Wanker of the Week: Frank Bruni

Well, no, Bruni does not think the presidential candidacy of actual billionaire Michael Bloomberg can deliver the United States from the presidency of faux billionaire Donald Trump:

Bloomberg, 76, probably doesn’t stand a chance. He has all the va-va-voom of a ficus tree, all the populism of a Bermuda golf course. And he’s hardly the perfect suitor for a party whose loudest voices are on the left.

Bruni wants a ficus tree to run. He's taunting it to put some fire in its belly.

"Bite me, Bruni, I got more va-va-voom than you ever will!" Photo via Desert Dream Gardens.

A Wank Supreme

Thanks for the shoutout, Professor Liberman!

The strongest Supreme.

Brooks ("Can People Change After Middle Age?") sounds as if he's wondering about himself again, or maybe Trump:

I sometimes read that people don’t change much after middle age.

He doesn't tell us where he reads it (is it always in the same place or does it pop up in different contexts?), so I'm not sure how seriously I want to take this. According to old William James, as I learn from the blog of Melissa Dahl, it was worse than that; personalities stop changing around 30, well before traditional middle age begins, according to his 1890 Principles of Psychology:

“In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”

On the other hand, that picture has itself begun to soften in the nearly 130 years since it was formed. Many psychologists feel there's a genetic component to one's Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) that leaves you with a kind of fixed endowment that really won't change much beyond softening us around the edges, but a large study at UC Berkeley conducted by Sanjay Srivastava and published in 2003 found reasons to question that and, pleasantly enough, that we all tend to get better. We get more conscientious through our 20s, and more agreeable starting in the 30s; and although younger women are more neurotic and extraverted than younger men, that difference begins to erase itself with time. So isn't that nice! Was there anything else you wanted to know?

But everyday experience contradicts this on a weekly basis.

I mean of course everyday experience actually takes place seven times as much as weekly experience does. Are you suggesting that people change after middle age just 14% of the time? It's probably too stressful to do more of it.

West of Eden: Despair and Wanking

Pre-production publicity (2012) for the Will Blesch film Requiem for the Night, Israel's first full-length vampire feature, which seems not to have been shot.

While the rest of the world is panicking over the Syria situation as if it had suddenly blown up in their faces instead of undergoing a well-publicized disintegration over the past four years, and as they try, however ineptly, to do something about it, Israel seems to have come down to asking, "Is there any way we can make a profit out of this?" Thus the Times gives us a story (Jodi Rudoren) on

the aggressive development goal — 100,000 new residents across the Golan in five years — being promoted by Naftali Bennett, a senior Israeli minister and one of many Israeli leaders and thinkers seizing on the chaos in Syria to solidify Israel’s hold on the Golan.

Mississippi cheap shot

Ooh, and speaking of National Review headlines, I cannot contain my enthusiasm for this one, in praise of Chris McDaniel, Teahadi primary challenger of noted pork-delivery senator Thad Cochran, who promises to get rid of all those corrupt earmarks (without apparently noticing that Congress itself managed to get rid of them, at least sort of, in 2010):

Pulling Pork 
Senator Thad Cochran’s conservative opponent stresses fiscal restraint. 

By Andrew Stiles

Does that make McDaniel Real Wanker of the Day?

Update:

Looks like State Sen. McDaniel is a bit of a Nullificationist who draws support from racists, neo-Confederates, and even the Fascists of the Greek Golden Dawn party! H/t Anomaly100.

Wanker Time

This award goes out to Gary Pruitt, CEO of the Associated Press:

“What I learned from our journalists should alarm everyone in this room and I think should alarm everyone in this country. The actions of the DOJ against AP are already having an impact beyond the specifics of this particular case,” AP CEO Gary Pruitt told an audience at the National Press Club. “Some of our longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking to us, even about stories that aren’t about national security. In some cases, government employees that we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone, and some are reluctant to meet in person.”

After it was made public that the Justice Department took AP Washington bureau phone records as part of the Obama administration’s aggressive anti-leak operation, Pruitt said the fear among potential sources has spread to reporters from other outlets.

Oh no they didn't! You mean those guys you always quote as "a senior official who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to comment on the issue" didn't comment on the issue? Or they made you drive over to a bar in Adams-Morgan?

What is this country coming to, anyway? Whatever happened to the part of the First Amendment that guarantees the right of senior officials to dictate newspaper stories? "No law shall be made infringing the access of the press."

Does this mean you Washington guys are going to have to start reporting now, like some bozo stuck in Kabul? Or stay home and read?

Anyway it'll all be better when John McCain's president.

Or maybe not: This (via Digby via Eschaton) is pretty upsetting.

