What Slate's new 'Hillary Deathwatch' feature lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in being a mercilessly accurate portrayal of the gorgon in her last days on the presidential stage.

To start off, we're putting her odds at a generous 12 percent. (Last week, a Clinton campaign official gave her one-in-10 odds.) At the moment, polls indicate that Obama has survived the Jeremiah Wright flap (for now). Clinton's Bosnia blunder has metastasized from a headache into a five-day circus. Bill Richardson finally climbed down from his fence onto Obama's side. And a Michigan court yesterday deemed the state's Jan. 15 primary unconstitutional and declined to order a revote, effectively smothering the last glimmer of hope for a deus ex Michigana bailout. Meanwhile, a new poll puts her favorability rating at 37 percent—its lowest since March 2001

Sadly, we may never know what her 'Solution for America' really was, though it seems a kind of inarguable certainty that some hapless demographic was going to be sluiced through merciless juicing machines: turning them into a kind of high-nutrition slurry that could be then bought for unreasonable amounts of money at your local Whole Foods.

Who am I kidding? She's a woman who looks for answers along the path of least resistance, and the Victims of the Juicing would almost certainly be the same 65-year olds who she relies on as her electoral shock troops.

Wait, what?

Paul Krugman's new NYT column: Everything about this election is like 1992 exactly, except things that are not.

It’s starting to feel a bit like 1992 again. A Bush is in the White House, the economy is a mess, and there’s a candidate who, in the view of a number of observers, is running on a message of hope, of moving past partisan differences, that resembles Bill Clinton’s campaign 16 years ago.

Now, I’m not sure that’s a fair characterization of the 1992 Clinton campaign, which had a strong streak of populism, beginning with a speech in which Mr. Clinton described the 1980s as a “gilded age of greed.” Still, to the extent that Barack Obama 2008 does sound like Bill Clinton 1992, here’s my question: Has everyone forgotten what happened after the 1992 election?

Let’s review the sad tale, starting with the politics.

And that sad tale? Bill Clinton, who was Barack Obama except in 1992 and not black, was elected as a beloved and talismanic figure, then clubbed/skinned like a baby seal by right wing demagogues because, well, Vote For Hillary, that's why, fucker.

As eminent scholar Jim Newell of Wonkette notes, this is way, way dumber than Bill Kristol's Times op-ed. That takes a special level of print media daring too, because Kristol is cavorting in the whole South Carolina racial issues thing this week.

The intent was totally to do a short write up of the State of the Union address. It often feels weird to think of Bush as our president still; I'm sure he still does things, I'm just not sure what they are. This might just be a matter of personal ignorance, or a causal side effect of how fucking pumped I am for President Mitt Romney. It's almost certainly one or the other.

The moment Brian Williams appeared on the screen, I had a pretty good feeling I was done for. It was a fitful sleep, and I remember awaking sporadically to see old white people standing and applauding, seemingly at random. I woke up sometime during Postpartisan It Girl and Obama bff Katherine Sebelius' Democratic response.

Her speech was folksy and fun, in a Midwestern-Cyborg-reads-from-teleprompter kind of way.

(As posted in alt-weekly bastion The Stranger)

Tuesday's primary in Michigan won't really matter to the Democrats—the state was stripped of Democratic National Convention delegates after it decided to move up the date of its primary, and has been boycotted by most of the field of Democratic contenders. On the Michigan ballot, the three leading liberal lights are Clinton, Kucinich, and Uncommitted. However, Michigan could play a decisive role in the Republican fight, sending one of the most beloved of the conservative cast members stumbling back to Massachusetts.

Mitt Romney needs to win something, anything, to continue to justify his well-coiffed presence in the race, and his father's old stomping ground of Michigan could be that magic state that saves "Mitt-stravaganza '08" from an early and ignoble end.

Here's the late numbers, from Politico GOP campaign embed Jonathan Martin:

The breakdown:

McCain: 27
Romney: 26
Huckabee: 19
Giuliani: 6
Thompson: 5
Paul: 4

The poll was taken Wednesday through Sunday, so it includes McCain's New Hampshire bounce.

