TODAY'S TOP FIVE: Who Will Win Next Year's Coveted Terrence Philo Jr. Award?
The Inmates Were Running the Asylum, But Then They Voted to Disband If you've been following the higgeldy-piggeldy over who's going to get to be the A+ Number One Puppet in Iraq, you're probably as confused as I am. First, nobody wants to be the "president" of the "interim government" that will take power on July 1. Then, one guy wants to be president, but Paul Bremer vetoes him. Bremer suggests another guy, who is vetoed by the governing council. The governing council then votes in a third guy, and promptly dissolves itself. This is all being covered as if either the governing council or the interim government will actually have any power, but it's hard to feel like we're not witnessing a tussle between the high school principal and the student council over who gets to chair the prom committee. At the end of the day, is there really any question about who's calling the shots?
The Semi-Fantastic Four The Congress is having a hard time performing its most basic function (passing a budget) because four GOP Senators are refusing to vote on the bill until the moron tax cut provisions are excised. The four senators are arguing that the party should actually make good on what was a central plank in its platform for 70 years: reducing the deficit. The House leadership, though, led by inept fatso Hastert and Tom "The Bug Man" DeLay, insist that now is no time to start acting like Republicans. Spend, spend, spend! How else is GW going to get "re"-elected if he can't bribe people with tax cuts and pork barrel spending?
From Now On, You'll Have to Do Your Crisco-Anointing and Breast-Covering On Your Own Time Time Magazine reports that, if GW Bush is "re"-elected, the purge of moderates in the cabinet will likely include cat-fearing Attorney General John Ashcroft, famous in American politics for losing a statewide election to Mel Carnahan, who died in a plane crash two weeks before the vote. The word is that Larry Thompson will be the next AG, meaning that Bush's cabinet will have three of America's five black Republicans (the others are Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and former Congressman "Smilin'" JC Watts). And of course I'm kidding about the "moderate" tag, but if Bush gets a whole term when he doesn't have to worry about re-election, I bet he's going to be appointing people a lot closer to his agenda, like, say, Mullah Muhammad Omar.
John Kerry: Is Anyone Safe from His Reign of Murder and Tyranny? Chuckle all you want, but I bet that ad is going to run in "key battleground states" by July 4. According to scholars of US presidential campaigns, this looks to be the most underhanded, negative campaign EVER, with Bush running 50,000 negative TV ads already, all of them with information that's either misleading or flat-out fraudulent. This is not helped by the dullards in the media who parrot the Bush gang's spin points on Kerry (behavior that goes from the New York Times all the way down to the Wonkette web log), but I guess it's what we've come to expect from the "liberal" media.
Quick, Throw That Sucker in the Clink Before It's Too Late! One bit of great, unexpected news over the three-day weekend was the ruling by a Chilean court that former CIA-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet no longer has immunity from lawsuits or prosecution stemming from his activities during the "dirty war" of the 1970s. A few years ago, a Spanish court tried to put Pinochet on trial for his numerous crimes, but failed because of his immunity, granted on a note from his doctor saying he suffered from dementia. After he gave an interview to a Miami TV station in which he was lucid and in control of his faculties, though, that went out the window. Let's hope this vermin dies in prison, where he belongs.
-Consider Arms
