farewell mother's cookies

let's hope they survive to make yummy yogurt-covered animal cookies another day.

back on topps

how cool is this: a funny web show about the guys who run the topps baseball card company.

journalists on journalism

I've been around journalists my entire life, since I was a little kid, and I haven't met more than five in three-plus decades who wouldn't literally shit from shame before daring to say that their job had anything to do with truth or informing the public. Everyone in the commercial media, and that includes Hitchens, knows what his real job is: feeding the monkey. We are professional space-fillers, frivolously tossing content-pebbles in an ever-widening canyon of demand, cranking out one silly pack-mule after another for toothpaste and sneaker ads to ride on straight into the brains of the stupefied public.

Matt Taibbi

This was written in the aftermath of the journalism world's regret that it had been duped by the Bush Administration's positioning of the invasion of Iraq. Even now, it's an acrid take on the tenuous nature of objectivity in professional journalism. Yay for *unprofessional* journalism.

AP smacks down Palin

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Less than a week after balking at the Alaska
Legislature's investigation into her alleged abuse of power, Gov. Sarah
Palin on Monday indicated she will cooperate with a separate probe run
by people she can fire.

AP, via Gawker

mccain no longer a maverick, now just another politician

McCain's persistence in pushing dubious claims is all the more
notable because many political insiders consider him one of the
greatest living victims of underhanded campaigning. Locked in a tight
race with George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in
2000, McCain was rocked in South Carolina by a whisper campaign
claiming he had fathered an illegitimate black child and was mentally
unstable.

Shaken by the experience, McCain denounced
less-than-truthful campaigning. Vowing to live up to his "straight
talk" motto, he apologized for his reluctance to criticize the flying
of the Confederate flag at South Carolina's state Capitol in a bid for
votes. When the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacked the
military record of Democrat and fellow Navy officer John Kerry in 2004,
McCain called the ads "dishonest and dishonorable."

Now, top aides to McCain include Steve Schmidt, who has close ties to Karl Rove, Bush's premier political adviser in 2000.

AP

mccain was wrong on iraq