SPITBULL

"He [Roberts] is a stealth candidate without a substantial public record," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. "He is strongly embraced by the ultra-right, which suggests they know something about his views on important issues that is not apparent to the public at large."

Subsequent research contradicted results of seven studies -- 16 percent -- and reported weaker results for seven others, an additional 16 percent. That means nearly one-third of the original results did not hold up, according to the study in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Once upon a time, the great god Zeus ordered the Hephaestus the craftsman to make the world's first woman. Hepaestus made Pandora, a lovely creation in the image of Aphrodite. The other gods gave Pandora gifts—Athena granted her life and a fab wardrobe, Aphrodite a beautiful smile and some bling, and Zeus gave her curiosity and a strange sealed jar which he warned her never to open. Then Zeus sent her down to earth to live among baseball players. Unable to control said curiosity, Pandora opened the jar and out swarmed terrible beasts named E-4, KL, GIDPwRISP, and Frank Thomas. As a curse from Zeus to humanity, poor Pandora had let out all the world's sucking. In penance, she spent the rest of her days as a Cubs fan.

A Letter To The Terrorists, From London

What the fuck do you think you're doing?

This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.

Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work.

All you've done is end some of our lives, and ruin some more. How is that going to help you? You don't get rewarded for this kind of crap.

And if, as your MO indicates, you're an al-Qaeda group, then you're out of your tiny minds.

Because if this is a message to Tony Blair, we've got news for you. We don't much like our government ourselves, or what they do in our name. But, listen very clearly. We'll deal with that ourselves. We're London, and we've got our own way of doing things, and it doesn't involve tossing bombs around where innocent people are going about their lives.

And that's because we're better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we're going to go about our lives. We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down the pub.

So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city.

NEW YORK—A U.S. Geological Survey expeditionary force announced Tuesday that it has discovered a previously unknown and unexplored land mass between the New York and California coasts known as the "Midwest."

"Believe it or not, this region may have things to offer us," said Jonathan Ogleby, a San Francisco-area marketing expert. "We could construct an airport there, a place where New Yorkers could switch planes on their way to California. We could stage revivals of old Broadway musicals there. Perhaps we could even one day conduct trade with the Midwesterners, offering them electronic devices in exchange for meats and agriculture."

Others, however, are not so optimistic about future relations. "We must remember that these people are not at all like us," Conde Nast publisher and Manhattan socialite Lucille Randolph Snowdon said. "They are crude and provincial, bewildered by our tall buildings and our art galleries, our books and our coffee shops. For an L.A. resident to attempt to interact with one of them as he or she would with, say, a Bostonian is ludicrous. It appears unlikely that we will ever be able to conduct a genuine exchange of ideas with them about anything, save perhaps television or 'the big game.'"

Embarrassing. Shocking. Outrageous.

Those were just a few of the printable adjectives used by bloggers, newspaper pundits and ordinary citizens to describe the first government shutdown in Minnesota's history.

• First, a visit to the little known Powerline blog for this doozy: "[The Democrats'] strategy was to refuse to agree on a budget, hold out until there was no alternative to a shutdown, and then blame Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty."
• Then, well-known media pundit Sisyphus at Nihilist in Golf Pants supplies two revealing explanations (out of the eleven offered) of why the Senate adjourned before a deal was reached: "legislating was cutting into their 'Real Life: Austin, Texas' viewing" and "depressed when they found out that despite the fact that they're senators, they won't be able to filibuster the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor's replacement."
• Fecke of the Blog of the Moderate Left is quoted blaming Minnesota's voters for the shutdown ("It's our fault, folks. If we want government to function smoothly, we should've voted straight-ticket all the way.") The article omits the post's (entitled "Shut 'Er Down") next sentence: "Of course, I've never cared much about a smoothly functioning government; I don't worry about the shutdown. They'll pass a budget soon enough."