I was on Right Wing News just now looking for something crazy to blog about and, as always, the site didn’t let me down. I didn’t even have to spend so much as one milisecond examining any actual content because the banner ad at the top of the page did the trick:

Well well well, look who’s taking the handout now, white boy. Even though the ocean of red between this country’s left and right coast is seething with hatred for those who hail from south of the border, they wouldn’t be willing to fax their representative if the shit wasn’t free? I mean, are the Mexicans destroying our country or aren’t they?

This is like the people who put the yellow flag magnets on their cars. They love the troops but nobody wants to see a car with fucked up paint on the bumper.

I’m in Vermont until Wedensday, so here’s a list of things I won’t be doing the District of Columbia this weekend.

Friday

* Some asshole thinks he knows so much about how we pick candidates just because he’s a fucking neuroscientist. Drew Western will talk about his book The Political Brain. Free, 7pm at Politics & Prose. [P&P]

* Free show by Andy Zipf and the drinks are free if you can believe it though it might be some ploy to get you to buy pants. Free drinks from 9-10pm at Denim Bar at Pentagon Row. [Denim Bar]

* Casiotone for the Painfully Alone is a one-man band doing lofi shit on 80s keyboards. $8, 8pm at The Red and the Black. [TR&TB]

* They grow up so fast! Palace of Wonders opened a year ago and they’re having an anniversary party at which you can get drunk and experience a whole plethera of bizzare acts from burlesque to vaudeville to Western rope tricks. $15 advance, $20 at the door, 9pm at 1210 H Street NE. [Palace of Wonders]

Saturday

* The National Gallery is screening a couple of Hungarian films as part of its examination of war-era Europe. [NGA]

* Golem is one of the leading only klesmer punk bands. $10, 8:30pm at the Rock & Roll Hotel. [R&R Hotel]

* Boring Kitchen at Comet Ping Pong is sort of like hanging out in your friend’s basement when you were in middle school except there are some key differences. The basement wasn’t immacultely designed, you were significantly less drunk most of the time, there was no DJ and the pizza was from Dominos. Don’t forget to tip your tall, handsome, red-headed server. He’s my roommate. $5, 10pm at 5037 Connecticut Ave. [Comet]

* Lobster Boy isn’t just a burlesque performer - he’s become an institution. Join Lobs and all of his friends at their Tiki Party at the soon-to-be closed Warehouse Theater. $12, 11pm. [Lobster Boy]

Sunday

* Buster Keaton classic, “The Camera Man,” has Buster pretending to be something he’s not to win over a lady, sort of like when you take a date to see a classic movie. $9.25, 4pm at the AFI Silver Theatre. [AFI]

* Will Mullins and the Virgina Playboys are going to be playing classic bluegrass as part of the Folklife Festival. Free, 6pm at the Kennedy Center. [Kennedy Center]

* Thomas Mallon set his new novel Fellow Travelers in the McCarthy Era. His books are good supposedly and it might be worth it to hear him read from it. [P&P]

Mike looks almost like Dubs, if Dubs was a Jew.

There’s a rumor swirling that Bloomberg has been telling people he runs into into on the street that he doesn’t think Obama is up to the task of being president. This seems like a particularly hollow criticism of a presidential candidate - any presidential candidate - because experience doesn’t matter one millionth as much as just having good judgement. President Shit-for-brains is a good example of the former: he’s a total fucking moron and basically no experience governing anything -not only did he get elected president* twice, he didn’t seem to have a lick of trouble using his position to advance his nutcase agenda until he let an entire US city get washed into the sea. Bush’s judgement is legendarily terrible and that’s why he’ll be remembered as the biggest failure of the century. Contrarily, other shitty presidents like Reagan, Carter, Nixon, Johnson all had tons of experience and were all ran the gamet from useless or diasterously damaging. Bad judgement.

This comes a week or so after Bloomberg ended his flimsy affiliation with the Republican party renewing speculation that he’s running for president. I imagine this new comment about Obama is going to add fuel to the fire. But let’s get real here for a second. No way is Bloomberg actually running. The best analysis I’ve heard about what’s going on here came from Ken Rudin on the June 21 episode of It’s All Politics. Ken suggested that Bloomberg just wants to shake things up and get some press which may seem simplistic until you consider that that’s exactly what Al Gore has been doing for like 6 years and he’s sort of had an impact, kind of. I think Bloomberg sees an opportunity to influence an election in an important time without running what would surely be a costly but ultimately losing campaign. He can help shape the candidacies of front-runners from both parties without spending a dime or undergoing much scrutiny, you know, except from people like us.

* If you’re rolling your eyes saying that the first election was stolen please bare in mind that had it not been so obscenely close the Bush camp would have not been able to steal it.

