worldwide pablo

Overheard in a gay bar

"I'll have a Sam Adams ... hold the foam."

[Joq's, at 5:30 p.m. today.]

Ding dong

Hi ho, the merry-o.

What he said

David Brooks is on a roll today.

The skies above are clear again

Thank you, Ohio!

A day to remember

Has there ever been another day like today? WWP can't recall any.

Know hope.

Get crackin', Oregonians!

You'd think that with an "election of a lifetime" and a hotly contested U.S. Senate race on our hands that Oregon voters would be flooding the elections offices with their mail-in ballots. But no! Turns out that Oregon -- which, "uniquely among the 50 states ... conducts the entirety of its voting by mail" -- is also uniquely behind in voter turnout so far.

Friends: Get those ballots in the mail now! You have until this Friday to safely mail them in time to be counted. After then, take your ballot to any of these locations.

Let's have no surprises come next Tuesday, okay?

Sacked

So, Portland’s boy mayor has set his sights on taxing grocery bags. They’re having the same idea up in Seattle, and one Emerald City entrepreneur thinks he has just the plan to get around it:

I want [to] thank the Mayor and city council of Seattle for opening up a huge money making opportunity for me! Starting in January, 2009, I plan to be standing outside your nearest grocery store selling bags, just off their property, next to a Democrats political sign and a homeless person, for only 10 cents each! For starters, I have purchased 50,000 of these at a cost less than one cent per bag. And I will be shopping just outside the city limits and will never shop in town again! And if you want to tax me for making a profit, and using public or private land to do it on, you will also have to remove the political signs for being placed on that property illegally and tax the homeless for making money also! So thanks again!

Maybe we can put this guy right next to the Girl Scouts.

[Via Slog]

One good YouTube deserves another

Decency in difference, honor among political opponents. That actually used to be a virtue, believe it or not. May the above command us to serve our better angels.

Now let us from this table rise

As if to prove WWP's point made here a few days ago, MoDo piles on:

Mr. Bush, who said he’s going to put a “Freedom Institute” in his presidential library, told reporters at a press conference with Mr. Brown that “one of the things that I will leave behind is a multilateralism to deal with tyrants, so problems can be solved diplomatically.” W. confessed only to “hopeless idealism” on Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said “history will judge whether or not, you know, more troops were needed earlier, troops could have been positioned here better or not.” But going in, he said, was right despite the “doubters.” “There is some who say that perhaps freedom is not universal,” he asserted, adding that he rejected as elitist the notion that “maybe it’s only, you know, white-guy Methodists who are capable of self-government.”

If there’s one thing W. and Cheney have proved, beyond a sliver of a shadow of a doubt, it’s that at least two white-guy Methodists are not capable of self-government.

Ouch!

"When we could, we couldn't..."

So, gay marriage is finally off and running in California, an historic turn of events that combines unequal parts of extraordinary exhilaration, a small degree of melancholy and a dose of "I told you so" smugness. The occasion has WWP amigo Lin Thompson over at Waldo Lydecker's Journal reminiscing about how gay marriage came to pass, and he muses about how he and WWP completely missed the boat:

[In 2004] Mayor Newsom in San Francisco, and a claque of nitwits in Portland, Oregon who'd never read that state's constitution, started issuing marriage licenses. More of my friends got on the road and got hitched. A friend and I joked about how things had changed -- both of us were then single --- he by death, me by email -- but had been happily settled when marriage didn't exist. "When we could, we couldn't; now we can, we can't," we joked.

Read the whole thing here.