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Had a pretty lazy night just talking and watching tv with J-. We finally got to see a Sharks game together at the same time, which was nice. And I got to see Patty Marleau make one of the prettiest goals of his career. As J- described it, "That was a video game quality shot". Sadly the remainder of the game made me sigh a lot and then go back to playing Zenerchi rather than watch everything fall sadly apart.

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Mister Leonard Pierce at Sadly,No! goes undercover at CPAC and gives us a full report from the front lines:

What I am doing here is to separate bad from worse. The convention will be attended, largely, by two groups of people: the mainline Republican rump who think George W. Bush was, and is, doing a Brownian heck of a job, and the radical right who think that the problem with Jolly George is that he’s not heartlessly conservative enough (whether socially or economically is a matter for a whole ‘nother fistfight). To put it another way, here we have the people who look at the wreckage of the American 2000s and pronounce it a wonderful thing, and the people who look at it and say “Yeah, it’s pretty awful, but if we tried, we could make it a whole lot worse”.

Of course no undercover operation is complete without a secret identity!

“Leonard Pierce, American Milk Solids Council.”

“I’m sorry? What is that?”

“It’s an industry group for milk solids manufacturers. We lobby Washington lawmakers to lessen regulations on the export of milk solids. The problem is that the government blames us for the incompetence of African mothers.”

“That is so unfair.”

“Tell me about it.”

And his description of being in the same room, breathing the very same tainted air as the Dark Lord himself is priceless:

The crowd gives Dick a standing o, and, as a gang of bull-veined dudes in front of me start chanting “FOUR MORE YEARS!”, I get the sensation for the first time all day that I’m at something that could easily turn into a fascist rally. When the applause finally quells, Dick chuckles evilly. Can that be done? Is a chuckle even feasible as the delivery vector for evil? If it is, Dick Cheney is the man capable of pulling it off with finesse. I have to admit, the guy has a certain degree of charm, but it’s the same kind of charm that you might find in Stalin or Dracula: the easy charisma of a man who knows he can, with a wave of his hand, have you ground into paste.