I’m Not Going to Do This Every Day

The excellent Jesse Ellison has a nice interview in Nwk with the author; I loved the book, and the interview is almost as good.

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Presenting Angry Journalist.com

Why Kansas can win, and why Carolina probably will anyway

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George W. Bush gave a long speech at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base yesterday making his case, for, well, for following whatever his lead is in Iraq. On bit keeps bugging me:

As this debate unfolds, I ask people on both sides to keep an open mind, and to take a close look at the situation on the ground. Here is what one scholar and critic of the war recently wrote: “No one can spend some 10 days visiting the battlefields in Iraq without seeing major progress in every area. If the United States provides sustained support to the Iraqi government — in security, governance, and development — there is now a very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state.”

And….that’s it. No mention of who this “scholar and critic of the war” is. Who is this person? Fred Kaplan? I kinda doubt it’s him. Dick Cheney? Some 5th Grader in Houston? A product of the fertile mind of a Bush speechwriter? Also, no mention of whether the “critic of the war” quoted had actually been to Iraq recently, or had just been reading Bush Administration press releases.

Please, W. At least give us a little effort here…

This is the first graf of Joel Stein’s new Joe Francis profile in GQ :

The first time I wrote about Joe Francis was six years ago; I rode with him on the Girls Gone Wild tour bus, where we watched a woman spread-eagle on a bunk bed and writhe for a video crew. At one point, Francis sent me to fill a Mike’s Hard Lemonade bottle with water, which the woman poured on her breasts before shoving the bottle inside her. When the woman’s cell phone rang, Francis grabbed it and asked whose number it was, and when she said that it was her boyfriend, his eyes went manic. He flipped it open, told the guy that he was the owner of Girls Gone Wild and was enjoying watching the dude’s girlfriend use a bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade as a sex device. He was barely looking at the woman. Francis’s real passion is dominating other men.

And this is the opening of Claire Hoffman’s excellent LA Times piece on the same subject from 2006:

Joe Francis, the founder of the “Girls Gone Wild” empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He’s pushing himself against me, shouting: “This is what they did to me in Panama City!”

It’s after 3 a.m. and we’re in a parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching this, this me-pinned-and-helpless thing.

Francis isn’t laughing.

He has turned on me, and I don’t know why. He’s going on and on about Panama City Beach, the spring break spot in northern Florida where Bay County sheriff’s deputies arrested him three years ago on charges of racketeering, drug trafficking and promoting the sexual performance of a child. As he yells, I wonder if this is a flashback, or if he’s punishing me for being the only blond in sight who’s not wearing a thong. This much is certain: He’s got at least 80 pounds on me and I’m thinking he’s about to break my left arm. My eyes start to stream tears.

More from our Nwk blog on the NCAA men’s basketball tournament

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A nice bit on Slate’s XX factor (an entirely unrelated aside: visually, ‘XX factor’ reads to me like a porn blog, or a blog about really large clothing. I know blog names are hard to come up with (see, for instance, the lame name of this site), but really, Slate, you’re being too clever by half with this one) about Mike Huckabee’s gracious response to Obama’s race speech:

On Obama’s speech:

… I think that, you know, Obama has handled this about as well as anybody could. And I agree, it’s a very historic speech. … And I thought he handled it very, very well.

And on the Rev. Wright:

… One other thing I think we’ve got to remember: As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, “That’s a terrible statement,” I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I’m going to be probably the only conservative in America who’s going to say something like this, but I’m just telling you: We’ve got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, “You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus.” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would, too. I probably would, too. In fact, I may have had a more, more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Funny how you don’t see Mark Penn or Howard Wolfson or Hillary Clinton saying things like that.

True. Though to be fair, Mike Huckabee isn’t running against Obama, so he can afford to be gracious. Read more XX factor here.

Today’s post from the Nwk NCAA blog:

Speaking of omens, did either of you see the latest bit of statistical analysis from Bill James? Over in the Web pages of our corporate sibling, Slate, Mr. Sabermetrics says that 40 years of witnessing the University of Kansas blow out opponents at Allen Fieldhouse left him wondering, basically, at what point on the clock does it become impossible for the losing team to come back? (The subtext here: How much do the Jayhawks have to be up by in the second half before it’s safe to bail early and get a head start on the crowds? (Lawrence traffic is murder on game days)). The piece comes with a nifty lead calculator (though: no widget? Basketball fans everywhere could use one of these for their Blackberries); just input the lead, time left to play and which team has the ball, and voilà! You get the chances that your lead is safe. According to James, as far has he’s been able to tell, no team has ever lost after having what the calculator says is a safe lead.

comes from Alex Balk, who responds to Susannah Breslin’s fine bit for my corporate lord and master with this:

I was reading Susannah Breslin’s great piece on why guys fuck whores, and this jumped out at me:

Often these guys aren’t just looking for sex. Many are depressed or stressed, lonely or bored, looking for intimacy or a connection, no matter how transient, no matter the cost. One john who was rejected on a regular basis in the dating scene wrote that, in contrast to the women he met at bars, prostitutes saw him as “a normal and charming guy.”

It’s hard not to read that and just be simply heartbroken. The idea that a fellow human being feels so rejected, so unwantable, that he needs to pay someone to simulate an interest in him makes me want to cry. There are a lot of terrible things in this world, but for whatever reason, the idea of loneliness is the one that makes me the saddest.On the other hand, what do I know? The guy could be a real dick. Isn’t it more likely that he’s actually one of these jackasses who won’t let a couple of girls get a drink after work without asking them whether or not he should buy a wallaby? But then it’s just as easy to turn that one back around: Maybe the guy’s that way because he is so cripplingly lonely and sad and awkward and that’s what he thinks is somehow going to help him get that spark, make that connection he so desperately craves.

I guess what I’m saying—or not saying—is who the hell knows why we do what we do?

This is so true. I mean, for instance, who the hell knows why anybody reads David Brooks’s incomprehensible cries for help? Yet, somehow I can’t look away…

But I digress. Balk’s bit really is very nice; read the whole thing here.

The Pentagon is suddenly less interested in publicizing an internal study that found no evidence of a direct link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Hmm.