Wednesday Mystery Meat, with extra snouts and fillers.

• Paul Westerdawg would like all of you to go to ESPN.com and vote for Georgia swimmer Kara Lynn Joyce for a 2007 ESPY in the category of Best Female College Athlete. (The layout for the voting site is kinda confusing -- there's a very thin scroll bar to the right of the categories, so just keep scrolling down past Best Upset until you see the right category.) Just for the record, Kara Lynn has become only the second person ever to win four straight national titles in two events, was named National Swimmer of the Year two years in a row, and has 18 total national titles to her name. Which means that Kara Lynn Joyce all by her lonesome has 17 more national titles than Georgia Tech does.

• Elsewhere in the SEC, please welcome to the blogroll: The Auburner, which created the chart shown below (hat tip: The M Zone).



Don't tell Kyle King; I hear he hates Auburn, or something.

• Sign of the apocalypse #45,857,369: Nancy Grace is spawning.

• Finally, some YouTubes I've been meaning to post forever but didn't for whatever reason. First, I don't care if you love "Family Guy" or loathe it with a passion, but there's just something hilarious about this, to the point where it's become a running joke among me and any number of people.



Heh. Here's one of my favorite "Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail" scenes, which I like so much I have on my iPod (sorry for the superfluous subtitles):



And finally, a "Saturday Night Live" sketch that popped up in conversation the other day at the office while we were all standing around talking instead of, you know, working. This comes from the Lindsay Lohan oeuvre from back before LiLo went on a skankpage and became an even bigger drunk than I am.



Oh, Linds . . . what the hell happened to you?

The slow death of conservatism, part XXVII.

Before I get started, watch Ann Coulter get pwn3d by Elizabeth Edwards and, subsequently, Chris Matthews. I think Andrew Sullivan might be right -- Elizabeth Edwards would make an awesome presidential candidate herself.

OK, Ann's just a fringe player whose 15 minutes had ticked off the clock long ago. But here's another disturbing look inside the conservative mindset that can't be quite as easily ignored, because these are real people (to an extent) who actually hold these views. Johann Hari's tales from the annual National Review reader cruise includes the following:

Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan's one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: "The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You'd think we're the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren't covered. We're doing an excellent job killing them."

Then, with a judder, the panel runs momentarily aground. Rich Lowry, the preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, announces, "The American public isn't concluding we're losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They're looking at the cold, hard facts." The Vista Lounge is, as one, perplexed. Lowry continues, "I wish it was true that, because we're a superpower, we can't lose. But it's not."

No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that people avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop. Then they return to hyperbole and accusations of treachery against people like their editor. The aging historian Bernard Lewis declares, "The election in the U.S. is being seen by [the bin Ladenists] as a victory on a par with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should be prepared for whatever comes next." This is why the guests paid up to $6,000. This is what they came for. They give him a wheezing, stooping ovation and break for coffee.

And this:

[Norman] Podhoretz and [William] Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs. Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who traveled through a long phase of left-liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America's power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling gray ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been "an amazing success." He waves his fist and declaims, "There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria. . . . This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better." He wants more wars, and fast. He is "certain" Bush will bomb Iran, and "thank God" for that.

. . .

"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning."

The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn't he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward." His wife nods and says, "Buckley's an old man," tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

We are now at a point in American political history when the definition of "conservative" continues to be launched further and further into deep space, and those who consider themselves "true conservatives" have drawn such wild distinctions between themselves and the rest of the world that "conservative" ceases to have any meaning in a domestic political sense at all. There once was a time when to be "conservative" meant favoring smaller government and less government spending, but then George W. Bush strolled into Washington to join the Republican majority in Congress, and the budget exploded like never before. (Actually, the myth of the conservative as frugal spender started being smashed all the way back in the mid-1980s, when Ronald Reagan ballooned the national debt past $4 trillion, but that's another argument for another time.) When conservatism ceased to be about lower spending, it could've still been about less government involvement in people's private affairs, but then Bush and the Republicans started getting an authoritarian streak and pushing all kinds of legislation about wiretaps and indefinite detention of American citizens just because, and there went that. So then being a conservative meant you were pro-Iraq war and everyone else was a defeatist cheese-eating surrender monkey. But then alleged conservatives in Congress started having doubts about the Iraq war, and even more signed on to an immigration-reform bill that surely no self-respecting conservative would ever support, so . . . what defines someone as a conservative these days?

