• Katherine Harris pulls the crazy train into the station for maintenance. Get well soon Katy!

• Stop Tim Russert whilst he’s walking and he will cut your effin jacobs off!
• God pardons Ken Lay.
• Joe Lieberman’s not sure who he is anymore, but he’s running for something
• American competitiveness slips again. We’re losing ground to the Koreans in nattiness of street mobs. ‘Tis of thee.
• The president can’t get his mind off his trip to Graceland, Larry King can’t get his off marginally relevant World War II era anecdotes.
• Apparently, the sodomy squadron has been napping on the job, because they needed Vanity Fair to tell them the Watergategate parties were
  all about the ass-fucking.

• Ken Lay predicted his own death! Just like Biggie Smalls and Martin Luther King! [Consumerist]

• Unless he didn’t, and is in Fiji right now. One of the two. [Dealing In Subterfuges]
• The name of the Dong. [Andrew Sullivan]
• We must reduce our dependence on foreign sources of kimchi! [Rude Cactus]
• Harold Ford of Tennessee - corruption so deep even Reuters can’t find it. [Sweetness & Light]
• James Wolcott is all about red meat and illegal fur - but draws the line at Honduran hookers. [James Wolcott]
• The lower you go in the Hookergate investigation the shadier the characters get. [TPM Muckraker]

Henry Allen, we know you’re a Pulitzer-winning critic, a respected old newspaper veteran, all that jazz. But please — the death of Ken Lay does not call for a rewrite of Hunter S. Thompson’s Nixon obit. Ken Lay was a garden-variety crook, not the near-mythic villain of a generation. You are a Washington Post staff writer, not an iconoclastic, self-destructive legend. Here are some phrases that should not appear in the Washington Post: MORE »

• Kenneth Lay’s death “effectively voids the guilty verdict against him,” though his assets will be fought over in court by the various people suing him. [NYT]

• An FBI consultant hacked FBI computers, just for a laugh. He learned the passwords of 38,000 employees and gained access to Witness Protection Program records. [WP]
• North Korea says they’ll continue launching missiles. President Bush faces an increasingly “bleak foreign policy landscape.” [WP, WP]
• President George W. Bush is 60 years old today. [NYT]
• The House Government Reform Committee subpoenaed the Pentagon seeking information on a soldier who claimed he suffered “reataliation” for reporting on abuses at Abu Ghraib. [AP]
• The Navy is reintroducing Vietnam-style swift boats in Iraq. [LAT]
• Hillary Clinton faced a difficult decision on the Joe Lieberman campaign, and despite her equivocal support, there’s no bad blood between them. Unless there is. [NYT]

“Ken Lay was too weird to live, too rare to die…” (AP)

Tony Snow on the passing of “Kenny Boy” Lay:

Q: What has been the President’s reaction to the death of Ken Lay?

SNOW: I really have not talked to him about it. I will give you my own personal reaction, which is that when somebody dies, you leave behind those that grieve, and I think that they deserve our compassion. But — I don’t know, what do you think would be the appropriate thing to say?

Q: I do not know. I don’t know him. The President was his friend, not me.

SNOW: No, the President has described Ken Lay as an acquaintance, and many of the President’s acquaintances have passed on during his time in office. Again, I think that it is sort of an interesting question but not answerable by me.

Thinkprogress has the video.

Yes, an acquaintance.

Bush, clearly shaken by his non-friend’s passing, cheerfully and goofily bought a reporter a cup of coffee at a Dunkin Donuts today. With his very own money! Your surreal press op theater transcript, after the jump.

MORE »

Jeez, we know the guy wasn’t well-liked, but even for us this is pretty intense schadenfreude. MORE »

Before the body is even cold, the internet will feast on the corpse for life-giving lol’s. MORE »

Enron founder Kenneth Lay died this morning in Aspen, Colorado, awaiting sentencing for fraud and conspiracy. Lay, 64, was admitted to the hospital last night after suffering a massive coronary. MORE »

The jury in the Enron criminal case has returned with a verdict, and the news is not good for the defendants. MORE »