Another masterful performance by the Little Prince from an interview with Politico.com. For one thing, he looks forward to the day when he can sent emails again. The way things are now everything has to be deleted each time Congress sends over another subpoena.

And for another thing, you will be touched in the appropriate place to learn that Bush gave up golf as an expression of solidarity with the Gold Star mothers whose sons he has killed. Sorry the following post is so long, but there are lots of presidential shallows to be plumbed here.

Q: Mr. President, thank you very much for having us into the Roosevelt Room for the first online interview. In the spirit of the Internet, I wonder if we could ask a question from one of our users, Steve Bailey, of New York, who says: With oil at $126 a barrel, pushing up the price of everything — even food — what can your administration do to help people right now?

THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate Steven’s concerns. With the price of gasoline going up, it’s like a tax. I wish I could give Steven a quick answer. In other words, it took us a while to get to where we are — very dependent on oil, and in a world in which demand is greater than oil. So my answer to Steven is that the best thing we can do is to increase supply, and to drill for oil and gas in environmentally friendly ways at home, and build more refineries. Steven probably doesn’t know this, but we haven’t built a new refinery since 1976, and if we’re truly interested in relieving the pressure on our consumers, then we ought to have a very active domestic policy now…

Q: Mr. President, the one thing we don’t see in here is a computer, and we know that you went cold turkey off email for security reasons. What are you looking forward to when you finally get your computer back?

THE PRESIDENT: Emailing to my buddies. I can remember as governor I stayed in touch with all kinds of people around the country, firing off emails at all times of the day to stay in touch with my pals. One of the things that I will have ended my public service time with is a group of friends, a lot of friends. And I want to stay in touch with them and there’s no better way to communicate with them than through email…

Q: Mr. President, acknowledging those constraints, you’re an oil man — some people say that climate change, global warming could have been your Nixon-to-China. Do you wish you’d done more?

THE PRESIDENT: I did what I think is necessary to actually work, Michael. I mean, I could have signed a — I could have supported a lousy treaty and everybody would have went, “Oh, man, what a wonderful sounding fellow he is.” But it just wouldn’t have worked. I don’t think you want your President trying to be the cool guy and not end up with policies that actually make a difference…

The biggest issue we face is — it’s bigger than Iraq — it’s this ideological struggle against cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives. Iraq just happens to be a part of this global war. Iraq is the place where al Qaeda and other extremists have made their stand — and they will be defeated. They’ll be defeated through military action, but they’ll also be defeated as this young democracy takes hold. They can’t stand to live in a free society, that’s why they try to fight free societies…

I feel like — I felt like there were weapons of mass destruction. You know, “mislead” is a strong word, it almost connotes some kind of intentional — I don’t think so, I think there was a — not only our intelligence community, but intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment. And so I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was.

Q: And so you feel that you didn’t have all the information you should have or the right spin on that information?

THE PRESIDENT: No, no, I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction — as were members of Congress, who voted for the resolution to get rid of Saddam Hussein. And of course, the political heat gets on and they start to run and try to hide from their votes. But intelligence communities all across the world felt the same thing. This was kind of a common assessment.

So “mislead” means, do I think somebody lied to me? No, I don’t. I think it was just, you know, they analyzed the situation and came up with the wrong conclusion.

Q: Mr. President, you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, it really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal…

Q: Now, Mr. President, President Carter recently told Charlie Rose the next President could change America’s image in 10 minutes. Here’s what he said: “I think the next President could change the image of this country around the world in 10 minutes by making an inaugural speech that would start off and say, ‘As long as I’m President we will never torture another prisoner, as long as I’m President we will never attack or invade another country unless our own security is directly threatened.’”

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, well, what he ought to be saying is, is that America doesn’t torture. If the implication there is that we do now, then he’s wrong. And you bet we’re going to protect ourselves by the use of military force. What he really is implying is — or some imply — you can be popular; if you want to be popular in the Middle East just go blame Israel for every problem. That will make you popular. Or if you want to be popular in Europe, say you’re going to join the International Criminal Court.

Popularity is fleeting, Michael. Principles are forever.

