1. So the Rude Pundit was sent to the store yesterday around noon to buy a new turkey baster, the old one having been used the night before for unholy things that rendered it unusable for basting food. He headed over to one of the many open stores, since holidays are really only for the bourgeois, and he passed by a Best Buy lined with gates, ready for the Black Friday mobs of consumers. And there, at noon on Thanksgiving, were already several people camped out to be first into the store. They had a card table. He drove away, wondering what it would be like by midnight.
This was the line outside an outlet mall in Michigan. That's 10,000 people waiting. At 2 a.m.
Those are the spending hordes at a Target in Chicago. Notice how happy they seem. Flat screen TVs are like down comforters for the soul.
This is a shopping American shown on Britain's Sky News. This is why they hate us.
2. Isn't there a point where, when you lie about factual information in order to defame someone, you're actually liable for, you know, defamation? Ann Coulter, being presumptively a lawyer in her pre-"Lemme-scam-the-rubes-into-thinking-I-am-a-crraazzy-bitch" days, ought to be aware of such things. In her latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "a big, slow swallow of cold cow piss"), Coulter says of then Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius's response to a tornado that wiped out the town of Greensburg, KS, in May 2007, "[S]he had been partying at New Orleans' Jazzfest the day after the tornado hit." Which would really be an awful Bush-esque dereliction of duty, if it was true.
No, see, the "Sebelius partied" lie was put out by the Bush administration, speaking to columnist Bob Novak (currently starring in the hit game show in Hell titled, Whack This Pinata Made of Bob Novak's Nutsack), to cover up for the lack of National Guard equipment in Kansas. In fact, according to the Wichita Eagle newspaper, the tornado hit Friday night, when the Sebelius family was, indeed, in New Orleans, as they are every year for Jazz Fest, and she was back home by Saturday afternoon without having heard a single note.
So Coulter repeated a lie that had been shot down two years ago. To what purpose? To attack Sebelius for something she did as Secretary of HHS? You see, you might do that and then you'd be making a little sense but you wouldn't be Ann Coulter. She was making some point that Keith Olbermann was wrong about something. To do so by demonstrably, factually lying would seem to undermine, well, the entire goddamned thing. But, then again, facts are to Ann Coulter as mop water is to wicked witches.