Cheap shots and chasers 2/17

Said the pediatrician: I'm afraid he's going to be severely conservative, Mrs. Romney—but with suitable care and a loving home environment there's no reason he shouldn't have a fulfilling life...

 Jeremy Lin and Landry Fields Special Nerd Handshake

Now that Michelle Bachmann's not running for president any more, she's back to her old job of making the other Congresspersons look sane by comparison. From Huffington Post:

The House and Senate both approved a payroll tax cut bill on Friday that would extend unemployment benefits through 2012.

But according to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), the extension is hardly the bill's crowning achievement.

"They're extending unemployment, too, but the big thing that we get is no longer can a welfare recipient walk into a strip club and get money out of an ATM machine to pay for a lap dance," she told conservative radio host Mark Levin on Thursday night. "Now, I'm not making this up. That's the big thing that we get out of this bill."

And remember these?

At a Santorum rally in Tacoma, Paul Constant (h/t Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice) reports a little crowd taunting a lone freedom-from-religion protester,

pinching their noses and miming as though they were swatting away flies. "I can't stand the smell of this guy," one fly-swatter said, adding, "it's like he's got garbage in his pockets." An old woman told the nose-pinchers, as she squeezed past the whole scene, "Watch out for the maggots." Another woman clucked her tongue, and told her friends, "If you're an atheist, you'll just believe in anything."

Just shoot me.

Happy news

Jeremy Lin Meme. From JerseyChaser.

Jeremy Lin—Linsomnia! Lintoxication!—and the newly competent Knicks won their sixth game in a row, the first one with Amar'e Stoudemire back from his brother's funeral. Welcome back Amar'e! I couldn't watch the game on the television since my cable company and their network are having one of those greed competitions, but I saw the extraordinarily dramatic last couple of minutes over my son's shoulder on his computer. I also got to hear the Tweets celebrated on ESPN:

Dave McMenamin, Lakers Beat Writer
The Lakers’ players lounge just erupted when Lin hit that big 3. World Peace emerged and ran through the locker room yelling ‘Linsanity!!’

Preoccupied as I was with car bombings, I totally forgot that World Peace was not world peace at all but merely Metta World Peace, that is the Artest formerly known as Ron, and so got the impression that Lin's feat was even more consequential than it actually was, though I couldn't have said why world peace would choose the Lakers' players lounge as the venue for its appearance anyway.

The Jeremy Lin of Wagner singing (calm, modest, extremely hard-working, and then out of nowhere spectacular beyond reason), Jay Hunter Morris, brought the two-year unfolding of the Met's and Robert Lepage's new Ring cycle to a close with his Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. At the close, world peace actually did emerge on stage, although that was written into the orchestral score and had little to do with the singing.

Morris did have a couple of moments of vocal weakness, one unfortunately at the heartbreaking moment when Siegfried dies in a preposterously difficult sotto voce head tone. Deborah Voigt, who I was worried about a year or so ago when her Brünnhilde voice in Walküre sounded a little dry to me, did not seem to have any weakness at all. Happy Valentine's Day, Debbie! Watching them "live in HD" at the old Ziegfeld on 54th Street, and seeing their faces closer than the folks in the $300 seats, I have been impressed through the whole series (unlike this guy) by the quality of the acting, which sometimes achieves a depth that you really don't imagine coming from singers (especially Iain Paterson as Gunther and Hans-Peter König as Hagen).

From act 2 of Walkure.