Cultural Bankruptcy Via Electrocution Disco

Sullivan suggests this as a "Mental Health Break", but surely that can't be right.

He Shouldda Listened To His Staff

Harry Reid displays that common touch which has made him such an effective spokesman for the Democratic Party.

The Capitol Visitors Center, which opened this morning, may have tripled its original budget and fallen years behind schedule, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid found a silver lining for members of Congress: tourists won't offend them with their B.O. anymore.

"My staff tells me not to say this, but I'm going to say it anyway," said Reid in his remarks. "In the summer because of the heat and high humidity, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol. It may be descriptive but it's true."

But it's no longer going to be true, noted Reid, thanks to the air conditioned, indoor space.

Protecting The Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwich™

James Boyle's book The Public Domain: Enclosing The Commons Of The Mind si available as a free download here. It looks great and I hope to say a lot more about it very soon. Excerpt from the preface:

Each person has a different breaking point. For one of my students it was United States Patent number 6,004,596 for a “Sealed Crustless Sandwich.” In the curiously mangled form of English that patent law produces, it was described this way:

A sealed crustless sandwich for providing a convenient sandwich without an outer crust which can be stored for long periods of time without a central filling from leaking outwardly. The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower fillings, and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings there between. The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter.

Otto The Anchorman

This is good ol' Otto the autopilot. We celebrate Otto today because I think he would make a fairly decent anchor for our evening news.
We may need Otto because, as it turns out, the local evening news anchor is an endangered species....at least in terms of holding down their six figure salaries. Oh, the humanity. Funniest quote from the story:

When the anchors depart, they take decades of experience and insight with them. “Basically, you replace someone who knows City Hall with someone who can’t find it,” said John Beard, who lost his job at KTTV last December after 26 years as a news anchor in Los Angeles.

Stop it, you're killing me. Man, that is a really good one. First, it asks you to remember the last time you saw a City Hall story. Then it invites you to ask when the last time was that you saw a City Hall story that appeared prior to the boys downtown being ready for you to see it. Most local TV reporters have their hands full covering a pot hole, never mind the talking head anchors. Once we get used to Otto we won't miss these guys at all. Otto even has the same empty, fatuous, reassuring smile

Nice Story

Maybe the Christmas season just has me in a sentimental mood, but I thought this little story about the celebration of Taino culture in Puerto Rico was a bit heartwarming for some reason. Not too often these days that a Times story does that to me.

Jeffrey Goldberg Is James Bond

Goldberg shares a little tradecraft with us. Seriously, I remember a couple of these from old Ian Fleming books. Sample:

Here are six ways to minimize your chances - already remote - of dying in a hotel besieged by terrorists. I'm not including in this some of the self-inflicted mistakes people make, such as allowing Russian prostitutes into your Baku hotel room and believing that they have your best interests at heart.

Joan Walsh Humiliates Christopher Hitchens

This entire Hardball segment was well worth watching in order to relish the sight of Walsh handling Hitchens's arguments with the sneering contempt that they deserve. I have always wondered why more folks don't apply the treatment to this absurd little man. I half-suspect that many of them are intimidated by the poxy British accent and by his ostentatious, often irrelevant, literary references. Walsh actually gets many better licks in than the link above indicates.
Joan Walsh as been a pretty biased Clinton booster for quite a time, and Hitchens is correct to say that Clinton's qualifications for State are pretty thin. Nonetheless, his constant attacks on Hillary are so ad hominem and so reflexive that they really deserve to be called out as the shrill hysteria the Clintons so often provoke. Buffoons like Hitchens are actually something in the way of a secret weapon for the Clinton team, as their attacks are so over the top and unhinged that they make the pair seem more reasoanable. Had the Clinton foes not attempted to torpedo them, the so-called "Progressive" wing of the Democratic party would have emasculated President Clinton far more effectively than the haters ever could.