BuffaloWings&Vodka

My Fellow Americans

I may just be oversensitive to these things, but was anybody else turned on when Bush winked at Justice Breyer? Hot...right?

Need Some Goo-Gone

I'm having a hell of a time getting the Kerry-Edwards sticker off of my bumper. And I'm not willing to risk hurting the chrome on my freshy-fresh Subaru Forester with something abrasive. So I'm thinking that instead of getting rid of the Kerry-Edwards sticker, I'll just add a Gore-Lieberman sticker and a Dukakis '88 sticker. Have any lying around?

Ouch

Goddam it. I can't believe I got the KerryEdwards tattoo on both cheeks. That's going to be way painful to remove.

Two things:

1. This just gives Bush four more years to fall victim to the Curse of Tecumseh. That's not a threat, just an observation.

2. I've got to believe that Dick Cheney is really fucking tired. Once Bush is safely re-elected, I'd look for Cheney to step down. There would be very little (if any) political fallout, and he'd be able to handpick the next Big Republican Contender. Just saying.

3. Though not technically old enough, I'd be willing to clear my schedule for the next four years. I think I could help the GOP pick up a lot of votes among strippers and nearsighted varsity cheerleaders. Just saying.

Rare Semi-Serious Commentary

1. I haven't investigated the matter very seriously, but I find it hard to believe that any "likely voter" methodology that's being used by pollsters is going to accurately reflect the actual voting-propensity environment these days. I've gotten more voter registration door hangers in the last three weeks than I've gotten Chinese take-out menus--things are different.

2. I have high hopes for tonight's debate. I'm praying that both guys will have a little slack in their leashes and feel free to start some serious shit. But I'm wondering: If the networks messed around with the camera angles to make Bush seem as tall as Kerry, what exactly are they going to do to narrow the sexiness gap between Cheney and Edwards?

What the Supremes Are Doing Over the Labor Day Weekend

Thomas: Catching up on TiVo'd episodes of One Tree Hill.

Scalia: Hosting his annual Labor Day cookout featuring the Scalia family originalist recipe barbecue sauce.

Rehnquist: Attending Scalia's barbecue and complaining about the carb content of the sauce and how he's "never going to lose three robe sizes by the spring term without a little goddam support."

Kennedy: Filming his episode of MTV Cribs, wherein he'll show off his Scarface bedspread and his full-size Cyberball arcade game.

O'Connor: Holing up with a case of Arbor Mist and drunk-dialing old boyfriends.

Breyer: Finally finishing Ninja Gaiden on Xbox.

Ginsburg: Haunting my dreams.

Souter: Seeing Wicker Park. Seven times.

Stevens: Getting all excited about the Northwestern game on Saturday; finding out that it was actually on Thursday; figuring out what to do with four gallons of uneaten seven-layer dip.

DNC Part III: The Reckonation

I'm sitting here trying to decide whether I'm more distracted by John Edwards's LL-ish tongue action, or the growth on his upper lip that seems to get larger every time he's on TV. Either way, the speech is pretty underwhelming.

The best speech of the night, and probably the best speech of the convention, was given a few hours ago by Rev. Al Sharpton. (I was watching him finish up on C-SPAN when the channel cut out, which is when I found out that MSNBC and FOX had stopped covering it. I swore. Loudly. Luckily, CNN was still carrying it.) He might be stuck sitting next to Terry "Why Haven't I Been Fired Yet?" McAuliffe at the moment, but Al rocked the convention pretty hard.

Yeah...maybe I teared up a bit during Sharpton's speech. So what? Bite me.

More Atrocities

I liked Clinton's speech last night, and I thought Professor Obama was pretty great tonight, but there's still plenty of awful crap going down in Boston.

First off, as if Monday's choice of having BeBe Winans sing a lounge-ballad version of the national anthem wasn't enough to make America puke on itself, the organizers went with a pair of Native Americans singing the Star Spangled Banner in their native tongue. (Later, it would be revealed that the last stanza they sang translated, literally, to "You are all fuckers; We hope you die of typhoid fever; This song has always sucked ass.") Don't get me wrong--they looked totally joyous and spontaneous. But I think that a choir of orphaned, crack-addicted amputees singing "O Happy Day" would have been a bit more subtle.

Secondly, someone thought it would be okay to let Ben Affleck roam freely and speak to cable news anchors. Now, I love Ben just as much as the next guy, but listening to him talk politics makes me hate myself for being a liberal. He showed up with Chris Matthews first, and initially he looked about as scared as I was during the J-Lo oral sex soliloquy from Gigli. He eventually calmed down, and clearly he's well ahead of the normal Hollywood IQ curve, but watching him talk politics was sort of like watching Michael Jordan play baseball, or watching myself do the Humpty Dance in the mirror. In this world you're lucky to be good at even one thing, so do everyone a favor and stick to that.

Finally, there was Ted Kennedy. For awhile I thought he was going to settle for just being bloated and incoherent, but when he trotted out a Tennyson line as being "from that poem that my brothers liked" I realized that he was also striving (as well as seeking and finding, but not yielding) for a new convention record for the most frequent inclusion of commencement speech clichés. Thanks, Ted.

