Couldn’t pass up these nuggets:

Bush flatly states that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 (and of course no one in the administration suggested otherwise)

From the What Liberal Media? pt. 523 files, the Washington Post “quotes” Bush talking about Iraq, but edits his statement in a way that makes him appear more serious… without informing their readers.

Bush loves fart jokes, farting in front of aides, and is terrified of women. That’s the leader of the free world there, people.

Pat Buchanan… white supremacist.

Lieberman is the de facto GOP candidate for senator from Connecticut.

Vacation time! See y’all in 2 weeks.

When posts monitoring his polling numbers in Connecticut are on RedState’s front page, every. day.

Well, that and his consistently Dick Cheney-esque policy positions and constant slagging of the Democratic party.

I can think of at least three people who need to be fired here, but I’d settle for the pharmacist guild stripping these fucktards from their authority to dispense pharmaceuticals of any kind.

The New York Civil Liberties Union filed complaints Tuesday against three upstate pharmacists, saying they refused to fill prescriptions for refill doses of emergency contraception.

The NYCLU filed the complaints on behalf of Claudina Ashelman-Owen, Colleen Shaw and Dr. Marc Heller, health care providers from Planned Parenthood Mohawk-Hudson who had prescribed the morning-after pill to women who were their patients.

What makes this case different from many other similar cases in the U.S. is the pharmacists weren’t objecting to filling the initial prescription, just the refill, said Elisabeth Benjamin, Director of the NYCLU’s Reproductive Rights Project.

In most similar cases, pharmacists wouldn’t fill the prescriptions at all based on religious and moral grounds, Benjamin said. “But these refusals seem to just be based solely on moralistic assumptions of women’s sexuality.”

NYCLU officials asked the state Department of Education’s Office of Professions to discipline pharmacists Matt Weaver, Andrea Barcomb, and Lisa McGuiness for their failure to fill the emergency contraception prescriptions.

Calls to the Office of Professions were not immediately returned Tuesday.

According to the complaints, in November 2005 Weaver said he would fill a patient’s initial emergency contraceptive prescription at a CVS pharmacy in Saratoga Springs, but wouldn’t provide the refills. Weaver then altered the valid prescription so that it listed no refills, according to the complaint.

Ashelman-Owen spoke to Weaver’s supervisor, Barcomb, who allegedly said that in her opinion, women who needed emergency contraception were “irresponsible” and obtaining the drug should be inconvenient for women and their doctors. According to the organization’s filings, Barcomb allegedly defended Weaver’s right to refuse to fill the prescription because he felt that refills were “a bad idea.”

I have an idea. When these people are in the hospital or need drugs of any kind, let’s just say no. I think giving them drugs would be a bad idea. Pain is natural, and it is immoral not to embrace your own nausea.

Actually, I believe this is a criminal matter. Pharmacists have no authority under the law to issue prescriptions on their own, merely to fill them. By changing the terms of a validly-issued prescription, the pharmacists are thus issuing a new prescription.

You. Are. Pill. Dispensers. That is all. You are a meat sack version of my Dino Flinstone-head Pez dispenser. Any thought outside of your mechanical processes is not only unwanted, but unwarranted. Now STFU&GBTW, bitches.

Would the news services kindly quit pimping JonBenet again? This is not newsworthy. This is not news. That one family’s tragedy has been blown into some People/Us story o’ the masses is as saddening as it is sickening. Almost as sickening as parents who put their 6 year olds in beauty pageants and dress them up as sexpots. The overall facts are interesting in a disgusting sociological way, but the particulars are mundane.

Probably the only thing newsworthy in this affair is a commentary on the power of the police. The entire world save perhaps maybe 15 people (and I was not one of them) thought it was the father that killed her. That this widespread, wrong, and horrific belief was propagated by an incompetent police department with an axe to grind and that it was accepted by nearly everyone should teach us a great lesson in skepticism regarding Official Statements and pronounciations from The Man.

Christ, can we just go back to Summer of the Shaaaaark!!!! again or something? Or, you know, that whole economy/Iraq/social works thing?

YES!l Finally, rationality begins to assert itself again. The question, of course, is whether the authoritarian felons currently manning the controls of the administration will abide by the Rule of Law.