The Internet is useful for a variety of things. You can sell your old CDs at eBay, or you can load up on free shit from Craigslist. Let’s face it, our generation’s personal economy and finances are interwoven with the World Wide Web. But there are certainly limits as to what you can do on the Internet, right?

Turns out there aren’t. How do we know this? Go to Help My Baby Live and you will find the story of a couple asking for $50,000 to raise a child or else they have an abortion. $50,000 or the fetus bites it.

It’s quite the plan, though. Think about the target demographic for this ploy. Even though the two proud parents contend that they aren’t pro-life, the obvious aim is to tug the heartstrings of the computer-literate Christian pro-lifers. Seems we’re not the only ones to catch on to this. An anonymous reader wrote:

The beauty of this scam is that Pro Lifers are so emotionally attached to this issue that they would rather take their chances losing a few bucks to a scam then think that it may be possible an asshole like you exists who weighs decisions like abortion on the outcome of an internet fundraiser.

It gets uglier, though. There are a fair share of people who don’t seem to really care for the Web site or its createors. “PENNYDETROIT4″ emphatically wrote:

IF U WANT GO AHEAD ABORT THE BABY GOD WILL JUDGE YOU SOME DAY FOR IT.AND WHEN YOU REALLY WANT A CHILD I PRAY THAT YOU DO NOT GET ONE YOU ARE LOW LIFE IN THIS WORLD MAYBE YOUR TWO MOMS SHOULD HAVE ABORTED YOUSE THEN YOU WOULD NOT BE HERE TRYING TO SCAM MONEY FROM PEOPLE.

Either way, something is working. As of June 28, they’ve raised $12,500, which isn’t too shabby. With 79 days left, the couple, who operate the Web site anonymously, is asking for donations in order to pay for child-rearing:

We’ve crunched some numbers, and we believe that, to really set ourselves up in a good environemnt for the baby, we need $50,000. That’ll give us the down payment on a decent house, get us a car that runs reliably, allow us to save away a little for the baby’s college fund, cover any medical bills (she’s uninsured), and give us a little buffer while she’s not working.

If you’re so inclined, you can check out more of the couple’s hate mail.

Featured Audio: “The Best Baby in the Universe” by Patton Oswalt(NSFW)

Multi-racial, opinionated and probably not going to bother voting

The New York Times is reporting that a new poll they conducted with CBS and MTV has found that young people, those between the ages of 17-29, are leaning heavily towards the left on almost all the issues. This may not come as a surprise to you since you’re probably between these ages yourself and not an idiot. Just to note though, four years ago the numbers weren’t quite like this. Young people were pretty much split between red and blue because apparently we’re just as easily bamboozled by President Numbnuts as anyone else is. But in any case, there is actually something sort of interesting about this new poll: The rest of the country feels almost exactly the same way as we do. Each answer is shown next to the answers given by the respondents from the “all ages” group, conducted last month. The 17-29 year-old group is indeed more liberal on practically every single question, but just barely. Five points, at the most, depending on the question.

Here are some examples: Of people between the ages of 17-29, 72% dissapprove of George W. Bush, which is the same number of people of all ages who dissapprove of him. 54% of young people think Congress is doing a shitty job while a mere 52% of all people think the same thing. 58% of young people have a favorable view of the Democratic Party while only 53% of everyone else has the same view, etc.

So, really the news here is that basically the entire country is pretty much fed up with the ass-backwards way the world is being run, but that’s hardly news at all. Top reporting, New York Times!

Full poll results [NYT]

Featured Song: “My Generation” by Patti Smith

To commemorate Apple and AT&T’s release of the iPhone, we here at CW are giving you the opportunity to decide the financial future of one our staff members:me. That’s right. You help decide whether or not my wallet takes the plunge and get an iPhone. For real. No, I’m not kidding.

If America (and our non-American readers; konichi-wa! or whatever) votes that I get one, you, dear reader, will get up-to-date coverage as to how this new piece of marvelous technology works. Or as in the case of most first generation Apple tech, doesn’t work. But who cares? It’s not your hard-earned money.

Interested? Do your democratic duty and vote.

The Supreme Court released a buzzkill of an opinion yesterday on the Morse v. Frederick free speech case. The trouble started in 2002, when the then-senior Jason Frederick was suspended for holding a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner at a school assembly in Juneau. But the Ed Rooney-esque actions of Principal Deborah Morse were just the start. Frederick’s mellow was ultimately harshed upon in a 5-4 majority decision from the Supremest of Courts that said his free speech was not violated in the suspension. But maybe they are right that the banner could have been disruptive to the educational environment, considering Alaska is ranked as the 46th dumbest state in the union. It gets better; Clarence Thomas even wrote a concurrent opinon in which he proposed overturning Tinker v. Des Moines, the foundation of students’ free speech jurisprudence. Bong hit banners are just a step away from black armbands.

Read the Post’s coverage here. They have to define what a bong is in the lead paragraph.