The Truffle

I mean, I'd hate to be up there squirming in case someone in the press pool points out the ways Bush's antiterrorism policy just doesn't add up. Via Eschaton. Bwahahahahaaaaa!

While everyone else was obsessing over fratboy punk turned wanna be bad boy James Frey, I was following the JT LeRoy hoax with strange fascination. Leroy was supposed to be a fragile man-child author with a lurid hustler/drug addict/sexual abuse/insert-horrible-childhood-event-here past. His slender little works of fiction won him a cult audience and loads of celebrity friends, even though he was supposed to be reclusive, camera-shy, sick--oh, he had all sorts of excuses for not showing his face in public. And when he did, he wore a blond wig and sunglasses. For a shy, traumatized former teen hustler, LeRoy was quite the famewhore, dropping names of famous writers everywhere and schmoozing with actresses and rock stars. He even claimed to have impregnated Asia Argento, who's directing a movie based on one of his books. Well, now it seems that the name-dropping, celebrity-schmoozing cult author doesn't really exist. The books published under the JT LeRoy byline were in fac...

That's what Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, calls the now-infamous UN presentation. Raw Story has more.

The modeling agencies don't like their girls to be interested in tech stuff or intellectual stuff or anything that doesn't involve snorting coke and wearing clothes. Majikthese has more.

Because I've got some extra time on my hand, and because I've grown weary of the "liberal = boogeyman" meme that has, thankfully, passed its freshness expiration date, I've assembled some quotes that are supportive of, or at least sympathetic to, the word "liberal." As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality. --George Washington Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved. --Aristotle Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear. --William Gladstone The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them. --Mark Twain The essence of the Liberal outl...

I've been on a Kate Bush kick lately, what with her comeback, Aerial. Just bought Kate Bush Live at Hammersmith Odeon. Believe it or not, she's only toured once, in 1979. Sad, because she put on an amazing show. The production values are very 1970s, of course, and Kate is a young, sprightly 21-year-old, not the eccentric, complex, mature model of femininity she became in the mid-eighties. So there's a lot of Kate cavorting with mimes and dancers, performing material mostly from her first two albums. There are lots of costume changes: Kate in a trenchcoat and fedora for "Them Heavy People"; Kate in leather for "Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake"; Kate in a cowgirl catsuit for "James and the Cold Gun." Final song is "Wuthering Heights," her breakthrough hit. As the credits roll and she sings the final chorus, she collects an armful of roses from the audience and then, during the guitar solo, jumps up and down wildly, w...

You think the Bidens and Liebermans are insufferable? There's something much worse than a Vichy Dem, and that's a Vichy Republican. Take Christine "It's my party too wait for meeeeeeeeee!" Whitman. Whitman just got raked over the coals by a judge. I know what you're thinking--she's a Bushco official. This is news? More details here. A federal judge blasted former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman on Thursday for reassuring New Yorkers soon after the Sept. 11 attacks that it was safe to return to their homes and offices while toxic dust was polluting the neighborhood. U.S. District Judge Deborah A. Batts refused to grant Whitman immunity against a class-action lawsuit brought in 2004 by residents, students and workers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn who said they were exposed to hazardous materials from the destruction of the World Trade Center. "No reasonable person would have thought that telling thousands of people th...