shelbinator.com

It’s been done before, but frankly, I didn’t like any of the existing mashups out there. So here’s mine.

Debate prep not goin’ so good for John McCain, but lucky for him there’s this economic crisis goin’ on.

I don’t have time for the chickensuit, but I have a few minutes for Photoshop.

At 10am CST, Sen. Joe Biden will be delivering an address on energy and climate security in Johnston, IA. Appropriately enough for an energy policy speech, he’ll be giving it at a gas station.

Inappropriately enough for anyone with an inner 12-year-old and the associated sense of humor, what appears to be quite the popular gas station & quick-mart chain in Iowa is Kum & Go. Quite the popular, dirty, anonymous, no-strings gas station.

I’m sorry, there’s just no way I can take that seriously. Larry Craig jokes aside, it’s not the kind of non-committal, kame & went kind of message I’d want to deliver in selecting a venue were I a second tier candidate poised to strike at the “inevitable” leader in the caucuses.

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Tags: navlopomo, navlopomo07

I want to talk to you about a problem.

A little problem we call ED.

ED is primarily a personal responsibility. But this is an American problem that affects us all. We are all responsible for our ED. And the future of our nation depends on whether we can come together to meet this challenge head on.

If you have ED or think you may have it, you are not alone. ED affects millions of people in the United States. But sometimes, the state of our ED makes it hard to, you know, finish the job. We hope that our presidential candidates will offer genuine leadership on ED rather than empty rhetoric and tell voters how they intend to strengthen America so we can handle ED appropriately. And you can do something about it.

Me, I got ED from an email. (Damn, you get one lousy debate press pass, and suddenly, your equipment is all junked up. With issue-PAC spam.)

Here is the latest news and information from the EDin08 Campaign. Below is the recent EDin08 Blog Posts, Press Releases, and Mentions in the Media, feel free to blog and post any of the information below. If you would like to not be on this Press List just email me and let me know.

We would also like to send you an EDin08 Tshirt.
Just let us know your Address and Shirt Size and well send one over.

Oh. Yeah. Right. Because what every thirty-something bachelor wants to wear around town is this t-shirt:

Now I love the education lobby, particularly for bringing me a Ghostbuster to give props to my candidate, but come on, even the anti-AIDS crowd has better, more fashionable marketing. I’m sorry, Cialis beat you to the acronym; get a new slogan for us to wear so we can, um, rise to the occasion.

And yes, for the record: the EDin08 education lobby publicity email tonight contained one split infinitive, one run-on sentence, one subject-predicate mismatch, and one missing apostrophe. They must be pretty hard up for communications volunteers.

Oh and hell yes I am still asking for a free shirt. This could be vlogging gold.

Senator Sam Brownback (hee hee!) is in the YouTube YouChoose spotlight this week, and the first thing we’ve learned from his rather topic-non-specific posting is that his internet staff needs to be more restrictive with the video response moderation. Presidential candidates with unmoderated commenting on their videos have been praised for their bravery and openness, and the more restrictive politicians frowned upon, butt ass we see here (hee hee!), video responses are a whole other story.

Next to the extremely unfunny Norma Lee Show’s reply (which, like her reply to me, is just some pre-loaded completely off-topic croonfest), we see the political asspirations (hee hee!) of one jrock6171, a young voter who’s obviously looking for a candidate she can get behind! Hee hee hee! </teenage-humor>

Any hapless Christian conservative fan of Brownback’s is just one “Adult content” warning away from committing surefire adultery with their eyes, as the crack-exposing, stretch-pant-wearing internet exotic dancer flaps her booty this way and that like a flag in a storm. Watch it wiggle, see it jiggle, come on Bill Cosby let’s get some puddin’ pops! And then we’ll make with the Hail Marys and extreme penitence.

Sadly, I was the first person to vote for her video at CommunityCounts. So much for democracy!

UPDATE: There’s a second racy thumbnail under our Republican friend’s video, this one with no intervening Mature Content warning as it’s just a couple of nice young ladies having an innocent pillowfight. New screengrab for posterior posterity.

Sooner or later the juvenile puns at Mark Foley’s expense are going to get old, but who am I to call time on such a fun game? I can’t help that this story’s got legs. Such strong, hot, lacrosse-hardened legs.