Predictably, McCain is doing well among indies and Dems while Romney leads among Republicans.

Also worth noting is that McCain has a strong precedent in the state (having beaten Bush there in 2000) and Martin reports that Huckabee may be quietly and effectively weaving his folksy spell on Michigan's evangelical voters, often thought to be part of the Romney base.

For what its worth, Romney claims he will continue, even if it means a third silver medal—or worse.

When not busy purveying new episodes of "Beef: The Series," Black Entertainment Television founder Bob Johnson reminded South Carolina that Barack Obama used to wake every morning in the ghetto and hoover mountains and mountains of cocaine, often while a heartbroken member of the Clinton family begged (begged!) him to stop, if not for himself than for the example he was setting for his people.

Or something:

BET founder and prominent Hillary Clinton supporter Bob Johnson said Sunday he is 'insulted' with the Obama campaign's latest criticisms of Clinton, and appeared to take aim at the Illinois senator for his admitted drug use as a young man.

"As an African American, I'm frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won't say what he was doing but he said it in his book," Johnson said while campaigning with Clinton in Columbia South Carolina.

In Johnson's defense, this is probably only the third most embarrassing thing a Clinton campaign surrogate has said this month. Unless you count the inevitable "Hillary Going Negative!" media narrative that's almost certainly going to unravel from this, in which case its like the second.

My domain host went all Chris Benoit on me.

These are the kind of things that dreams are made of:

That’s right! According to The Hill, Patrick Buchanan is being discussed as a possible candidate for Senate in Virginia. Unlike the other two likely candidates, Rep. Tom Davis and former Gov. Jim Gilmore, Buchanan is both an outspoken conservative and an aggressive campaigner. His candidacy would be a welcome addition to the Republican field.

The idea of a Buchanan vs. Gilmore primary would be absolutely mind blowing; Gilmore, who ran for president with his only hope being that people would eventually come to embrace the fact that he's a total fucking reptile, versus a man who has spent the last decade of his life preparing us for the brutal realities of the coming Race War against the Mexicans.

Life is, until this dream is smashed with all the others, good again.

Oh, btw- I've been in Mexico City for the last week, and will continue to be so until the fifth.

I'll bring you back something nice.

The question before us:



"How many other campaigns for president are willing to give Furries the right to marry?"

It occurs to me more and more that in writing about the debates, you could probably start making shit up and nobody would be the wiser:

"The real turning point of the debate seemed to be when a clearly agitated senator Chris Dodd began referring to his fellow candidates as "dumb pussies," and offered to fight anyone in the audience who disagreed with him.

Despite audible consternation in the audience, Dodd continued menacingly, "I've killed enough hookers, cats, and homeless people in my life to know that the world is a cold, dark, hole that you can never escape from: that's the perspective I'll bring to the White House. Until you've looked Satan straight in the eyes, you can't handle the pressure."

Sensing a shift in the crowd, the issue of stalking and murdering the homeless became the issue of the morning. "The corporate owned media don't want you to know about my comprehensive plan for murdering vagrants with my own bare hands," former senator John Edwards remarked."

Eli Sanders' pictures from the event capture the unnerving power of Biden-mania at it's full and unforgiving apex.

If you're like me, a whirling cocktail of self hatred pounding out words at 2:30 in the morning, the litanies of real reasons why black hole-cum-conservative social critic Dinesh D'Souza found himself wandering Amsterdam's Red Light district are pretty disgusting to wrap your head around. In one of the few interesting blog posts amongst all the paint huffing (he's still using "cut and run," which gives him an 'A' for perseverance and an 'F' for being totally bankrupt as a human being) D'Souza writes home about the wonders of de Wallen:

The pornography shops have special sections with categories like "orgy" and "animals" and "grannies" and "watersports." There were also categories were so exotic I'm going to have to look them up. The evening acts feature not erotic films but rather "live sex acts." A fellow was standing outside one of the theaters, inviting people to come in. "Three on one action," he called out. "Fifty euros, three free drinks.

