Thanks for the table link, Hec. That's gorgeous.

My car is in the shop, and so far Geico has made it so I don't have to think much. Downside is I'm driving a Toyota Yaris, upside is it's not out of my pocket.

I'm just going to sulk and apply for jobs and watch lots of TV.

Christopher Buckley, in an exclusive for The Daily Beast, explains why he left The National Review, the magazine his father founded.

I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column, because of the experience of my colleague, the lovely Kathleen Parker. Kathleen had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleen’s mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster. I didn’t want to put NR in an awkward position.

Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it’s pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review—a friend of 30 years—emailed me that he thought my opinions “cretinous.” One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have “betrayed”—the b-word has been much used in all this—my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, “Cancel my subscription,” I was able to quote the title of my father’s last book, a delicious compendium of his NR “Notes and Asides”: Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.

...

My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, and if those were met by members of the other side rather than by his own camp, he said as much. My father was also unpredictable, which tends to keep things fresh and lively and on-their-feet. He came out for legalization of drugs once he decided that the war on drugs was largely counterproductive. Hardly a conservative position. Finally, and hardly least, he was fun. God, he was fun. He liked to mix it up.

...

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.

But the whole thing is good....

Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance.

THANK you!

I just had a hectic hour or so that I think (hope) cleared up my fuckup from earlier with the federal government. Fingers crossed!!

I think I just fell a little in love with Christopher Buckley.

Wow.

From Wonkette:

Oh god someone named a newborn “Sarah McCain Palin.” This baby will never stop crying — nor should it.

The source article: Baby named Sarah McCain Palin

A new father has secretly named his baby girl Sarah McCain Palin after the Republican ticket for president and vice president.

Mark Ciptak of Elizabethton put that name on the documents for the girl's birth certificate, ignoring the name Ava Grace, which he and his wife had picked earlier.

"I don't think she believes me yet," he told the Kingsport Times-News for a story to be published Tuesday. "It's going to take some more convincing."

Ciptak, a blood bank employee for the American Red Cross, said he named his third child after John McCain and Sarah Palin to "to get the word out" about the campaign.

"I took one for the cause," he said. "I can't give a lot of financial support for the (McCain/Palin) campaign. I do have a sign up in my yard, but I can do very little."

That's grounds for divorce.

The naming is grounds for divorce. The part where he did it behind the wife's back without telling her is grounds for more, let's say, personal punishment.

I'm sure that child is going to wish for something more dignified and reasonable, such as Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii.

Ciptak, a blood bank employee for the American Red Cross, said he named his third child after John McCain and Sarah Palin to "to get the word out" about the campaign.

Get a bumper sticker you freak.

divorce, sole custody, no parental visitation, and he should have to cover all future therapy costs - oh and the child re-named IMMEDIATELY.

Christopher Buckley

look - principles - I knew people still had them.