As if the massive debt wasn’t bad enough, Tony Williams’s manic quest to bring baseball back to D.C. is fucking the city up yet again. District officials are looking to sell the name of RFK Stadium, where the ExpoNationalGraySenators will play for the next three years, for between $1.5 and $2 million. And it gets worse:

The name “RFK Stadium” will not be replaced; rather, the name of a corporation likely will precede it. The commission is strongly leaning toward placing a corporation’s name in front of the words “Field at RFK Stadium.”

Lockheed Martin Field at RFK Stadium? Philip Morris Park at RFK Stadium? Oh wait, we know who’s got a lot of spare cash lying around these days. Can’t wait for Opening Day at Halliburton Field at RFK, coming up next week! – “Joe Klein” MORE »

Forget the bioethicists, forget the church and by all means, forget the politicians. If you want to know how to resolve the Terri Schiavo situation, all you need is Craigslist. A sampling of brilliant ideas sprinkled in between the free couches and “who wants to fuck right now?” postings:

• Before you liberal morons start foaming at the mouth, let me tell you that I do not believe that the good Lord ever intended for us to be kept alive by machines. My Lord is not a mean God. I do believe in death with dignity. … What if we had an H.M.O. that offered a free shot to end the suffering.
• Remove Tom DeLay’s Feeding Tube
• hmmm…maybe terry schiavo will die today and rise again on sunday. we could start a new religion–the schiavists. the priests could be called activist judges and would molest congressmen instead of children.

We actually kind of like that last idea, though we have a feeling finding someone who wants to molest Barbara Mikulski might take a while. MORE »

We always knew the Bush administration was a little leery of the press, but this is getting ridiculous:

Your pool was convened by conference call about noon Friday by deputy White House press secretary Dana Perino.

Um, conference call? That’s one way to keep the president away from any tough questions (now that the other way isn’t working so well anymore) . Actually, it seems the whole White House is very telecom-oriented today:

Perino said the president had tried calling [Floyd Jourdain, chairman of the Red Lake Chippewa Tribe] a couple of times on Friday, but didn’t connect, getting voice mail instead.

Voice mail! We’d love to hear the president leaving a message for this guy. “Mr. Jourdain, yeah, uh, this is George W. Bush… heard you’ve had some tragedies up there lately… uh, but I guess you’re not there now, or maybe you’re screening, so…” Mr. President, if he still doesn’t call you back after you leave a couple messages, we’ve got some bad news: He’s just not that into you.

Full report after the jump. – “Joe Klein”

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It must really be almost over for Terri Schiavo: today’s Washington Post Style section features, well, basically an obituary, but the kind of insanely sappy one that you don’t get unless you’re a truly tragic figure.

She was a girl who loved animals and worshiped cute television stars, paying homage to heartthrobs Starsky and Hutch by naming two gerbils after them. She daydreamed about working for a veterinarian when she grew up, or maybe just being a dog groomer.

Okay. We think this whole thing is awful. But this story is so full of details that tug at the heartstrings that it almost turned into a parody. Schiavo “wrote to John Denver, asking him to come sing at her wedding.” She had white wicker furniture in her purple-and-white bedroom as a kid. “She liked David Cassidy more than Shaun.” And of course, she married the first man she ever kissed (and now he’s trying to murder her like the monster he… oh wait, sorry, Randall Terry stole the keyboard for a minute there). MORE »

Richard Leiby may be on his way out as the Washington Post’s gossip columnist, but he stuck around for one more live chat today to… let his readers take potshots at Wonkette!

Monterey, Calif.: Is Wonkette back doing her own blogging again or is she still outsourcing? I can’t tell if she stopped being funny all by herself or if she’s getting help. Do they still let her into parties or is that over too?

Richard Leiby: I haven’t seen the Wonkette, aka Ana Marie Cox, at parties lately, but that’s my fault. I refuse to go anywhere these days, figuring that any event that wants me can’t be worthwhile.

We can’t speak to whether Wonkette gets in to parties or not these days, since she tries not to hang out with her minions in public, but we can vouch for Leiby on that last point.

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So it turns out that Social Security really is in a crisis — yesterday’s report by the system’s trustees found it will run out of money in 2041, not 2042 as projected earlier. See, don’t you get it? President Bush said we had to act fast or we’d be screwed, and now that’s a whole year we’ve lost, all because those Democrats in Congress… well, okay, mostly because Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security is about as popular as a Sacajawea dollar. But still! MORE »

For network news divisions, nothing says “I’m sorry” quite like dumping your anchorman and having his legendary predecessor dis him in print the week before he leaves. But beating up on Dan Rather wasn’t quite enough to make the Bush administration stop hating CBS. Adam Levine, a former White House press flunky who oversaw TV, tells the New York Observer, “removing Dan Rather from the equation

The United Food and Commercial Workers have launched a campaign to get ABC’s “Good Morning America” to dump Wal-Mart as a sponsor of the show’s “Only in America” segment, on the grounds that, well, Wal-Mart specializes in selling underpriced Chinese crap to the people who used to work in factories until their jobs got sent overseas. The union says:

With this sponsorship, ABC News provides Wal-Mart both a format and visual framing to perpetuate a long-term myth—that Wal-Mart possesses a unique American patriotism manifested in practices that promote American values, respect workers, and privilege American-made products.

Of course, it’s debatable how valuable the sponsorship is when the programming is so cheesy it makes you want to gouge your eyes out — recent segments have included “Orphaned Teen Makes A ‘Friend’ At Oscars,” “Horton Family Gives Thanks For Quadruplets,” and “Ethiopian Girl With One Arm And One Leg Swims To Success.” (And yes, that last one is real.) MORE »

The One America Committee, John Edwards’s PAC, is venturing out into territory heretofore occupied only by losers with too much time on their hands (which, really, means this sort of makes sense): the Podcast. The thought of having Edwards’s drawly, populist voice ready for playback on an iPod at all times is strangely comforting — “mmm… son of a millworker…” But the e-mail pitch they sent out to try to get people to subscribe is downright bizarre:

From: John Edwards [mailto:InfoOAC@OneAmericaCommittee.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2005 2:47 PM
Subject: Today. Podcast. Today Show.

Of course, both the Podcast and the Today Show appearance are actually tomorrow, not today, but whatever. It’s probably for the best anyway — when it comes to Democratic messages, seven-syllable grunts certainly beat year-long ramblings about Vietnam! Full e-mail after the jump. — “JOE KLEIN”

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It’s the moment you’ve been dreading, that awful step you hoped would never come but feared was just around the corner: Mel Gibson has joined the fight over Terri Schiavo’s life. Writes Gibson in a missive apparently intended to buck up the spirits of her supporters:

I fully support the efforts of Mr. & Mrs. Schindler to save their daughter, Terri Shiavo, from a cruel starvation.

Now, we don’t want to question Gibson’s commitment to all things fervent and Catholic. This is a man who made a movie in Aramaic and had to be persuaded to add subtitles by the studio, after all. MORE »

Well, that’s about enough from us as guest editor, kids. We finally figured out how to undo the chain the real Wonkette used to keep us here on her couch all week, and now we’re going to ransack her house looking for more booze. Thanks for reading, thanks for sending in tips and thanks to the real Wonkette for abandoning us so completely in this terrifying world. So this is “Joe Klein,” signing off…

Oh wait, we almost forgot. Secret identity revealed after the jump.

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