Wonkette

If you look over to your right there, you will see the official description of Wonkette (the one our boss wrote): “Wonkette is an online roundup of gossip from Washington, DC and the US political arena.” MORE »

8:54 PM Welcome. Wonkette (Original Wonkette) household is tuned to the ‘SPAN right now, where the pandering and gladhanding can be watched without interruption. Everything’s overlit and we’re hoping someone brought a flask.

8:57 PM Arresting Cindy Sheehan. So best. Not clear what they arrested her for, but I trust they’ve been listening to her phone calls and therefore know better than us.

8:59 PM OMG: Wolf on CNN just reference how “good” Dick Cheney looks. Brokeback correspondent? Now a cut to Laura’s box (as it were). Where’s REX?

9:00 PM Mrs. Alito could start crying at any moment. Is that on the drinking game? Who will start crying first, Mrs. Alito or Anderson Cooper?

9:02 PM The Veterans Affairs guy is the one assigned to stay away tonight. Seeing as how he’s the one of the ones demonstrably not doing his job, great planning.

Tipsy typing continues after the jump.

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Spent from our last close Note encounter, we are calling it a guest-blogging career. We’ve much enjoyed our tour of duty as surrogate content providers for Wonkette World Enterprises, and we’ve been delighted to serve as Powertown docents through wind, snow, sleet, and, well, snow. We bid you all godspeed, and extend a warm shout-out to tomorrow’s entrant, Ezra Klein, an amazingly precocious American Prospect writing fellow, eloquent opiner, and of course proprietor of an eponymous blog. Be nice to the fellow, and also think kindly of us when you chance to, happy as a lark and without a cent. –HOLLY MARTINS

We tried, honestly, on what promises to be our swan song in Wonkette guest-blogging, to lay off the devoted practitioners of the Halperinite Tendency over at ABC. Be gracious in retiring, we told ourselves; spare a kind word, or at least a circumspect silence for the language-mangling media elitists who thrill to each fresh beat of Dan Bartlett’s heart. But our better angels did not conquer. As we let our eyes rest on the practiced vacuities slithering out of the many-fingered beast that is Team Note, we could remain silent no longer. Consider, first of all, today’s Notely overture:
There is some elaborate seasoned-pol style throat clearing to the effect of “the Clinton White House was leaky; the Bush one not so much.” Only, you know, delivered in three hundred so words of preening self-congratulation, for having been so close to so many powerful apparatchiks for so long. Then, the irrelevant, though no less irritating aside:

Out goes the elaborate lede we had written based on yet another leak (the early reviews of Tim Kaine’s State of the Union response preps, which we will save for a non-rainy day). Instead here is our insider report on this morning’s White House senior staff meeting.

Yes, because the lead (or, if you must, Note, “lede”) you have selected instead is so much less fucking elaborate. And correct us if we are wrong, but aren’t you all publicly congratulating yourselves for receiving a White House-orchestrated piece of pre-debate smear in the classic Rove-Bartlett vintage? This tickles your pride as journalists how, exactly?

More Notely questions after the jump.

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Michael V. Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency, is mounting a White House-endorsed PR offensive for the legally innovative wiretapping initiative, WaPo reporter Michael Branigan writes. (Preferred Wonkette HQ usage for the program, by the way, is “Warrants? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Warrants!”) Warming to the task, Hadley volunteered that if a procedure-smiting spy program had been in place prior to Sept. 11, “we would have detected some of the al Qaeda operatives in the United States, and we would have identified them as such.” Hadley produced no evidence to support this claim–which may well be a good thing, since this is what it sounds like when he does try to appeal to evidence: MORE »

Margaret Elizabeth Taylor, a 98-year old widow from Findlay, Ohio, who died last November, instructed the executor of her $1.5 million estate to fork the whole works over to the federal government, with the explicit instruction that it be dedicated to reducing to the national debt. Never mind that said debt now finances all sorts of rampant idiocy–from the Office of Faith-Based Charities to the sunny prose stylings of the Lincoln Group. Never mind, in addition, that Ms. Taylor was “a staunch Democrat” and that her own attorney, Tom Drake says he would have counseled against the bequest. It’s easy to make sport of all this, but we figure an Ohio Democrat at the end of her days, having suffered through November 2004, is entitled to any stunningly meaningless send-off gesture of her choosing. After all, it’s not as though her vote counted when she was alive. –HOLLY MARTINS MORE »

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Enthusiasts of the Bush-revamped Supreme Court can celebrate their first big victory against the official Washington Establishment. Today, the Roberts court refused to hear an appeal of the lower-court patent-infringment ruling against Research in Motion, the manufacturer of Washington’s ur-geek accessory, the Blackberry. The no-decision call by the Supremes could well be the final act for the Research in Motion, which suffered a 2003 injunction from patent-holder RMT Inc. to halt future sales of the Blackberry, and has been frenetically appealing it ever since. Fallout from this might well outstrip that of the Abramoff scandal: If Washington high rollers are once more forced to look each other in the face for the sake of socializing or conducting official business, depression, substance abuse, and suicides all seem certain to skyrocket. All of which seems a readymade prescription (as it were) for another Marion Barry administration. Be very afraid. –HOLLY MARTINS MORE »

Shock horror! WaPo reporter Dan Eggen comes forward with word that the Bush Department of Justice treats civil rights complaints concerning the abridgement of voting rights in a brazenly political fashion. Staff attorneys in the DoJ’s civil rights division found their recommendations to investigate credible claims of voter fraud or tampering with ballot access were met with stunning indifference, silence and/or hostility from on high. Cases ranged from Tom DeLay’s charming campaign in Texas to redistrict the Democratic party out of functional political existence and an especially wide-ranging Georgia case in which a hare-brained voter-identification plan threatened to purge hundreds of thousands of voters off the rolls who lacked driver’s licenses. (This in addition to earlier voting-section studies indicating the plan would unduly harm black voters, who wouldn’t exactly view renewed poll tests and credentials in the South as a major step forward on the road to racial justice.) Higher DoJ officials in that case furnished a textbook study in measured Bush-era empiricism, right out of the WMD files: “They said that as many as 200,000 of those without ID cards would be felons and illegal immigrants and that they would not be eligible to vote anyway.” Because, you know, if you’re not driving, why you’re just not a trustworthy American. MORE »

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The vigilant members of Virginia’s largest Episcopal parish have drafted a letter to the upper reaches of the church’s hierarchy to compel their straying pastor, the Right Rev. Peter H. Lee, to “repent and return to the truth.” The Right (or evidently, not-so-Right) Rev.’s transgression, reports the Washington Times’s Julia Duin, was his decision to support the ordination of New Hampshire’s openly gay bishop, the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson. The congregation’s bully exhortations are modeled on a passage in Matthew 18:15-17, which lays out strangely specific instructions for reproving a “brother [who] sins against you,” which would culminate in treating the ill-behaving soul “as you would a pagan or a tax collector.” But the congregants were just revving up their literalist sanctimony, it turns out. They went on to admonish Rev. Lee for arguing that gay parishioners and clergy should be welcomed on the same principle that brought Gentiles into the believing fold some 2,000 years ago. That species of reasoning, the righteous congregants sniffed, is “selective and careless exegesis that could be used to condone any sin, sexual or otherwise.” MORE »