My heart is bleeding right now. This has to be the blackest day since Tom Ford left Gucci….how will I go on…aaahhh the pain, the pain.

You know, there are just some days where cleaning my house is just a complete bore! Sometimes I like to pretend I am someone else cleaning so it doesn’t seem so overwhelming. This can included many various disguises: wigs, pink fuzzy bathrobes, French maids outfits and even cha-cha heels. But I must admit all of this has become very lack luster for me. So I have sent myself out on a search for my new Cleaning Ensemble!
At first I thought, Star Trek! Beam my Dust up, Scottie…..no that doesn’t work! Then I thought, Jungle Book Cleaning Day, swinging from the chandeliers naked as a jay bird….no, those lights would come ripping out off the ceiling and how do I explain that to Mike when he gets home. Maybe an Oprah Cleaning Day, where I sit my fat ass on the couch, flip my hair around and talk to my friends about very private issues in front of millions of people….no, I have no friends with private issues.

And then I found it! Thumping music, Snow Ball disco lights, and free beer from the Frig! With this new top, and a pair of terry cloth hot-pants (for dusting of course), who the hell would care about the dust!!! WHHHAAA-hooooooo! Disco Dusting here I come!

Karl Christian Rove

It’s not just the long history of dirty campaign tricks or his penchant for championing conservative activist judges or even the fact that he is almost singularly responsible for the rise of George W. Bush.

What really bothers me about Karl Rove? He’s a consultant.
Read the rest of this entry »

Frank Rich has a great tells us today about her inability to get a White House press pass. (A propos of my post yesterday, perhaps turning tricks might actually increase her chances!) She starts off in rare form, asking “Who knew that a hotmilitarystud wanting to meetlocalmen could so easily get to be face2face with the commander in chief?” But her experience confirms the obvious–that the White House was actively preferential in getting Gannon/Guckert in. She uses this story to its best end–tying together all that we know about the White House’s Orwellian and un-democratic manipulation of the media. That’s the tragedy. What makes it fun is the opportunity to laugh at the farce of the Gaybasher-in-Chief consorting with a gay hustler.

I’m still mystified by this story. I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the “Barberini Faun” is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?

At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed, even though I’d been covering presidents and first ladies since 1986, no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer, he said he’d renew the pass – after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months.

In an era when security concerns are paramount, what kind of Secret Service background check did James Guckert get so he could saunter into the West Wing every day under an assumed name while he was doing full-frontal advertising for stud services for $1,200 a weekend? He used a driver’s license that said James Guckert to get into the White House, then, once inside, switched to his alter ego, asking questions as Jeff Gannon.

Mr. McClellan shrugged this off to Editor & Publisher magazine, oddly noting, “People use aliases all the time in life, from journalists to actors.”

I know the F.B.I. computers don’t work, but this is ridiculous. After getting gobsmacked by the louche sagas of Mr. Guckert and Bernard Kerik, the White House vetters should consider adding someone with some blogging experience.

Does the Bush team love everything military so much that even a military-stud Web site is a recommendation?

Or maybe Gannon/Guckert’s willingness to shill free for the White House, even on gay issues, was endearing. One of his stories mocked John Kerry’s “pro-homosexual platform” with the headline “Kerry Could Become First Gay President.”

With the Bushies, if you’re their friend, anything goes. If you’re their critic, nothing goes. They’re waging a jihad against journalists – buying them off so they’ll promote administration programs, trying to put them in jail for doing their jobs and replacing them with ringers.

At last month’s press conference, Jeff Gannon asked Mr. Bush how he could work with Democrats “who seem to have divorced themselves from reality.” But Bush officials have divorced themselves from reality.

They flipped TV’s in the West Wing and Air Force One to Fox News. They paid conservative columnists handsomely to promote administration programs. Federal agencies distributed packaged “news” video releases with faux anchors so local news outlets would run them. As CNN reported, the Pentagon produces Web sites with “news” articles intended to influence opinion abroad and at home, but you have to look hard for the disclaimer: “Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense.” The agencies spent a whopping $88 million spinning reality in 2004, splurging on P.R. contracts.

Even the Nixon White House didn’t do anything this creepy. It’s worse than hating the press. It’s an attempt to reinvent it.

I am remiss in not having written about the “Jeff Gannon”/Jim Guckert affair before now. Why, you ask? After a long season of political news that made me so angry I simply had to write it out, I’ve been too busy laughing my ass off about this story to get behind the keyboard!

For those of you who have been under a rock, read Kos, World O’Crap or, most especially, AmericaBlog–or, wow, the Washington Post’s Howie Kurtz for whom the appearance of Guckert’s naughty bits seems to raised the new value of the whole sordid story.

