Friday, October 27, 2006

Punch it! Punch it!

Since we can't think of anything better to blog about this morning, we thought we would check in with our Washington Bureau since we're only a few weeks out from the big mid-term elections. It's pretty much the usual stuff--sleazy behavior, criminality, slander, incompetence, borderline psychosis, and, of course, sex. Lots of sex. Here we go:

1. Via TPM, Roll Call has assembled a lovely graphic listing members of Congress who are under federal investigation. Fourteen R's (though they forgot Katherine Harris, so it should be 15) and three D's. These people have truly distinguished themselves for their accomplishments in sleaziness. And that's against some really tough competition.

2. In not unrelated news, Republicans, reeking of desperation, are running some really vicious and misleading ads about their opponents. Shocking, I know. From the WaPo: "The result has been a carnival of ugly, especially on the GOP side, where operatives are trying to counter what polls show is a hostile political environment by casting opponents as fatally flawed characters. The National Republican Campaign Committee is spending more than 90 percent of its advertising budget on negative ads, according to GOP operatives, and the rest of the party seems to be following suit."

3. For an example, there's a highly competitive--and vicious--Senate race going on in Tennessee between Harold Ford, Jr., and some clown named Bob Corker. One particularly odd aspect of this race is the Corker campaign's obsession with Ford's sex life, as if that's any of their business. James Walcott proposes an explanation.

4. Our Dear Leader, speaking to a bunch of right-wing journalists, commented that being kidnapped in the middle of Baghdad "must have been weird." Meanwhile, after slogging through the entire transcript of the discussion, the very smart Matt Yglesias concludes: "You ... can't get this much Bush without noticing that ... the President of the United States is conducting national security policy under conditions of truly frightening ignorance and dangerous analytic errors.... The President, it seems to me, entered office in January 2000 utterly ignorant of foreign affairs and has spent the past six years filling in the blanks with pleasant illusions and straight-up misinformation."

5. Vice President Torquemada loves torture: "It's a no-brainer for me." If you click through, check out the graphic on waterboarding: "origins traced to the Spanish Inquisition." Nice.

6. Finally, in somewhat less depressing news, my old friend David Kuo is pimping a book on the mendacity and incompetence of the Bush Administration. I haven't read it yet, but have been hearing lots about it--most of it good. I haven't talked to him since he joined the Bush Admin., and so I didn't know that he had cancer; small world. Courtesy of TNR, I also didn't know that he's had the pleasure of being dry-humped by Sandra Day O'Connor while on a fishing trip. This is priceless:

I flailed the rod back and forth, managing to get [my] fly line tangled around a hitching post.

"Oh no! You call that casting?"

She came up behind me, pressed her front side into my back one and grabbed my arm.

"Relax!"

Sure. Sandra Day O'Connor is draped around me, gripping my right forearm like it was a stick, flailing it back and forth. It was very relaxing. She persevered and soon had me guiding the rod back and forth between an eleven o'clock and a one o'clock position. She stepped away to examine my form from the front. "NO! NO! NO! Damn it, David. Don't flail the rod like it is some pussywillow branch. Punch it! Punch it! Punch the rod to a stop. Punch it!


I'm going to go take a shower.

Posted by jwb at 12:30 PM   

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