Wonkette

David Brooks allows a made-up reader to address him as “Mr. Kierkegaard” today in his column. Here is what “Existential in Exeter” asks Søren Kierkegaard, who is David Brooks, about Culture: “All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?” David Brooks gets high and then answers — oh man, does he ANSWER — this question (which he actually wrote to himself after getting high, too). MORE »

Passionate Clinton promoter Lanny Davis is an endearing toady who wears comical pin-striped suits and says things like “Hillary can still win” while everybody else on the teevee panel laughs and laughs. And now he will bring his wonderful brand of aggrieved DLC hackery to Fox News, where he will get to spend the rest of his days blaming the network’s continuing bedbug problems on Barack Obama and Florida’s half-seated delegation. [Media Notes]

News: Duncan Hunter’s internets got hacked. Bigger news: Duncan Hunter is a Republican candidate for president. Biggest news: Duncan Hunter is tied with Rudy Giuliani in delegates. [Duncan Hunter]

Karl Rove’s “right hand man” (we thought that was Jeff Gannon?) is quitting, too. J. Scott Jennings was known for being involved in that whole U.S. Attorney deal that worked out so well for Rove and Gonzales and a bunch of other hacks, and now he squirms out of the White House to work for some PR company, hooray! [KY Politics]

In a hilarious, madcap mix-up, the Bush administration accidentally appointed an unqualified quack who lied about his credentials and experience to the Department of Health and Human Services as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs, or the “birth control czar.” Dr. Eric J. Hackenbush Keroack has a few important words for you regarding your uterus. MORE »

Julie MacDonald, the Interior Department’s Assistant Secretary of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, is in a bit of hot water for, well, the usual cronyism bullshit that every single hack in every single department is guilty of to varying degress. One of the complaints: she was a bit careless with sensitive DoI documents, and, you know, tended to forward a lot of them on to lobbyists and right-wing think tanks. Oh, and random 14-year-old internet nerds. MORE »

Remember Patrick Rhode? He was the former TV reporter who leveraged a job as deputy advance guy for Bush in 2000 (deputy to the guy who makes sure there’s bottled water behind the podium!) into a gig as deputy director of FEMA. Then New Orleans drowned, and Rhode called FEMA’s response “probably one of the most efficient and effective responses in the country’s history.” MORE »

As a public service we share a reader hint. Entering “mms://160.111.253.227/pandacam1” into browsers (or directly into Windows Media Player) provides a, uhm, backdoor entrance into Butterstick’s lair… which makes it sound like we’re advocating some kind of nasty, “Last Tango in Panda” clip job. But no: It’s the just Stick, in all his fuzzy glory. Sure, laying back with his belly in the air, blissfully dreaming of bamboo is kind of obscene, but it’s not hurting anyone. MORE »