The stomach-turning quotes from pundits and average Joes alike on the National Review cruise hold the answer: To be a conservative these days, you have to be in favor of killing as many Muslims as possible, whenever killing Muslims is called for, wherever Muslims are located. It doesn't matter if the Muslim in question is just some random guy the feds mistakenly yanked off the street in New York City or Dearborn; you have to be in favor of detaining him for as long as it takes, and torturing him to within an inch of his life, to find out what he knows (even if it's nothing). It doesn't matter if the U.S. military is stretched too thin as it is, if someone calls for an invasion of Iran, you have to be for that. Any hesitation on your part to call for a war or the killing of a Muslim somewhere just shows that you're weak, you're not really up for the fight, and you're not a true conservative.

Bizarre.

The silver lining to all this, of course, is that if history is any guide, such ideologies tend to burn themselves out pretty quickly. The cloud is that there's usually a lot of hate, division, and yes, killing before they get there.

Modest Proposal VII.

You know, as much as I've delved into politics on this blog of late, I've actually kind of surprised myself by laying off George W. Bush. I mean, sure, there was this, but other than that, I mean, what's left to do? Guy's at a 26% approval rating, why carry coals to Newcastle?

Why indeed? So this isn't about Dubya; instead, I have a modest proposal regarding his pal Cheney, and here's the short version:



The long(er) version is that Cheney has basically taken it upon himself to write every civics/American history textbook you've ever read in your life. Contrary to what most of you learned during your freshman years in high school, the vice president is in fact not part of the executive branch, and as such all those neato "checks" and "balances" are straight out the window. It was such a bizarre, and radical, alteration of how the federal government is supposed to work that even Deputy White House Press Secretary Dana Perino -- never one to shy away from the task of abject bullshit-slinging -- was at a loss to explain or defend it. (Hat tip: Talking Points Memo.)

So come on, somebody, defend this. Is this OK? Whether you're a naughty big-government liberal or a so-called small-government conservative, is this how you want our government to act?

I remember back in 2001, when we were all huddling around trying to figure out what purpose there could possibly be for crashing 767s into our tall buildings, and what most of us came up with was that they just wanted to sow chaos and bring about a fundamental, and negative, change in the way our very country operates. Well, guess what: Someone has made a fundamental and negative change in the way our country operates, but it wasn't Osama bin Laden. It's our own vice president, who wants to put himself and his actions beyond any kind of oversight and thus, for all intents and purposes, outside the law. I don't care how terrified you are by the prospect of a radical Muslim terrorist attack or how many freedoms you're willing to give up on the chance that that can be kept from ever happening again, that's wrong. Dick Cheney placing himself above the law doesn't put any kind of a dent in al-Qaeda and it doesn't make any of us safer; all it does is create a government position whose occupant is allowed to do whatever the hell he wants.

I don't know, maybe some of you right-wingers out there like that. Well, let me ask you this: How much will you like it when, say, Hillary gets elected and Vice President Ted Kennedy or John Edwards or whoever the fuck gets that same kind of power? Think you'll just be sitting back and taking it then?

Rahm Emanuel, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, has nutted up and informed Cheney that if he doesn't consider himself part of the executive branch, then Congress may not feel obligated to finance his executive expenses. That's a start, and quite frankly it's more balls than I would've given Congressional Democrats credit for in a long time. But it's not enough. Someone needs to take this guy down, because if we don't, there's no telling who's going to claim this kind of privilege again and what they're going to do with it. I'm sick and tired of waking up every morning to face a country that's a little less recognizable every single day. Are we so cowed by the allegedly looming threat of creeping "Islamo-fascism" that we don't even recognize or care when one of our own leaders slouches toward actual fascism in our own capitol?

My modest proposal: Impeach this motherfucker, Congress. If attempting to unilaterally rewrite the Constitution and removing oneself from a fricking branch of government doesn't qualify as a "high crime," then pray tell, what does? And really, we're not talking about someone that masses of American citizens are going to rise up and defend; the risks are not as great as some would have you believe. Impeach this motherfucker, take him down, make an example out of him. It's not about revenge, or just looking for something to do, it's about trying to maintain some semblance of sanity in a country where everyone's supposed to be equal in the eyes of the law.

Either impeach this motherfucker or tell me what possible purpose there is in keeping him around, 'cause frankly, I just don't see it.

Re-branding.

I'm headed down to Baton Rouge this weekend for a wedding, so you won't hear much from me over the next couple days, but I still wanted to leave you with what the French call "a little sum'n sum'n."

