Either Relevant or True » “Stop chain-chewing that Nicorette, there, Annie.”

“Stop chain-chewing that Nicorette, there, Annie.”

Tie:: This one, known with some affection around here as the “ice cream tie,”

Segue:I think they left the music out again.

Worst Person: The one-and-only(thank God…Ben Stein should forgive the expression) Coultergeist, for reasons some blogger with a funny name explains at some length.(Just kidding, KO, the “orange menace” loves to have you. Well, okay, not “have” you…basically just gape after a particularly apt sentence and mutter “I got the same 26 letters the sports guy got…why couldn’t I write that?!” We think you have powers. Anyway…)

5. Tonight represents an all-important delegate battle…in Guam. But then, as Richard Wolffe explains, it’s a caucus in Guam, and those “don’t count,”

5a. Another thing that doesn’t count for much, at least witheconomists is Hillary Clinton’s support for a summer repeal of the gas tax. Jonathan Alter says it would be bad for the infrastructure, and in the end, not save that much at the pump.

4.Why is a Clinton advisor going to right-wing smear sites? Eugene Robinson, with typical good humor, says “If you want to find some slime, you go to a swamp.” He then adds that, while all the sites and periodicals uncovered might trouble Clinton’s base, only one is really troubling in terms of its biases and/or lack of standards:
the apparently bogusly-named Accuracy in Media.

Oddball: On this day in 1903, Dr. Benjamin Spock was born. Dr. Spock’s books on baby and child care are only outsold by the Bible.

In other Oddball news, last summer’s duct-tape bandit accepted a plea agreement. I guess the homework didn’t come out like he expected.

Bushed!
Bush wants $70 Billion for a war he told us we were done with five years ago.

Reading First does not improve reading scores one bit. “From the same guys who brought you abstinence-education…” I can almost hear the movie announcer now.

3. Rachel Maddow joins Keith to talk about the moment where McCain ties the war in Iraq to oil.
They both wonder what his real strategy is, because, as they point out, in better words than this, we’re not winning.

2. Worst Persons:

Worse: Billo picks apart Al Franken’s taxes.

Worser: Ben Stein equates all science with Nazi science. Godwin’s Law? Anyone? Bueller? If Mr. Stein had been on a message board when he said that, invoking Hitler would have automatically cost him the argument. Anyone else miss Ben Stein, Happy Fun Conservative? me too. Although my friend’s sister saw him at the Baskin Robbins, and he looked really sick.

1.I love Richard Lewis. I’ve been a fan for a long time, and not only because he makes me look healthy and confident in contrast. But he is darned near impossible to recap…I’ll try.

Hates Bush, gets upset at the very sight of that flightsuit thing, to the point of nausea. Almost risked his marriage by screaming out “Mission accomplished” at the point of, let’s say “imperfect happiness” here(Was that the first or second use of “orgasm” on “Countdown”? Not counting fangirl blogs on Special Comment night, I should say.Or maybe not. See, I got confused and indiscreet.)

Well, that was mostly the way it was.

Poor Richard. People say stupid things before, during and after sex. And when did Ben Stein go nuts?

Coming soon to a TV near you:

WIN BEN STEIN’S MISSING MARBLES!

Godwin’s law indeed! And in this case the content did not even make any sense. What is it will comedians like Dennis Miller and Ben Stein losing it lately?

I am sorry but I cannot follow Richard Lewis when I am sober.

Ice cream tie and the taupe suit. It was like retro day! :)

Hawaii:

I don’t know I would call Dennis Miller’s losing it a recent occurrence. He’s been a blowhard for a decade at the very least. Then again, I’ve never really been a fan in the first place!

Normally I really tire of Lewis quickly, but he wasn’t half bad yesterday.

I think about 10 or so years ago, Dennis Miller talked about the state of media, in particular the 24-hour news cycles. He likened it to an old cartoon where the train is racing down the track and they have to ‘feed’ pieces of the same train to itself in order to keep it going. I thought that sentiment pretty spot on.

As for Miller now, even though he calls himself a conservative and is on right-wing talk radio, he’s downright progressive in comparison to the absolute race-baiting-xenophobic-sexist right-wingers he shares the dial with.

The filly that Hillary picked for the derby today broke both her ankles and had to be put down immediately. She did come in second though. I am not joking:

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080503/SPORTS08/80503026

Maybe that’s where Dennis lost his comedic touch.

Hey, it must’ve been a case of AMNE$IA!

A powerful “Special Comment” by Bill Moyers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfqCyMU3mfo

A couple comments:

My hubby had an interesting observation about the increasing gas prices. He said that the rising gas prices are not due as much to the cost of a barrel of oil as much as the steep decline of the dollar (although they are related). If you look at a plot of oil prices with that of the value of the dollar, they are the exactly same — except in a different direction.

That means that the rising costs at the pump are due to the lousy economy and the exploding costs of the Iraqi war well as Republican policies that help corporations take their production overseas which all balloons the Federal budget deficit — which reduces the dollar’s value. Therefore, Clinton’s and McCain’s push for a gas tax holiday, if not balanced elsewhere in the Fed budget, will only tend to INCREASE this deficit, further hurting the dollar and eventually — RAISING THE PRICE OF GAS even further!!

As far as Richard Lewis is concerned, I really enjoyed him last night — as KO obviously did. The way Keith nearly fell out of his chair with the flak jacket comment was priceless!!

