Video Daily Double

We don't generally post links based on reader requests, which has until now been a result of never getting reader requests. Here are our first two, both of which exemplify the sort of commitment to individual art that landed Van Gogh, Pollock and about a hundred others in asylums. Alert reader Dan Mullin sent us this link of a really good guitar player with a lot of time on his hands (shocking how often those two go together:)

See It Now

Our second link comes from Don Chappell, who was rightly impressed by the music-sync'd juggling of one Chris Bliss:

See It Now

We know at least one of the Flying Karamazov Brothers has read the Eight before, and we don't want to place anyone above you guys on the juggling totem pole, so if you have free links to video online, let us know. But this guy's pretty good.

Bad Things Comma Very

So called because the damn Firefox kept freezing up for some reason when we tried to title the post Very Bad Things.

There is bad news today, and it comes in the form of Bill Maher's leadoff monologue joke: The Dubai firm that had arranged to buy the port management contract (or whatever, frankly this was a nothing story until today and we are for once proudly ignorant of the details of the whole thing,) has backed out of the deal due to pressure from the public reaction in the US, thanks to Lou Dobbs et al. Which is maybe a neutral fact. Until you learn that in the absence of that firm to make the deal now the port management contract will apparently go to "an unnamed American entity." And that the semi-official scuttlebutt is that the unnamed entity is in fact wait for it Halliburton.

Not hard to imagine what that decision making moment in the Veep's office was like: "They don't want me to sell the ports to Dubai? F*** 'em, I'll give it to Hally. (Because you just know he's got a pet name for his baby.)

-.- (or "dash dot dash," "K" in Morse code, which is telegraph operator code for "switching tracks.") (lame historical tidbit courtesy of the Standing Eight Pompous Pedant Foundation.)

-This is The Eight's 60th post, which we only mention by way of demonstrating that we passed 50 a while back without making any fuss.

-Over the next week, Standing Eight may or may not post our usual, oh what's a fancy word for it, "stuff," from glamorous International Waters. And you know that once you get CQ miles out from shore there are no rules.

Kofi Annan (and on and on)

The headline tells the story here:

UN Staff vote no confidence in Annan management

Don't you wish we could do that with our leaders?

Vernon Robinson, Playa Hate-a

If you like being outraged by the bald-faced ballsiness of the right, don't miss Vernon Robinson's newest ad in his North Carolina House race. It's got to be the worst since Max Cleland was compared to Saddam Hussein. Which unfortunately probably means that Robinson is going to win.

See It Now @ Crooks and Liars

Talkin' Baseball, 'cause we never really played it very well

One hears a great deal of jabber in the wake of this SI article about Bonds/Steroids about should he be booted from the game a la Rose, Shoeless Joe et al, or should he have his records removed or ignored a la Maris' 61* or just what on Earth are we to do about this Bonds fellow?

This is not strictly a sports opinion website, but our slugline does mention sports, so the Editorial Board of The Eight have developed the following official position on the 'Bonds Thing.' To wit:

Let him keep playing, let him juice if he thinks he can do it without getting caught, and one of two things will happen, MLB will catch him, and he'll get tossed, or he'll catch Ruth and then maybe (probably not, we'd wager,) Aaron. Here're two reasons that go a long way to explaining why this is our official position:

1) The unanimous consensus of the board held that Ruth would have taken steroids if they'd had them then. He ate like a pig to give himself bulk to hit more home runs, because he understood better than anyone before that time the connection between the two.

2) Records were made to be broken. Bob Beamon doesn't hold the long jump record anymore, the 100m record keeps getting ticked down, those low-TV-rated skis at the Olympics get a little waxier every four years. Athletes are getting better due to Sport Science and Sport Medicine, not to mention the ability to view one's swing in eight different speeds on five different cameras in hi-def. If you want to keep the old days alive, walk six miles in the snow to work, don't bitch about a guy who plays baseball for a living.

That's that about that, but we did, at the Board meeting, have one other observation about this and all situations like it: The greatest thing about these sorts of stories is watching to see how many sports reporters cannot consistently and correctly pronounce the word 'asterisk.' Check it out and see if it doesn't provide a certain glee akin to the dread we all feel when Bush says 'nook-you-lar'.

--Full Disclosure-- This is a Late Update, reason number 1 above has been edited for clarity and the removal of stupidity, ours.

What about the atheists in the foxholes?

If you saw a headline that read: "Seminaries threaten to stop sending chaplains to military" you might suspect that the seminaries in question were some of the more liberal ones that dot our fine nation's blue-state coasts, GTU in Berkeley, Union in Manhattan, and so on.

That's certainly what we assumed until we hit the link below and saw that the seminaries Army Times' article refers to are about as far from liberal as you can get: Temple Baptist Seminary (Chattanooga,) and GWB's own controversial '00 campaign stop, Bob Jones University.

See It Now

So let's have a big Standing Eight cheer for TBS and BJU, for being willing to admit that one's Christian faith can be incompatible with American Imperialism, and that when it comes to hypocrisy, a finite number of straws can break a camel's back. Or to quote either Rozencrantz or Guildenstern, which is to say Tom Stoppard:

Consistency is all I ask
Opportunity is all I seek
Give us this day
Our daily week

RIBH (Rest In Baseball Heaven) Kirby Puckett

We are saddened to learn today of the passing of Kirby Puckett following complications from a stroke he suffered on Sunday. You'll get no home run totals or career summing-up here, only the following sincere compliment, which may be equally true for about a billion baseball fans: though we've never especially liked the Twins, we have always especially liked Kirby.

ESPN.com

NYTimes

Knock Ty Cobb on his ass when you see him. He deserves it.

--LATE UPDATE-- Actually, after reading the Times obit above, Standing Eight officially has no dog in the Puckett/Cobb fight in Baseball Heaven, they may both 'deserve it.' Whatever 'it' is. This could be the first time Standing Eight has 'spoken too soon,' and if our ombudsman recommends it we'll correct or retract at the appropriate time.

Greatest Post Ever

We will link to the article, which offers you the tripartite choice of QT, Real, or WMP, but whichever way you can, see this video:

The Sun Online - Bizarre online: The Simpsons come to life

Genius. How did we not think of it first? (By 'we' I mean Americans more than Eighters.)

Congress Shall Make D'oh Law...

22% of us (ugly americans,) can name all 5 Simpsons (Maggie, being who you're forgetting if you only thought of four, Abe doesn't count.) But only .1 (that's point one,) percent of us can list all 5 first amendment freedoms. We suspect that most Eighters can complete both lists.

See It Now

And hey, it's probably a good thing, since in the current climate the Simpsons may well last longer than archaic freedoms like speech religion press petition and assembly. Assembly's almost gone already.

Of course, some say the chief freedom that the first amendment protects is our right to be stupid, ignorant, wrong-headed, hater-ish and foxnewsy (some of these our coinages.) So it's doing its job no matter how few out of a thousand could list its protections.

Shocked, Positively Shocked...

...To learn that the NSA is conducting even broader domestic spying than we previously knew of:

See It Now

Alberto Gonzales with the Hill Testimony equivalent of one of Bush's 'signing statements.' Very much akin to saying, 'we don't torture' when the cameras are on and then waiting until they're well off to complete your statement, saying, 'as long as you don't count water-boarding, dogs, stress positions and light to medium beatings.' And as of 2am California time, this story isn't even up on the top of the Post's webpage.

Good stuff.

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.