Let’s say you’re in favor of letting the states legalize abortion and and drugs and same sex marriage if they want to. And you favor an immediate start to our withdrawal from Iraq. And you think the telecom companies should be punished for warrantless wiretapping. And you hate the Patriot Act for its gutting of civil rights. And no matter what the Creep from Crawford thinks, you think habeas corpus belongs in the Constitution after all.

Folks, have I got a candidate for you! He’s an Iowan born and bred. He went to high school in Iran. He’s a former CIA spook and federal prosecutor. Plus he’s a proud member of both the NRA and the ACLU.

Ladies and Germs, let’s hear it for the only candidate who’s really got your back — Big. Bob. BARR!

This from the BBC:

Out of 33 keyboards swabbed, four were regarded as a potential health hazard and one harboured five times more germs than one of the office’s toilet seats.

Microbiologist Dr Peter Wilson said a keyboard was often “a reflection of what is in your nose and in your gut”.

During tests in January this year, a microbiologist deemed one of the office’s keyboards to be so dirty he ordered it to be removed, quarantined and cleaned.

It had 150 times the recommended limit for bacteria — five times as filthy as a lavatory seat tested at the same time, the research found.

All right, let’s see you resist clicking on these two links, both of which are perfectly legitimate:

Number one: Thirty-five-year-old man holds breath underwater for 17 minutes, four seconds.

Number two: Sixty-nine-year-old man grows new finger, as shown on video.

Too bad for the wingnut bloggers who jumped on the story like a chicken on a Junebug, but it was a hoax. Yale student Aliza Shvarts has not in fact “repeatedly impregnated herself and induced abortions that she videotaped for use in a senior art project.”

Still you’ve got to give Ms. Shvarts major weirdness points, even if she’s a Goody Two-Shoes compared to this Princeton scholar:

A science student of Mr. Silver’s once proposed impregnating herself with chimpanzee sperm. Mr. Silver convinced her it was a “horrible thing for her to do,” but his fictionalized account of the event became a book and a play.

…BADATTITUDES.COM, barely used but beautifully maintained by previous owner, a little old blogger from Connecticut. This just in:

A US man has sold the domain name pizza.com for $2.6 million after maintaining the site for just $20 a year since 1994.

Chris Clark, 43, accepted the offer from an anonymous bidder after a week-long online auction…"It will make a significant difference in my life, for sure," he said.

Meet Melvin:

Melvin "Man-o-war" Costa has a classic Nazi eagle and swastika insignia tattooed across his chest and a prison gang spider web inked on his right elbow.

Costa, 26, also is a convicted felon, self-avowed white nationalist and currently the 10th-ranked light heavyweight fighter in King of the Cage, one of the most popular semi-professional "mixed martial arts" (MMA) combat leagues in America.

Judging by online forum discussions, Costa's growing legions of white supremacist fans seemed far less concerned with his swastika or spider web tattoos than a third tattoo, circling his navel, that boasts, "I have a small penis." The common theory is that, as one fan said, "He might be going for a bit of sarcasm, depending on the actual size of his penis, given the false stereotype about us."

I knew you’d want to know. Full details.

MUNICH, Germany — A woman was stopped at Munich airport after baggage control handlers found the skeleton of her brother sealed in a plastic bag in her luggage, police said Wednesday.

President Bush at a press appearance in Crawford with Prime Minister Rasmussen of Denmark:

Q: Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you for bringing us to the great weather.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, back to Texas, man. I cut his teeth in Texas. (Uneasy Laughter.)

(Actually the transcript doesn’t say “uneasy.” I just figured the laughter had to be uneasy, because otherwise it would have to be servile, and these guys and gals of the press are watchdogs, not cringing curs.)

Come on, people. How am I not going to post this?

Gangs are said to sneak the dwarves into the luggage hold, hidden inside baggage.

Then, once the journey has begun, the stowaways are free to rifle through the bags of other passengers without fear of being apprehended.

Before the coach arrives at its destination the dwarves take their loot back into their suitcase, zip themselves inside and wait to be collected by their partners in crime.

As of this writing, the video below had been viewed 593,359 times on YouTube. Of these viewers 3,939 were moved to leave comments. Here is one of them. I hope it clears everything up for you:

bist du auf drogen??XD..lol...das video hat keinen sinn-.-..die guckt doch nur in die cam....is das bescheuert X))

If even one of you out there missed the absolute greatest newspaper story in years, I’d feel terrible if I didn’t put it up for you. The excerpt below is from the second-day story in today’s New York Times. But start with the first-day story.