President Barack Obama’s unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of “insider threat” give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct....
Employees must turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches. “Penalize clearly identifiable failures to report security infractions and violations, including any lack of self-reporting,” the strategic plan says.

Then again, it looks like McClatchy managed to worm quite a bit of information out of them! Documents and all. 

Wanker of the weak

Fried chicken. From RollingOut.com.

Not since Ward Connerly (last spotted in trouble with the IRS, even though he gave himself a huge pay cut, down to $850,000) have I seen such a deeply self-hating black man as the Drive-By Pundit (via Sarah, Proud and Tall at Balloon Juice), making his debut at American Thinker with the claim that Obama is losing the African American vote, and thus the election:

I see that loss reflected in the faces of my fellow blacks, who at the mention of Obama’s name no longer beam with rapturous joy—something we blacks normally reserve for winning lottery tickets and intimate getaways with persons not our spouses.

Hey, Drive-By, aren't you forgetting about watermelon? Why, I suspect that you may have gotten a little out of touch with the brothers. Numbers, adultery, watermelon... and fried chicken...

I know what I'm saying can be dismissed as anecdotal, but there really is something refreshingly conservative in the air again in the black community.  Black "pastors say their congregants are asking how a true Christian could back same-sex marriage as President Barack Obama" does.  If the story can be believed, some black pastors are encouraging their congregations not to vote on Election Day, given the choice between the Rock Star in Chief and a Mormon.

Oh, I can just about believe the story. I remember it from way back in 1993 and New Jersey, when Ed Rollins bragged about distributing the "walking-around money" to black pastors on behalf of Christie Whitman. But it wasn't true then, * and I doubt that it's particularly true now. Not because the Republicans wouldn't do it—there's certainly something Republican about the concept of paying people to not vote, Democrats traditionally doing it the other way around—but because few if any black pastors would accept those thirty pieces of silver, knowing as they do what the vote represents to the community in suffering and triumph. And for the same reason the ones who are talking about not voting for free will turn out to be very few.**

Oh sure, when it comes to their waning ardor for Obama, blacks put up a good front, especially around whites -- i.e., pollsters.  But I know my people "like every square inch of my glorious naked body" (a little Rush Limbaugh lingo there).  When in the wrong and confronted by whites, blacks will always hide their true thoughts and feelings, much in the same obstinate way as their refusal to admit that O.J. did it.  (He did, by the way.)

Every square inch? Are you calling yourself a wanker, there, in the old-fashioned sense? And how do you and your glorious naked body keep up with your people, out there in Plainfield,*** Illinois (95.85% White, 0.84% African American)? Through your pals at Move-On-Up?

With apologies to the great, late Sherman Hemsley.

Yup, I think you may be a little out of touch. And I bet you're not making money on the Connerly scale either, huh?

*At least, there's no evidence that Rollins actually committed this serious federal crime, or none that the FBI was able to find. When the US attorney asked him, he said he'd made it all up, and tbe feds, after an investigation, agreed. The Times commented,

Mr. Rollins may be happy that he is only a liar, not a crook. Democratic victims of his campaign management and blacks victimized by his boasting are less satisfied. The prosecutors have swept a menacing cloud from Mrs. Whitman's inauguration next week, but not the lingering smell.

**According to no less an authority than Bill Clinton, this year's Republican tactic in Florida is to cancel early voting on the Sunday before the election, when African American church congregations traditionally hire buses to bring elderly and disabled people to the polls after services.

***Click for the great article where Drive-By finds solid evidence that the Democrats supported slavery back in the 19th century. You can just imagine him saying, "Bet you won't hear about that on NPR."

Wanker of many generations!

Bill Johnson, ex-politician (R-Alabama, sometime gubernatorial candidate) and current international humanitarian, discussed in a post here last December, resurfaced recently (via General Stuck in comments at Balloon Juice).

Possible recipients in the Rotorua mud baths. Picture from Fodors.

Johnson was the strange soul who went off to New Zealand to help with earthquake relief and while living in Christchurch took to the unusual hobby of sperm donation, [jump]

Uh-oh, mustachios!

Updated 4/18/2012

Mean Girls. From Mustachios on Everything.

Heartiest congratulations to Thomas P. Friedman, and to his alter id, really, Tom Friedman, on his or their receipt of the Eschaton One True Wanker of the Decade Award passed out in honor of Atrios's 10th anniversary of pernicious bloggery.

It must be great to be recognized for all that slogging, for the ability to find the one neoliberal taxi driver in any town, no matter how exotic (everywhere I go all the taxi drivers are [jump]