And One Last Note: I've noticed that FOX news and Bill O'Reilly have chosen to talk thru a number of the convention speakers' speeches, which is, in itself, a heartless diss. But for two nights now they have chosen to talk during the national anthem, and, both times, if you listened hard, you could just make out the faintest of sounds....the sound of Ronald Reagan's weeping. Shame on you, Bill O'Reilly. Shame on you.

Top Five Crimes Perpetrated by the DNC in the Last Two Hours

5. Letting BeBe perform without CeCe.
4. A video montage of the nine female Democratic Senators that was one seagull shy of a Summer's Eve commercial.
3. The worst parody of "Proud Mary" since Staind covered it for their Tina Turner tribute album.
2. Scheduling the Jimmy Carter speech opposite FOX's Trading Spouses.
1. The shameless exploitation of Tipper Gore's Nipples.

Veep, O Mine Eyes

During TNR's roundtable on the Edwards selection, Jonathan Chait wrote:

Let me raise another point. I find it noteworthy that Edwards is frequently described as "handsome." It's kind of a slur--it suggests he's shallow, what Seinfeld would call a "mimbo." The interesting thing is that George W. Bush, who is a very handsome man, is almost never described as handsome. I'm not trying to suggest that Edwards's handsomeness is a net detriment to his career--surely the opposite is true--just that there is a downside in having that fact be pointed out so often that it becomes the only thing many people know about you. Bush, who is handsome but rarely described as such, has the best of both worlds.

Isn't the reason that Bush doesn't get pejoratively slapped with "handsome" that he's too busy getting pejoratively slapped with "dumb"? I'd rather be handsome than dumb any day. Luckily, I am both.

As big of an Edwards groupie as I am, I do, actually, have a bit of a worry. Though I'm confident that Edwards would have looked great against Bush in a debate, I'm sort of worried about how he'll look against Cheney. Edwards v. Bush would have been two charismatic guys with modest foreign policy knowledge going at it, and Edwards' speaking ability could have won the day. But against Cheney, there is a real risk of Edwards looking like an uppity kid that just needs a good spanking. I know that he's been brushing up on his foreign policy, and that everyone has listed his activities in the Senate that indicate a lot more foreign policy acumen than he gets credit for. But it's still scary.

Also: Under no circumstances should Edwards allow himself to be interviewed by MTV. He is, by far, the least hip of all candidates involved. When Chris Matthews asked him about his favorite movie, it took him ninety seconds to come up with something, and even then he couldn't remember the name of The Shawshank Redemption. And his favorite book? The DaVinci Code. (The Onion sums up my thoughts on that work of genius here.) The dude hasn't had any time to suck up pop culture, so, if you want to help, just don't ask him about it, okay?

RunningMateMuch?

Apparently, Kerry is going to announce his VP pick today, and I am frightened. This campaign has done a lot of retarded stuff so far, and I wouldn't be surprised if they kept it up by picking a running mate that someone told them might help them pick up a few points in a state rhyming with Pflorida, or who would add the much-needed redhead to the ticket. But let me be clear:

If Kerry chooses anyone other than John Edwards, I will change the name of my blog to JohnKerryisEffingRetarded&Vodka.

Additionally, I will be pissed. If he picks Gephardt, I'll probably be too depressed to vote. If he picks Bob Graham, I'll vote for Bush. I he picks Wesley Clark (a near impossibilty, but some assholes keep bringing it up), I'll vote for Bush three times. And if he picks Vilsack, well, I'll probably just say "Huh-huh...Vil-sack." But I might vote for Bush then too.

Edwards has everything Kerry needs in a VP. He's from the South. He's clearly alive. And he's really quite short. I only hope J-Eff-K can see that.

UPDATE: Well, that's good. May I suggest that we lobby the networks to skip coverage of the last night of the convention? If the last thing people see is the Edwards speech on Wednesday, the Dems might just pull this off.

Rove is using McCain footage to spin this as Kerry settling for his second choice, which is clever. I can't imagaine that anyone in the Kerry camp ever actually thought that McCain would accept, so if the leak of that particular idea was Kerry's fault (could have been a complete GOP fabrication, I dunno) I'm hoping it was some weird scheme to make him seem more moderate for awhile. Anyway, Kerry was my second choice. Come to think of it, so was Bush, and he did pretty well.

Caucus for Wings and Vodka

My name is Mike, and tonight I'm asking you to link to my blog. I believe that my blog, more than any of the other blogs, has what it takes to get this community headed in the right direction.

My blog understands the plight of the average law student, and knows what it means to struggle. My blog came from a very poor family, a family much poorer than that of any of the other blogs, so poor that it could barely afford a counter, let alone a fancy comment system.

My blog was against the war in Iraq, even though, for political reasons, it wasn't able to come out and say that until after the war was over. But rest assured that if my blog had been able to keep a lower profile, say, in Vermont, that it would have spoken out sooner. Additionally, I should mention that it came from a poor family.

Finally, I would like to point out that my blog has never taken, and will never take, special interest money. And I'm not saying this just because it hasn't been offered. Rather, I say this because money is not important to my blog. My blog values other things, like hope, and values. And hope.

So, in conclusion, I would like to again ask for your support tonight. Together, we can change America. Or at least Iowa. Or if not Iowa, then together we can change this font. Because that is something I cannot do alone. Thank you.