P.J. Gladnick's blog

Somebody should send a message to the absolutely clueless AFP (Agence France-Presse) news agency: the Coffee Party today is about as signficant a political force as the Prohibition Party. However, in this AFP story by Edouard Guihaire the Coffee Party,  which pretty much died almost at birth, is portrayed as a major political force on a par with the Tea Party. Perhaps Guihaire is new to America and has not woken up to the sad reality of the moribund Coffee Party which even our own liberal mainstream media has given up covering after an initial flurry of hype at the beginning of the year. So here is AFP laughably trying to convince its readers about the incredible political significance of the Whig... I mean Coffee...Party:

WOODBRIDGE, Virginia — A progressive infusion in US politics, the Coffee Party is brewing a strong counter-movement to the ultra-conservative Tea Party, just a week ahead of the US legislative elections.

Born in January in reaction to the bashing President Barack Obama's proposed health care reform was getting in Congress and the media, the Coffee Party first took shape on Facebook.

"It started on my personal Facebook page," said party founder Annabel Park, a small, soft spoken woman with a strong character.

So what was the reaction at the Huffington Post to the admission  by West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, who is now running for a U.S. Senate seat from that state, that he would now oppose ObamaCare despite his earlier support for that same legislation? Brutal scorn as can be seen in the very title of Huffington Post political writer Sam Stein's article, "Joe Manchin Does 180: I Would Have Voted Against Health Care Reform." Stein, as well as the comments from the Huffington Post readers, are now slamming Manchin for blatant political opportunism on this topic. It's not a pretty sight. First Sam Stein weighs in:

Oooooh!

You're so angry and stupid that...you're GONNA EXPLODE!!!

That sums up the incredibly embarrassing childish critique of Rush Limbaugh by Norman Lear. Not one issue was mentioned. Ironically Lear slammed Limbaugh for being like an uncontrollable kid yet it was Lear himself who lowered himself to using slams that most folks haven't heard since sitting in a grade school cafeteria and hearing the children ragging on each other.  Even for the Huffington Post, Lear's childishness is over the top. The only reason I can think of about why the editor gave his piece a pass is that Lear is a celebrity. And in case you think your humble correspondent has exaggerated about the content-free childishness of Lear's slams against Limbaugh, here is his entire brief schoolboyish mudsling:

Folks, I'm worried about Rush Limbaugh. Has anyone ever exploded, you know, burst apart, like if we humans had seams and they just burst open and guts and shit shot out in every direction?

Has that ever happened to anyone any of you have ever known even in the wildest of election seasons? 'Cause listening to Limbaugh in my car today, carrying on about Obama with less than 2 weeks to the midterms (and I'm someone who's heard him a lot and knows what a screamer he is) how he can carry on like the kid you knew up the block who could stand there and holler dumbness until his face got red as a radish --oh, My God, is that where "redneck" comes from?! -- and today, riding with my car windows down, I thought "This guy is gonna split a gut so bad I better put my car windows up even if I'm in LA and he's broadcasting from Florida.

 

What happens when a mainstream newspaper gets too cozy with local politicians? In the case of the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel they often have to play catchup with the free alternative weekly, the Broward Palm Beach New Times, when it comes to exposing the foibles of those same politicians such as happened when the New Times' Bob Norman led the way with his stories about Broward School Board corruption to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. And once again Bob Norman is leading the way (although he sometimes goes off the deep end when discussing national politics) in his New Times Daily Pulp blog with a special series of articles exposing the amazing activities of Broward County Democrat Chairman, Mitch Ceasar, including allegations of corruption, vote tamperiing, and "wandering fingers." I'm sure you want to start off with the incredibly juicy details of the latter so check these claims in Norman's story made by Donna Greenburg, former executive director of the Broward Democrats:

"He's very predictable," Greenberg, who was married, says of her former boss. "He would walk over, shut the blinds in his office, and close the door. Then he would come over, say 'You look tense,' and massage my neck. It was so weird. I was freaking out. I was like, 'What do I do?'"