Over time it became abundantly clear that pretty much everybody hated the picture I had on my Blogger profile, the one with me sneering and sticking my tongue out. Honestly I was kind of shocked by that, because I love that picture. Really, it sums up my personality about as well as any picture of me that anyone's ever taken.

But everything gets stale after a while, so like Aunt Jemima and the guy on the New England Patriots' helmet, the official Face of Hey Jenny Slater has been freshened up a little.

Sneering Doug is out. Pimp Daddy Doug is in -- very, very in.


Incidentally, this is the picture Paris Hilton has taped up on the wall of her jail cell.

I must warn you, don't look at that picture too long, because its sheer sexual magnetism may prove too much for you to handle. If you must look at it for an extended period of time, use a box with a little hole punched in it or something, and make sure you have a cold shower at the ready.

Have a great weekend, dorks! See you in a few days.

Creative writing contest part 2: The mayor flakes out.

And yet John Edwards continues to catch shit for getting an expensive haircut.

Do y'all remember the creative writing contest I held last month in which readers were invited to conjure up hypothetical conservative reactions to Hillary Clinton blowing off a planned campaign event in Iowa because the hosts didn't make enough money? (Hypothetical because it was actually Rudy Giuliani who did that?)

That was fun, wasn't it?

Well, get your creative juices (and your mad right-wing-pundit-impersonation skillz) flowing, because I'm throwing another one. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a hypothetical right-wing opinion column, blog post, or talk-show rant skewering Hillary if she was at the center of this:

Rudolph Giuliani's membership on an elite Iraq study panel came to an abrupt end last spring after he failed to show up for a single official meeting of the group, causing the panel's top Republican to give him a stark choice: either attend the meetings or quit, several sources said.

Giuliani left the Iraq Study Group last May after just two months, walking away from a chance to make up for his lack of foreign policy credentials on the top issue in the 2008 race, the Iraq war.

He cited "previous time commitments" in a letter explaining his decision to quit, and a look at his schedule suggests why -- the sessions at times conflicted with Giuliani's lucrative speaking tour that garnered him $11.4 million in 14 months.

Feel free to launch any attack you think a right-winger might make. Hillary doesn't care about national security! Hillary doesn't even show up for her job! Hillary is basically giving the bird to the American taxpayers! Actually, this time I don't even care whether you make it about Hillary. Pick Obama, Edwards, Kucinich, seriously, go nuts. Just conjure up something as snide and/or hate-filled as you possibly can -- keepin' it real, of course -- and throw it in the comments.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it. But if you do accept it, fuckin' follow through on it, know what I mean?

Or if that's too similar to the last contest and you're jonesing for a new challenge, simply come up with an answer to this essay question:

Other than the fact that he happened to be mayor of New York on 9/11, what possible attraction could there be to the Rudy Giuliani campaign?

Your move, readers!

A very special Tuesday Random Ten.

After two days of sitting shiva following the tragic, and some would say untimely, death of my previous iPod, a new addition has been welcomed into my home -- courtesy of a birthday present from my parents which, I think any of you will agree, is far too extravagant for a pissant like myself.

So anyway, thanks, Mom and Dad, for making me whole again. More than a decade after the end of your legal obligation to give me so much as one red cent, you're still being nice to me for some reason, even if this is just some very clever reverse-psychology ruse designed to make me feel guilty about asking to move in with you in the event that I ever lose my job. And even though it ended up getting taken care of, thanks to all of you who donated through PayPal to help me buy a new one -- and by "all of you" I mean Josh, whose selfless $0.01 donation will come in handy when my current headphones blow out and I replace them with 0.000256% of these.

At any rate, here are the first 10 songs that came up when I put the new kid on shuffle:

1. Bill Withers, "Lovely Day"
2. Jackson Browne, "Running On Empty"
3. Cartman, "Kyle's Mom is a Big Fat Bitch"
4. EMF, "Unbelievable"
5. The Dust Brothers, "Single Serving Jack"
6. The Farm, "Mind"
7. The Beatles, "Back in the USSR"
8. Roni Size, "Brown Paper Bag" (Photek remix)
9. Richard Cheese, "Brass Monkey"
10. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, "Go Daddy-O"

. . . And now my life can go on.

Intervention.

JEFF FISHER: Adam. Hi. Glad you could meet with us today. This is Steve Underwood, general counsel for the team, whom I'm sure you're well acquainted with by this point.

STEVE UNDERWOOD: Hi. Pleasure.

ADAM "PAC-MAN" JONES: Yeah. What's up.

FISHER: Well, Adam, I'm not sure quite how to broach this subject, so . . . do you mind if I ask you a personal question?

