The Dish
Oh sure, there’s SERIOUS stuff out there… like FISA insisting the White House respond to the ACLU request on wiretapping, the tragic earthquake in Peru and Hurricane Dean heading ashore as a Category 5 — but let’s gossip, instead, shall we? Why should we be different than anybody else?
Here’s a collection of buzz and hot topics for those who don’t want to think too hard — very entertaining, seemingly mindless and vapid. But don’t be deceived that all of this is brain candy … rumors are interesting and lead to other revelations — the last couple of links prove that you never know what will yield gold.
So lets dish about …
Bush closing in on an entire YEAR of vacation time during his [seems like never-ending] reign;
Dub’s displeasure at being criticized for his Texas garb [open the link for the engagement news and wedding speculation];
Wonkette’s biting snark on the rumors about Jenna;
New blood drawn in the Edwards/Coulter smackdown;
FAUX news unable to duplicate the Daily Show because they have no actual sense of humor;
Snippy Tony Snow leaving the W-House because of money … or maybe it’s the cancer metastasized to his liver;
Joe Biden’s unhappiness that his son will deploy to Iraq;
Skinny Bitches and Vegansexuals;
The million dollar snafu to get .40 worth of hardware to Iraq;
The REAL reason why Rummy left;
Uncle Dick’s flip-flop video;
… and Jon Stewart’s meltdown because of it.
This is a pick ‘n choose, of course — but remember the “Men in Black” went to the rags to get the real skinny; smoke, fire … yadda.
Jude
Snooze to Destiny
Jon Stewart, Comedy Central | Video
Jenna and Henry: Now They’re Really, Really Official
Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts, WaPo
Friday, August 17, 2007
[snipped … open for wedding news]
What really gets George W. Bush riled up? Calling him a fashion victim.
Last week, Marques Harper of the Austin American- Statesman wrote a short piece about the president’s sartorial style on his Texas ranch, where Bush is spending a two-week vacation. The article was reprinted Tuesday in a Waco, Tex., paper, and the leader of the free world was not pleased.
Harper received a phone call that morning from White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino, who, Harper told friends, said the president read the article and was unhappy about the way he was portrayed.
“I was surprised,” said the style writer, who declined to repeat the off-the-record conversation with Perino when we called.
Harper wrote:
- “The president has two distinct looks when he’s in Texas: the ranch-hand man and the crisp appearance of a ranch owner. In recent months, with his sliding popularity, he’s opted to look more like ‘Walker, Texas Ranger’ than a sweaty, tough ranch hand.” In the piece, an image consultant offered that Bush needed to “step it up” to keep his “bravado image” on the ranch.
“It was a piece that looked at his ranch wear at Crawford over the years,” Harper told us yesterday. “It was a fun piece. Here in Austin, I got e-mails saying, ‘That was the dumbest story I ever read.’ “
No laughing matter for the president, who apparently was offended that anyone would think he just dresses like a real rancher. After clearing all that brush? Never!
Dept. of Knocked Up Loaded: How Pregnant is Jenna Bush
Wonkette
[pictures in this one]
Bless Her Heart
TRex, FireDogLake
Fri Aug 17, 2007
Well, jump up and slap the mule:
ABC News’ Rick Klein Reports: Former Sen. John Edwards on Friday fired the latest round in his ongoing verbal feud with Ann Coulter, calling her a “she-devil” at a public event before quickly adding that he shouldn’t engage in name-calling.
Ah, yes, those of you who grew up in the south will recognize this as a variant on the “bless her heart” feint, which allows one to say the most brutally honest and satisfying things with a certain measure of impunity. And it means that between the Edwards family and Ann Coulter, the gloves have completely come off.
Edwards, D-N.C., was railing against the right-wing media â?’ including Fox News and Rush Limbaugh â?’ when he reminded a crowd in Burlington, Iowa, that his wife stood up to Coulter in a public spat earlier this summer.
“We know these people. We know their game plan. They’re going to attack us personally,” Edwards said. “They attacked Elizabeth personally, because she stood up to that she-devil Ann Coulter. â?¦ I should not have name-called. But the truth is â?’ forget the names â?’ people like Ann Coulter, they engage in hateful language.”