It only got worse the one time that party business caused her to have to go to Ceasar's house in Plantation. She was there to collect photographs that were to be posted on the Broward Democratic Executive Committee website.

"He totally came onto me and tried to get me in bed," she said.

At one point in the checkered writing career of your humble correspondent, he criticized children's cartoons for displaying fascistic attit

Updated with correction below.

How embarrassing is it when a senatorial candidate sits down with your own editorial board and issues a statement so absurdly mendacious that the video clip of the "Pinocchio moment" becomes a big hit in the blogosphere yet your own story about the interview completely misses it? Such was the case with the Palm Beach Post. Charlie Crist sat down for an hour long interview with its editorial board and declared that he would still have left the Republican party even if polls had shown that he was running 20 points ahead of Marco Rubio in the race for the U.S. Senate seat from Florida. Here is a transcript of that memorable magic moment:

Q: But if you had been 20 points up in the polls over Mr. Rubio would you have left the party to run as .an independent?

A: Absolutely. Yes. I absolutely would have. Because I think it's that important. Sure. I would have...

Remember all the media hoopla earlier this year surrounding the birth of the liberal alternative to the Tea Party called the Coffee Party which was founded by former Obama political operative, Annabel Park? Well, despite all the promotion of the Coffee Party by the MSM, it has pretty much fizzled out. The extent of its slide into complete insignificance can be measured by the fact that its national convention in Louisville, KY this past weekend registered almost no media coverage. Perhaps even the MSM was embarrassed by the Coffee Party's current obscurity to the extent that its lasting legacy might well be the performance at their convention of the lamest rap song in history.

What little coverage the supposedly 350 people attending the Coffee Party convention received seems to have been pretty much limited to local media such as the Louisville Courier whose article could do little to hide the navel-gazing aspects of this "movement" moving nowhere:

The Coffee Party USA — which was founded on Facebook and is holding its first national convention in Louisville this weekend — bills itself as a more thoughtful and reasoned alternative to the tea party.

Saturday night the organization held a panel discussion, part of its three-day “Restoring American Democracy” convention, that included bloggers, college professors and communications strategists talking about what they can do to make politics more inclusive. They also discussed how to draw more disenfranchised voters back into the democratic process.

Remember when liberals brushed aside any criticism of candidate Barack Obama being unqualified to become president because of his lack of executive experience? Well, that was then and this is now because Susan Estrich has suddenly developed "concern" over the qualifications of the Tea Party backed Republican gubernatorial candidate in New York, Carl Paladino. A skeptic might rightly believe this recent Estrich infatuation with qualifications could be inspired by the fact that Paladino is closing the gap in the polls with the Democrat candidate, Andrew Cuomo.

Here is Estrich with her newly developed qualifications concern:

The Republican nominee for governor of New York doesn't spend a lot of time talking about himself, which is both good and bad. It's good because, in truth, his surprise victory over the "establishment" favorite (and Conservative Party candidate) Rick Lazio had very little to do with his qualifications and agenda, and everything to do with his tea party-infused attacks on Albany, government and the powers that are. It's bad, of course, for precisely the same reason.

Is Carl Paladino actually qualified to be governor of New York?

Flying Pigs Alert!

The gubernatorial campaign of Andrew Cuomo has such a poor credibility problem that even the local New York City CBS affiliate is asking: "Cuomo Caught Lying About Voting for Bloomberg?" And what caused such an aspersion to be cast upon Cuomo's veracity? Check out this video in which Cuomo asserted that he voted for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. However, as the CBS affiliate pointed out, it didn't happen:

But for all his actions as the state’s chief law enforcement officer, Cuomo did have a little problem with telling the truth about his election box support for Mayor Bloomberg.

“Have I voted for the mayor? Yes,” Cuomo said.

Actually, he didn’t. The Cuomo campaign had to issue a clarification, saying he was only registered to vote in New York City in 2005 when he endorsed Democrat Fernando Ferrer.

