Are you smart enough to be a citizen? While it’s long been accepted that ignorance of history is what keeps America strong, it seems that immigrants are all expected to pass a civics test to become citizens and get Tom Tancredo off their backs. And they just updated the whole thing. So now everyone has to answer brand-new questions about Abe Lincoln and the lady from the old dollar coins (not the Indian, the other one) and, uh, 9/11. MORE »

Thanks to the Washington Post’s new “Fact Checker” feature, we know that when Fred Thompson claimed that more Americans “have shed more blood for other people’s liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world,” he wasn’t making any goddamn sense at all. [WP]

SHOCKER: Mitt Romney apparently once believed that “all citizens deserve equal rights!” Also he printed a totally gay flier. Back in 2002. He’s from Massachusetts, did you know this? And if he has his way all the gay Mormons will get married to each other and form one huge polygamous union/army. [Romney Facts via ABC]

Strom Thurmond’s wife sexily undoing another man’s tie so that they can “party.” Just in case, you know, you had any sort of sex drive left. Maybe tomorrow someone can share a story of a three-way involving Truman and Robert Byrd! [Quick Study via Andrew Sullivan]

A couple weeks ago we mocked the RNC research department for trying to tie Hillary Clinton’s felon donor story to the various trumped-up Clinton fundraising scandals of the mid-’90s. The emails seemed to suggest that the “scandals” were one and the same because all the donors in question were Asians who were therefore probably secret Chinese agents. This, uh, interpretation didn’t really get much traction. Until today! When the Post’s campaign blog thing ran a de-racialized version of it! MORE »

Back in 1988, some Libyan terrorists exploded an airplane over Scotland, just a few short years after they shot and killed beloved scientist Dr. Emmet “Doc” Brown. A couple years after that, a tv actor named Freddie Thompson provided the accused terrorists with some legal advice. MORE »

Noriega’s getting out early for good behavior! But do we send him to France, where he faces a money-laundering conviction, or Panama, where he’ll be under house arrest until he dies? We say, let’s send him on a wacky road trip with the dude who shot Wallace, so they can rediscover America, and themselves. [CNN]

George Will, the original bowtied conservative prick, uses his column today to predict that David Petraeus’ forthcoming report on the state of the Iraq War will lead to something he calls “a Weimar moment.” He refers to Germany between World Wars I and II, when the freewheelin’ liberal democratic government was undermined by the feelings of the people that the nation had been betrayed by their leaders. The Germans knew they were just one Surge away from winning The Great War, and to prove it they elected Hitler to kill all the gays and Jews and win them a second, Greater War. Will is pretty sure this will happen once General Petraeus tells Congress that we are kind of winning in Iraq next month. MORE »

With his daughter getting married, his administration wiretapping all of his political enemies, paranoia running rampant and everyone in the country high out of their minds on coke, Bush has finally come to realize that his pointless, unwinnable war is exactly like Johnson and Nixon’s pointless, unwinnable war. Because while before we were fighting in Iraq to prevent Iraq from fighting in us, or something, now we fight there so that Pol Pot doesn’t rise from the dead and take over. It’s true! Bush is going to deliver a speech about it and everything! MORE »

Tony Snow was on Hugh Hewitt’s show yesterday, to talk about how the surge is working really well and how we’re going to bomb the shit out of Iran and also how he’s going to retire, some day! Because it’s Friday and not much is happening besides the collapse of the world economy, the collapse of various mines, and the collapse of parts of Peru, the wires all picked it up and reporters asked him about it and he said that yes, he would eventually quit being the Press Secretary, at some unknown date in the future. Why?

MORE »

“With more than a year left in the fading Bush presidency, Karl Rove’s worst days in the White House may still lie ahead of him.”
— First sentence of the lead story in the September Atlantic.

Whoops. But hey, their revamped revamped website looks neat! MORE »