Detective Rapp looked out the window and saw the unwieldy trio. Something about the way they struggled to balance the man in the chair caught his eye.

“At this point, when they approached closer, I saw the body and I said, ‘Well, this is a dead guy,’ ” Detective Rapp said on Wednesday in a phone briefing…

…and to all a good night!

Here we learn that crickets in Utah are already living the Republican dream:

But in the deserts of Utah, Dr. Couzin and his colleagues discovered that giant swarms may actually be made up of a lot of selfish individuals.

Mormon crickets will sometimes gather by the millions and crawl in bands stretching more than five miles long. Dr. Couzin and his colleagues ran experiments to find out what caused them to form bands. They found that the forces behind cricket swarms are very different from the ones that bring locusts together. When Mormon crickets cannot find enough salt and protein, they become cannibals.

“Each cricket itself is a perfectly balanced source of nutrition,” Dr. Couzin said. “So the crickets, every 17 seconds or so, try to attack other individuals. If you don’t move, you’re likely to be eaten.”

Send this article to all your mush-brained friends who believe that crafty Arabs were able to pre-install explosives in a building that had already been bombed once by terrorists, and then detonate the charges right after a bunch of other crafty Arabs flew planes into the World Trade Center.

Then ask your mush-brained friends what the planes were for.

Well, maybe just a little, considering that the Loizeaux clan still had to finish threading several hundred eight-inch sticks of dynamite with yellow ignition rope and race through the stripped-down carcass of the New Frontier Hotel-Casino stuffing the explosives into the correct pillars …

You will be interested to know that a Texas man named Wes Pemberton has a five-inch hair growing from his leg. It is believed to be the world’s longest leg hair, the previous record holder being only 4.88 inches. Want the full details? Knock yourself out, dude.

You probably thought things couldn’t get any weirder. Well, you were wrong.

A U.S. man who stored his amputated leg in a barbecue smoker that was later auctioned off is locked in a custody dispute with the man who bought it …

This might sound weird, but suppose your current state of mind condensed, à la Iain Banks’s Culture, to a desktop manager like Windows (gag), or MacIntosh, or KDE (the only one I could comfortably fit into).

New situation? Encapsulate the existing one, push it onto a stack, deal with the new one, pop the previous one off the stack, go back to dealing with that.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.

What's left? Who is it that pops?

If only the poor guys just took their time, read more, looked at the world a little more closely. Then they might… Well, no actually. It turns out that’s not the problem. The base is hardcore because it’s hardwired:

In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

The results show “there are two cognitive styles — a liberal style and a conservative style,” said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research…

Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said.

If you’ve got college age kids, you need to warn them about something. Just watch the video below and you’ll know what I’m talking about. And don't forget the words of Kurt Vonnegut, who famously said, “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” I won’t spread terror any further by reminding you who’s still running the country right now. Thanks to Max for making this video possible.

I have seen many weird things in my day. I watched Richard Nixon give his Checkers speech live and then again, 40 years later, in the Nixon Library. I have stood in the Reverend Bob Schuller’s magnificent Crystal Cathedral, in silent awe at the stupidity of my species. I have watched Jimmy Carter and Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia pretending nonchalance on the speaker’s platform while the rest of us gagged on tear gas from an anti-Shah demonstration on the Ellipse. I covered American Nazi Party protesters at Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I even watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at a drive-in theater.

And now, courtesy of Waiting for Dorothy, I have watched the video below and you can, too. Hang in there till the very end.

What did we learn from Newsweek this week, gang? We learned that those lovable cut-ups, Condi and Dickie, just have a high old time whenever they can manage to get together for a good banter.

Wouldn’t you just love to be a fly on that wall! Unfortunately, though, considerations of national security and executive privilege make it necessary for us to deny your request. Try renting an old Tracy and Hepburn flick instead.

RICE: But I want to say something about the vice president. You know, if he doesn’t agree, the vice president talks about it, just as if [Defense Secretary] Bob Gates doesn’t agree, or I don’t agree, we sit down and talk about it. And then if necessary we talk about it with the president and he decides … The vice president has never been somebody who tries to do that on the sidelines, behind the scenes. He really doesn’t.

