Don't Tell Arizona

The National Spelling Bee has foreigners in it!

p.s. -- I correctly spelled 25 on the sample test, including the incredibly dorktastic Round 2 and 3 words, which was not good enough to enter the semi-finals and constitute begging for a wedgie. At age 10, I probably would have scored a 3.

Blog Whoring

Los Angelenos are more fucked up than anyone ever imagined:

"FOR a solitary blogger, Mickey Kaus is astonishingly social and well connected: It's difficult to find a writer or politico in Los Angeles who hasn't knocked boots (or opinions) with Mr. Kaus at a party, or at the monthly mixers he hosts at Yamashiro restaurant and a supper club jokingly called Morons." (Link added)

After next Tuesday, the constant stream of undeserved puffers from the EMESSEM will end, and Kaus will stink up Slate.com (the job he never really quit) once again. Everyone will stop pretending that Kaus was "trying to reach a new audience" by holding house parties at his friends' fabulous homes and appearing on wingnut radio programs like the Depends Media Political Comedy Hour. No one will care that Kaus never tried to reach Democratic voters beyond those in his members-only swingers' club, and never sought to lower himself by engaging with, or speaking to, actual union members, teachers or immigrant rights supporters. It was all just a kabuki cocktail circle jerk for fat and self-satisfied elites, starting (sic) with the candidate himself, who never encountered a problem they couldn't blame on the help.

Polls open Tuesday at 7:00 a.m. and stay open until 8:00 p.m. Cast your vote. You may never enjoy an election more than this one.

As long as there are people with full-time jobs and social obligations (or medical appointments!) who are too lazy to figure out ad software and are content to publish lame gags with lots of swear words, there will always be an amateur blogosphere.

Catch the Spit

Aging hippies sic their shysters on a creepy racist:

Lawyers representing Canadian rockers Rush have ordered an American politician to stop using their music as part of his Senate campaign.

The musicians are said to have been left fuming after discovering Kentucky's Republican candidate Rand Paul had been using their tracks during public events and in online adverts as he seeks election to office.

Robert Farmer, an attorney for the band's Entertainment Group Inc. record label, has written to Paul's campaign officials claiming the use of Rush's music violates copyright laws, according to Courier-journal.com.

Rand Paul: rights for me, but not for African-Americans or Canadian hippies who can't even get their name spelled right in the fucking Toronto Sun!.

More on Rush and Rand here. (I see Chait linked to this in April, but I found it independently.)

Wankerman

Tucker Carlson's giant sinkhole, the Daily Choler, is running columns written under the nom de wingnut "Anchorman." These missives are written by someone pretending to be "a well-known news anchor from a top-10, big city station." The columns invariably involve Anchorman snivelling about how liberal the news business is, and how he would lose his job if secret wingnut identity was disclosed.

The Daily Choler promised Anchorman complete anonymity by agreeing to publish him on the Daily Choler website.

In publishing the most recent of these pieces, the Daily Choler forget they were pretending that the author was a local anchor and titled his column "Anchor accuses own network of 'embarrassing' bias in Israel coverage." But the premise of the column was that Wankerman was writing a memo to his own boss about what appeared on his local station's 5 p.m. newscast. (The headline duped some of the duller dullards.)

It's clear that Wankerman is a fictitious character. Because most of the time, his patrons forget to pretend they're keeping his "identity" secret.

For example, the Choler claims Wankerman is a well-known talking wigstand in a top ten teevee market. Wanker stated in a recent column that he drove home from the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Only four of the top ten markets are on the East Coast: New York, D.C., Boston and Philly. It's highly doubtful that even a Wanker would drive home from D.C. to New York or Boston, particularly if he had to anchor the Sunday morning station i.d.'s between Hair Club infomercials.

In another column, the Wanker shows a bigoted fascination with two D.C. murder cases. Doubt those got much play in NYC/Boston/Philly.

Wanker also claims he "anchored a No. 1 rated 10 p.m. newscast in the Midwest in the mid-1980's," meaning that the character would have had to been working in teevee for at least 25 years.

And so on. It wouldn't be hard to identify Wankerman if he was a real person, rather than one of Tucker Faye Carlson's unpaid interns pretending to be an elderly reactionary who cribs column ideas from Mallard Fillmore and Free Republic. Tucker should give up the gag and admit the closet case anchor is a fake.

Kaus Hires Ruth Shalit as Ad Director

From Kausfails:

We have our first TV ad, which you can see here. .... Press release here. ... It's based on a classic Paul Wellstone spot (done by North Woods Advertising). ...

Kaus still can't come up with an original idea. Maybe if he stole Wellstone's policies and not his advertisements he'd crack the .0001% voter support ceiling.

Bonus Kaus Komedy: "We're going to win on truth." So if you lose, it's because of your lies, Mickey?