He’d also like Santy to bring him a pony

Bush refuses to criticize the pork-laden spending bill, but does say, “I hope the Congress will give me a line-item veto.” Moron Boy evidently doesn’t know that Congress can’t do that, that the last time they tried it was struck down by the Supreme Court (in 1998) as unconstitutional. How can he not know that?

What’s wrong with this picture: the WaPo buries the story about the alleged assassination attempt on Bush on p.24, in World in Brief. Dunno which page it’s on in the NYT, but they don’t seem to take the story seriously either, noting that the Colombians made the claim “without offering details or proof.”

The attempted coup plot in Equatorial Guinea, in which Margaret Thatcher’s idiot son Mark is implicated, was known in advance by the British and American governments, neither of which told the...whatever you call residents of Equatorial Guinea (2 stories in the Observer).

Michael Kinsley states the obvious, but he states it well: all the talk about “values” is a way of putting a thumb on the scale in favor of one’s own views by making it literally an act of bad taste to challenge them: “a value just seems inherently more compelling than a mere opinion. ... the holder of a value is held to be more sensitive to slights than the holder of an opinion. An opinion can’t just slug away at a value. It must be solicitous and understanding. A value may tackle an opinion, meanwhile, with no such constraint.”