Seriously?

Sunday's New York Times published an editorial that would ordinarily merit a thorough reading. It starts: "There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency."

This would ordinarily have been an excellent commentary, except that it comes from the same newspaper that just last week offered an employment opportunity and a soapbox to Bill Kristallnacht. It's like a restaurant hiring a guy with a famous past of making brown, shitty omlettes and then bitching about brown, shitty omlettes.

In Which The "Best Page in the Universe" Offers the Best Take on the iPhone Evar

The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face.

I feel the same way, but replace “Nokia E70″ with “Treo 650.”

Grab Your Ankles

Reports are that former Pakistan PM Benazir Bhutto has been killed.

This initially strikes me as what you call a "spark" in a "powder keg."

(See Ferdinand, Archduke.)

Willard Stinks

How utterly revolting a human being is Willard Romney? How disgusting, how ignorant, how repulsive can a human being be?

First, he utters one of the wrongest, most anti-American things a person can utter: “Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom.” Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong! Wrong!

Then he lies about his daddy’s affiliation with Martin Luther King Jr., trying to use the man for his own political profit. Wow. Mortifying.

That is all.

Did Petey Greene Write A Joke For The Current President?

Rachel Maddow recently chronicled the president’s fondness for a joke where he expresses concern that someone in the audience, often NBC correspondent David Gregory, might steal some of the White House silverware. Here it is at the Huffington Post:

I wonder if Bush ever met or knew of late ’70s - early ’80s D.C. media phenom Petey Greene. From Wiki:

“After leaving prison, he was hired by AM radio station WOL to host his own show, ‘Rapping With Petey Greene’. His stature grew, and he soon found himself hosting his own television show, ‘Petey Green’s Washington’, on WDCA-TV. On March 8, 1978, he was invited as a guest to the White House by President Jimmy Carter to honor visiting Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito. He famously quipped to the Washington Post that he ’stole a spoon’ during the evening gala.[2]”

I bet you a dollar it was funnier when Petey Greene said it.

Can You Yell Fire in a Crowded Farragut Square?

I haven't thought about the Riddle Building in years.

I worked in 1993 for my hometown newspaper in Ravenna, Ohio, and one morning, the Riddle Building caught on fire. We sent every staffer on duty out that day to do some story or other. I think I recall that my job was to call the Red Cross and see what was needed or something. I don't know.

I just remember how it smelled, how smoke permeated all the air, how you couldn't escape it.

That's what it smelled like this morning, when the OEB caught fire. I just walked to werk from Farragut West over to north, watched the fire trucks go, and smelled, and sort of remembered the Riddle fire and sort of missed for a moment being a news reporter. It was fun, sort of, but I know I don’t have the constitution for it. I shoulda been a copyeditor. Sorry, Bill Walsh. Copy editor.

Or a Webmonkey. Whatever.