Why Jon Stewart should be hosting Meet the Press

okay, it's from last week, but here is everything you need to know about the first presidential debate

Ladies against women
ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES tells us all about Mrs. Cheney and her "Ladies against Women" group is getting involved in the Iraq troughing.
thanks to Atrios at Eschaton for giving me the link to Echidine in the first place

"The U.S. Department of State has awarded a major grant to the Independent Women's Forum to promote women's political and economic participation in Iraq. Yet the organization, whose board emerita includes Lynne Cheney, the spouse of the vice president, is devoted to countering "the dangerous influence of radical feminism in the courts" and combating "corrosive feminist ideology" on college campuses, among other things, according to its Web site. "


Not such a minor goddess at all. She posted this one today

"The Fairness Doctrine in Media

One would think that the U.S. media is obligated to provide time and space for both sides in a political debate. One would be wrong. The so-called fairness doctrine was abolished during the Reagan years"

Cheney by name, dick by nature
Rude Pundit has the right idea . Cheney is a professional weasle who turns everthing he touches to disaster. As this excellent piece in Rolling Stone demonstrates

Vote early and vote often
The new electronic ballot in Florida

Looping, loopy novel takes quantum leap into metafiction
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Andrew Crumey has clearly taken the dictum "write what you know" to heart, and with his PhD in theoretical physics and job as literary editor at a major weekly newspaper, Scotland on Sunday, what he knows makes for a interesting mix.

In his fifth novel, Mobius Dick, Crumey combines quantum theory with literary and scientific history to produce an imaginative, erudite and playful novel of alternate realities peopled by such historical luminaries as authors E.T.A. Hoffman, Herman Melville and Thomas Mann, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composer Robert Schumann and scientist Erwin Schrodinger.

When Scottish physicist John Ringer receives a mysterious text message--"Call me: H"--on his new "Q-phone" he wonders if it could be from his former lover, Helen.Visiting a former student at a secretive research center, Ringer is offered a chance to work on a new kind of communications and computing technology based on quantum theory and meets Helen's double.

Things get progressively stranger and more mysterious for Ringer as coincidences mount and his memory starts to play tricks.
Ringer's story is intercut with excerpts from a metafictive novel supposedly published in 1949 by Cromwell Press in the British Democratic Republic. Heinrich Behring's The Angel Returns relates a visit by Goethe's mistress to Schumann in a mental hospital and a capsule history of Schumann and his wife, Clara, in which Brahms appears as Clara's lover.

Next, in another narrative thread that could be part of Ringer's world, Behring's "reality" or another metafictive excerpt, we meet accident victim Harry Dick who may be suffering from false memory syndrome along with partial amnesia.

He meets a fellow patient named Clara and a writing therapist who has never heard of Mann or Gustav Flaubert.

Another supposed excerpt from a Behring novel Professor Faust deals with Schrodinger's sojourn at a Swiss rest clinic where he has come to meet his lover and search for a scientific theory that will make him famous.

Crumey shuffles these four threads until the cards blur together, handling the deck like a professional sharp. Themes examined include causality, dualism, the differences between what is real, what is remembered and what is imagined, and particle/wave quantum theory.

It sounds heavy, but the author leavens the heady mix of provocative ideas and twisting, tailswallowing plot with a generous measure of humor that runs from goofily sophomoric to cleverly self-referential. In the opening chapter, Ringer stumbles on a literary lecture titled "Vicious Cycloids" that absurdly cross-references Moby-Dick, the works of Schumann, Hoffmann and Mann. Ringer scoffs at the false significance given to coincidences in the arts, musing: "No doubt some imaginative novelist could conceive a logical scheme linking everything: Hoffmann, Schumann, Schrodinger, Mann. Some grand unified theory in which Helen and Ringer would be quantum resonances...a narrative inevitability."

Mobius Dick is a pleasurable paradox that leaves the reader smiling, if a little dizzy.

More media follies
This time at the Wall Street Journal, where they spell suspension "l-o-n-g-v-a-c-a-t-i-o-n" (thanks to War and Piece and Atrios for the tip off). Reporter's personal letter about what Iraq is really like gets passed around the internet, newspaper takes reporter out of circulation until after the election.

What is wrong with Amerika- part 57

When the posting of photos like these (warning -graphic depiction of consequences of 'pinpoint' smart bombing) gets the idiotic response it got, you know that some folks out there are swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool.

Evil or just plain stupid?
A question I often ask myself when watching the antics of politicians and my media brethern at the FOX 'fair and balanced' propaganda network. ("Murdoch decides, you do as your told"). Often when howling errors are made it is because someone is just too dumb to know better. Other times the mistake or omission is made to further an agenda. Take a look at these two cases and tell me whether they are evil or just plain stupid.

FOX pulls fake story off web site

Communists for Kerry

Oh sure, they apologized, they claimed the 'manicured metrosexual' story was just a joke by their chief political correspondent that wasn't supposed to be posted on the website. It was just an accident. Yeah, right. If I douse you in gasoline for a laugh and accidently drop a lit cigarette in your shirt pocket, I'm sure you'll forgive and forget. The reporter in question, Carl Cameron, should not have written the joke piece, but I can almost understand how he might have. I've written joke stories before (and they were much funnier) but I haven't passed them up the line to my editor. And if I did, he wouldn't print it. Carl has an editor too, probably several. He doesn't just post stuff on the FOX website without it being seen by somebody.

They knew they would have to pull it off the site in a matter of hours, and they knew the rest of the press would pick up the story of Carl's little joke and would repeat the little joke until everyone had heard that Kerry was effeminate. Bravo, Turd Blossom

Many put George W. Bush down for being an ignorant smirking frat boy, claiming he has the IQ of a piece of furniture. This is a mistake. George wants to be seen as dumb, so that people will give him the benefit of the doubt and not consider him the evil bastard he really is.