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Tuesday, June 06, 2006

668 -- The Neighbor Of The Beast

It's funny how people, in their ennui, can take a numerical coincidence and find something portentious about it. On the other hand, some things -- Ann Coulter made an incredible ass of herself with Matt Lauer of all people, which may be the final nail in the sarcophagus from which she keeps escaping. I mean, when a slow pitch artist like Lauer can make you lose your cool, because he decided to flog you with your own quotes chastising 9/11 widows as opportunistic, that may just be an omen.

Enjoy retirement, Annie, it's coming sooner than you think. ¿Como se dice "first up against the wall" in Spanglish? I'd like to see Ann in a cell next to Ken Lay and his future Aryan Brotherhood husband, but I'll settle for her career to plummet just enough that she has to give Bill O'Reilly regular handjobs to get any facetime.

Let's see, what else happened today? I did my civic duty and voted in the primaries. I can understand the utter lack of interest though, except in the race for the Dukestir's seat, where the Republicans spent $4 million to hand the seat off to something called Brian Bilbray, who may not realize yet just how much corporate cock-gobbling $4 million entails. Consider: the seat is pretty staunchly GOP, and the Democrats nearly took it with half the money and an unknown candidate.

Anyway, they finally got them newfangled touch-screen machines up here in the sticks. Sequoias they were, not them Diebold Hackmaster 2000 pieces o' crap. Accurate, easy to use, and best of all, a paper receipt. Imagine that.

The only real contest of note in this area was statewide, the Dem primary runoff between Phil Angelides and Steve Westly. The two have run a fairly nasty, sniping campaign, for which I'm sure current guv'nah Gonad the Bavarian is immensely grateful. One hopes the two will be big enough tonight to patch things up, and join forces for the general campaign. Neither one generates kilowatts of excitement as of yet, but there's plenty of time. Whoever the winner is, he's got his work cut out for him; there's no shortage of goobers out in the sticks here who are still wowed by Schwarzenegger's past glories. It's hard to fault Ahnuld for taking advantage of that but still, you get the feeling that they'd vote for some American Idol castoff if he were running, just because they'd heard of him.

The main noteworthy thing about Angelides is that he rolled up a lot of union and political endorsements, having been part of the CA Dem machine for years (and I don't mean that disparagingly). He seems like a decent egg, a competent button-down technocrat. Unfortunately, the last guy like that got thrown out so we could hand the fucking state over to Kindergarten Cop. Westly seems to have a little more energy, a "new blood" attitude, even though he's been a pol for years as well. But because of his entrepreneurial background, it's much harder to pin him with any of the usual anti-business/pro-union bullshit that the CA GOP will most assuredly throw at their opponent.

I'm loath to pick one as "better" than the other; they both seem like decent, competent men. But Westly seems more electable, and has test-polled very well against Schwarzenegger. This is key, because despite the beating he took in the polls all last year, Arnold has drifted back up by simply staying out of the spotlight. Indeed, the only thing he's done publicly this year is had a couple of minor spats with Dear Leader, thus instantly increasing his favorability rating by not being seen as just another Bush/Cheney butt-boy. For an administration that refuses to deal with anything but butt-boys, that's something. It's going to be a very interesting campaign season here in the Golden State.

Finally, Satan's Day marks the passing of an r&b/classic rock legend, and a former distant cousin by marriage (seriously), Billy Preston. I never met him, but the mutual relatives always had great memories and love for him, as I recall, about what a great down-to-earth person he was. And he certainly left a wealth of great music over many years, which is a rare and wonderful thing.

So. The feared apocalypse did not come, though Coulter's appearance on the Today show may have been a harbinger of doom, a portent as one of the Four Horsemen (in Coulter's case, I'm guessing Famine or Pestilence, unless there's a Shrieking Harpy Cunt horseman). So perhaps it really was a once-in-a-lifetime day.

But then, aren't they all?

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