Finding One-Election-At-A-Time Inefficient, High Court Will Decide All Future Elections At Once

Or that's what the Times' headline should be, if they didn't need all that space for advertising. See It Now.

"The most pressing and unsettled questions in election law are those that concern the role of money, the role of race and the role of partisanship. The Supreme Court will take up all three this week."

Being how 'The Famous Linda G' chooses to lede this week's installment in "21st Century Practical Applications of Article III"

Mad as heck and considering maybe not taking it anymore

(Some may say that this fantastic monologue from Network might be included here as a preachy plagiaristic way of making some liberal-academic-elitist political point, but we include it for no other reason than that Ned Beatty is a great actor. Hear it here in mp3)

Beatty: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Finch: But why me?

Beatty: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Finch: I have seen the face of God.

Beatty: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

Eight: Damn that's a great movie.

That's some discovery. (No legalese pun intended.)

No need for our trademark snark here, this one's pretty much self-explanatory. Here's the headline: White House 'Finds' 250 E-mails in CIA-Leak Case.

See It Now.

Not every rumor in the story will pan out, in all likelihood; but this scoop, and others like it, are why J. Leopold won a 'Standy' at the end of last year.

--Coming tomorrow or the next day, (we at the Eight believe 'deadlines' are inhumane): Down on the Democrats: How the Dems' are getting kicked in the ass by their own Achilles' heel. --

Congressional Democrats: the Seattle Seahawks of Congress

Conventional wisdom (which is neither conventional nor wisdom,) says that the Democrats are either impotent or out of ideas, or afraid to start fights with GWB. Pundits all over the media spectrum are agog at how little pushback they see to Bush's flubs of the past year. Standing Eight has been reserving judgment on this question, hoping that some coherent message might soon emerge from the congressional minority that could propel them to majority status in one house this year. Well judgment is no longer reserved. Things could change, but CW looks to have been right.

We believe that this article (See It Now) detailing Harman and Dashcle's recent comments on the BushCo./NSA domestic spying program is a test balloon for a national Democratic position on the issue. And guess what? It's a nuanced position. They think the spying is "necessary," but that the president "exceeded his legal authority."

How did nuance work out for John Kerry 2 Novembers ago? I seem to remember it served him poorly among moderate voters. How often did we hear that he "voted for the 87 billion before he voted against it"

Well, here's a nuanced political statement that a lot of Americans may be making on Election Day this year, if a certain jackass-mascotted party doesn't get it's act together: "I actually considered voting for the Democrats, before I voted against them."

Same Post New Title: Cheney's Got a Gun

Q: What makes Bush's Chinese door blooper look like the Gettysburg address?
A: How about Cheney shooting a hunting partner in the face? Sound too good to be true? Then you haven't read today's WaPo, or probably any other paper. See It Now.

Since the guy was with the veep, we assume he'll be getting the very best of medical care, and the article makes it seem that he will in all likelihood be fine. In that spirit, let's place the over/under on the number of consecutive days that Letterman will joke about this in the monologue before skipping a day. Anyone? It's the monologue only, no desk chat, no audience games. And the offer is rescinded if the guy takes a turn for the worse; lowbrow is one thing, but tasteless quite another. One thing we will not do, rest well assured, is disappear this post down the memory hole.

Vox Populi, Vox Ignoramus ("The voice of the people is a voice that should be ignored")

Josh Marshall already linked to this, so you may have seen it. Oh, it also appeared in a newspaper called the Washington Post. You may remember the big Social Security plan Bush was going to sell to us all after he won his 'mandate' in '04? The plan that got less popular among the public with every public stop he made to tout it? The plan hat was declared dead by death-declarers in both parties?

Well Bush has put every last drop of it in this year's budget proposal. See It Now. No fanfare, no goodwill tour, no SOTU mention, just slide it in and hope no one reads the bill. How unlike him. And we would call it underhanded and disgusting, but of course the real problem is not him doing it, it's that it could work.

An interesting fact to us is that Bush and Co. seem to want to do progressive indexation, which is, don't you know, 'practically communist,' to your core conservative types. We're pretty sure it either wasn't explained to Bush properly, or if it was that there is some angle for him in it somewhere. Maybe if he gets it passed he'll cause an inflation crisis and reap the higher benefits.

At some point we're just going to have to knuckle under, and change the 8th grade civics class lesson about "how a bill becomes a law." e.g.:

"Well, first some dirty lobbyist sees a moneymaking opportunity, then he bribes a few key congressmen, they do a couple dirty backroom deals, and then they slide it into a bigger bill late at night so no one will ever read it, and they sleep better than you do, because they have no souls. And that's how a bill becomes a law."

"But where do the bigger bills come from?"

"God makes those. That's why they're called "omnibus" bills. Study harder in math and science"

Pardon our lack of interruption...

...Into your cyber-time of late, we have been out of commission here at The Eight for the last two weeks or so. We won't say that there's been nothing in that time that might have been reported on our pages, but the SOTU is almost always a non-story, never more so than this year. Hindsight being average, we feel justified in ignoring it here.

If you're looking for some Standing Eight-Style outrage, stay tuned in the coming days, and to hold you over, this is pretty disgusting:

jasmynecannick.com: White Anti-Gay Group to Protest King Funeral

Not to be cute, but when we say 'outrage' that's not totally accurate. Most of the things we link you to here at The Eight would have outraged us some years ago, but outrage requires surprise. And these sorts of things, like Bush speeches and Superbowl blowouts, are no longer surprising.

Although technically the Standing Eight Sports Book is predicting a very close (<3) style="font-style: italic;">betting money.)