NSA whistleblower on Olbermann says the Bush administration was systematically spying on journalists.

A slightly revised panel from last summer. Original joke (c)(tm) Jon Schwartz.

I was walkin’ down the street
In the town where I was born
I was movin’ to a beat
That I’d never felt before
So I opened up my eyes
And I took a look around
I saw it written ‘cross the sky
The revolution starts now
Yeah, the revolution starts now

The revolution starts now
When you rise above your fear
And tear the walls around you down
The revolution starts here
Where you work and where you play
Where you lay your money down
What you do and what you say
The revolution starts now
Yeah the revolution starts now

Yeah the revolution starts now
In your own backyard
In your own hometown
So what you doin’ standin’ around?
Just follow your heart
The revolution starts now

Last night I had a dream
That the world had turned around
And all our hopes had come to be
And the people gathered ‘round
They all brought what they could bring
And nobody went without
And I learned a song to sing
The revolution starts now

When you have able news on in the background all day, you hear them cycle through the same news stories repeatedly. But even at that, how many times does the world really need to be told that Michelle Obama hasn’t decided what to wear tomorrow?

Meanwhile on right wing talk radio: boy, does Limbaugh sound bitter and alienated. It’s really somewhat stunning, how quickly the zeitgeist has shifted.

… and: it’s the first episode of Glenn Beck’s new show on Fox … and gosh, he is just awful on live tv …

I have nothing profound to add, that a thousand other people haven’t already said in the last hour alone. It just seems strange not to acknowledge the moment.

Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely anything—just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts— along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.

Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.

I’ve been unhealthily obsessed with Thomas Friedman for more than a decade now. For most of that time, I just thought he was funny. And admittedly, what I thought was funniest about him was the kind of stuff that only another writer would really care about—in particular his tortured use of the English language. Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying—and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.

Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging.When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.

More!

Wonder how much damage Bush can still do.

So I’m reading a book about writing by Russell T. Davies, the showrunner for the new Doctor Who series. It’s in the form of a year-long email exchange between Davies and a journalist, following the creation of a season of Doctor Who from start to finish. Might not make as much sense if you’ve never seen the show, but it’s full of insight and angst about the writing process, universal stuff in which any creative person will immediately see their own experience reflected.

More to the point: on maybe the third page in after you get past the foreword and the intro and so on, there’s this little bit:

Anyway I’m off to bed. Not because I’m tired, but because I’m reading a brilliant book, Prisoner of Trebekestan. The Trebek is Alex Trebek, who’s presented the US quiz show Jeopardy for over 20 years. It’s the story of a man who dedicated his life to getting on the show. It’s so brilliant and so funny and even heartbreaking in small and beautiful ways. A man who’s devoted to telly. No wonder I like it.