AddieStan

The American Prospect Online today offers a look at an arresting Web comic on the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Have you been tossing and turning at night, wondering the reason for the death of the portly religious-right front man, the Rev. Jerry Falwell , from cardiac arrest at the tender age of 73, or of former Southern Baptist Convention President Adrian Rogers , who died of colon cancer at the virtually adolescent age of 74? And what about the revelation of yet another anti-gay darling of the Republican religious set having been revealed as a practitioner of homosexual-like tendencies? [Sen. Larry Craig denies that he is gay, despite having fluttered his hankie at an undercover cop in the stall next to his in a men's room in Minnesota.] Well, Pastor Rick Scarborough has the answer, according to Right-Wing Watch , a blog of People for the American Way: In Isaiah 3, God pronounces nine things that happen to a nation that turns its back on God. Included in the list are such things as rampant homosexuality, (Is. 3:9); apathy among the citizenry, (vs. 6-7); crime (v.5); and immature leader...

American Prospect writing fellow Dana Goldstein has a fascinating post up at her personal blog on how Anne Rice -- she of Interview With a Vampire fame -- has endorsed Hillary Clinton , even though Rice herself has converted to Catholicism and become ardently anti-abortion. Figures that the purveyor of tales of the undead should become the defender of the unborn.

...dammit! Fredo footsoldiered its undoing; now it's time for Congress to seize back its constitutional powers from the executive branch -- by whatever means necessary. Your blogstress offers a prescription at The American Prospect Online. And while you're there, check out TAPPED to learn about the Fredo-Sanjaya connection .

White House photo by Chris Greenberg President George W. Bush and Mrs. Laura Bush sit with U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his wife, Rebecca, during a visit Sunday, Aug. 26, 2007, at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. Well, you can't say it's been a boring summer here in Our Nation's Capital, mes amis . New York may be empty while tout le monde vacays in the Hamptons, and the population of D.C. maybe reduced to the people who actually live here, but the White House keeps churnin' out the hits: the Libby pardon, the Rove resignation and, now, Fredo 's farewell. Over at his dashing, redesigned blog, the Media Consortium's Brian Beutler examines the irrelevance of the label "Washington insider" when assessing a bureaucrat's virtues. Alberto Gonzales , of course, was a Washington outsider, but too much of a parent-pleasing, White House insider to do his job properly. Your blogstress, however, cautions her devotees not to fall for ye...

Is it just your blogstress, or is anybody else sensing a big-ass shoe about to drop? On today's resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the New York Times has an early piece, posted here at MSNBC.

With Congress slated to return next week to the big, white building down the block from your blogstress's Oppo Factory, your cybertrix endeavors to suppress the the hope that Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont will actually make good on his to charge the president with contempt of Congress for his failure to comply with a Senate subpoena for documents related to the illegal NSA wiretapping program that Congress so cravenly passed earlier this month. The need for hope-suppression stems from the numerous disappointments your Webwench has suffered, longing for indignant Democrats to do more than express indignation at the flouting of the Constitution by the autocrats that inhabit the executive branch. But blogstress, they plead; we haven't the votes to save the Constitution! Saving the Constitution would divide the republic! (Note to Dems: absent a working Constitution, there is no republic.) Here's a suggestion from one Harvey Silverglate , who represented Mike Gravel , the...

You may recall that your blogstress has a veritable herd of brothers, several of whom have appeared on this site under assumed names. Your Webwench can't possibly understand why they would wish to obscure their blood connection to your cybertrix. Be that as it may, one bold soul, Timothy C. Stan , steps into the light to discuss the phenomenon of soundtrack music for the retail environment. The topic came up because of our common fondness for Talking Heads, and my horrified elation at finding myself serenaded, while shopping for canned goods (to have on hand in the event of an al Qaeda attack on Capitol Hill) at the local Giant Superstore, by David Byrne singing "Burning Down the House." Whatever happened to the Montivani Orchestra? The elation was short-lived: David Byrne was next replaced by Reba McEntyre , who sang, "The Angel in Your Arms This Morning (Is Gonna Be the Devil in Someone Else's Arms Tonight)". Tim, who has done serious career time in th...

Wonderful lede graf in today's Washington Post story by Peter Baker on the Bush administration's newly revealed manual for how to deal with protesters at presidential appearances: Not that they're worried or anything. But the White House evidently leaves little to chance when it comes to protests within eyesight of the president. As in, it doesn't want any. While your blogstress concedes that even before the hole in the ozone layer permitted the blogosphere to hover closer to earth, newswriting had become more colloquial and casual in tone, there are syntactical qualities here that tend to be more peculiar to bloggers. As in, people who blog. Oh, and the piece is a must-read. Not that I'm paranoid or anything.

Last week, he promised to go all elusive on us and everything, inviting us to call him Moby (although the whale's last name may prove a more apt moniker), today, your average Sunday-morning couch potato just couldn't get away from Karl Rove , even if she wanted to. (Click here to read, at The American Prospect Online, your Webwench's morning-after piece about Rove and the rightie who may have done him in.) There he was on "Meet the Press" telling David Gregory that he didn't have to testify before Congress because the nation's founders granted him executive privilege -- apparently through some sort of special dispensation: KARL ROVE: We have a constitutional separation of powers. The founders talk about this. They, they understood this issue, and they wanted to insulate the judicial, the executive and the legislative from each other in this respect. So, the founders are apparently talking to Karl Rove telling him that "separation of powers...