This is more like it. Did you see that? It is the time-honored SCUD missile of southern acrimony. “Ann Coulter is a bottle-blond chihuahua on crank, but I shouldn’t call names, of course.”
It is the same conversational hinge upon which you can swing something like, “Bless his heart, but I believe he’s the only preacher in captivity who can eat peanuts through a fence” or “Why, she doesn’t have the sense that god gave a head of cabbage, bless her heart.”
I like seeing the Edwards team on the offensive. Especially against the flailing maniacs of far-right broadcasting. Coulter has crossed the line so many times, and yet so few people press back with any kind of insistence. And it’s precisely the, “Oh, ignore her maybe she’ll go away” behavior set that allows her to keep popping up on Good Morning America and The Today Show like herpes.
I guess that Coulter (and the big-money interests who control her) figured John and Elizabeth as easy marks, soft targets. But see, I’ve grown up around many, many southern people whose honeyed, gracious demeanor hid the internal steeliness of Spartans (especially with regards to threats and attacks toward their families). I think that Coulter’s decision to try and take on the whole Edwards family may well prove to have been a Grave Tactical Error.
Bless her heart.
Satire sinks at Fox News
‘Half Hour News Hour’ cancelled
MICHAEL LEARMONTH, Variety
Fox News Channel is getting out of the comedy game, canceling its news parody “The Half Hour News Hour” after a 15-episode run.
Co-created by “24″ producers Joel Surnow and Manny Coto, the show was an attempt to create a right-wing sendup of the news, a “Daily Show” for conservatives.
The first episode, which featured guest appearances by Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham, beat its cable news competition and drew 1.4 million viewers, which qualifies for hit status on Sunday nights on Fox News Channel.
But considerable buzz in the blogosphere and plugs on Limbaugh’s show weren’t enough to keep it around.
In a memo to staff, FNC programming chief Bill Shine said the skein could return in a different form. “We are considering ways to retool the show for future scheduling needs,” he said. “There is still a chance you will see the program at some point in the future.”
Snow resigning White House post, but money may not be why
Freddie Mooche, AXcess News
Washington - Tony Snow said he will resign his job as White House press secretary, but not until his money runs out, saying he needs to find a better paying job before the end of President Bush’s term, but money may not be the real reason Snow is leaving.
Snow makes $168,000 a year and says he can’t afford to live on that and needs to find a new job that pays better, while stating he loves being the White House Press Secretary, and he should love it. Being White House Press Secretary gives the news commentator an edge in moving to a high-paying job on television. But for Snow, 52, there are other issues - his health.
Appearing on television, clearly distraught, Snow said he was completing his chemotherapy treatment for colon cancer and that the cancer had spread to his liver. Snow had just finished his eighth and final chemotherapy treatment after having been diagnosed with colon cancer in March, suggesting that the cancer was spreading through his body at a rapid pace.
Questions arise over Snow’s motive for leaving the White House that he says is due to the money he could make somewhere else, but the decision didn’t come up until Snow was on his back in a hospital and all of a sudden he can’t afford it?
Friday morning from Crawford Texas during a Press Gaggle, White House spokesperson Gordon Johndroe pointedly told reporters when asked that he was “unaware of Snow resigning.”
Many in the media don’t like Snow and feel his attitude is condescending towards them - accept Fox News - Snow’s old employer.
Since Snow took the job things have changed at the White House press corps and I don’t mean the new digs on Capitol Hill. News post to the White House website is delayed 24 hours when it comes to text from the daily press meetings and often responses made to reporters questions were incomplete or the question itself left out as if who ever was typing it couldn’t distinguish what was being said. Now you can look at that two ways, one, there may be at times inaudible statements made, but its been rather inexcusable to have it happen over and over again and then any time there’s been something asked that Snow just doesn’t want to answer - its left out. “See the video”, the White House may reply, but the person transcribing the press meeting could do that too.
This is the White House and Snow’s predecessor did a bang up job of seeing to it that news was made available quickly and accurately and he didn’t treat reporters as if they were lesser men and women. Where Snow’s press regime is just the opposite, treating his peers with an open frankness that’s been smug at times at best. Since Snow stepped in and took over the post of White House Press Secretary, the ex-radio news commentator has turned White House press conferences into an atmosphere not unlike a call-in radio program, taking questions with quick, smug shots at reporters if he doesn’t like the question.
