hot town, summer in the city


Provence, Summer Heat, by Ian Elliot

* Top ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

"9. The Bush Administration

"I thought this was a joke when I first read it, but unfortunately it's all too true. Last week the National Journal published the salaries of 403 White House staffers, and Think Progress has found the four most overpaid:

"Deborah Nirmala Misir
Ethics Advisor
Salary: $114,688

"Erica M. Dornburg
Ethics Advisor
Salary: $100,547

"Stuart Baker
Director for Lessons Learned
Salary: $106,641

"Melissa M. Carson
Director of Fact Checking
Salary: $46,500

"Funny stuff, eh? It's hard to believe that there's a Director of Fact Checking, let alone a Director of Lessons Learned who gets paid $106,641 a year."

* The Rude Pundit:

"Ken Lay's Ashes:

"Already, just a week after his timely death, Ken Lay's corpse should be rotting in its grave. There was a good chance that insects would have already made their way in, soon to be hungrily burrowing into Ken Lay's flesh before it turned to jerky. His clogged arteries killed him, but they wouldn't have stopped the eggs from being laid in his body, from the worms and maggots disintegrating him, leaving him quite the opposite of the shell of a man he had become. Unfortunately, though, Ken Lay was cremated, his body boiled away and the bones crushed to make what we call 'ashes.'

"At his memorial service, Lay was compared, no shit, to JFK, Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr., and racist dragging victim James Byrd. Said the Reverend Doctor William Lawson, 'Ken Lay was neither black nor poor as James Byrd was. But I'm angry because he was the victim of a lynching.' Except, you know, without the ripping off of skin and limbs in an agonizingly painful act, and with luxury houses in Aspen. Oh, and apparently, Lay was crucified. Except, you know, without the whole nails going through his body aspect and with beluga caviar.

"And...you know what? Fuck it. The Rude Pundit was gonna go on a bit about what a wimpy piece of shit Ken Lay was, how everyone talking about what a great man he was sounded like the people who say that George Bush is very personable if you forget all about the whole 'destroying the nation' shit. But instead, let's be brief here: Fuck Ken Lay. Fucker got off easy. The Rude Pundit's sickened writing this and sickened by the idea of a memorial for Lay attended by a former President. The proper memorial service would have been to hand his corpse over to former Enron employees so they could rip it into pieces and burn it for fuel in their homes."

* From Harper's, August 2006:

-- Number of giant inflatable rats that U.S. unions have purchased to protest non-union projects: 285

-- Hours it takes for non-union laborers to make each rat: 50

-- Number of AK-47s that have gone missing after being sent by the Pentagon to Iraq last summer: 26,000

-- Amount of casino profits that the Pechanga, a California tribe, paid out last year to each of its adults: $290,000

-- Total number of days that the 2005-6 House of Representatives is scheduled to have met by the end of its term: 241

-- Last two-year term whose House met for fewer days: 1955-56

-- Number of day that the 1947-48s famous 'do-nothing Congress' met: 254

* "Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it." -- Colette