Atrios Threatened With Lawsuit by Paul Krugman's Stalker

Yes, just when you thought one could not sink lower in the petty pool than Bill "Shut Up" O'Reilly, you look a few fathoms lower and find Donald Luskin. What makes this worse is that Atrios blogs anonymously and has neither Al Franken's connections or bank account.

But if you Google "Donald Luskin" and "stalking" the first person who called Luskin a stalker appears to be -- Luskin himself. I hope this is just a lot of hot air. So in support of Atrios I am posting what has the funniest post ever on Luskin's preoccupation with Paul Krugman.

Seriously, I've paid less attention to girls I wanted to have sex with than Luskin does to Krugman

Well, what do you expect from someone called Midge?

Okay, that’s probably not fair. If there any readers named Midge who have not written a breathless tribute to sex god Donald Rumsfeld (I can’t believe I typed that) please accept my apologies. Still, I think you should join me in a hearty round of ewww-ing at what I can only describe as smut peddling.

She spoke of her subject admiringly, but without obvious emotion. “The key to him is that he is a wrestler,” she said. “A wrestler is a lone figure. He battles one on one, and he either wins or loses. There is only one man on the mat at the end of a wrestling match. It is no accident, as the communists used to say, that he wrestled.”

Is the whole unitard clad –man writhing with another man thing a little obvious? Okay I won’t go there.

She observed that he was called a “virtual rock star” on CNN, a “babe magnet” on Fox, and “Rumstud” by the president. He appeared in the December 2, 2002, issue of People, having been selected as one of the world’s sexiest men. “In Washington, to be anywhere he is has become chic,” a friend of Rumsfeld’s told Decter. “People actually follow him around.

Yes, you are reading that correctly. President Miserable Failure in a flight suit called him Rumstud.

Ann Coulter Yammering Doll

Just in time for the holidays. No voodoo seance would be complete without one. Spring for the Dennis Miller doll and have a grand ole dittohead bonfire. I think the dog needs a new chew toy anyway.

WARNING: Parents of teenagers, doll may promote anorexia nervosa in girls and bed wetting in boys.

Couldn’t bring myself to sit through the Dem Debate last night on Fox. I prefer my Fox News heavily filtered. I’m guessing that the logic behind this unholy alliance was to reach as many viewers as possible. I know these debates are part of the process but they discourage me in the same way that Democrat-Green Party fights do. United we stand, blah, blah, blah. Well, at least I don’t have to watch it.

Anyway Jesse condenses it nicely, so I don’t feel so guilty.

Ok, the Almighty needs to work on His Aim.

(via Tbogg)
Offred and Ofglen go swimming.

We don't need the Taliban. We grow our own.

He is Viggo!

I like Viggo unabashedly. He's smart, he handsome, and I have to respect the work he does at Perceval Press.

American History 101

"Why, we have gotten into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation."

Which quagmire is this quote referring to? Iraq? -- nope, too easy. Vietnam? -- nuh-uh -- even easier. California? -- hee-hee. The Philippines? You are correct, sir!
And who said it? Mark Twain, of course.
If you knew this little piece of American history than you're way ahead of that knucklehead we call George W. Bush. President Less-Sense-than-God-gave-a-donut said this last week: "America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people."
Proud?!? Amy Kaplan, at the L.A. Times explains why proud is not what America is.

Nearly 5,000 American soldiers died, and historians estimate that 250,000 Filipinos perished — 20,000 were killed in combat and the vast majority died from disease and starvation. The U.S. Army burned villages and fields, massacred civilians and herded the residents of entire provinces into concentration camps.

Can someone get this man a tutor? And while you're up, could you get me an aspirin?

I'm reinstating comments. We'll see how it works out this time. Hope to hear from you!

Partial Birth Abortion Ban Follow-up

I once remarked to a friend that being a Democratic voter these days fell somewhere between battered spouse and abandoned child. Melodramatic? Yes, but it was right after the 2002 midterm elections. That was a bad time. Wellstone had died. The Senate Dems had been MIA for the entire year before that. Can you blame me for playing fast and loose with my analogies?

In a way what's disappointing about the Democratic Party is what's disappointing about the United States. A great platform, a wealth of ideas, so much past accomplishment and unseen potential, and yet at times a spectacular failure at protecting the very values it claims to hold dear. This is what makes it hard to write of the Party despite its (many) mistakes. It's still a good idea and we still have some good representation out there (Note to self: email Senator Durbin to thank him).

In about two weeks we will be a year away from Election Day 2004. The question that keeps coming up on blogs I read isn't always "Can they win?" Sometimes it's "Do they deserve to?" The answer to that questions changes depending on the bills that pass through Congress. The Democrats should pay heed to that.

Tbogg has a list of Senate Dems who need to be taken out to the woodshed.

Jim over at Rittenhouse is taking a break because life is more important than blogging. Really, it is. See you soon, Jim!

Yay! Jasmine's back.

Those wacky Feds

Apparently some of the 9/11 Hijackers are alive and well and actually aren't hijackers or even terrorists.

Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well...FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.

We can't find Osama or Saddam or the weapons of mass destruction or that pesky White House leaker. (which way did he go, George?) Of course we can't identify the 9/11 hijackers correctly. Just another day in bizarro world. We are so far into the looking glass that nothing surprises me anymore.

Touchy

Apparently Condo's love life (or lack thereof) is off limits.

Condoleezza Rice is a sticky subject at the Washington Post this week.

The paper has suspended "The Boondocks," a comic strip populated by cynical,
politically aware African-American children, because of a series of jokes
about the national security adviser's personal life. (You can read the
banned comic in this newspaper.)

On Tuesday, cartoonist Aaron McGruder had one of his young characters
speculate: "Maybe if there was a man in the world who Condoleezza truly
loved, she wouldn't be so hell-bent to destroy it."