Suffice it to say, this is the story I’ve been waiting for–the story that proves that there is some justice in the world, right at the intersection of Hubris Street and Hypocrisy Avenue. More than that, it proves that trying to simultaneously repress and exploit the gay community is a bad idea–when you push us too hard, secrets you thought were safely hidden will find a way out of the closet.

This is also the story that Orwell would have loved. The White House’s obsessive message control, endless repetition of inane talking points and distaste for the “reality-based community” have created a situation in which their dependence on right-wing media whores has culminated in the appearance, right there in the White House press room, of a real whore. They have gone–with amazing speed–from partisans who shill for money to those who fuck for it.

The right has seized on the idea that we left-bloggers are “invading Guckert’s private life.” No, in fact, we are exploring his professional life. If you doubt this, imagine the scandal that would result if we learned that Maureen Dowd were giving handjobs for $10 in the stairwells of the Times’ headquarters! To the great chagrin of the right in this country, we have an expectation that people earning a living as members of the “fourth estate” are not simultaneously turning tricks. [Although perhaps they are preparing us for a "free market" future in the "ownership society" they are pushing, where we might have to get used to seeing grandma turning tricks on the corner so she can afford a nice cat food dinner.]

AmericaBlog’s John Aravosis, who helped break this story, has an appropriately outraged
post today about the right wing’s faux outrage that somehow left-bloggers are homophobic to be following this story. He’s mad enough for both of us, and I hope I don’t have to spell out how ridiculous this is. It’s really only a valid argument if you think “homosexual prostitute” is a morally redundant phrase.

Many people have said this more eloquently, so I’ll say it bluntly: can you fucking imagine what would have happened if Clinton had let a gay male prostitute into regular briefings? It would have made Monicagate look minor by comparison. [I sure am glad Bush has "restored honor to the White House" like he promised in his 2000 campaign!]

So I’ll write more later, and add in some choice links from this post, but I needed to get on the record. My final comment is this: if we Democrats don’t flog Bush with this endlessly over the next few news cycles, we’re total idiots. The Republicans don’t just live in the gutter of personal attacks, they dug it! (Don’t believe me? Think of the GOP comparing legless, armless war vet Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden. Shameful.) None of this “don’t stoop to their level” bullshit. They own all three branches and have loyal mouthpieces in the media– they set the rules of this game and if we are not complete idiots we will play those rules right to the foul line. I, for one, plan on really enjoying watching these sad old elephants sweat.

While I will give David and Terry the benefit of the doubt about all the flavored chips in England (though not lamb and mint. I’m sorry. I’ve never tasted lamb with mint jelly, but that just seems so wrong. And I love lamb.) Sara’s comment about the unfairness of comparing the scary end of the local grocery to the show window of an Italian baking cathedral got me to remembering that even in Italia, there were some none-too-appetizing looking foodstuffs lurking on shelves here and there.

Case in point, electric-colored pastas.

There were a few other things in the shops in Italy that gave me pause as well. Like wine in Ssips boxes–you know those juice box things with the straws we had as kids? And tuna salad topped pizza. Or deviled ham panini. (Who EVER thought that would be a good idea?)

But Diet Coke was better there. As was pretty much everything else. Like cheese.

And sunset.

France has its Monets. Italy has its Caravaggios and DaVincis. The Netherlands has all those Vermeers and van Goghs. Spain its Picassos and Goyas.

But we, the mighty US…we the leaders of a free world…we the shining light on the hill for all to admire and emulate…we have Cassius Marcellus Coolidge.

Never heard of him? Oh come on. You’ve seen his work in some of the finest pool halls and sports bars in the land. Your parents might even have had a print of his classic work. The name might not be all that familiar, but his indelible images are as memorable as Marcel Duchamps urinal or Botticelli’s doleful blondes.

Mr. Coolidge was the artistic genius behind the 1903 masterpiece ‘Dogs Playing Poker”. And we love it. Which is why one of us shelled out over half a million dollars to own this cultural masterpiece.

In the artistic smackdown, I think the US will easily beat out the namby pamby “high art” snobs of Europe.

You’ve been wondering how much of Homeland Security’s energy is spent on art criticism, haven’t you?

Fake passports created as part of an Austrian artist’s exhibit have been confiscated by U.S. government authorities, Ohio museum officials said Tuesday.

You can get a State of Sabotage passport online for 35 dollars here.

Just got back from England, where they’ve got no chance of even getting a ticket to the culinary smackdown. Also seen: vegetarian haggis, next to the non-veggie blood sausage on the shelf. Put that in your shopping cart next to the Lamb and Mint Sauce flavored potato chips.

I had to laugh at this Boing Boing post about a “hilariously mistranslated ” candy wrapper:

“[W]hen I first saw this… I was stunned and speechless. It literally means “crazy diarrhea” in both Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji.”

Then again, maybe it’s like that time we put Ex-Lax in my crazy English teacher’s hot chocolate!