The Stuff I Didn't Get To -- 12/12/08

Gingrich or polar bear; who's whiter?

-Headline of the day-
"Gingrich Offers To Be Rep.-Elect Cao’s Liaison To The African-American Community."

I'm sorry, what?

The man who beat the corrupt William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson -- of bribe money in the freezer fame -- is also the first Vietnamese-American ever elected to congress. In other words, he's not black. His district, however, is pretty solidly African-American and so -- despite the fact that he won -- people figure he's going to have trouble connecting with his voters.

So in steps the second whitest man in America -- after Mitt Romney -- to help Rep. Joseph Cao get the pulse of the African-American public.

Yo, yo, yo! Da Newtser's in da hizzle!

I give him ten minutes on the job before he lets fly a racist joke. (Think Progress)


-One last campaign screw-up, for old time's sake-
Most of the time, the McCain campaign seemed to be an experiment to see how badly you could screw things up without actually killing anyone. There was that weird green backdrop in New Orleans, the time he used a photo of Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, CA -- instead of Walter Reed Army Medical Center -- and, of course, the time a his economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, claimed that John McCain had practically invented the Blackberry.

The Blackberry makes another appearance in the annals of McCain goofs, with the campaign accidentally selling a few -- complete with confidential information -- as they ran their big McCain-Palin campaign clearance sale. The FOX affiliate in DC attended the fire sale and found a lot of nifty gizmos going fast. "The hottest item? Blackberry phones at $20 a piece," the report reads. "There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple...

"When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night. "

Says the McCain-Palin campaign, "[I]t was an unfortunate staff error and procedures are being put in place to ensure all information is secure." As always, Team McCain promises to shut the barn door after the horse got out.

McCain-Palin '08, still a well-oiled machine... (Fox 5)


-Bonus HotD-
"FEMA Ratchets Up the Warnings on... Social Networks?"

That's right, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has issued a press release telling everybody, "We Are At War With An Enemy That Wants To Destroy Our Way of Life!"

Well, the exclamation point's mine, but the rest is verbatim -- I just thought the bang was appropriate, given the "CRAP YOUR PANTS" tone of the headline. Besides, wouldn't that be "An Enemy Who Wants To Destroy Our Way of Life?"

Who is the enemy? Well, Facebook and MySpace, I guess. Turns out that terr'ists want to use social networks to "destroy our way of life and society through coordinated terrorist attacks followed by cyber attacks."

See, the problem is that federal employees might be a little chatty. "Federal employees are now using social networking tools on the job, raising new challenges that executives need to deal with immediately," the release states.

OK, I get it. Shut up about your super-secret spy-stuff on Twitter -- "OMG! This new deathray is teh shit!" But why does this have to be a big red-alert press release? Why can't it be a big red-alert internal memo? I mean, I don't know any super-secret spy-stuff.

Oh yeah, the headline - "We Are At War With An Enemy That Wants To Destroy Our Way of Life!" I guess in our new, No-Drama-Obama age, we're not nearly as freaked out as we should be. So any excuse to put out an "EVERYBODY PANIC!" headline is a good one.

Remember, if your pants are dry, you're not a real 'Merican. (MoJo Blog)