At Georgia Tech today, some administrators gave a presentation and panel discussion about the new/old/whatever speech policy on campus, inasmuch as the old-new rules, which apparently banned “intolerant” speech, were thrown out in court and we’ve gone back to some new-old rules, or something. The court decision came after a lawsuit was filed by a legal defense group that “protects” conservative Christian students from persecution on dirty liberal campuses, because this rampant persecution of the ruling majority has gone on long enough. College Republicans like Ruth Malhotra were incensed that the old-new speech policy would prevent her from talking crap about the evil gay-homosexuals who represent all that is wrong with our country, so they successfully sued for their First Amendment right to hate speech.

And you know what? Good on ‘er, mate. It doesn’t take a long-term reader of thissy here blog to guess that as much as a “girl” like Malhotra makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I see her, I wholeheartedly support her right to be as much of a bitch in public as I am on the internets. And in public. And at home, in the office, at the Vortex, and while sleeping. As uncomfortable as it may be for traditionally dicked-over persons like gays and blacks and whomever else Malhotra hates in that cold, black lump of coal she has under her severely underwhelming chest, I hold the freedom of speech in the highest regard and will go down fighting for it no matter what kind of crap you want to say. Otherwise, it’s a slippery slope down to the days when I myself can’t criticize this administration for making the world less safe for Americans nor poke fun at that frumpy chick with the bad skin and bitchy agenda. I don’t know if the university is going to set up some kind of ombudsman to handle cases where protected hate speech crosses over into all-out harassment or what; personally, I think we should just establish an Office of Crap Reflection, in which ideologically-segregated comedians and writers help the offended student(s) craft an equally obnoxious retort to the haters. Perhaps I’m being too hopeful.

So today, after this morning’s new-old-revised speech policy presentation, some gay-friendly group on campus set up a booth on the walkway where student groups do such things, and they offered pens and post-it notes for students to come up and share their thoughts on bulletin boards with different socio-political questions about the civil rights of gay people. Across the walkway, the College Republicans set up a table to mock the gay students, displaying a big sign that said “Traditional Marriage - Vote GOP” and handing out little discrimination leaflets. The only other table out on the walkway today, a little ways down, was some eastern philosophy book club with a very calm dude trying to Ommmmm his way into ignoring the cross-walkway vortex of animosity that was totally disrupting his Chi.

Now perhaps I’m just being a little sensitive — we liberals are well-known to be complete pussies — but seeing the in-your-face counterdisplay on the part of the College Republicans really drove home the fact that it’s not just that I disagree with a number of the tenets of the GOP, it’s that I really don’t like the way they’ve made being dickheads about it a fun and acceptable part of public discourse. Politics is such an ugly thing these days, and perhaps I’m being naive here but I’m going to go ahead and point a finger and say, “You started it.” I spent a lot of my early teen years listening, while on long summer drives to North Carolina with my parents, to Rush Limbaugh, about the only thing besides country music we could pick up consistently. I found it more amusing than blood-boiling at the time, because anything ranty appealed to my sick sense of humor and I was too young to really grasp (or care about) what I was hearing. But from Limbaugh to Hannity to O’Reilly to Savage, AM radio is just a historical record of how the Right took debate down the toilet. The Left had to go out and invent its own AM station just to keep up! I was hearing about “snot-nosed, bed-wetting liberals” on the air for years before anyone on the other side reached my radio with rants about “the Bush crime family.”

But I digress.

So Malhotra and her gang were out with their Righteous Christian Elephant sign across from the dirty queermos, and as I tried to slink back to my office with my fancy liberal coffee, one of them stuck a leaflet in my face and said with an inquisitive uptone, “Defend traditional marriage?”

I said, “What, you mean like with pages?” As if this idiot didn’t see this coming — how could he not? North Korea didn’t wipe our collective consciousness that fast — his jaw dropped a little and he just stared blankly at me. Shame on him, not having a comeback ready when trying to trot out the facade of morality only a week after we met Gram the One-Eyed Snake. If you’re gonna fight, fight smart, ’cause boy, I got 12 good years of being a dickhead on you, and a better education to boot.

How does Congressman Foley separate the church from the state?
With a crowbar!

Yeah, no, it doesn’t really work, does it? Damn. But hey, it makes one helluva copout:

CNN Breaking News — Former Rep. Mark Foley was molested as a teenager between the ages of 13 and 15 by a clergyman, his lawyer says.

Another faith-based initiative bites the dust.

If I know someone who once served as a Congressional page, am I in fact now morally obligated to begin sending him requests over AIM to take his shirt off? I really don’t see any other prudent course of action.

I said “action.”