Better enjoy the Lion King while you can. Flipper could also be gone soon. If a certain nutty professor has his way, all lions, dolphins, as well as all other carnivorous animals on this planet would be selected for controlled extinction for the "high crime" of eating meat and causing suffering in other animals. I kid you not.

In a long, rambling, seemingly endless opinion piece in the New York Times that comes off like a bizarre mixture of Dr. Strangelove and Professor Irwin Corey, Rutgers philosophy professor Jeff McMahan makes the case for playing God in the animal kingdom because of his assertion that God was flawed for allowing animal suffering in the wild:

Viewed from a distance, the natural world often presents a vista of sublime, majestic placidity. Yet beneath the foliage and hidden from the distant eye, a vast, unceasing slaughter rages. Wherever there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their prey. Agonized suffering and violent death are ubiquitous and continuous...

...Suppose that we could arrange the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones.  Or suppose that we could intervene genetically, so that currently carnivorous species would gradually evolve into herbivorous ones, thereby fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy.  If we could bring about the end of predation by one or the other of these means at little cost to ourselves, ought we to do it?

Joliet, Illinois must be a community absolutely bursting with newsworthy events. Why? Because the Herald-News newspaper in that city was (conveniently) unable to cover a local news story that has become a sizzling hot topic in the blogosphere. All one has to do is enter the name of the Illinois 11th Congressional District Congresswoman, Debbie Halvorson, into Google Blog Search and you will get results chock full of a shocking incident a few days ago, including this video. The Frugal Café Blog Zone, which is but one of many sites covering this, explains:

Would MSNBC or CNN have featured this shocking story if the vile protesters at the Nazi-themed protest were CONSERVATIVES or REPUBLICANS or if left-wing extremists had dressed up like Nazis and crashed a tea party posing as conservatives or Republicans? Why do you even ask? Of course they would.

When interviewed in the video below, these anti-conservative protesters in Joliet, outside Chicago — proudly carrying Nazi-esque signs slamming GOP congressional opponent Adam Kinzinger and other well-known conservatives, like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin — denied several times being there in support of, or affiliated with, Democrat Rep. Debbie Halvorson. Congresswoman Halvorson is running against Kinzinger in the November election.

...Much later, these bogus grassroots protesters were videotaped returning to the congresswoman’s campaign office in the dark of night. Obviously, they’re part of the liberal congresswoman’s camp. Unless Halvorson had NO IDEA that these left-wing extremist folks had her campaign office keys and gained access to her office. They look pretty darned cozy in there in the video with Julie Merz, Halvorson’s campaign manager.

Take a quick break from speculating about the outcome of the elections this November. There is a new topic that is causing quite a bit of speculation: just what did Kiran Chetry of CNN's American Morning do last Wednesday that caused co-host John Roberts to pause in the middle of introducing guest David Axelrod and snap at her in a fit of extreme irritability? Almost as funny watching it on TV was the fact that the moment was officially recorded in CNN's transcripts:

DAVID AXELROD, SENIOR ADVISER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA: Thank you for having me.

ROBERTS: Let me ask you first of all, David, before we get into the -- excuse me. You would mind not doing that while I'm talking? Thank you. I appreciate that. If you don't mind.

David if, I could just Terry Jones and this Quran burning that is planned for September 11th, what does the president think about that? Does the president -- is he as concerned about it as other members of his administration are?

Can watching too much MSNBC affect a person to the extent that he acts in a completely irrational manner? According to a Tampa Tribune story, a Florida man convicted of threatening death upon a congresswoman for her opposition to ObamaCare believes the answer would be yes:

TAMPA - A Spring Hill man who threatened U.S. Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite during the health care debate will spend more than two years in federal prison.

Eric Lawrence Pidrman, 66, claims he was in an alcoholic blackout when he telephoned Brown-Waite's office about 6:30 a.m. on March 25 and left a message saying he had 27 people who would make sure she "doesn't live to see her next term."

"I'm terribly sorry that it ever happened," Pidrman said this morning before he was sentenced. At the time of the morning he made the call, he said, "I very often watch the recycled news shows on MSNBC."

