A crotchety old man was stuck in traffic and called 911 to complain: (Audio)

Operator: 911 state your emergency

Caller: It’s not an emergency but do you know why on one side at the damn drawbridge of 95 traffic is stopped for 15 minutes and yet traffic’s coming the other way?

Operator: Sir, are you calling 911 to complain about traffic? (pause)

Caller: “(Expletive) you.” (caller hangs up)

The dispatch office called back and it went to voicemail: (Audio)

Hi this is Joe McCain I can’t take this message now because I’m involved in a very … important political project… I hope on Nov. 4th we have elected John.

Nope, not a joke. This is John McCain’s brother tying up 911 because traffic is slow. For more fun listen (audio) to Joe McCain calling 911 back to complain about the message that was left on his phone. (Via Politico)

I had no idea that the McCains were trying to out Lee Camp our very own Lee Camp.

In a smoke-filled back room in an elite, moneyed private club on the East Coast, the following scenario is being discussed between two of the power elite’s more powerful elites. Let’s call them Dick Toole and Harry Johnson.

As Dick and Harry see it:

• The numbers have been crunched and the party’s McCain problem looks terminal. This presidential election, they conclude, can neither be won nor safely stolen. Full story »

By now I’m sure most of you have heard that Levi Stubbs, lead singer of The Four Tops, died last week. Bob Lefsetz has a nice remembrance of him.

And I have one, too.

Like Lefsetz, I was not into the Motown thing at first. I tolerated The Supremes, but I wasn’t into The Temptations. I wanted boys with guitars and dreams I felt connected to, not guys in tuxes doing silly/funky dance moves. Full story »

Men who commanded other men in the age of close-order battle often wrote of the tell-tale signs of a rout. It seems that, in watching the battle from afar, one could often see a line of men waver as if wind were blowing through wheat, and when that happened, absent a rally or reinforcement, it was usually just a short while before those men would break and run.  A battlefield commander would have to make a determination when he saw the waver:  Should he send reserves to that part of the battlefield, reinforcing the weakness and hoping for a victory on another part of the field, or should he withdraw, using the reserves to cover the retreat in good order, keeping as much of his army intact as possible to fight another day? Full story »

Bob Woodward in a Slate roundtable on the new film, W.:

I think one of the best scenes in the movie is when Bush makes it clear to Cheney that he’s the boss — that Cheney can push and argue and have his say, but Bush is the boss. … President Bush made these decisions on his own. The issue for history in the coming years and decades will be further examination of how Bush exercised that free will. Full story »

Freewriting, then, around some keywords: [sigh]

The fusion juice contusion
slams it together in song and inclusion
we join our hands in stark confusion

Reusing the poverty-stricken vows of
howitzers and butterflies
freebasing the verse reverse
like bass guitars with wings
(the bassist is racist? What the hell does that mean?) Full story »