Frankly, if Snow leaves his job it would be better for everyone. While I don’t mean to wish him ill health, I don’t want his radio talk style of White House representation any longer. So if you’re going to resign Snow, get it over with. I am sure you’ll be back on the air for big bucks, only then you’ll be questioning the administration instead of defending it.
Biden’s son headed to Iraq in 2008
Yahoo
Thu Aug 16
WASHINGTON - The son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is preparing for deployment to Iraq next year. Capt. Beau Biden, a Judge Advocate General in the Delaware National Guard and the state’s attorney general, is part of the 261st Signal Brigade that has been told to prepare for duty in Iraq in 2008. They have not been given a date of deployment yet.
“I don’t want him going,” Delaware Sen. Joe Biden said from the campaign trail Wednesday, according to a report on Radio Iowa. “But I tell you what, I don’t want my grandson or my granddaughters going back in 15 years and so how we leave makes a big difference.”
Biden criticized Democratic rivals such as Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama who have voted against Iraq funding bills to try to pressure President Bush to end the war.
“There’s no political point worth my son’s life,” Biden said, according to Radio Iowa. “There’s no political point worth anybody’s life out there. None.”
Lt. Col. Len Gratteri, spokesman for the Delaware National Guard, said Beau Biden is not being treated differently because of his office or because his father is running to be commander in chief.
“He’s a deployable asset just like any other soldier in that unit,” Gratteri said.
Two other presidential candidates, Republicans John McCain and Duncan Hunter, have sons who’ve been in military units deployed to Iraq.
Skinny Bitches and Vegansexuals add “spice” to meat-free decision
Martha Rosenberg, BuzzFlash
Fri, 08/17/2007
Salad is out and red meat is in on the first date says The New York Times in an August article.
Fortifying yourself with food before a date like our moms did so you can order light and appear ladylike — until the date drops you off and you can pig out like the comic strip character, Cathy — is passe.
Ordering salad today doesn’t mean you have a dainty appetite, it means you’re “wimpy, insipid, childish,” says Michelle Heller. Chicken doesn’t mean you’re demure; it means you’re “finicky,” echoes Sloane Crosley. No, real women are favoring the butchered column of the menu, writes Allen Salkin — conveying to their dates they are down to earth and have no food or weight issues.
But tell it to Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, whose Skinny Bitch has camped out on The New York Times bestseller list all summer, immortalized by reported endorsements by Victoria Beckham (aka Posh Spice) and Lindsay Lohan.
Not only does meat make you fat they say — you’re a “gluttonous pig” if you think you can “eat cheeseburgers all day long and lose weight” — but you also are what you eat and “no matter how you slice it, it’s still a putrefying corpse.”
Nor do the authors have good words for dairy, which they write, treats unwitting consumers to prolactin, somatostatin, melatonin, oxytocin, growth hormone, luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone, thyrotropin-releasing hormone, thyroid-stimulating hormone, and 14 other unwanted hormones in addition to fat, calories, cholesterol and antibiotics. No wonder you’re fat and bloated, say the authors whose writing leans toward Drill Instructor; First Week.
And it’s not just b-girls either; skinny bastards are writing about diet too, such as Daily Mail reporter Edward Batha, who lost five pounds and reduced his cholesterol by 23 percent after a 1-month vegan diet he didn’t even want to try. (”‘I’m a vegan,’ I said pathetically as if announcing botulism,” he remembers).
He also slept better, “lost that desperate urge for dairy produce,” and achieved greater regularity. (Many phrases are coined for this phenomenon in a Skinny Bitch chapter called Pooping. What are they trying to say?)
There are even skinny pastors such as Rev. George Malkmus of Shelby, N.C., whose The Hallelujah Diet which includes no red meat, high-fat foods, or “food with a face” was listed No. 1 on Amazon.com just weeks after its release last year. Malkmus adopted a vegan diet 30 years ago after being diagnosed with colon cancer and expects to die of old age.
Not only do animal products cause “90 percent of problems we have today… heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, you name it,” he tells the Ledger-Enquirer, “The food that God designed did not have all these chemicals and growth hormones.”