EEK!

There is a conservative student group at our sacred campus club rush. Remove them immediately!

Such was the attitude of Palm Beach State College administrator Olivia Ford-Morris at the sight of a Young Americans for Freedom table. You can see and hear the extreme urgency in the attitude and voice of Ms Ford-Morris accompanied by campus security guards in this video as she demands the students at the YAF table "Pull it up!" Although Ford-Morris claimed she didn't remember receiving either an e-mail or a phone call from YAF about getting a table for club rush, evidence is now contradicting that claim (below the fold).

So this is obviously a great story of campus censorship that the Palm Beach Post would love to cover since it happened locally? Wrong. The only comment from the Palm Beach Post on this incident is the sound of crickets chirping. To get information on what happened at Palm Beach State College you would need to check sites on the blogosphere such as Orlando Political Press:

(Lake Worth, FL) On Tuesday September 7, 2010 at around 11:00am one Palm Beach State College (PBSC) student and two Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) members, state chairman Daniel P. Diaz and state vice chairman Eddie Shaffer, were shut down and had campus police called on them after tabling and recruiting during club rush at the College. The PBSC student, Christina Beattie, had received prior permission from college administrator Olivia Ford-Morris to promote her organization on campus via telephone and email communication.

As your humble correspondent has learned, writing humor can be very dangerous since it can easily backfire. Such was the case with a story written by the former Mr. Sharon Stone aka Phil Bronstein, Editor-at-Large of the San Francisco Chronicle. Just from the very title of his piece, "Should Obama have smoked crack?" you just know Bronstein was going to run into trouble. Some readers didn't know he was trying to be funny and were outraged. Other readers realized he was attempting to write humor but felt it was really lame. So here is Bronstein's backfiring humor attempt:

...His druggie past is not helping him shape the overarching grit of his public character nearly as much as it could be. Weed and cocaine? Who's going to be impressed with that, when his hugely successful contemporaries like Oprah Winfrey have the truly dark and evil specter of crack in their background?

...He needed some rock in that pipe of his youth. If he'd had a crack addiction then instead of an effete taste for powdered cocaine and pot, people might be a little more respectful of him now. It would have been an even tougher journey to the top. The big dog bite needs teeth sharpened by real adversity.

The most surprising thing about Jimmy Breslin's article in Harper's Magazine is that he is still around. Who knew?

Not so surprising is that Breslin hasn't lost any of his barely coherent rage which seems to be his trademark. This latest example from Breslin is so off the wall and all over the place that it is actually hard to get upset over it. Just mark it up to typical Breslin and savor it for the flat out nuttiness of the proposition that people attending last week's Glenn Beck rally in Washington, D.C. are somehow like assassins. Breslin jumps right into it from the start in which he somehow connects assassinations with free speech with the Glenn Beck crowd. It makes no sense but, hey, that is Jimmy Breslin for you:

There are these sudden loud noises in the hotel kitchen, one, two, three, probably a tray falling, and then there is so much screaming and a hand holding a gun high in the air and Robert Kennedy, who had walked into the gun, is on the floor with his eyes seeing nothing. On this June night in 1968 he has just won a Presidential primary and suddenly he is fit only for a gravedigger’s dirt.

It happens this way when the claws of madness swipe through the sky. In 1919 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called it for all time, and crashingly so today, when he wrote, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

...All day on television yesterday you had the aimless babbles of this Beck, who looks like he eats Bibles.

This is a sad time to be David Brooks, the New York Times house conservative. The souring economy (along with other poor administration decisions) has caused a big drop in the popularity of his beloved Barack Obama with his party facing electoral disaster at the polls this November. So what to do? Why, engage in fantasy by writing an alternate history in which an all-wise Obama cuts taxes and vetoes big spending plans passed by the Democrat congress. Here is some of the comedy gold Brooks dreamed up in his alternate history universe:

...He told his aides to put away the history books and reject the New Deal comparisons. Unlike in 1932, Americans today have a raging distrust of Washington, he observed. Living through a crisis caused by excessive debt, they will viscerally recoil at the prospect of federal debt without end. “Somehow,” Obama concluded, “we have to address the crisis without further terrifying the American people.”