Q: Not even when Don Rumsfeld was around?

RICE: [Laughs] You asked about when I have been secretary of State. As secretary of State I can tell you we have the most open relationship. In fact we have a kind of friendly banter about it, in which I’ll tease him [Cheney] about the image that he doesn’t like diplomacy.

Just in case you missed this:

“I was so upset,” said Zahi Hawass, the chief of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. “How the hair of the mummy — of the greatest king of Egypt — can be sold on the Internet!”

Just wanted to share this with you:

In comments published yesterday in the British music magazine NME, Mr. Richards, 63, said: “The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow…”

I know this stuff is getting beyond cliché and into the realm of statistically significant psychosociological data, but still… Who can resist just one more helping of hot, throbbing hypocrisy? Not me, certainly.

So here’s a link to a gay website named TowleRoad, where the curious will find a photograph of Ann Coulter posing cheerfully at the recent CPAC conference during which she gave everyone a good giggle by gay-bashing the amazingly straight John Edwards.

Her far-from-straight companion in the picture is gay ex-hooker and porn star and Marine corporal Matt Sanchez, now a student at Columbia (below) who has been making the rounds of wingnut pundit shows with complaints that antiwar students are picking on him.

But read all about it at TowleRoad, where the even more curious will find links to many other photographs and film clips as well. These range from the former marine’s recent appearance on The O’Reilly Show to appearances on many other earlier shows of equivalent intellectual depth.

Back in the fifties the fathers of today’s tinfoil hat brigade were convinced that fluoridated water was a commie plot aimed at driving good Americans like themselves insane so that they could be locked up forever by commie shrinks, the whole Freud thing being a commie plot which you could tell it was by the way all the commies in Russia locked up dissidents in their commie nuthouses.

One evening back then a reporter colleague, Sam Eastman of the old Washington Evening Star, arrived late to cover a political rally in the Virginia suburbs. Since the most nutzoid of the candidates had finished speaking, Sam passed a note up to to the platform asking for the gist of his remarks.

The candidate passed back this answer: “I spoke in opposition to mental health.”

I was reminded of this by the obituary in today’s New York Times of Dr. David B. Ast, who died earlier this month at the age of 104. He was a leader in the fight to fluoridate America’s water, which did in fact wind up driving millions of Americans insane. What else could account for Bush’s reelection?

I think we’d all like to know a little more about Prince Frederic von Anhalt, wouldn’t we, fellows? So here goes, from the New York Times and the Times website. The first picture below is of an earlier Prince Frederic von Anhalt. I include it to show the remarkable extent to which selective breeding has improved the royal lineage. The second shows the present prince, receiving Botox injections. (My translation; the original is “…lässt sich die Falten unterspritzen.”)

Prince Frederick von Anhalt, 59, who is married to the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, 90, told The Associated Press that he and Ms. [Anna Nicole] Smith had had an affair since the mid-1990s …

He told The A.P. that he met Ms. Smith when she approached him and Ms. Gabor at the Plaza Hotel in New York. He said this was during Ms. Smith’s 14-month marriage to the Texas oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall II, who died in 1995 at 90

Gabor, a onetime sex symbol and star of such 1950s films as ‘‘Moulin Rouge’’ and ‘‘Queen of Outer Space,’’ has been in declining health in recent years and suffered a stroke in 2005. She was partially paralyzed in a car crash in 2002.

Von Anhalt, who is Gabor’s eighth husband, said he and Smith met in the 1990s when Smith was still married to elderly oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II. He said Smith approached him and Gabor at the Plaza Hotel in New York …

He said the two started an affair soon after, meeting over the years in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. For much of that time, he said, Smith urged him to make her a princess like his wife.

But short of divorcing the actress, he said the only solution would have been adopting Smith. Von Anhalt said he did consider that and even filled out adoption papers, but Gabor refused to sign them.

Failure to communicate can be an art. Examples cast a tiny light on our countrymen, and their refusal to think. This one I found top notch:

“BMW — Where no ideas are harmed in the making of our cars.”

Imagine, if you will, an ad writer laboring to come up with a slogan and then, in a burst of understanding, writing the above. Think about the grown ups sitting around an oval table taking it all Oh so seriously.