Obama won the Guam Caucus by eight votes.

Ben Stein was a speech writer for Nixon and Ford. Considering that, his “losing it” should come as no surprise, not that he ever had “it” to lose.

Most of the show was so sharp, especially with Rachel, and wasn’t her explanation of the possibility of what McCain could have meant, but probably not, re war and oil brilliant?

Then, feeling incredibly shallow as I realize that at various times in my life I have thought, “Goodness, but he is handsome” - including in years long past Richard Lewis and Dennis Miller (and throw in Ron Silver for a trifecta), but at least never Ben Stein.

But, I have not enjoyed the recent visits of Richard Lewis to Countdown and found Friday’s nightclub act filled with sex crap, designed to appeal to drunks, rather appalling and out of place on a news show, even on cable.

I worry that in the future I will never again see the flight suit footage or the Mission Accomplished banner without trying to block the nightmare image of Richard Lewis in orgasm, which is very much what I image he would look and sound like if he had been terribly constipated and….

It was bad enough to have that Chris Matthews comment about the cod piece on the flight suit floating around in my memory banks. Now, this.

Did everybody see this?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/02/john-gibson-mocks-rachel_n_99898.html

John Gibson is a disgusting excuse for a human being.

Gibson probably thinks she’s gay just to spite him.
I would, I suppose, go along with the “yummy,” thing if it weren’t such a put-down of her awesome, fearless, intellect. Rachel’s cute. But that doesn’t excuse some skeevy commentator picturing her and Hillary Clinton having a pillow fight.

T: Was there audio or video at that link? I could not find any, but what a thing for Gibson to do.

We are each whatever the DNA decreed when we were born. Short, medium, tall; fat, medium, thin; skin color, ethnic background, sexual orientation, etc.

I suppose that I should not blame Gibson as it is obvious that on the incredibly stupid, average, smart chart he came in at the bottom and cannot help exposing himself so appallingly.

I always assume that other people’s sex lives are none of my business unless they wish to perform in front of me, in which case I would prefer a good book.

I do wonder about the fear behind the anger in these attacks as it must be intense.

Perhaps I have a blind spot here as it never occurs to me to wonder about let alone obsess about someone else’s sexual orientation.

My own major objective in life is to be happy, and I wish to extend that to everyone else in whatever way works for them.

Rafismom: There’s a little button under “listen” at that link — I can’t click it because it’ll crash my ancient computer, but I get the impression there’s a clip there.

There’s also this, the original MediaMatters report on it, which includes a bit of transcript.

Stef: Thanks for the transcript link. Good Grief, or Jesus Christ on a Spoon, if you will.

Talk about some men who are really anxious about their own masculinity and perhaps sexuality.

That Rachel obviously has an IQ higher than both of their’s put together must also be an issue for them.

They seemed unaware of the previous Rachel vs Joe S. event on Race 4 which led the latter to throw down his mic and storm off the set, and I would be very surprised if that did not play a role in this new exchange between them in Scar’s rather ineffectual effort to reestablish his male power.

The issue Rachel was raising was the media’s obsession with trivial gossip nonsense instead of real issues, and Gibson and friend followed through by doing the same darned thing, gossipy, insulting nonsense.

I still do not get the Bathtub boy “insult”, unless Gibson and Rich are both opposed to physical cleanliness and think that manly men should stink of BO.

I wonder what they would make of one of my best friends who says that she has the best of both worlds as she is a gay man in a woman’s body. Happily married for many years, mother, grandmother, former teacher. Gibson and Rich would probably want Mary dragged from the school house and burned at the stake. As her husband is unphased by this, I am not certain why anyone else should be.

Plus, thanks to the transcript for the memory jolt and add Che Guevara to my previous list of handsome men, near the top, just below Toshiro Mifune. Prior to Che’s death, of course, Zombie Lovers have never been my thing. And while Chairman Mao never appealed to me, Mary and I have another friend who spent years pining over Chou En-Lai. Proving again that there is someone, and perhaps many some ones, for everyone.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/84370/

This is the link to the footage from that first hour of MSNBC Pennsylvania coverage which so many missed in which Chris Matthews has his moment of clarity and says that the media has created the delusion that Hillary can still win to keep this going and as a result 4 out of 5 of her followers believe her race is still viable.

It is interesting to see and hear Keith’s reactions and sports analogies..

Of course, within a few hours Matthews was yammering on again about how Hillary is still in it.

By the way, John, how’d that co-hosting gig go down at Fixed Noise, hmmmmm?

Here is the best explanation I have been able to find of why Gibby, and thus Keith haters, love to refer to him as “Bathtub Boy.”

Gibby claims (whether or not this is actually true only he knows) that back in the days when he and KO both worked at MSNBC when KO was doing The Big Show, whenever Keith got so nauseated at the thought of spending another night discussing Monica Lewinsky that he couldn’t stand it, he would call in sick and retreat to his bathtub in dread and terror of the outside world. This would cause MSNBC to have to call on Gibby to save the day by serving as Keith’s substitute host–which he, of course, heroically did, time and time again, because of course, Keith was far too mentally unstable to be counted upon to actually show up to do his job.

Given that in this tale told by Gibby, he invariably presents himself as the self-sacrificing hero while painting Keith as a total nutcase, I highly suspect it’s full of horseshit.

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