The stimulus package, he continued, should rely heavily on cutting payroll taxes. This, he argued, will send a quick jolt to the economy without concentrating power in Washington. It will deliver a sharp psychological boost to the middle class. It might even be bipartisan. Obama noted that John McCain had a $445 billion stimulus plan along these lines and his fellow Republican senator, Mel Martinez, a $713 billion plan.

Does anybody out there remember Tyler Collins who earlier this month had the distinction of performing perhaps the worst political impersonation ever recorded? Collins later claimed that his "performance" at Kentucky's annual Fancy Farm picnic was just satire but for satire to work, it must have even a slight degree of credibility. Nobody bought Tyler's obvious act which was so humiliating that all he accomplished was embarrassing himself and becoming a Web laughingstock. In fact, "Rand Fan" Collins, who was also a columnist for the Crittenden Press, was so embarrassing in his entirely unconvincing role as a Tea Partier that even former fake Washington Post "conservative" Dave Weigel panned his pathetic act:

When Collins was young and irresponsible, he was young and irresponsible. He's not the first kid to play dress-up to make fun of a politician he dislikes, and he won't be the last. But he really should have dropped the ruse when he was caught; he must realize now that he's become a cause celebre for activists who claim that all "racism" in the tea party is fake.

Delaware might soon be referred to as "Little Alaska" not only because of its relatively small size in area but, more importantly, because the September 14 Republican senate primary in that state threatens to become a possible repeat of what recently happened in Alaska when little known Tea Party backed candidate, Joe Miller, apparently defeated the establishment incumbent, Senator Lisa Murkowski (absentee ballots still being counted). In the "Little Alaska" state of Delaware, Joe Miller comes in the form of little known Christine O'Donnell who is challenging "moderate" Congressman Mike Castle who has, until now, been considered as the sure victor in that state's primary. However, after what happened in Alaska, the O'Donnell challenge has to be taken more seriously.

Michelle Malkin is now focusing on that election in which anything, after Alaska, now seems possible:

Well, 70-year-old, nine-term House cap-and-taxer GOP Rep. Mike Castle has a challenger. She’s Christine O’Donnell — a young, energetic, fresh-faced conservative activist with a real shot at dislodging the entrenched liberal Republican. She’s been traveling the state of Delaware non-stop and reaching out to conservatives across the country for support. I met her on Saturday at a grass-roots gathering of Moms 4 America in Washington, D.C. Castle refuses to debate her and has resorted to sneaking in and out of local GOP meetings to avoid her. He has bagged out on four scheduled GOP primary debates, most recently one sponsored by the League of Women Voters. The establishment Republican fund-raising organizations are sticking by their big government brother.

This is one story that U.S. News & World Report's Washington Whispers might want to keep to a low whisper or risk even more ridicule than what they are already receiving. Paul Bedard, writing in Washington Whispers, quotes Kennedy's biographer and former girlfriend who claim that Ted was really an innocent victim of the Chappaquiddick accident. Here is Kennedy biographer Burton Hersh making the case for Kennedy as merely a lousy driver:

Now, a year after Kennedy died, his lifelong biographer Burton Hersh, armed with fresh interviews with Kennedy's mistress at the time, tells Whispers that the whole July 1969 episode  should have been handled as a simple crash, leaving the senator's legacy untainted. "It was a car accident," he says. "Ted was a terrible driver. He never paid much attention to where he was going."

"He took a tremendous blow on the head," says Hersh. In interviews following the crash, Kennedy displayed confusion and amnesia, he says.

Your pink slip is on the way.

That is the fear that is probably driving Ed Schultz completely over the edge. And Big Ed probably insured the likelihood of that outcome when he recently threatened to go postal and torch MSNBC when that network neglected to promote his abysmally rated show on an election night.

