We'll Suceed Unless We Quit

Some things I’d take the time to notice, were I able:

• Late news, yes, but I’m really happy about what my nation accomplished on Tuesday, November 7th. I’m less happy about the bad headcold I received after a long day of working as an election volunteer for the city. My kids have that cold now, so the spectre of 11/7/06 hangs over our head still. I hope we recover before the opposition party does.
• Our president, in his speech in Hanoi, suggested that the great lesson of our long and ultimately futile war in Vietnam was that we should stay in a long and (so far) futile war in Iraq.
• The counter-kinder-culture baby clothing available at http://www.babywit.com/. Whoever wants to buy my kids Billy Bragg T-shirts featuring the image of The Clash’s Joe Strummer can do so here. Also worth checking out, the “Color of Dissent” coloring book.
• Speaking of which, enjoy FEMA’s coloring book. What color is your hurricane?
• Television is really bad all of a sudden. Shows I was looking forward to watching, like “Studio 60” and “30 Rock” and “Six Degrees,” have been unwatchable (or nearly so, in “Studio 60”’s case). “Lost” has really slumped since late last season, particularly in killing off its 2nd most interesting character and in refusing to have any forward action thus far in Season Three.
• Fox News and at least one CNN anchor suggest that our fabuloso mid-term elections may cause terrorism and insurgency.
  

  JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: Well on the point that Michael Ware was making. That the people who are fomenting this kind of activity over there aren't stupid. They understand with the results of the U.S. midterm elections that there are a lot of unanswered questions in this country about what happens next. And they are going to use that opportunity to make hay while the sun shines if you pardon a kind of poor play on words. But our uncertainty and lack of direction at this moment simply creates another opportunity for the bad guys and they are taking full advantage of it.
  

  
  This reminds me of Stephen Colbert’s election night accusation that the Democrats had only been in power for 3 hours and already we’d become stuck in a quagmire in Iraq.
  Oh, and, um, terrorism/insurgency = making hay in the sun?
• I also loved how the Today show this morning tried to use the election for House majority leader as evidence of a dis-unified, disconnected Democratic party. If I had a time machine, I’d track down Will Rogers and make him understand that his quip about belonging to “no organized political party” would make life easy for hack journalists in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
• The local news channel, meanwhile, has a reporter circling sites of drunk driving accidents on a city map with the idea that then you can avoid those particular intersections and be safe from drunk drivers. There’s a name for the place where all the drunks live in the same area and go to the same tavern via the same roads. It’s called “college.”
  TV News: Is It Trying to Do Your Thinking For You? Find out at eleven.
• This adroit comment by Harry Shearer regarding O.J. Simpson’s upcoming Fox TV special entitled “If I Had Done It”: “It's a breathtaking use of the past subjunctive by a network that normally can barely manage the present tense.”
• Alan Kalter's Message To Britney Spears
• And more comics, sometime soonish.