Bill Clinton in a nutshell

From Best of the Web Today:: "I last saw Clinton near my own house in the celebrated Notting Hill district of London in 2002. He decided to do a walkabout, and plunged into the crowd, an activity he enormously and palpably enjoyed, and which delighted everybody. No one ever matched him as a simple campaigner. It was the thing he did best--perhaps the only thing he did well. It might be said, indeed, that he never did anything else. In Notting Hill he was not running for office. The locals were not his voters. But he behaved as if they were and they loved it. The old con master was in his element. He found himself in a pub and ordered drinks all round. All cheered. The news spread to the vast crowd outside, and it cheered too. Adrenaline racing, fists thumping chests, hugging and handshaking, wisecracking and slogan swapping, Clinton worked that crowd for twenty minutes, leaving it hoarse and exhausted, delighted and deeply impressed when he swept off in his limo. The only unhappy man was the bartender, who was never paid for ol' Bill's round."

Trust me...

A lot of people probably have greenhorns working for them for the summer. Many of them are spoiled kids, boss's family or other unworthies good only for hazing. So get them good.

First you prime them. Send them after the prop wash, or the left-handed crescent wrenches, or send them back to the warehouse for screws with heads on the other end ("These go on the other side, stupid!"). After hours, take them on a snipe hunt.

Then when it looks like they start to suspect an inkling of a shadow of a clue, send them to the store to get you a DVD rewinder.

Yep, someone is selling them. Thanks to Gizmodo for telling us, I think.

You be the judge

What is the appropriate penalty for someone who sells 30 million AOL customers to spammers?

I propose that he should stay in prison until he has transcribed each of the spams longhand, then written a separate letter of apology to each recipient for each spam in longhand.

And that's not to mention the trees...

Mt. Rainier violates environmental laws.

Second chance....

Just in case you didn't follow Glenn Reynolds' link to Rand Simberg, you get another chance here. Now read it all, especially if you are a journalist.

Eat Your Fugu and Die of Cancer Like the Rest Of Us

It appears that the famously poisonous puffer fish aren't poisonous themselves - it comes from what they eat.

Title and link stolen from Steven Saporito over at SashaCastel.com: Fugu? Hai!

"Coonass"

Say what? Find out here.

For those of us without older sisters....

...comes a fable from Mostly Cajun.

Just desserts

Bill Clinton couldn't disappear with decency for a few years like Richard Nixon - he has to keep sticking his his head back out. That would be OK if he had learned a few things since then, but no. His book got a review in the NY Times which said in part "sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull-the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history". He rages in a BBC interview because the interviewer brought up the most memorable occurrence in his Presidency. And he speaks of his impeachment fight as a "badge of honor"..

Bill Clinton was not just a lawyer, but a former law professor. He lied under oath. The subject of the lie was immaterial - he was legally compelled to answer the questions truthfully and he didn't. He knew he needed to tell the truth, or ought to have, and he didn't. Case closed. That he was also a slut (where are the medical records?), and grossly irresponsible (were there no *discreet* Dem women who'd have him?) is just gravy.

But suppose we did, as the Democrats insisted, assume that this "did not rise to the level of impeachment" (an awkward phrase that became popular through Dem choreography). There's a case for that, but not for his subsequent behavior. That solipsistic jackass had his minions attack the fundamental morality of the US, and it's still going on today (if they didn't do it at his command, then the decent thing would have been for Clinton to call them off. But that would have taken some class). "It's just lying about sex". "It was just a blow job!", ad infinitum, just to save him from well-deserved ignominy. It's as if current charges against a certain celebrity were proven and he started a national campaign with a slogan "Boys - the other white meat".

But lying about sex was trivial?. Right. If it's so trivial, then why lie about it? "So I got a BJ, big deal - what's the problem?" Some even tried to get us to believe that in the same act, Ms. Lewinski had had sex but he had not.

The fact is that lying about sex was critical to his election hopes. That's what inspired him and Hillary to appear on "60 Minutes" for their little show of solidarity after the Gennifer Flowers situation. That's why he regularly had his little photo ops in front of left-wing churches with a Bible in his hand, while truly religious men like Ronald Reagan quit going to avoid burdening the churches with the security issues. He knew very well that his pluralities against two of the least charismatic men the Republicans had ever run might not have held had more voters known what kind of man he really was, and thought that Monica's behavior was more than an essential social skill.

Then there was that "sheet-sniffer" Kenneth W. Starr. What were Starr's offenses? He *published* what Clinton *did*, in accordance with his mandate. Now tell me again, who's the perv? By Clinton's standards, we should have let the "In Cold Blood" killers go and locked up Truman Capote instead.

Well, let's try this one - lying about sex was heroic! He did it to save his family! He was Tom Sawyer, lying to save Becky Thatcher's delicate behind from old man Dobbins ("Oh Tom, how could you be so noble!"). Sorry pal, but you don't save your family by lying about being a slut, you save it by not being a slut in the first place.

But hey, maybe he and Hillary had an "understanding", and her reported reactions were for show. There's still something to object to. I'd think that even a cursory look at this woman's background would have screamed "Indiscreet!" But as Gary Aldrich had already informed us in a book the Clintons tried hard to suppress, he had abandoned normal FBI screening practices for his staffers. So he didn't even have access to an FBI file about her.

Saddest of all was watching the Democratic Party play along with it. What a !@#$!@ disgrace to see them lined up defending him, which should have demonstrated to even the most naive of us that the Democratic Party abandoned all pretense that it was about anything but its own propagation.

Look, I'm no Hillary fan. I could feel sorry for her husband whoever he was, and if he had taken his medicine like a man I could have mellowed out on this. But if he made a deal with the devil let him pay the price just like she does.

Likewise I'm no Al Gore fan, dating back well before his haunting of the White House. Since then things have only gotten worse. I could give Clinton and the cynical yet sane Dems who supported him some points for doing what they could to keep Gore out of the White House if they hadn't supported him in the subsequent election.

But the day a President's private affairs get in the way of discharging their duties as President, and he hijacks the mechanisms of govt to defend himself to the detriment of such things as national defense ("Bin Laden? Save it in case we need to push Monica off the front page") is the day the President should resign. Bill Clinton did not do that. He failed to live up to the standards set by Richard Nixon, and thus must be judged as a failure.

Eat like a Filipino

See what you're missing?

BALUT, for those still blissfully ignorant non-Pinoys out there, is a fertilized duck egg. It is commonly sold with salt in a piece of newspaper, much like English fish and chips, by street vendors usually after dark, presumably so you can't see how gross it is. It's meant to be an aphrodisiac, although I can't imagine anything more likely to dispel sexual desire than crunching on a partially-formed baby duck swimming in noxious fluid. The embryo in the egg comes in varying stages of development, but basically it is not considered macho to eat one
without fully discernable feathers, beak, and claws. Some say these crunchy bits are the best. Others prefer just to drink the so-called 'soup', the vile,pungent liquid that surrounds the aforementioned feathery fetus... excuse me, I have to go and throw up
now. I'll be back in a minute.

Sorry about that wanton culture-centric editorializing - I'm just quoting the post.

More here.