Brian Maloney at the Radio Equalizer has recorded the Schultz dementia from his radio show as he pathetically makes the case for the "success" of his failing MSNBC Big Ed show. The full transcript is below the fold but first an excerpt from his demonic rant which demonstrates why the MSNBC suits, for safety sake, might want to pass Ed through a metal detector whenever he enters their studio:

And you have no idea, in my bones, in my very soul! In my heart! I want to kick Fox's ass! I want to drive them into the ground! I want to spike the ball! I want to kick 'em in the teeth on the way back to the huddle! And then I want to turn around and lift my leg on 'em! Because that's all they're worth!

Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite.

Unfortunately for residents of many urban areas such as New York and Philadelphia, the bedbugs are not only biting but spreading at an alarming rate. Despite this outbreak, the mainstream media has until recently kept insisting that bedbugs developed a resistance to DDT so any emergency lifting of the EPA ban on that pesticide is unnecessary. However, your humble correspondent has speculated that the MSM would eventually have to change its position on the DDT ban due to the fact that so many of its members are being assaulted by bedbug attacks which keep increasing despite the use of other pesticides. Well, it now appears that New York Times writer, Emily B. Hager, has had a revelation about DDT. While its not an outright call for a lifting of the DDT, consider it an important pit stop on the way to demanding the ban be lifted:

...Bedbugs, once nearly eradicated, have spread across New York City, in part because of the decline in the use of DDT. According to the city’s Department of Housing and Preservation, the number of bedbug violations has gone up 67 percent in the last two years. In the most recent fiscal year, which ended on June 30, the city’s 311 help line recorded 12,768 bedbug complaints, 16 percent more than the previous year and 39 percent above the year before. A New York City community health survey showed that in 2009, 1 in 15 New Yorkers had bedbugs in their homes, a number that is probably higher now. 

The Tea Parties are driving the liberals crazy. They charged that Tea Partiers were racists but that pretty much backfired on them when they were unable to collect on the $100,000 Breitbart prize offered for any video evidence of racial epithets that were supposedly hurled at congressmen on March 20 at the Capitol. Now it seems that they have gone back to the Nancy Pelosi charge of accusing the grassroots Tea Party of being an "astroturf" organization. And who is suposedly financing them? According to a New Yorker hit piece article written by Jane Mayer, much of the money is coming from businessmen brothers, Charles and David Koch.

Of course, any article complaining about businessmen contributing to conservative causes will have a big elephant in the room in the form of George Soros who pours hundreds of millions into the far left movement. And that elephant is so large that even Mayer can't ignore it. So what to do? Why, portray Soros as saintly. So start plucking your harps as you read the hilarious money quote Mayer employs to explain away this hypocritical matter by presenting the "benevolent" Soros floating upon his heavenly cloud:

Of course, Democrats give money, too. Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a hundred million dollars a year in America. Soros has also made generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s. But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.”

Imagine a movie about Abraham Lincoln's assassination that neglects to include the character of John Wilkes Booth. Ridiculous, right? Well, that is pretty much what has happened in the movie Fair Game in which the person who leaked the name of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak, Richard Armitage, never appears in the film. So how to excuse such an absurd situation? Simple. Just write off complaints about this as political insider nitpicking. That is what Washington Post writer Ann Hornaday has done in her article that sets up laughable excuses in advance to what is sure to be a firestorm of criticism about the absence of the very leaker responsible for why we even know the name of Valerie Plame. The photo caption accompanying her story encapsulates her excuse:

In Washington, watching fact-based political movies has become a sport all its own, with viewers hyper-alert to mistakes, composite characters or real stories hijacked by political agendas. But what audiences often fail to take into account is that a too-literal allegiance to the facts can sometimes obscure a larger truth.

