Tuesday Olio

• If you're in the market for this sort of thing, Indiana's got a Toll Road to sell you:

Mitch Daniels signs a book deal. The AP reporter asking if this maybe signals that he's running for President like he's already been doing for eighteen months hears this:

“There’s nothing I can say except ’not so'. The idea of writing a book came together well before anybody suggested to me that I was a candidate for anything. I can’t keep people from leaping to that conclusion, but they’d be wrong.”

Governor? Governor? If you'll get back on the two soapboxes it requires for you to make a meaningless public announcement, I have a couple of followups?

First: Do we really have to hear this routine every last fucking time somebody mentions The Coyness Campaign? Second: how much of you indecision is due to the fact that you began your Presidential campaign two weeks after telling Hoosiers you'd never seek another public office, and how much due to the legal maneuvers required to keep all the really big bucks rolling in to that PAC of yours?

Finally: that explanation might have worked if signing an oddly-timed book deal was all you did; coming in the midst of regular campaign weekends stretching back to January, a new right-wing-rag profile every month, and the rumors about the recalcitrance of The Lovely Cheri getting loud enough that she had to come out in public, well, no; it just raises the question of just how stupid you imagine everyone else to be. We've all heard by now you'd be the shortest President since Madison, and the only one ever to lie about his height, but we don't know if anyone's keeping a record for Most Contemptuous Candidate Since Nixon.

[Off the record, Guv: that "If anyone's built for jockeying, it's me" line was pretty good, but if you're really gonna do this you need someone on the campaign with the instincts to add, "Although now I'm probably going to hear from the PC height-police. Har har har."]

• Dear God, just shut th' fuck up:

Speaking of Daniels' scriptwriters there's David Brooks, who kills god knows how many trees to say this:

These days we are all co-religionists in the church of multilateralism. The Iraq war reminded everybody not to embark on an international effort without a broad coalition.

Yet today, as an impeccably crafted multilateral force intervenes in Libya, certain old feelings are coming back to the surface. These feelings have been buried since the 1990s, when multilateral efforts failed in Kosovo, Rwanda and Iraq. They concern the structural weaknesses that bedevil multilateral efforts. They remind us that unilateralism may be no walk in the park, but multilateralism has its own characteristic problems, which are showing up already in Libya.

For motherfucking cryin' out loud, it's already beyond despicable that the buttboys of Presidents Bush, Cheney, and Kristol, once seen Voguing for Joy (in 2001!) atop our glorious victory in Afghanistan, still have opinin' jobs. Now they get to pretend to be all thoughtful about military interventionism!

I'd like to mention this again: it's always the people who profess, if not their personal subscription to Bronze Age superstition at least their abiding respect for its omnipresent superiority to all other modes of thought, who are the first, and most blatant, tempters of a wrathful God.

• Now here's Julie Margolis with a report on the different between shitting on gold and shitting on stainless steel…

Fraudulent Republican Money Spigot Tim Durham bails out of LA lockup to head home and face securities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy charges; his slow-motion white Bronco fall from grace prompts someone to give 8's Debby Knox a line musing about the depths of that fall. Or maybe she ad libbed it. At any rate, the current score:

Overpaid sounders-out of teleprompter inanities commiserating with lavish-lifestyle pig who lost the multi-million-dollar car collection he bought with other people's money: 1

Public expression of concern for the lifestyle changes forced on the 5000 people he robbed of their life savings: 0

There was a bit of fun in the event, since Durham's $1 million bail ("It should have been much higher! The old Tim Durham would have wanted it that way!") was coughed up by his ex-wife Joan SerVaas and her father, former Indianapolis City Council Kingpin, Saturday Evening Post publisher, and anti-fluoridationist crank Beurt SerVaas. It was nice to see the old gent getting some press now that the mere mention of his withered bunghole doesn't cause news hairdos to instinctively pucker.

Here's my favorite SerVaas story: his mansion is surrounded by acres of woodland. Only they're not his. It belongs to a charitable trust he established, and once a year--once a year!--for an afternoon disadvantaged children are allowed to roam free there, after which it returns to its pristine state, the way God intended, for another 364 days: free of property taxes.

Durham, by the way, is described on 8--inevitably described on 8, which has an unlimited amount of stock footage of his earlier, more piratical career since it was frequently invited to fawn over it--and did--as "embattled financier" Tim Durham. It's funny how, during that day's rundown of meth lab busts you never hear anyone referred to as an "embroiled chemist".