popular pre-election promises has just become law and it’s become a mere footnote in an article about how Congressional leaders are afraid of an unpopular President. Why sneak this onto the President’s desk when it’s so popular? Why hide one of your successes behind one of your largest failures?

Furthermore, why didn’t the Democrats throw some oversight into the bill that actually pertains to war funding? Fine, any funding bill with “benchmarks” will get a veto, but that shouldn’t have stopped the Democrats from going after the no-bid contracts, lack of body armor, funding cuts for military hospitals, gutting of the national guard, war profiteering, or any other issue that could be addressed by passing a funding bill that tracks the money that Congress is giving the President. Democrats control the committees and have public opinion overwhelmingly on their side, so there’s no reason for them to come out of this fight looking like a bunch of children. It’s embarrassing.