My best guess is D'Souza, dressed in a burka, while a procession of Russian prostitutes water board him until he "gives up on freedom," though this is pure journalistic speculation. I always figured D'Souza for a possible animal enthusiast as well, and the thought of him high five-ing the guys back at the Catholic League over photos of the lost innocence of a poor palomino doesn't seem all that weird.

D'Souza goes into a less than veiled hint that maybe Theo van Gogh wouldn't have been shot numerous times and all but decapitated by a Islamic fanatic if only we stopped the Dutch from having live sex shows starring some of Amsterdam's more nimble elderly, but that's D'Souza: if he can't find a way to find common ground with violent fundamentalists, he wouldn't have a job.

And why ruin the perfectly plausible mental image of Dinesh D'Souza fucking a horse with more talk?

Looking at something like the Ames Straw Poll, it is not hard to feel a little repulsed. The angriest segment of Iowa combines forces with the whitest segment of Iowa, and are all bused to one small corner of the state to be entertained by a billionaire polygamist and a supporting cavalcade of other stooges attempting to pray upon their fears of homosexuals and Mexicans.

In the end, nobody shows up and the voting machines all burst into flames. Mitt Romney "wins," but Huckabee kind of also "wins." Brownback probably doesn't "win." Tommy Thompson most certainly doesn't "win" and "fucks the dog." In the end 14,000 fanatics in the mild of nowhere determine the fate of the nation.

So, the political aspect is a non-starter.

But what about the rock wall?

"Youngsters in U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback’s camp romped through an inflatable castle, barreled down a 30-foot-tall slide and crawled through a red-and-yellow outdoor obstacle course. Others looped rings over a toy elephant’s trunk and hurled balls into cans for a toy spider or smiley-faced sticker.

Children in the neighboring camp scaled Mitt Romney’s rock-climbing wall and back-flipped in a balloon castle rented by the former Massachusetts governor’s campaign."
...

Participants, many with their thumbs rubbed with magenta ink to show they have voted, are taking it all in. Duncan Hunter has an Elvis impersonator; Ron Paul has a live monkey."

Why not just lay it out on the table: Were they expecting Ron Paul to show up with a dead monkey? While the image of the curmudgeonly Paul swinging a deceased primate in circles to teach children the evils of an intrusive federal branch of government seems not just probable but almost likely, people come to these kinds of events with a certain expectation level.

To digress slightly from Ron Paul manhandling deceased jungle creatures; how cretinous would you have to be to think eating Mitt Romney's free barbecue should be equated to those risking death to cast a vote in Iraq?

If you're one of the seven casual readers who made it their business to frequent this blog , you might have noticed that there hasn't been a post for the better part of three months.

And why not be honest for a moment: if you noticed, it was one of the few viable memories in that jangled cache of images you're relatively certain weren't cough syrup induced hallucinations. How much opium and YouTube can one human being consume before they start to literally devolve as a creature? This post, as much a mea culpa for my absence, is a chance for you to stop wasting your life and get a job. No woman will ever have you in your present state. Life can't all be Ron Paul jokes and Husker Du, and somewhere in the back of your mind you know this just as well as I do.

Wait, you're high right now, aren't you?

I don't owe you any explanation.

Deryk Schlessinger, pictured far right. Photo courtesy of CNN.com.

"I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic
and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of
running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it .
. . and some that don't."

-Deryk Schlessinger: alleged enthusiastic war criminal, MySpace connoisseur, and son of braying sociopath Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

In what may or may not be one of the most sincerely fucked up pieces of war pornography since Eduard Limonov's buoyant recount of gang rape in Diary Of a Russian Punk, Schlessinger is accused of having created a MySpace profile detailing a spree of rape, drug use, and torture while deployed with the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan.

In one scene, a soldier forces a child to suck him off while holding the child at knife point in front of his mother. Another features the rape of a wounded Afghani woman.

In a Pat Tillman-esque moment, an Army spokesman declared that this was in fact the work of our enemies, who’s devious use of MySpace is attempting to undermine the war on terror, “Our enemies are adaptive, technologically sophisticated, and truly understand the importance of the information battlespace.”

