Freaky Thursday Round-Up

Wonkette has the right response to this bass-ackwards world we currently inhabit: blog only while drunk. But since we've been snowed-in for -- what? -- weeks and can't get to the booze store, and so far the ABC boys won't make home deliveries, not even for ready cash, we have to face life's bizarre developments unfortified.

1. Hillary, triangulating. The former First Lady, current junior senator from New York, and candidate for president in 2008 is rediscovering how important God is in her life. While I generally applaud magnificently over-the-top examples of public hypocrisy ... I need alcohol to swallow this particular load.

2. Dear Tasmanian Devil and part-time senator from West Virginia Robert C. Byrd apparently did the opposite of Hillary's triangulation yesterday and implied that the Republican national leadership is a bunch of Nazis. Senator Byrd, whom I used to lampoon when he was chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee for hauling off huge chunks of the federal bureaucracy to West Virginia, has been one of the few Democrats in the Senate to stand up to the Bush steamroller. He was righteous against this war. And he was righteous on Tuesday, evidently, decrying the "nuclear option" the Republicans say they're prepared to use to shut down Democratic filibustering. Judging from the horrified gasps from the Right-Wing Gasbags ("Did you hear that! He called us Nazis!"), Byrd connected. (I was trying to melt snow-water yesterday over a pitiful campfire of broken chair legs when I saw that born-again paragon Bob Novak replaying parts of the Byrd rant, apparently so that viewers of CNN would get the impression that there was actually a human being somewhere more odious than Bob Novak.)

3. Yesterday, El Presidente's new CIA director, Porter Goss, said he was overworked, overwhelmed, and confused by his new job. Too much to do, he whined. Can't keep up, he implied. It's harrrrd, he said, imitating his boss. All by way of reassuring us, evidently, that our national security is in very good hands.

4. There's unrest among faculty members at the Chapel Hill campus of UNC, over a proposed gift of $14 million from the John William Pope Foundation to set up a new program in "Western cultures" (read: dead white males and their products). The Pope family has been prominent in right-wing Republican politics in the state, and Pope Foundation offshoot, the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, has made news attacking the pinko-Commies on the UNC faculty, attacking women's studies classes, making a federal case out of UNC freshmen's reading of a book on the Koran, and other witch-hunting activities. Clearly, the administration at UNC wants their mitts on the $14 mil and are apparently willing to do what the Pope Foundation tells 'em to do to get the money. The Pope people want an escape clause that says they can withdraw the money after five years, just to keep the heat on. And at least some of the faculty -- at least the few who are paying attention -- justifiably smell a rat.

(The UNC uproar bears a resemblance to an effort a few years ago by a prominent ASU trustee to give a far smaller amount to set up an Ayn Rand Institute for the Advancement of Objectivism on the ASU campus, and clearly at that time, the ASU administration found the cash just too enticing, until a few heroic faculty members started looking into the Ayn Rand Institute. Challenged, the ASU top dog turned down the money.)

5. On Tuesday, in a city-wide primary for city council seats, the voters of Topeka, Kansas, soundly defeated an anti-gay initiative on the ballot along with anti-gay candidate Jael Phelps, a member of Westboro Baptist Church (most famous for conducting notorious "God Hates Fags" picketing at funerals). Phelps was running in the primary against Topeka's lone openly gay city council member, incumbent Tiffany Muller. Not only did the voters of Topeka reject anti-homosexual bigotry, the issues in the election brought out the largest number of voters in any city election since 1971. So, whatever's "the matter" with Kansas is not the matter with Topeka!