A rep for the Post, which won't be resuming the strip until Sunday, said:
"We had no way of knowing whether Mr. McGruder's assertion that Condoleezza
Rice had no personal relationship was true or not."

Rice's office didn't return a call yesterday.

The artist's rep told us yesterday, "Not a single other paper in the nation
chose to abort this week's strip."

Is Aaron really being mean? I think he's being compassionate. Just look at this woman's life.

For Rice—who has never married, has no siblings, and was orphaned just a few weeks before assuming her post—Bush and the job represent a very large part of her life, even by upper-level White House staff standards. She has a close circle of old friends and relatives, but most of them live down South or in California. She isn't on the Washington social circuit. Home is a sparsely furnished apartment in the Watergate complex. Entertaining means ordering takeout. Her primary off-hours companions seem to be George and Laura Bush.

Aaron's been on Condo's casebefore. Why all the fuss now?

Howard Zinn has read my mind

This is exactly how I feel.

I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has taken over. Those Mexican workers trying to cross the border--dying in the attempt to evade immigration officials (ironically, trying to cross into land taken from Mexico by the United States in 1848)--those Mexican workers are not alien to me. Those millions of people in this country who are not citizens and therefore, by the Patriot Act, are subject to being pulled out of their homes and held indefinitely by the FBI, with no constitutional rights--those people are not alien to me. But this small group of men who have taken power in Washington, they are alien to me.

I wake up thinking this country is in the grip of a President who was not elected, who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth, the water, the air. And I wonder what kind of world our children and grandchildren will inherit. More Americans are beginning to feel, like the soldiers in Iraq, that something is terribly wrong, that this is not what we want our country to be.

Something is horribly, horribly wrong--the straw has, long ago, broken the camel's back. There is no other choice but to kick the thugs in suits and their trained chimp out of the White House. Lighting candles and saying novenas is not going to cut it, my friend. We have to exert ourselves and break a sweat on this one. Wake up your loved ones as if your house was on fire. Wake up your neighbors as if their house was on fire. WAKE UP!

I feel I should sympathize with David Brooks, but he really doesn’t make it easy.

To begin with I really don’t enjoy the whole pennant thing right now. It’s not that I don’t like the Cubs as a team. It would be nice for them if they won. But on game days I go out of my way to avoid Wrigleyille. I realize that not all Cubs fans are drunken ex-fratboy yuppies with their overdressed girlfriends swishing on their arms. I realize that most people don’t urinate against buildings and loot and block traffic. But that contingent of sports fans pretty much ruins the whole Cubs experience for me. So as we approach a potential pennant victory, I find myself wishing I could be in another city till the whole thing is over.

In fact here is exactly how I feel, just substitute Cubs and Chicago for Sox and Boston.

So yeah, Brooks does have a point when he says this:

It occurs to me that some of my friends in the Southwest may be watching the series on TV, and may be alarmed by some of the behavior they are seeing on the field and elsewhere. They may think it impolite to grab a 72-year-old man by the head and toss him to the ground, or throw hard objects at people's faces, or hold dueling press conferences calling each other names.

He is of course speaking of this incident at the Yankees-Red Sox game on Saturday.

But I can’t help wondering two things. The first, since when has professional sports been a model of civility and decorum? The second; under what rock does Brooks live? I’d wager it’s a giant gilded one in the manicured garden of a gated community. The only thing wrong with it is that it’s not in Tucson.

My friends should remember that the Yankees-Red Sox series is a contest between two Northeastern teams, and while the Northeast is no longer a particularly important region of the country — we haven't sent a person to the White House in 43 years — we do have a distinct way of doing things, which we cherish.

For example, while most people in the Southwest seek pleasure and avoid stress, we in the Northeast do not have that orientation. The place in their culture that is occupied by the concept "happiness" is occupied in our culture by the concept "cursing at each other."

I’m not going to defend idiots who think turning over a car is an acceptable form of celebrating victory. Nor am I going to make a case that the Northeast is a better place to live than the Southwest. I’m merely pointing out that drunken sports fans whoop it up after games have nothing to do with the red state blue-state polarization.

Reading this piece it’s hard to picture Brooks physically attending this game. Did he brave the stands holding a scented hanky to his nose the entire time? Or did he observe from the safety of his skybox, peering at the mayhem through his opera glasses? It’s not that I object to his snobbery. In many ways I am a snob. But I know enough not go to places where my snobbish sensibilities might be offended.

Brooks could have written a better piece than this. He could have written about sports and alcohol and rivalry. And I might have enjoyed reading it. But Brooks lives in a red and blue world where the antics of rabid sports fans are limited to one region of the country and thus condemn it to political irrelevancy. Others have pointed out Brooks’ peculiar form of color blindness so I won’t go into it.

Meanwhile, tonight is game six. Go Cubs and God help us.

Margaret Cho has a blog. Enjoy.

Aaron McGruder on Fresh Air today.

Don't Hate the Playa, Hate the Game (via Eschaton)

Urban Outfitters has decided to add "peddlar of racist board games" to its already considerable crime of "peddlar of overpriced pseudo-vintage gear for suburbanites." It's hard not to laugh at the absurdity of such a move on the part of both the manufacturer and the distributor.

Could it get any worse? Take a gander at the Ghettopoly Web site. Oh yes Ghettopoly is only the beginning. On deck we have Hoodopoly, Thugopoly, HipHopoly, and Redneckopoly. I could not make this up if I tried. Gee I can't wait for Wetbackopoly in which players have to cross the border without getting shot. But I shouldn't plant ideas in such weak yet fertile minds.

You know the drill:customercare@ghettopoly.com

Be mean and curse a lot.