But you don’t need knowledge of the scriptures to benefit from The Hallelujah Diet, Rev. Malkmus assures. “We have had a number of people without faith apply the principles to get well. The Christian body is no different than any other.”
Still, what if you’re not worried about losing weight or going to Heaven? And, like Batha, “very happily complicit in being removed from the knowledge of how my meat gets to be on my plate?”
There’s another reason to consider the V-word. Vegansexuals — a group of mostly young and attractive vegans in New Zealand — are refusing sexual contact with meat eaters! “I would not want to be intimate with somebody whose body is literally made up from the bodies of others who have died for their sustenance,” says one Vegansexual on Stuff.co.nz.
“It would disgust me to see my boy tucking into a chicken,” says another, adding that she “struggles” with bodily fluids, especially “sexually.” Even kissing presents ethical and aesthetic problems for another Vegansexual, who is turned off at the thought of “lips that allow dead animals to pass between them.”
And while some New Zealand meat eaters say Vegansexuals will breed themselves out of existence and that their ideas are ill conceived — “animals were put on this earth for human USE!” writes commentator Ann Lowenstein. “They do NOT have ‘jobs,’ they don’t ‘bowl’ and they are NOT being ‘exploited’” — others might start to give second thoughts to what they eat when they see an attractive, potential mate.
US Paid $1 Million to Ship Two 19-Cent Washers
Jim Wolf, Reuters via CommonDreams
Friday, August 17, 2007
The U.S. Defense Department said on Thursday that a flawed system designed to rush supplies to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan let a small-parts supplier improperly collect $998,798.38 to ship two 19-cent washers.
Loopholes in the automated purchasing system have been fixed and the ill-gotten gains were being returned to the U.S. Treasury, said Army Lt. Col. Brian Maka, a Pentagon spokesman.
The lock-washer incident was the last in a series of abuses by twin sisters running a South Carolina company that bilked the Pentagon out of about $20.5 million in fraudulent shipping costs, federal prosecutors said after obtaining guilty pleas earlier in the day.
The owners of C&D Distributors of Lexington, South Carolina, submitted online bids to the Defense Department to supply hardware components, plumbing fixtures, electronic equipment and other items, according to court papers.
Related shipping claims were processed automatically “to streamline the resupply of items to combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said a statement by Reginald Lloyd, U.S. attorney for the district of South Carolina.
Lloyd said C&D fabricated shipping costs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, as in the case of the washers, although the value of the items purchased rarely topped $100.
Lock washers place tension against a nut after tightening, to help prevent the nut from loosening.
Maka said the Defense Criminal Investigative Service launched an investigation last September into invoices submitted to the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, or DFAS.
“DFAS has put in place the internal controls necessary to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again,” Maka said of the shipping fraud. “The money that they stole will be returned to the U.S. Treasury.”
Charlene Corley, 47, of Lexington, South Carolina, as well as her company, C&D Distributors LLC, pleaded guilty to wire-fraud and money-laundering conspiracy charges in federal court in Columbia, South Carolina.
Darlene Wooten, Corley’s twin and co-owner of C&D Distributors, committed suicide at her lake house last October after being contacted by federal investigators about the fraud, Lloyd said.
The improperly collected funds were used to buy beach houses, luxury cars, boats, jewelry and vacations among other things, prosecutors said.
Conspiracy to commit wire fraud is punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. Conspiracy to commit money laundering carries up to 20 years and a fine of $500,000, or twice the value of the property involved in the laundering transactions, whichever is greater.
Rumsfeld’s Mysterious Resignation
Robert Parry, Consortium News
August 17, 2007
The disclosure that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned on Nov. 6, 2006 â?’ the day before the election, not the day after as previously thought â?’ means that he was pushed out of his job the same day he suggested a de-escalation of the Iraq War. [open link for article]
The Untold Story of the Cheney ‘Quagmire’ Video
Mary Anne Akers, The Sleuth
08/16/2007
When the C-SPAN producer toiling in obscurity last month reached for the tape, he had no clue how juicy a nugget he had unearthed. The tape was labeled simply, “Life and Career of Dick Cheney”; dated April 15, 1994. [open link for article and Cheney video.]
Stephen F. Hayes and Jon Stewart on Cheney
Jon Stewart, Comedy Central | Video
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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