From a reader who simply calls himself "the man," comes this photo statement, which is one among many on the same visual theme that devotees can find at the Web site, Made You Think . Better yet, you can participate in the documentation of the turdification of the national discourse, mes amis . Write into the man, and he will send you little flags designed for adorning the scat of your choice. A sort of organic take on the Flat Stanley craze of some years ago. Your blogstress, being a paradoxical creature of both refined tastes and low humor, is quite charmed by the man's project. Though, by her lights, not even Flat Stanley can equal the titillation of Ukulele Boogaloo's fabukelous Ukulele World project, a sort of uke-porn meets travelogue thing.

At Pottersville , they're offering the "Top Ten Likeliest Items Left in Karl Rove's Desk Drawers," only three of which can we print on this dysfunctional-family-friendly blog: 10) Letter opener still caked with human brain matter. 9) 14 pages of emails from Mel Martinez at the RNC filled with jokes about Jerry Falwell’s death. 8) Expired contract with Satan with loopholes circled in red ink. Of course, we can't stop you from driving through Pottersville .

From the New York Times obituary by Peter Keepnews : Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940’s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners’ expectations, died early today in Manhattan. He was 83. [...] Mr. Roach was an innovator in other ways. In the late 1950s, he led a group that was among the first in jazz to regularly perform pieces in waltz time and other unusual meters in addition to the conventional 4/4. In the early 1960s, he was among the first to use jazz to address racial and political issues, with works like the album-length “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.” The "Freedom Now Suite" was a collaboration with, among others, his first wife, Abbey Lincoln, who has an extraordinary new record out. It's called "Abbey Sings Abbey," and it features fresh recordings of pieces penned by Lincoln herself. The instrumentation is acoustic, with a gypsy feel.

It would be one thing if this nasty, racist old man took his show over to satellite radio, where people have to pay to hear his crap, but to have him return to public airwaves -- a public trust, owned by toi et moi , is truly a slap in the face to women and Americans of African descent. At 12:30, Jennifer Pozner of Women in Media and News will appear on the Fox News Channel to argue against any deal that would return Imus to the airwaves. And check out Maretta J. Short , president of the New Jersey chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), who has been on the front lines of the Imus wars since the multimillionaire bully tried to demean the accomplishments of the women's basketball team at Rutgers , the state university of New Jersey. CLICK HERE TO HEAR MARETTA SHORT TAKE DOWN IMUS

Here's a snip from an interview Karl Rove gave to the McClatchy newspapers: Rove also expects congressional Democrats to continue efforts to get him to testify in an inquiry into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. "They're going to keep coming after me," Rove told McClatchy. "They've got a bunch of guys auditioning for the role of Captain Ahab, and I'm Moby Dick." Well, he is big and white.

He'll be too busy collecting oodles of dough for a book advance and corporate governance deals -- not to mention answering the calls speed-dialed from the Oval Office. From our long lost correspondent, The Internationalist , your blogstress received this fit of pique: Damn, if I have to hear more about the "genius" of Karl Rove, I am going to hack up a fur ball. The tale of how he saw the potential in the blue-jean-wearing "W" who came to meet him at Union Station -- the "glow" Karl saw was probably W's Jack & coke buzz. I would go on about Rove having "the math," but it just gives me a headache, reminding me of trying to find the square root for imaginary numbers. Watch out for fuzzy projectiles, mes amis .

Few are the pundits who find any virtue in the evolving 2008 schedule for the primaries and caucuses by which the presidential candidates of the two major political parties are chosen. Things were bad enough when, only recently, February 5, 2008, was dubbed "Tsunami Tuesday" or "Super Duper Tuesday," thanks to the scheduling of primaries by nearly all the powerhouse states on that day. Well, maybe not all. Today comes word from the great State of South Carolina that it will move its Republican primary up to January 19, which will likely to push Iowa to conduct its caucuses sometime around Christmas. The most eloquent explanation of this extreme climate change (written before these latest developments) that you will ever read, mes amis , is this April piece, " Pileup ," by The New Yorker 's Hendrik Hertzberg . After noting that the "Pileup" plan, however horrid, was born of a laudable impulse--that of wanting the contest in one's home...

It did not surprise your blogstress -- no, it truly did not -- that all of the Republicans on Capitol Hill, senators and House members alike, would vote to allow the president to wiretap (and otherwise unreasonably search and seize) anyone he damn well pleases. No, for those Republicans, your cybertrix offers her prayers to the Blessed Mother. But it will be a while before she can be quite so magnanimous toward the 57 Democrats who voted to do the same. For the record, here they are: U.S. Senate Evan Bayh (Indiana) Tom Carper (Delaware) Bob Casey (Pennsylvania) Kent Conrad (North Dakota) Dianne Feinstein (California) Daniel Inouye (Hawai‘i) Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota) Nancy Mary Landrieu (Louisiana) Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas) Claire McCaskill (Missouri) Barbara Mikulski (Maryland) Bill Nelson (Florida) Ben Nelson (Nebraska) Mark Pryor (Arkansas) Ken Salazar (Colorado) Jim Webb (Virginia) U.S. House of Representatives Jason Altmire (4th Pennsylvania) Melissa Bean (8th Illinois) Dan Bor...

CHICAGO--Your blogstress never meant to neglect her devotees; truly she did not, mes amis . It's just that, this time of year, there are so many conferences and so little time. Consequently, your cybertrix finds herself blogging instead for Real Women, Real Voices , the blog of the National Women's Editorial Forum , which has sent your Webwench to observe the haps at the Yearly Kos convention, the confab that bears the name of the giant, multi-voice blog known as Daily Kos . There, you may find the recent musings of your écrivaine , but clicking the links below. Prez Candidates Too Busy for Women Blogger Convention Make it to Where the Boy Bloggers Are Blogging While Female Feminist Bloggers Poised to Combine Resources and Strength