YES YES YES

Under the strong leadership of God's President we've been safe for 7 years. But if we abandon God now, we could be hit again. Yes, we can vote for George W. Bush in 2008...

The important thing to understand about so-called "term limits" is that they are man's law, not God's Law. The God who parted the Red Sea is surely not worried about so-called "term limits"... Presidential term limits are not in the Bible...

Millions of partriotic (sic) Americans need to know that we can write in George Bush for president in 2008. Never underestimate the power of a bumper sticker to get the word out.

I love this country.

(Via.)

This Administration Is Over

On the Drudge Report right now:

"BUSH URGES PEOPLE TO EXERCISE"

In other news, the President also instructed Americans to eat their veggies, scrub behind their ears, and wait forty minutes after they eat before swimming.

Let's take another look at that picture:

Remember when Jimmy Carter suggested Americans put on sweaters to save on heating costs? This is approximately the same level of ineffectual ridiculousness. President Bush has officially become our grampa.

(Meanwhile, the people who actually govern are busy defying the will of Congress. It must be a little surreal to come into work at the White House these days; things are decaying around them like the Roman Empire on speed. Poor kids.)

Roundup -- So Close And Yet So Far

About this time in April at Harvard everything comes to a head. It dawns on you, and your TFs, that we have what -- five, six weeks left of classes? Holy shit. Crunch time. You expect the next 20 days or so to just rocket by in a barrage of papers and problem sets and Student Group Activities and housing lotteries and PANIC! But of course, time never goes slower than when you have lots of unpleasant crap to do, and you'll still spend what feels like most of the day watching asinine YouTube videos and weeping softly into your keyboard. The end result being, from now until reading period will feel like longer than the rest of the year combined. Hooray for college! Now look at this:

My favorite graph of all time. (Professor Pollkatz puts it together.) I love to show it to haters who claim that public opinion surveys are arbitrary or inaccurate -- TRY and tell me there's no science to that trend.

But the real insight here: look closely. The only periods post-9/11 where Bush approval has increased or levelled (other than the spikes for the invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam) were July-December 2002, June-December 2004, and June-October 2006, all of which contained intense electoral campaigning which put the GOP in a better light. (Clearly, by the end of the 06 cycle, Dem messaging had got through and negated that effect.) At all other times, Bush's approval has been constantly declining at a remarkably consistent rate, and it continues to today. Logically, then, one should not necessarily assume it's going to bottom out. We could potentially see a decline even further, below Nixon territory and into uncharted waters, within the next few months. Hypothetically: impeachment could be on the table, and more importantly it could be widely popular.

Anyway. Why dwell on the "public" and its silly "opinions"? We have more pressing roundup matters to attend to! Like:

--STUPID BULLSHIT! Yes, the White House claims that it has magically "lost" a jillion emails that might pertain to the fired attorneys, presumably while the I.T. guys were waxing out the Intertubes. Every commenter on Daily Kos immediately pointed out how patently ridiculous this is; even Patrick Leahy had the sense to describe it as a "dog ate my homework" excuse. (DKos's Kagro X went on to suggest that we start calling this scandal "DogAte." You know, like Watergate and Travelgate, except cleverer. Truly we live in the end times.) Up next: Alberto Gonzales gets "stuck in traffic" on the way to his Senate committee deposition and is never heard from again.

--On a happier note: warm welcome to Endria Richardson, making her blogdebut at Cambridge Common with some cool poetry. Looking forward to more!

--Read David Sirota on the so-called "labor shortage," which he argues is a fiction produced by business interests trying to justify outsourcing and keep costs under control -- meanwhile wages here continue to stagnate (and let's not even get into the ugly truth about disposable income and purchasing power). Our economy is in deep shit. (But hey, did you hear? That American Idol guy survived another round! BIG NEWS!)

--An unwitting RedState writer sums up the mentality of the entire conservative intellectual movement. Special treat for Garrett:

I was listening to the re-run of an obvious spinster-to-be named Jenny Ballantine on Rush Limbaugh's radio show as she was kvetching and whining in New Hampshire in front of the Edwards "Couple" and I thought of that flag with the snake that said "Don't Tread on Me." It's still on the license plate, if I'm not mistaken.

Whatever happened to the rock-ribbed New Englanders that Norman Rockwell immortalized back in the day when Life Magazine and Saturday Evening Post covers portrayed a different reality, one of a nation that worked out its difficulties through grit and gumption?

Yup. That'll solve our problems: grit and gumption. And we'll all wear an onion on our belt, 'cause it's the style at the time. Prohibition forever!

--Speaking of the olden days, Phyllis Schlafly is still alive and still writing op-eds about those darn feminists. Who'd have guessed?

--Have you been following the Michael Godelia story? Me neither. But kudos to Kameron Collins for handling it with such class. He's done the Harvard community a service.

--Mystery Pollster has a great look at some recent FOX polls that are insanely, ridiculously biased. We call them a "news" organization why?

--Best look yet at the New Populism, and how John Edwards fits into it. If I say it enough times maybe you guys will listen: this is how we win. "Edwards is a one-man 50-state strategy."

--If you'd like to be really disturbed, watch this British documentary on the Westboro Baptist Church (those people who protest soldiers' funerals). It's like a car accident, you can't tear your eyes away.

--MyDD's Matt Stoller, who has been strange and off-kilter lately, suddenly shouts out a wonderful and impassioned articulation of everything the New "Netroots" Left (or whatever we're called) stands for. Read it.

--Random Wikipedia Curiosity: "Erdős–Bacon number." Mathematicians apparently have lots of time on their hands.

--Band Madness's 4th round ends at 4:00, and Neil Young needs our help. He's down 400-some votes to Guns 'n' Roses. This cannot stand (I mean, "Sweet Child of Mine" is classic, but come on.) We can do it, liberals!

..AND that's all I got, save a closer; of all the tributes I've seen for the late Kurt Vonnegut -- who was one of my heroes, literary and otherwise -- James Wolcott's somehow seems to be the most appropriate.

But I can't say the atmosphere was any cheerier when I left. I was escorted down a corridor, a door opened, and standing there, waiting to enter, was Kurt Vonnegut, looking rumpled, baffled, and tired after his long inward journey through life. It was such a startling apparition--I had no idea Vonnegut had been booked and was taping immediately after me--that I couldn't even rustle up a hello, not that he seemed to notice. He was there to do his television duty, no more, no less. The look on his face so matched the mood in the studio that additional comment seemed superfluous. I wonder what he and Cavett chatted about during the commercial breaks, or if in lieu of small talk they sank into separate compartments of silence as the crew made busy little adjustments to the lights, sound levels, camera angles. It was all so long ago, sometime during the Age of Chivalry. Anyway, that's my non story about not meeting Kurt Vonnegut.

So it goes. This is an open thread.

The Bush Library: Too Close to Home

My "beloved Dallas" (as Markus called it) and specifically my neighborhood will likely be the home of the George W. Bush Library. Excuse me as I vomit.