JONES: Naw, I guess not.

FISHER: OK. Well, Adam, uh -- what kind of porn do you like?

JONES Uh -- come again?

FISHER: What kind of porn do you like? Is there anything in particular you like to see when you're looking at naked women?

JONES: Uh -- aside from pussy? I don't think I get what you're --

UNDERWOOD: I think what Coach Fisher is trying to ask, Mr. Jones -- can I call you "Pac-Man"?

JONES: Whatever.

UNDERWOOD: OK, cool. Pac-Man, I think what Coach Fisher is trying to ask is, are there any particular types or genres of pornographic materials that you prefer over others? Do you like magazines, or are you more of a video man? Are you fine with soft-core, or do you need to see actual penetration? Any fetishes you're particularly into, girl-on-girl, latex, bondage . . .

FISHER: . . . autoerotic asphyxiation, peeing, pooping, bukkake, anything like that? Having a girl put on spike heels and crush a guy's balls?

UNDERWOOD: Uh, OK, coach, I think we've pretty well laid it out for Pac-Man here.

FISHER: Sorry.

UNDERWOOD: So, Pac-Man, did we hit a bulls-eye with any of those?

JONES: Uh . . . well, yeah, dawg, I guess I like all that stuff. Except for the spike heels and ball-crushing, I don't know about that.

UNDERWOOD: Fair enough. So it's safe to say, then, that pretty much any kind of depiction of a naked woman in a sexual context is appealing to you.

JONES: Yeah, I guess, but . . . man, back this up a second -- what's this all about?

FISHER: I'm just gonna come out and say it, Pac-Man -- Mr. Underwood and I are prepared to do whatever it takes --

UNDERWOOD: Within reason.

FISHER: -- within reason -- to keep you out of the goddamn strip clubs.

JONES: What?

UNDERWOOD: Let's call a spade a spade here, Pac-Man -- you and strip clubs just don't mix. I'm referring specifically to an incident back in February in which your, uh, entourage shot up a strip club in Vegas . . .

JONES: They was takin' my money, dawg.

FISHER: Pac-Man, that's what strip clubs are for. And if you didn't want them to take your money, why did you pull out a Hefty bag full of eighty-one grand in one-dollar bills and start throwing it all over the stage?

JONES: Yo, I told y'all, that was a visual effect, dawg!

FISHER: So let me get this straight, when you throw out a bunch of singles on stage at a strip club, you expect to get that money back?

UNDERWOOD: If I could steer this back on course for just a moment, Pac-Man, when that incident got you suspended for a year by the commissioner of the NFL, you met with Commissioner Goodell in New York to discuss that suspension. And what did you do the night before that meeting?

JONES: You mean besides playing PlayStation and, uh, reading to some kids at the library?

UNDERWOOD: Yes. Humor me.

JONES: Went and had some drinks with some friends.

UNDERWOOD: Uh-huh. And this occurred at . . . ?

[pause]

JONES: What, you want me to tell you the exact name of the place?

UNDERWOOD: Please.

[pause]

JONES: Uh, I don't remember.

UNDERWOOD: Of course you don't. But it is public record, Pac-Man, that you visited a strip club and then lied to Commissioner Goodell about it the next day.

FISHER: I mean, really, Pac-Man . . .

UNDERWOOD: And now of course we've got this incident in metro Atlanta.

JONES: So, what, dude, what you gonna do to me? You guys gonna suspend me? Go ahead, dawg, I already been suspended for the whole season! You want to take away my parking space at the stadium? Or, I know, you want to ground me? Tell me I can't even watch the games?

UNDERWOOD: Now, settle down, Pac-Man, this isn't about punishment. This is about . . .

FISHER: Behavior . . .

UNDERWOOD: Modification. Exactly. Behavior modification. We want to try to . . . perhaps provide a . . .

FISHER: Prostitute?

UNDERWOOD: [sighs] Thank you, Jeff, but no, we want to provide a -- an incentive for you to avoid those . . . environments in which you might be more vulnerable to . . . "challenging" behavior.

JONES: Man, speak English.

UNDERWOOD: If you must see titties, Pac-Man, we'd feel a lot better if you could do it without leaving the house.

[pause]

JONES: Man, this is fucked up.

FISHER: Look, it's like Mr. Underwood said, Pac-Man, we're not sitting here trying to punish you. There's nothing wrong with liking hot women -- you've seen my wife, I like hot women! There's nothing wrong with liking titties -- I like titties! But we just don't think strip clubs are the right place for you to be --

UNDERWOOD: Partaking.