Fox News reports a federal district court in Detroit has ruled that the Bush administration’s NSA warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.

A separate federal district court in San Francisco had previously rejected the administration’s argument that the courts could not hear the case due to a “state secrets” privilege. The lawsuits have alleged that NSA program violated the First and Fourth Amendments, as well as a number of federal statutes, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The defendants included AT&T and the federal government.

Check back for more updates.

UPDATE: Judge Anna Diggs Taylor’s opinion HERE. She writes:

In this case, the President has acted, undisputedly, as FISA forbids. FISA is the expressed statutory policy of our Congress. The presidential power, therefore, was exercised at its lowest ebb and cannot be sustained.

UPDATE II: Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner blasts the decision as a “terrorist-friendly ruling.”

UPDATE III: A copy of the injuction HERE. It enjoins the administration from “directly or indirectly utilizing the Terrorist Surveillance Program.”

Update: holy shit, this is a great and important decision. I was going to analyze it in depth, but Greenwald already beat me to it. Read the opinion or the injunctive order.

In sum: the actions of the Bush administration in violation of FISA are illegal. Full stop.

Update 2: notice how every time they mention the judge who issued this opinion - Judge Taylor - and with “they” being the television media, that they are putting up a picture of Judge Taylor and mentioning her race?

Funny, I don’t recall that happening every time Posner pulls some law and economics/screw the People opinion out of his pie hole.

The Butterscotch Stallion is a homewrecker?!? Nooooo!

On August 14, Kate Hudson announced that she was separating from Chris Robinson, her husband of five and a half years. And though the actress, 27, and the Black Crowes singer (who have a son, Ryder, 2), were rumored to have been on the outs all summer – she never visited him during his current U.S. tour – multiple sources confirm to Us that Hudson’s burgeoning relationship with actor Owen Wilson, 37, was the main catalyst for the split.

That’s not cool, man. I mean, have you seen the hairstyle she’s putting on her kid?

because the George Will I know and loathe would never have written something like this:

The London plot against civil aviation confirmed a theme of an illuminating new book, Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.” The theme is that better law enforcement, which probably could have prevented Sept. 11, is central to combating terrorism. F-16s are not useful tools against terrorism that issues from places such as Hamburg (where Mohamed Atta lived before dying in the North Tower of the World Trade Center) and High Wycombe, England.

Cooperation between Pakistani and British law enforcement (the British draw upon useful experience combating IRA terrorism) has validated John Kerry’s belief (as paraphrased by the New York Times Magazine of Oct. 10, 2004) that “many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror.” In a candidates’ debate in South Carolina (Jan. 29, 2004), Kerry said that although the war on terror will be “occasionally military,” it is “primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world.”

Immediately after the London plot was disrupted, a “senior administration official,” insisting on anonymity for his or her splenetic words, denied the obvious, that Kerry had a point. The official told The Weekly Standard:

“The idea that the jihadists would all be peaceful, warm, lovable, God-fearing people if it weren’t for U.S. policies strikes me as not a valid idea. [Democrats] do not have the understanding or the commitment to take on these forces. It’s like John Kerry. The law enforcement approach doesn’t work.”

This farrago of caricature and non sequitur makes the administration seem eager to repel all but the delusional. But perhaps such rhetoric reflects the intellectual contortions required to sustain the illusion that the war in Iraq is central to the war on terrorism, and that the war, unlike “the law enforcement approach,” does “work.”

/me *rubs eyes* *blinks*

At least, the George Will I know wouldn’t have written this article back when the GOP was on the ascendant. Welcome back to the reality-based community, George (provisionally granted).

Because I so would have overlooked George Clooney.

Who knew this guy would turn out to be sexier (the verb[fn1]) than a box full of rabbits on X, and sexier (the noun) than the distilled essence of eau de Grant mixed with the sweat of Lawrence Olivier?

People is doing one of those occasional series that magazines like that do, with the “before they were stars” series. Looking at the photos, Pitt’s always been gorgeous, Jolie is an outlier on the awkward-to-beauty path, Vince Vaughan looks totally different, the Tom Cruise doesn’t count because he was already a star by that point, and I am now absolutely convinced that I hate Jennifer Anniston. Check out that photo. You know she was a total Heather and a complete snatch patch (tm, Ms. Grumpy).

