I think Paris Hilton just solved the energy crisis. I will now go into my room, get back into bed, and hope I wake up from this strange, strange dream.

I remember when we were kids, and we were losing a game of four square, the sun would conveniently be in our eyes. That’s why we lost. It wasn’t because we sucked.

Anyone notice how Hurricane Gustav has conveniently prevented George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the two least popular men in the Republican Party (if not the country), from speaking at the Republican Convention today? If they were anyone else, I might suspect they were exploiting a disaster for political purposes. But since these people have never done anything like that before, I’m sure they only have the interests of the citizens of New Orleans at heart. Thank God.

**UPDATE– Since the hurricane failed to deliver the blow the Media had hoped for (CNN’s now calling themselves the “election center” again, after being the “hurricane center” just yesterday), Bush is going to have to speak today (Tuesday). This reminds me of the times in the Eighties when I was supposed to do homework but got sidetracked by Robotech and He-Man. Then, of course, I had to ride my bike around the block a few times before dinner. And after dinner, there was always Three’s Company or the Cosby Show. Then, probably because of the bike riding, I was tired. Who could blame me? In the midst of self-hate and panic the next morning, I would sometimes see rainclouds gathering beyond the avocado tree in our backyard. I would pray for a hurricane or a twister to cause massive carnage and destruction so I wouldn’t have to face an angry teacher. But since this was Los Angeles, I never had that kind of luck. I always had to own up to my mistakes. But I always had a two hour school bus-ride to either do my homework or (almost as often) to think up a good excuse.

Maybe when he speaks at the convention (well, not really AT the convention, he’ll be putting in a brief cameo on video from the White House) Bush will offer one hell of an excuse tonight for the last eight years. One we haven’t already heard a thousand times, I mean.

The talking heads on my tv are telling me Sarah Palin was very funny last night, and I have to agree. The funniest line in Palin’s speech was when she said something like “Let me tell you exactly what the mayor of a small town does,” and then she didn’t.

How else to explain these unexpectedly cruel “gotcha” questions?

Never before have I been so pissed about my website being down. Yesterday, when I made my usual rounds of the Net’s preeminent hate sites, I came across a huge (HUGE) headline on the Drudge Report. Apparently a McCain volunteer had been viciously “mutilated.” She was a 20 year-old white girl, brutally attacked by a huge, dark skinned (of course) black man. He mugged her, and when he saw her McCain bumper sticker he flew into a rage, held her down, punched her, kicked her over and over again, and then carved a “B” (for “Barack”) into her face, to “teach her a lesson.”

 I’d heard this story before. We all have. Countless times. Only sometimes it’s a young white mother whose kids were stolen by a large black man (only later come to find out she was a little bit off in the details: her kids were actually sitting at the bottom of a lake where she’d put them days earlier).

I try to suspend my cynicism when I hear about things like this, because these sorts of attacks do occasionally happen. Thugs and monsters come in all colors, creeds, and shoe sizes. But then I got to the part of the article where it said she hadn’t gone to the hospital. And the part where her friend drove her around for a while until they found the place where the attack supposedly occurred. And the part where her photograph showed the “B” carved BACKWARD in her cheek, as if whoever had done it had been looking in a mirror.

But my website was down, so I couldn’t point out any of this. So I went to sleep, feeling 100% sure the hoax would be uncovered by morning. And sure enough it was. She made it up. This 20 year-old College Republican member from Texas, Ashley Todd, made the whole thing up. Reality wasn’t helping out in the whole “Obama and his supporters are scary, dangerous traitors” routine, so she had to do something. And who can blame her? She was raised in an era where her favorite party made a practice of fabricating their own facts when the real ones weren’t advantageous for them.

But at least she could’ve carved the “B” foreward. I hope that “B” she’s going to be carrying around for the rest of her life is a scarlet letter that’ll remind her, from now on, not to be such a moron.

On the bright side, when she’s out of jail, she’s got quite a career ahead of her in the Republican Party.

Chris Matthews has been increasingly willing to call Republican politicians out on their childish attempt to rename the opposition party. I take credit for this. I didn’t hear a single Media personality even mention this pathetic trend until my 2007 cartoon on the topic ran in the Washington Post (& everywhere else). Oh, and some other obscure comic called “Doonesbury” (you’ve probably never heard of it) may have also run a similar cartoon on the very same day as mine.

I subscribe to about a dozen left-wing RSS feeds, but I also subscribe to at least as many right wing newsletters. I want to know what everyone’s saying. And every week, I browse the right wing newsletters to get a snapshot of their state of mind. Or at least, a snapshot of the tactics someone’s trying to use to manipulate them. I want to see if the Republican chatter has turned away from nonsense and begun talking about issues that average Americans care about. I want to see whether they’ve come up with some way to appeal to voters who grew disgusted with Rove’s petty and destructive divide and conquer politics. I want to see if they’ve noticed the demographic shift in America and realized racist code-speak and xenophobia are bad long term strategies in a nation where whites will be a minority in just a few decades. I fired up my Mailplane app this morning and clicked on one of the right wing “Human Events” e-mails at random because I wanted to see if they’ve woken up.

“Dear Friend of the Constitution,

The biggest political cover up in American history
is taking place right before our eyes.

Worse than Watergate, Whitewatergate, or any of the other cover ups of previous administrations, is the question of whether Barack Hussein Obama is eligible to serve as President of the United States of America… OR, is he a FRAUD, a USURPER, a man with no legal authority to sit in the position that he now claims to hold?

Barack Obama could simply put the issue to rest right now by releasing his ACTUAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE! But he WON’T! Instead, he has had teams of attorneys all over the country, fighting “tooth and nail” to thwart the efforts of the United States Justice Foundation (USJF), and our allies in a number of states to compel him to produce an ACTUAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE and to prove that he is Constitutionally eligible to be President of the United States!”

…Guess not.

Dick Cheney just refuses to get off my TV. Apparently during the years 2001-2008, his secret undisclosed location was the year 2009.