FISHER: Uh, right. Exactly.

UNDERWOOD: And that's why we're asking you about your porn preferences. Any kind of porn that particularly turns your, uh, crank? You like artsy stuff? Or you like it a little raunchier? Or let me approach this a different way: What do you like most about strip club girls? Boobs? The dancing? Or you like big butts? Lemme guess -- you're a butt man, am I right, Pac-Man?

FISHER: Extremeasses.com, Pac-Man. Just say the word and you've got a subscription. You don't have to shell out a dime; me and Mr. Underwood will take care of it.

UNDERWOOD: Well, all due respect, coach, I don't know that I care to . . .

FISHER: OK, I'll take care of it myself. Extremeasses.com, Pac-Man. Or Booty Catchers. Wait, you didn't say whether you liked magazines or video, did you? OK, maybe I'll get you a subscription to Rear View. Or I'll get you Rear View and one of the Web sites, you can try 'em both out for a while, then decide which one you like best.

JONES: Man, I don't know . . .

FISHER: OK, just keep both of 'em. Fine. I'll pay for it. Money out of my pocket. It's nothing to me, Pac-Man! Just for God's sake, stay out of the strip clubs!

UNDERWOOD: Your coach is making you a very generous offer here, Pac-Man. He's doing it because he cares about this team -- we have, after all, made a substantial investment in the, uh, Pac-Man name -- but also because he cares about you. We got our Risk Management guys to run some numbers, and they concluded that at any given moment, when you enter a strip club, there's a 74.5% chance, on average, that shots are going to be fired. And a 36.4% chance that some of those shots are going to be fired at you. You understand that? You walk into any strip club in North America at this point, and on average, there's a better than one-in-three chance that you're going to end up like Tupac.

JONES: Wow.

UNDERWOOD: Yeah.

FISHER: Please, Pac-Man. I'm trying to save more than your football career. I'm trying to save your life.

[pause]

JONES: So tell me some more about Booty Catchers.

UNDERWOOD: Attaboy.

Obituary, and the Friday Random Ten.

iPod, 2, after brief illness

BIRMINGHAM -- Doug Gillett's 20GB clickwheel iPod, a faithful music provider ever since its purchase in March 2005, was pronounced dead earlier this week after a brief bout with an as-yet-unspecified illness.

After several weeks of intermittently locking up and needing to be reset, the iPod locked up permanently last Friday and was brought in for treatment. Attempts to resucitate the device were unsuccessful, and Gillett formally ended life-support efforts on Wednesday.

"I just thought it was the right thing to do," a tearful Gillett said. "I'm going to miss it, and it's going to be tough listening to music now without it, but sometimes you just have to know when to let go. And I decided this was the time."

Neither Tom DeLay nor Bill Frist, oddly enough, could be reached for comment.

Friends recalled the iPod being the life of the party for numerous parties, road trips, and listenings of various Richard Cheese alt-rock parodies, German gangster-rap songs, and filthy Dave Attell comedy bits. "It also had, like, more than 300-something Pet Shop Boys songs on there alone," said an acquaintance who asked not to be named. "I don't know how it managed."

The iPod is survived by Gillett, 29; its longtime companion, a Dell Inspiron notebook, 1; a Sony Discman, 8; 3,287 songs; all 21 episodes of the first season of "30 Rock"; and a Dave Chappelle comedy video.

In lieu of flowers, Gillett requests that donations be given to the Buy Doug A New 80GB Video iPod Fund. Donations can be made through PayPal at paris_1968 (at) hotmail dot com.

What a long, strange trip it's been. iPod, iSalute you, and iThank you for your service. Now iSend you out with a ceremonial Friday Random Ten.

Godspeed you, sir.

1. 3rd Bass, "Sea Vessel Soliloquy"
2. KRS-One, "The MC"
3. Beck, "11.6.45"
4. U2, "Until the End of the World"
5. Orbital, "Tunnel Vision"
6. A Tribe Called Quest, "Luck of Lucien"
7. The Police, "Every Breath You Take"
8. U2, "Mysterious Ways" (Perfecto mix)
9. Me Phi Me, "Herewecome"
10. Pet Shop Boys, "I Want to Wake Up"

And what the hey, a bonus 11th that really shows the depth of my music collection's depravity:

11. a-ha, "The Sun Always Shines on TV"

Sorry, I'm . . . I just need a moment right now. I'm sorry. While I'm pulling myself together, put your own Tens (and condolences) in the comments.