According to the Salt Lake City Tribune article that broke the story, many of Schlessinger’s fellow soldiers linked to his profile, meaning the terrorist MySpace fifth column had all but assumed Schlesinger's identity.

Dr. Laura, who had claims to have "raised a warrior son," has not been made available any comment on her son's alleged actions.

Having made the high speed conversion from powerful segregation enthusiast and general all-around human bag of shit to three hundred pounds of evangelical hamburger, the Rev. Jerry Falwell's legacy in the land of the mega-church appears to be taking shape:

According to the Washington Post, bolo-tied guy on a horse turned governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson is in fact Hispanic, something you could easily miss due to his lack of comically over-sized sombrero.

He paused. Leaned forward.

"Plus I'm Hispanic," he said. "Did you know that?"

He was teasing, but it's a real strategic issue for a candidate with a vanilla name. He's convinced that even a lot of Hispanics don't know his background -- that he's the son of an American father and a Mexican mother and spent his childhood in Mexico City until coming to America to start the eighth grade."

Trying to pitch the idea of the internet to a group of people who last interacted with a computer in a brief seven minute tryst with CompuServe in 1995 is hard, and harder still after their feelings about the medium were brutally confirmed when ABC paraded through everyone on MySpace in a degenerate child rapist review.

But the Republican party is going to change all that, because now they have a blog and blah blah blah, Barack Obama has a billion Myspace friends, and he has sex with like half of them!, blah blah blah blah, WEB 2.0! blah blah...

2008, where reporting on social networking sites is the new/hipper/dumber, "could you see yourself having a beer with the candidate?"

Another Republican -- Michael Turk, who was in charge of Internet strategy for President Bush's 2004 campaign -- puts the problem his party faces more bluntly: "We're losing the Web right now."

...

There are other measures as well. No Republican comes close to matching the popularity of another Democratic candidate, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois,
on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, the social-networking triumvirate. The
Democrats are ahead in the online money race. The top three Democrats, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama and Edwards, amassed more than $14 million over the Internet in the first three months of 2007; in contrast, the top three Republicans, Giuliani, McCain and Romney, collected less than half of that, $6
million. Furthermore, ABC PAC, the conservative fundraising site, has raised $385 so far for Republican presidential hopefuls; Act Blue, its liberal counterpart, has collected about $3 million for Edwards alone.

For those yearning for the sweet and merciful embrace of self immolation, don't reach for the gas can yet.

John Boehner, the Republican House leader from Ohio with surprisingly normal looking hair for a man of his political stature, has joined networking site Twitter. With the ironic detachment angle of your Ron Paul for President Myspace account waning, wile away another precious ten seconds of your life by showing that you've got nothing more pressing to do than having John Boehner as your internet BFF4eva.

Jim Gilmore of Virginia: Running for president just to fuck with people because he can.

"John McCain has fought conservatives time after time, even invoking the rhetoric of class warfare to oppose the Bush tax cuts," Gilmore said. "Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney both repeatedly opposed core conservative values to win elections in New York and Massachusetts."

With almost no money (he
raised less than 1 percent of what Romney did during the first three months of the year) and almost no staff (he says he has a single "field man" in Iowa), Gilmore has decided to gain ground in the crowded field of 10 candidates through a simple strategy: attack, attack, attack -- and hope the rest start attacking one another as well.

The Gilmore campaign, short on money, devoid of campaign staff, and run by an angry old man who seems to have just had nothing else to do for the next two years, has adapted a campaign strategy luridly devised from repeat viewings of the movie Predator: Lure them into your jungle lair, decapitate the weak ones, and then hope for the best in a one on one struggle against the strongest remaining candidate.

And if that fails? Dial in the secret code on your wristband nuclear self destruct thing and take everybody with you.

Cynical, disgusting, and ragingly nihilistic, Chug Bleach is proud to offer a (temporary) endorsement of Jim Gilmore for the Republican nomination.

Hillary Clinton Hates Black People: Pantsuit McBombeverything accepts campaign support of Hurricane Katrina villain Sheriff Harry Lee, who famously turned back African-Americans trying to reach safety through Jefferson Parish.