The only way we even know the name of Valerie Plame (and fame seeking hubby Joe Wilson) is that that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage leaked her name as a CIA officer to columnist Robert Novak. That is what set in motion the long drawn out Plamegate affair in which only Scooter Libby was convicted of something other than leaking her name. So you would figure that the supposedly biographical movie scheduled for a November USA release about Plame, Fair Game, would feature Armitage front and center as the principal villain. Right? Wrong. The fact is that "Fair Game" has tossed Richard Armitage down the memory hole. The man who is responsible for the reason that any of us even know who Valerie Plame is appears nowhere in the extensive IMDB cast credits for this movie.

Of course, the aforementioned Scooter Libby (David Andrews) who did not leak her name is listed. Also listed in the cast is the Armitage-leaked name of Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), fame seeking hubby Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), Nervous Analyst #1 (Louis Ozawa Changchien), Chauvinist Analyst (Sean Mahon),  Head Paparazzo (Harry L. Seddon), Four Seasons Waitress (Satu Rautaharju), Starbucks Employee (Angela Lewis), and Turkish Embassy Guest (Marsall Factora). However, as for the person who made the "Fair Game" movie possible by leaking Valerie Plame's name, he appears nowhere in the cast credits.

The dog ate my homework.

That's not much of an excuse but at least it is better than the one Susan Estrich came up with as to one of the reasons why she changed her mind on the Ground Zero Mosque controversy. Estrich claims she thought they were talking about another mosque when Fox News asked her to comment on the mosque controversy. What other mosque? Anybody even slightly knowledgeable about current events will now instantly think "Ground Zero Mosque" when they hear about a mosque controversy. Not Susan Estrich. Here she is delivering her laughable excuse:

Recently, I found myself on Fox News defending the "Ground Zero mosque" before I'd fully thought it through. Truth be told, when someone called to set up the "hit," I thought they were talking about another mosque project I'd heard about on the radio. So there I was, invoking the First Amendment, arguing that our enemy is terrorism, and that the only way we would ever win that fight is by gaining the support of the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are not our enemies and who we need to respect as friends. All true.

The Justice Department has dropped its case against former House Majority Leader, Tom Delay, and Newsweek's Eleanor Clift is in mourning. She just can't accept the fact that there was no substance to the charges against DeLay and ascribes the dropping of the case to the Obama Justice Department trying to score points with Republicans in the interest of bipartisanship. Clift also manages to smear the late former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens in her angst over the dropped charges:

The Justice Department’s decision to let former House majority leader Tom DeLay off the hook and end the six-year-long investigation that drove him out of Washington at the peak of his power should win the Obama administration some points with Republicans, if not Democrats. This is the second high-profile Republican that Attorney General Eric Holder has vindicated, the other being the late senator Ted Stevens, whose corruption case Holder declined last year to prosecute.

Don't be too surprised to soon see CNN's Wolf Blitzer go from merely rubbing his beard to violently scratching his entire body. And please, Anderson Cooper, do try to refrain from incessantly touching yourself on camera. However, perhaps they can be forgiven. You see, according to TV Newser, CNN/Time Warner has a bed bug infestation and has sent out the following internal e-mail:

August 13, 2010
To: TBS, Inc. Employees
From: TBS, Inc. Human Resources

The Time Warner Center Facilities Department advises that bed bugs have been detected in Time Warner Center. This determination was made after testing was conducted on several floors of the building. In response, Time Warner Facilities is working with pest control providers to address the issue in an environmentally safe manner, and during non-working hours...

New Orleans Saints running back Reggie Bush has caused a lot of problems for his alma mater, University of Southern California. While playing at USC, Bush accepted cash and gifts from a wannabee sports agent which later caused the NCAA to impose harsh sanctions upon USC including four years of probation and banishment from the 2010 and 2011 bowl games. Because of his actions, Bush apologized to the current USC athletic director, Pat Haden, according to David Leon Moore writing for USA Today. Only one "little" problem, Haden vehemently denies that Bush apologized to him. First the "apology" that never happened as misreported by USA Today:

LOS ANGELES — Reggie Bush apologized to new Southern California athletics director Pat Haden and expressed tremendous regret for his actions that landed the school on NCAA probation.