LL&CB: Thanks in advance.

Pressing this button will turn off the music, but will also, one second later, fill this shed with hungry gonorrhea-infected mice, while the free jazz will be replaced by Gilbert Gottfried's audiobook reading of 'The O'Reilly Factor for Kids.'

LL&CB: Bagel.

Louis Pound’s last bagel was a Magnuson’s Onion, toasted and spread with reduced-fat cream cheese. One half lay a few feet from his outstretched hand, underneath a stool, face down; the other half a few feet further away, leaning up against a carton of orange juice that was, like Louis Pound, leaking its contents onto the floor of the deli.

POLITIK: Two Thousand and Eight, Bitches!

I've been busy. What do you want for nothin'?

Sorry.

I'm back now. Who knows for how long, tho. Enjoy me while I last.

That last bit is, in retrospect, is probably not the best phrase to put out there for attribution.

Anyway.

To the 1.5 conservative nutjobs that read this blog because it usually has a non-political bent and makes a nice change from www.iamkarlrovesmanwhore.com:

First of all - JESUS, leave Cindy Sheehan alone. If you lost your kid in a war thousands of miles away, you'd probably go a little batty, too. She's earned the right to make a little noise. I mean, seriously. And if the administration can't handle this woman - an adminstration so adept at spinning everything else that it makes Goebbels look like a guy dressed as a giant hot dog handing out coupons - then she must be striking a chord that the conservatives obviously can't learn the fingering to.

Secondly – look - I’m not gonna argue the point with you - Ann Coulter is HOT. I'm not one of those catty everything-right-is-wrong folks. Indisputably HOT. Hot like a pretzel. Which makes her stances all the more dangerous. I mean, hot AND eloquent? She's a conservative WMD. She could wipe out whole rooms of centrist thinking with just one well-timed flash of a belly chain.

And I gotta agree with MB on this: Rove is a PIMP. And the most cynical man on earth. To deny his aplomb with the conservative base is folly.

But the hole is getting deeper, right-wingers. The daily news from Iraq is, on the whole - as a friend of mine covering the war is fond of saying - "Different numbers, same brown people." Civil war, if not imminent, will likely require an increased commitment of troops and materiel to prevent. And whether or not the tragedy of Katrina's aftermath is wholly the federal government's fault or not, Bush is going to carry some, if not most of the blame. (That Times-Picayne story about a drop-off in federal funding for the Army Corps projects from a few years back is going to TOTALLY screw you guys.)

In November 2004, after the election, I wished, jokingly and somewhat darkly, that the war in Iraq would go south and that the economy would tank, just so the redder portions of the red states could froth and piss and moan for a few years before having to admit that they'd elected a dunderhead AGAIN - because they wanted to elect someone who said he stood up for them, and the well-being of their families - even though much of the previous four years were filled with evidence to the contrary.

I dunno. Bush fucked with the two things that you don’t fuck around with when it comes to preserving goodwill for the midterms, or, for that matter, 2008 – kids (state and local governments are withdrawing from No Child Left Behind) and wallets (deficit spending - as much as I, personally am a fan of it – is no good at the rate it’s compiling.) Not to mention we’ve got a whole bunch of folks who, even though we managed to get rid of the second biggest pain in the ass in their neighborhood, are still super fucking pissed at us for sticking our nose in their business in a way that they couldn’t pretend wasn't happening.

You guys are gonna get your asses moderately spanked in 2006. And then, unless Osama bin Laden shows up on al-Jazeera in a "Savannah is for Lovers" T-shirt and tells his boys to put down their guns and sign up for yoga, 2008 is gonna be NASTY.

Just plain DIRTY.

I wish 41 (Daddy) was still around. Weenie tho he was, he looks positively Clintonian next to his son.

And given how things are going, I think, deep down, even H.W. would consider that a compliment.