He'd been running for ONE DAY, and already with the whining.

Yes, the electrons displaying Newt "I'm The GOP Visionary, If You Can Believe It" Gingrich's Tweet announcing his comic-relief candidacy for prez were still warm, and already the self-parodying Supremo of Do As I Say, Not As I Do...

A Facebook friend quoted a comment about the movie version of Atlas Shrugged: "I get it now -- this is the capitalist/atheist rapture story." And I wanted to smack my own face with a slab of halibut for not having thought of that myself -- which I would have, if...

I've been writing parodies professionally since 1974, and boy, are my arms tired. In fact I don't do it much any more -- not because it isn't fun, but because there are no longer magazines willing to pay bad, let alone good, money for such things.

Which is too bad,...

Fans of overheated melodrama, dorm-room philosophizing, relentless humorlessness, sex-as-rape, and crude science fiction--is that everybody?--rejoice: the movie of Atlas Shrugged does indeed exist, and is slated to explode in libertarian fabulosity at, or in, or all over, a theater near you.

Of course you can't wait. Who can? But we'll...

Remember Leave it to Beaver? Remember how young Theodore "The Beaver" Cleaver would get into scrapes, as big brother Wally teased and Mom June offered motherly comfort and Dad Ward taught valuable lessons?

I ask, because on January 2nd, N. Gregory Mankiw (a professor of Economics at Harvard)

Frank Rich, depressingly, notes:

Big money rains down on the "bottom up" Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies' names secret. Reporters at The Times and The Washington Post, among others, have...

Am I the only one who received this email yesterday?

E.W.

Dearest Most Beloved--

I am Mrs. Charity Heavensent Obolele, widow of the Hon. Napoleon Masterpiece Obolele, formerly Assistant to the Chief of Treasury of the Official Exchequer for Disbursement of Funds of the Country of NIGERIA. It...

Is it 5771 already? Well, look, time flies when you're having a great culture.

The arrival of the High Holy Days makes every Jew, across the entire spectrum from secular to frum (Yid., pious, observant), get a little more self-conscious and reflective. But what are they reflecting on?

I was going to write, "AMERICA IS UNDER ATTACK," and maybe throw up some exclamation points (!!) for effect.

Then I was going to list its attackers: the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, the lunatic blogosphere (Pamela Geller, etc.), the always-wrong blogosphere (The Corner, etc.), Mitch "The Smooth Man"...

Ladies and Gentlemen, Prof. Newt Gingrich :

You know, Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There's no reason for us to accept a...

Andrew McCarthy, one of the dependable frothers over at what experts call "American's Shittiest Website," has some indignant things to say about Islam and Islamists--and in so doing, he has deeply insulted both me and America.

How? In a minute. First, though, everyone wants to know:...

Suddenly everyone is wondering (not that it's any of our business) whether Chelsea Clinton is going to convert to Judaism prior to her wedding to NJB (Nice Jewish Boy) Marc Mezvinsky. Don't believe it? Give a kuk (take a look).

A blessing on their head, mazel tov, mazel...

So Joe McGinnis (The Selling of the President; Fatal Vision; Going to Extremes) has moved next door to Sarah Palin ("You betcha!"; "In what respect, Charlie?"; "All of them."). And Palin's first, instinctive, most characteristic response has been to leeringly imply the author's temptation to pedophilia, to send hubby over...

What's the expression? "In the kingdom of the psychotic, the merely crazy man is king." Something like that. Or maybe, "...the merely crazy man is relatively sane, although still arguably out of his fucking mind."

One is given to such thoughts -- profane thoughts, yes -- when one is exposed...

In 2004, you'll recall, I jumped up and down and railed about how "stupid" people were who couldn't see George W. Bush for the lying, snickering warmonger and enabler of cronyism and incompetence he so obviously, obviously was. Then, in 2008, who could forget the sight of me jumping up...

Dear Ms. Jackson,

I know you'll forgive me when I say that, because of my age (I'll be 112 years young next October), I wasn't watching Saturday Night Live much when you were on it. But I did see you in a few sketches back then, and I thought you...

New York Times right-wing Boy Wonder Ross Douthat has a sad because The Green Zone isn't mature enough to handle the tragedy of George W. Bush:

Americans believe in evil, but we're uncomfortable with tragedy. We accept that there are wicked people in the world, with malice in their hearts...

Recently, former Fox "News" anchor Brit Hume expressed concern about Tiger Woods, noting, "Whether he can recover as a person I think is a very open question." Then Hume offered this bit of heartfelt advice:

The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his...

The Corner, as my fellow intellectual masochists know, is the daily blog of the formerly-relevant National Review. Like the Jewish resorts in the Catskills--once the site of so much vitality and schpritzaturra, now mostly mouldering ruins in appalling states of neglect--this is where you go to wander around in a...

Peggy Noonan, in defiance of all normal expectations, keeps getting more embarrassing. It's one thing to think outside the box. When the box is your head, you get this:

It was a good thing, the Nobel Peace Prize. Every year the giving of it was a matter of note...