Month: October 2010

Georgetown, Guyana, 5 pm

The Onion reports:

Citing a desire to gain influence in Washington, the American people confirmed Friday that they have hired high-powered D.C. lobbyist Jack Weldon of the firm Patton Boggs to help advance their agenda in Congress. Known among Beltway insiders for his ability to sway public policy on behalf of massive corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, Monsanto, and AT&T, Weldon, 53, is expected to use his vast network of political connections to give his new client a voice in the legislative process.

Weldon is reportedly charging the American people $795 an hour.

Cheap at the price

Brian Doherty explains where the No On 19 money is coming from. There's not much of it so far – even from the beer industry.

Hiatt publishes D'Souza's "Kenyan anti-colonialist" poison. One of the few times a rhetorical rat has jumped onto a journalistic sinking ship.

Felix Salmon swallows hard:

The U.S. does not have the luxury of waiting indefinitely for job growth to resume. Already we’re at the absolute limit: any longer, and most of the unemployed will be long-term unemployed and, to a first approximation, unemployable. This country simply can’t afford an unemployable underclass of the long-term unemployed — not morally, not economically, and not fiscally, either.

Nate Silver gives his latest:

Republican odds of taking over the Senate on Nov. 2 have now improved to 24 percent — up from 22 percent last week and 15 percent three weeks ago, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast model.

I was arguing last night with someone about Harry Reid. Sharron Angle is a nutcase, obviously. But if I were a Nevadan and had the vote (nearly there), I really don't think I could vote for Harry Reid.

He is everything I hate about Democrats: incapable of making an argument, a face so weak it changes depending on the way the wind is blowing, a voice so sad you think he's a funeral director, a man whose appareance on television has never evinced any reaction from me but "where's the remote?" I just couldn't pull the lever for the guy. Sorry. So I won't be surprised if the nutjob wins. And a tiny part of me will feel a pulse of intense pleasure to see him go down.

So yesterday, after a week of traveling, blogging and thinking rather intensely about the laws of war, and before I had to write a column on Iraq, I decided to take a break and go to, well I won't name the establishment, but it's a place which caters to the grooming needs of men. I needed a haircut (we baldies do need to mantain order and Aaron isn't around with the buzzer) and a beard trim. But I also saw that they had on their list of possible treatments what they called a "grey-blending."

Now I was quite proud of myself for having finally gotten over the "I'm turning into Santa – where's the Just For Men? phase" of the mid-ok-late 40s bear, but "grey-blending" sounded, well, pretty mellow and not drastic and, like a sober alcoholic, I thought a little snifter couldn't do any harm. And, after all, these people are pros. They're not going to put the JFM on, get a phone-call, forget and turn around and realize they've just turned me into Moqtada al-Sadr.

So I lay back and had this lady put on the "grey-blender". I said, "It's 40 percent grey, could you make it 20 percent grey?" I'd rather look like Santa than Billy Mays (may God rest his soul). I thought the white goopy stuff she was brushing on might be a little de trop, but figured she knew what she was doing. I also thought a twenty-minute wait, with the seat lying down with the shit on was a little long, but figured she knew what she was doing. And then, when she finally finished washing out the stuff (you can't just rinse out the beard while pivoted with your head below your feet for fear of being waterboarded), the seat rose up and I looked in the mirror. The face looking back to me looked like a less subtle version of this:

My 20 percent grey-blend looked like I was some guy playing a bit part in Fiddler on the Roof in high-school with a paint-brush stuck on my face. I actually have more beardage than Bluto at this point, so it was a bit of a shock. I asked them what I could do. The only answer, apparently, was to bleach it down. So then I had a bunch of basically clorox on my face for five minutes; washed it out; then another five minutes, until the pitch boot-black no-gray, nothing-but-pitch-black had become a little less intense. They didn't charge me. And insisted that the color they had used was "dark blond".

And this morning, I woke up and have what can only be called a ginger mop attached to my face. I think this is basically what happens when you try and resist the aging process one iota. Just don't. I've learned my lesson. Never. Again. Especially by a professional. So if on TV next week, I look like some bald cross between Zach Galifianikis and a leprechaun, have a good laugh.

You warned me. I wavered. And next time, remember that "Grey-blending" is the enhanced rejuvenation technique known previously as boot-blacking.

(Correction: in my first draft, I wrote Willie Mays, not Billy Mays, a brain fart. Willie Mays is alive and well, I still know nothing about sports, and I'm terribly sorry for the premature obit. And in my second draft I got it wrong again. That beard dye must be like vagisil.)

Here's his latest post, tackling my Israel lobby frustrations, after a somewhat intemperate previous one, a little de trop because he had not read past the "Read on…" button (which makes a difference).  I'll respond to it later today.

You can't wait, can you?

Your morning moment of really, really gay.

Bernstein runs though their options. One possibility:

[One] strategy would be to go on offense: to try to get their agenda passed by streamrolling Barack Obama and the Democrats.  In other words, to imitate 1995.  The problem with this one is that it would be spectacularly unsuccessful, and those who remember 1995 know it.  Surely that includes John Boehner, who is almost certainly no fan of Newt Gingrich.  Depending on the size of their majority, it's not even clear that Republicans could agree on a budget on the floor of the House.  Even worse for them, if they can pass a Tea Party budget, it will almost certainly be stopped in Senate (best-case scenario 51 Republicans including Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins aren't going to try to shut down the Department of Education).  And in the highly unlikely chance that they do get agreement on a budget that could make the conservative base happy, they'll never get enacting legislation through WH vetoes.  The whole exercise would leave few if any substantive accomplishments, and plenty of ugly votes for the Democrats to sift through for the 2012 campaign.  Even worse, a veto fight produced by this strategy would yield a government shutdown, which might thrill Tea Partiers but would likely help Obama and produce Boehner-destroying chaos inside the Republican conference.