From Raw Story, reporting second hand from Roll Call:

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) said that with better intelligence the South would have won the Civil War, today’s Roll Call is reporting.

Conflicting reports have emerged about what was said, one from a source to Roll Call’s “Heard on the Hill” column, the other from a spokesperson for Chambliss.

According to Roll Call’s source, Chambliss said, “We need better intelligence. If we had better intelligence in the Civil War we’d be quoting Jefferson Davis, not Lincoln.”

Some people can post whatever they want, whenever they want:

“My wife is 6-foot-3 and weighs 300 pounds,” said Ozmun, who became chief [of police] in January 2005. “If there is somebody that thinks they can control her, have at it. I have tried for 11 years and haven’t been able to.”

I admit I can find humor where none is intended and where no one else can, but this report is funny. If you disagree, you can just ignore me. I’m fine in my own little world.

Check this out.

Is this not the stuff of which great comedy is made? Ya, I think so.

Three police officers were accidentally shot Sunday as one or more officers took aim at a pit bull attacking a member of their crew, police said. All were in stable condition.

The three officers suffered minor graze wounds and a fourth was bitten, said police Officer Doris Garcia.

The men had been responding to a dispute between a landlord and tenant in a Bronx building when the animal ran from another floor and attacked one of the officers, police said. The dog was killed by the gunfire.

Update: When originally posted there was a bad link to the story and now I can't find it. So sorry. That is the whole report anyway.

Update: It seems when you're guest blogging you tend to make all the stupid little mistakes you normally do on your own site, but you don't catch them. Argh!

Hey, cut me some slack. I'm new at Movable type.

Well, I can report on at least two advantages to being in a small town in Appalachia.

In San Francisco, it took me four months to get a copy of Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy from the library. They had nine copies, and when my name finally bubbled to the top, there were 150 holds behind me. Here, I went to the library yesterday. They had one copy, and it was on the shelf.

The local newspaper, which recently ran with the death of a local dog as the front-page story, has above the fold today two pictures and a story about a 96-year-old man who “modestly admits, he only bowls for the fun.” I’m not sure what the alternative was. Below the fold is a report on a stolen video camera, which contained a tape of a wedding. The couple, still on a cruise in the Bahamas, are as yet unaware of the disaster. The report presents the hope that a reader might happen across some information that would lead law enforcement to the evil-doer, or if all else fails, perhaps “the power of conscience might prompt the return of the tape.”

Just for context, the Washington Post today is spending time on the war in the Middle East, Bush’s speech to the NAACP, and his veto of the stem-cell bill.

The lead editorial in the local paper concerns the disaster in Lebanon and Gaza. It makes at least three claims of fact that appear to me to be incorrect, so I wrote a letter to the editor and emailed it around noon. By 2PM the paper had called me to verify that I was the author, said the letter was a bit too long, and suggested a cut to bring it down to size, to which I agreed. I expect they’ll publish it tomorrow or the next day.

From the Senate Majority Project:

During today’s same-sex marriage amendment debate, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) used a prop of a blown-up photo of his family (some 20 people or so). Gesturing towards the photo, he said:

(MR. INHOFE) As you see here, and I think this is maybe the most important prop we’ll have during the entire debate, my wife and I have been married 47 years. We have 20 kids and grandkids. I’m really proud to say that in the recorded history of our family, we’ve never had a divorce or any kind of a homosexual relationship.

From (Jerry Doolittle):

My wife and I have been married 50 years. We have 15 kids and grandkids. I’m really proud to say that in the recorded history of our family, we’ve had quite a few partial assholes, but never a complete one like Imhofe.

Oh, and another thing. Inhofe’s official homepage, as of this morning, reports that “Inhofe has been married to his wife, Kay, for 46 years and has four grown children and twelve grandchildren.” Apparently the senator didn’t bother to take his shoes off before doing the addition.

Italian movie star Alida Valli died Saturday at the age of 84, occasioning one of those sentences that should have been at least a chapter:

Rather than comply with the dictates of the fascist government, Ms. Valli retreated into hiding and in 1944 married Oscar de Mejo, a Surrealist painter and composer, whose most successful song was "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth."

The South is such an interesting place. I offer up this “crime report” from a paper in the rural South. May your life be so uncomplicated.

I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I did.