HOLY SHIT is this funny -- John Saunders, Sarah Palin, and Amanuensis

From the New Yorker -- a sample:

Explaining how she felt when John McCain offered her the Vice-Presidential spot, my Vice-Presidential candidate, Governor Sarah Palin, said something very profound: “I answered him ‘Yes’ because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink. So I didn’t blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.”

Isn’t that so true? I know that many times, in my life, while living it, someone would come up and, because of I had good readiness, in terms of how I was wired, when they asked that—whatever they asked—I would just not blink, because, knowing that, if I did blink, or even wink, that is weakness, therefore you can’t, you just don’t. You could, but no—you aren’t.

That is just how I am.

Do you know the difference between me and a Hockey Mom who has forgot her lipstick?

A dog collar.

Do you know the difference between me and a dog collar smeared with lipstick?

Not a damn thing.

We are essentially wired identical.

Read the rest.

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Hurricane Ike

I don't like Ike. Damn him and his Rockwellian name!!! I'm feeling nostalgic for good ol' Gustav.

Spent yesterday helping my folks move their stuff out of their house on Bolivar island. People were evacuated by helicopter from Bolivar all day today -- and apparently much of the island is now underwater. Then I boarded up my windows here in Houston and moved to my folks place (a brick house where there are no old Pecan Trees). We've been told that he electricity will go out some time tonight. But I'm done with my work today -- which means margs, beer, and fajitas. Yum.

Hope everyone else out there weathers the storm okay. Just heard that 40% of the folks on Galveston stayed. That's maybe 20,000 folks. Not good. Anyway, I'll be back when the Texas internets fire back up.

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Hookers and Blow? Only if you're a Clampett

So I don't know if you missed it, but during the 'DRILL, BABY, DRILL' Republican convention, the living dead fox-trotted the night away to the stylish tunes of a band called "Hookers and Blow." Seriously. Well, it turns out this wasn't just smack talk:

As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

Please, please, please, can I be a Republican now?

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Comedy Break

I don't have cable. So sometimes I'm slightly behind the times. But I found this today. Enjoy.



(Sara Silverman to boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel: "I'm fucking Matt Damon.")

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OMG Banh Mi!

I just finished my Banh Mi from Cali Sandwich for lunch and thought again, for the ten thousandth time, why the hell don't I eat this every day? It's an explosion of mint/cilantro/jalapeno/RoosterSauce crispiness in your mouth with every friggin' bite. If only the French had colonized the rest of Asia at some point. Can you imagine what their influence on curry would have tasted like? Lord Almighty.

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I WANT IT -- Gene Portrait

DNA11 is a quirky company that offers genetic portraits. You send the swab, they take a photo of the DNA gel, and put it on a canvas of various sizes (from 1.5 to 5 feet). I WANT ONE. Don't worry, it's only a thousand for the large canvas with studio frame.

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Obama on the Constitution and "Terrorist Rights"

FINALLY (via WashPo):

It was in St. Paul last week that Palin drew raucous cheers when she delivered this put-down of Obama: "Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights."

Obama had a few problems with that.

"First of all, you don't even get to read them their rights until you catch 'em," Obama said here, drawing laughs from 1,500 supporters in a high school gymnasium. "They should spend more time trying to catch Osama bin Laden and we can worry about the next steps later."

If the plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks are in the government's sights, Obama went on, they should be targeted and killed.

"My position has always been clear: If you've got a terrorist, take him out," Obama said. "Anybody who was involved in 9/11, take 'em out."

But Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for more than a decade, said captured suspects deserve to file writs of habeus corpus.

Calling it "the foundation of Anglo-American law," he said the principle "says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, 'Why was I grabbed?' And say, 'Maybe you've got the wrong person.'"

The safeguard is essential, Obama continued, "because we don't always have the right person."

"We don't always catch the right person," he said. "We may think it's Mohammed the terrorist, but it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You might think it's Barack the bomb-thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president."

Obama turned back to Palin's comment, although he said he was not sure whether Palin or Rudy Giuliani said it.

"The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting," Obama said, his voice growing louder and the crowd rising to its feet to cheer. "Don't mock the Constitution. Don't make fun of it. Don't suggest that it's not American to abide by what the founding fathers set up. It's worked pretty well for over 200 years."

He finished with a dismissive comment about his opponents.

"These people."

I've been waiting to hear a major candidate for office say this for seven fucking years. And there's no way Clinton would have taken a stand on this during the election.

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"Why Eat Soup with a Knife?": The Inimitable Matt Yglesias

AWE-SOME:

This subject really deserves a treatment longer than a blog post, but let me recommend my colleague Matt Duss’s post on Bob Woodward and the perversity of that burgeoning establishment consensus that the main lesson of Iraq is that, whether or not we should have gone to war in the first place, we’ve now learned a bunch of awesome counterinsurgency techniques that will allow us to subdue future adversaries near and far.

I know he disagrees with this interpretation, but I’ve always thought it made a lot of sense to dwell on the fact that the title of COIN guru John Nagl’s excellent book on the subject is Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife. One thing you might ask yourself, of course, is why would you do that? And it’s hard to say. I mean, even a starving man with a bowl of soup and no spoon is just going to drink directly from a bowl. Of course you can devise some kind of scenario in which it might be necessary to eat soup with a knife, but your basic gameplan in life is going to be to avoid being in those kind of situations. And much the same, it seems to me, with the lessons of counterinsurgency. This is very difficult stuff. Like eating soup with a knife. Your top policy priority should be to avoid the situations in which it arises.

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