Via David Nieporent, nappy-headed Rutgers basketball player cum attention ho Kia Vaughan has withdrawn her goofy lawsuit against Don Imus for insulting her and/or her teammates. Apparently, you can’t make a gazillion dollars off of somebody just because he insulted you. Too bad. There went my suits against Radley Balko, Glenn “Ryan” Greenwald, Kip Pseudo-Esquire and the guy who flipped me off on the freeway last week. Looks like I won’t be retiring this year, after all.

I was half-tempted to pick up one of those iPhones, but after reading this I’m thinking I might want to hold off five more months and get one for free.

Mary K thinks Fred? may have made a fatal mistake by sitting out the last debate and promising to appear on Leno instead. At this point, I can’t say I disagree. Fred? should have struck when the iron was hot. At this point, it may be too late.

UPDATE: He’s finally in. Are we having fun yet?

I’m torn as to which part of Whoopi’s trifecta of retarded is the dumbest. Which of the following three implications do you find the most idiotic?

1. Newport News, Virginia is part of the Deep South.
2. Dog fighting is generally accepted behavior in the Deep South, the Shallow South, or whatever the hell region of the country Whoopi Cushion had in mind when she uttered that goofy statement.
3. The fact that Whoopi and Michael both have similar levels of pigmentation played absolutely no role in her defense of the guy.

Snopes, the guys who “debunked” Jerry Rivers/Riviera and Al Gore’s Internet on technicalities while bending over backwards to uphold “looting vs. finding” and an apocryphal Reagan quote as an innocent “paraphrase,” once again plays the “your view is an urban myth, mine is a fact” card by purporting to clarify a series of genuine and unflattering (at least, from the perspective of anyone who isn’t a Marxist) Hillary Clinton quotes.

Claim: E-mail reproduces various “Marxist” statements made by Hillary Clinton.
Status: Multiple – See below.

In fact, as Snopes all but admits throughout the body of the post, the only thing “multiple” about the six quotes is that they are true, true, true, true, true and true. The problem is that from the perspective of a Hillary supporter, they’re also inconvenient, inconvenient, inconvenient, inconvenient, inconvenient and inconvenient, respectively. Therefore, as a web site devoted to debunking all urban legends, potential urban legends and urban non-legends that may prove inconvenient to the left, Snopes steps up to the plate in a lame attempt to explain them away. In six nutshells:

1. The quote about taking stuff away from rich people for the common good isn’t really Marxist because she was addressing a group of rich Democrats who share her goal of taking stuff away from rich people for the common good.
2. That line about “shared prosperity” isn’t really Marxist because she also said something good about “markets,” as long as such markets are commanded and/or controlled by her.
3. That bit about something having to be taken away from some people can’t be considered socialist since she was talking about global warming.
4. The line about requiring people to give up their turf to build “common ground” wasn’t really Marxist because she was arguing for socialized medicine.
5. The line about the free market having failed isn’t really socialist because she said a bunch of other stuff, too.
6. The line about “send[ing] a clear message” to the “most profitable sector” that they “are being watched” wasn’t really socialist because she was only attacking the big, bad oil companies, not your mom and pop’s business, which really isn’t the most profitable sector of the economy after all. Sorry to disappoint.

To those readers who know German, the above pun is obvious. To those who don’t, the German word fast means “almost.” That’s the general rant. Here are the more specific ones:

• To the Bullets in Oilville, VA: just because you’re located in a town named after Oil, that doesn’t mean you should sell burgers that barely consist of anything but that. Seriously, it scares the crap out of me to think what y’all might sell if you opened up shop in Ballsville.
• Also to the Bullets in Oilville, VA: you know what’s even lamer than a burger joint that sells inedible hamburgers? A chain that runs out of burgers entirely. WTF is up with that?
• Bullets, I’m not done with you yet. Do you know what is even lamer than a burger joint that makes inedible burgers and then runs out of them? How about a burger joint that makes inedible burgers, runs out of them, and then puts up a sign apologizing for being out of “Burger’s.” What the hell did they teach you in school, that apostrophes mean “look out, here comes an S?!”
• To the Mr. Barbecue in Clemmons Winston-Salem, NC: OK, I get it, X plus bread equals an X sandwich. Real cute. Now that you’ve made your funny, please stop taking pieces of chicken, bones and all, slapping pieces of bread over both sides, and calling it a chicken sandwich.

Well, you don’t see that every day.

Bitter is bitter to see Craig go. Radley doubles down in the typical Balko fashion of making up facts to suit his agenda, in this case, falsely claiming the peeping charges were “thrown out” by the court rather than pleaded out by Craig himself. Beldar charitably describes this misstatement as “confusion.” I’m a bit more cynical myself, given Balko’s long history of systematically “confusing” matters in a way that just happens to help his side of the argument.

As to I say, if Craig’s initial comments had been half as conciliatory as his withdrawal speech, he’d still be in and he’d deserve our support. It’s not like he was accused of robbing a bank or anything. He didn’t do anything untoward in the Senate’s equivalent of the Oval Office, so unless your idea of exalted public institutions includes the “throne” in every stall at MSP, he didn’t even commit an offense analogous to Clinton’s. Besides, even Clinton’s actions shouldn’t have gotten him impeached if it only been about adultery, and not about committing and suborning perjury to cover it up afterward. But when Craig blamed a newspaper for his own actions and called on his fellow citizens to avoid “rushing” to a judgment that had already been entered, that was just lame. Not lame enough to warrant forcible expulsion from a body that doesn’t consider perjury and obstruction of justice impeachable offenses, mind you, but lame nonetheless. By pleading guilty to a minor offense and then refusing to take his lumps for it, Craig went from being a prized asset of the GOP to a liability. He needed to go.