Then again, I could just be proje…. no, no, No, No, NO! She’s a total bitchsnark cooze who uses people and then disposes of them for her own evil schemes. She feasts on the still-beating hearts of cripples that she flies in from Malaysia in order to hunt them on her private, wheelchair-friendly preserve. She bathes in the blood of unicorns and Elliot (Pete’s dragon). And on the full moon, she steals the money the tooth fairy leaves underneath little kids’ pillows. Evil! Eeeeevil, I say!

OK, OK, it’s not a word. “more sexed” sounds lame. Sexed-ier, perhaps?

Would you rather have dolphin-flavored tuna or tuna-flavored dolphin?

Geriatric1927. His username is no misnomer. He was born in 1927, he’s British, and he’s a YT star.

No, seriously. His vlogs are totally popular. I think Ms. Grumpy will totally dig this video… and not just for that awesome wallpaper.
Here’s his first

(note the callout to Renetto! hee)

Anyway, here’s a second. Enjoy!

Update: the infamous and very calvarytastic Hutton weighs in. And if you haven’t read Hutton, you really should (see his Malkin post from yesterday, or the J.Lo-has-been-shot post). He’s awesome.

The end of George Allen Jr.’s (R-VA) presidential hopes? … I don’t know if I’d go that far; after all there’s no live boy or dead girl involved here, but it’s pretty darn close. Nice going, George Jr.

Democrat James Webb’s Senate campaign accused Sen. George Allen (R) of making demeaning comments Friday to a 20-year-old Webb volunteer of Indian descent.

S.R. Sidarth, a senior at the University of Virginia, had been trailing Allen with a video camera to document his travels and speeches for the Webb campaign. During a campaign speech Friday in Breaks, Virginia, near the Kentucky border, Allen singled out Sidarth and called him a word that sounded like “Macaca.”

“This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere. And it’s just great. We’re going to places all over Virginia, and he’s having it on film and its great to have you here and you show it to your opponent because he’s never been there and probably will never come.”

After telling the crowd that Webb was raising money in California with a “bunch of Hollywood movie moguls,” Allen again referenced Sidarth, who was born and raised in Fairfax County.

“Lets give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” said Allen, who then began talking about the “war on terror.”

In an interview, Sidarth said he suspects Allen singled him out because he was the only non-white face in the audience, which he estimated included about 100 Republican supporters.

“I think he was doing it because he could and I was the person of color there and it was useful for him in inciting his audience,” said Sidarth. “I was annoyed he would use my race in a political context.”

Allen campaign manager Dick Wadhams said the Webb campaign’s complaints about the comments are unfounded and he said Allen had “nothing to apologize for” to the young man.

The early supposition was that he was saying ‘macaque’ like the monkey or just some furrin-sounding type name.

Now I know that ‘macaque’ is an ethnic slur used to refer to some Africans, but I’m going to be generous here and assume that Allen was trying to refer to the macaque monkey, but is too stupid and thuggish to know or care about the proper pronounciation. Also, I don’t think ‘macaque’ as a racial epithet is very well established in the states. For one, it’s too frenchified. Like I said, I’ll be generous. After all, it is better that he’s an ignorant fucktard than a racist asshole who’s too much of a coward to say ’sand nigger’ to the brownie’s face, right?

Nice.

Update: now they say they were calling him ‘Mohawk’ because of his hair (use the WaPo link above).

This is what Sidarth looks like:

To quote Borat: niiiice!

Update 2: general consensus is now that Allen was directly using White Power wording in a speech to his peeps. Niiiiiice.

Bonus points if you can name the pop culture reference in the title of this post

I’ve taken to what I like to call “Channelling the Wu” lately (and that phrase is tm, me, bitches, so if you steal it, give credit).

If you’ve ever watched Deadwood, you may have an idea what Channelling the Wu entails, but essentially it involves me saying “COCKSUCKA!” at a really loud volume in a chinglish accent in times of annoyance or stress.[fn1]

Good times. I encourage everyone to Channel the Wu. You’ll thank me when you do.

The Wu of Deadwood knows 3 words in english, “cocksucka!,” “swear-gen” (Al Swearengen), and “San Francisco.” You know, you can say a lot with those 3 words… or at least Wu can.