Thanks to Wonkette for the tip-off.

This ad manages to screw the pooch in exactly the same ways that the Britney-Paris ad screwed it, but harder and deeper. It's a minute and fourteen seconds of purest fail. Watch it to the hilariously bitter end.

There was a recent diary by rennert expressing...well, disgust for the fact that John McCain is running a deceitful, sickening ad lying about Barack Obama and the visit to wounded soldiers in Germany.

But this whole incident shows how inept the McCain campaign is.

The last few weeks, the mainstream media has disgusted me with its utter disregard for substance. Last night, that digust hit a new peak. If it weren't for blogs, I would be lost - I can't imagine getting my news from Cable TV, and even newspapers are losing their last vestiges of trust. So I penned the following letter to

  As a Democrat Abroad, I've commented previously on the sorry state of our Foreign Service around the world.  I have a new "duh" moment, and need a bit of help!!  I'm looking for dirt on William Henry Harrison, possibly soon to be honored with the naming of a new Embassy building in Latin America.  History buffs and sleuths, time to get to work!

On Wednesday November 1, 2006 George W Bush voiced his strong support for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. In an effort to make this support clear a reporter asked whether Cheney and Rumsfeld would stay on until the end of the administration. And, George W Bush answered that they would. Today, one week later George W Bush announced the replacement of Donald Rumsfeld with Robert Gates.

I was listening to David Gergen give a talk to the World Affairs Council a few weeks ago. For those of you who do not know who David Gergen is, he is a former advisor to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He knows his stuff, and he knows people who know what is happening in the current Bush administration, even with their code of secrecy.

So, it was quite interesting to hear him tell us what we already know about Iraq in the light of someone who has been in these types of situations before. He could have told us about all the mistakes that the Bush administration has made, but he chose to tell us about "Plan B."

As grandiose as my distaste for President Bush and his policies may be, the last thing I want to happen is for Mr. Bush to be assassinated.

Someone on the White House staff doesn't appear to care too much about his security, however. The president's agenda was left in a garbage can and retrieved by a garbageman who happened to be an ex-con. It wasn't classified information, but it's certainly not the kind of intelligence that ought to be in wide circulation either.

Over the last three years political commentators have remarked that the United States has been loosing its moral authority. But, how did the United States come to posses this moral authority that it has somehow begun to loose? Why should other countries turn their heads and look to the United States for moral direction? What, besides a deep seated belief in the equivalence between moral superiority and patriotism would somehow give anyone the idea that the United States could lead with moral authority?

The problem with a one party system is that there is no accountability. During the Cold War the argument about the evils of Socialism or Communism were always tied to the fact that they only allowed one political party. The problem with a one party system was that there was a litmus test that one needed to pass in order to become a member of the party. However, members of the party could vote in Democratic elections for candidates that were all members of that party.

Well, America's great experiment with one party politics is underway. The same people that fought tooth and nail against Communism because of  "the lack of Democracy" are in power in essentially a one party system. And, thanks to Tom Delay and other Republican operatives they are using their power to make their stronghold on power stronger. When Tom Delay drew up his redistricting plans in Texas his objective was to create six new Republican seats in congress. This is obviously a blatant power grab. But not all these political actions are as obvious.

I've been working through Politics, Hendrik Hertzberg's nearly forty years of observations and arguments taken from the New Yorker, with great enthusiasm.  Each chapter provides an intimate glimpse into realms of American public life otherwise not available to the common reader. But The Child Monarch, the chapter containing his review and analysis of Ronald Reagan the man and the President, is strikingly relevant when compared against our current 'Monarch.'

It's been a REALLY LONG year for GEORGE DUBYA: Iraq, Plame, Sheehan, Iraq, Katrina, Chavez, Iraq, DeLay, Iraq, Frist, Abramoff, Iraq, Rove, Libby, Iraq, Torture, Miers, Iraq, Rendition, Iraq, NSA, Iraq and now BOLIVIA?!!