Weekend Olio, Aw, Fuck It, Vol CCCXLIX Edition

• The Republican primary battle between desiccated Senate fixture Dick "Dick" Lugar and Some Guy With a 2x4 With a Nail in It just gets worse, by virtue of going on, and thanks to TeamLugar's palsy-fisted response to a Teabagger challenge. "Actual moderates" (oh, play along; we're grading on the current US political scale otherwise known as "Horrible Beyond Despondence", and, besides, it's just a bit) such as Ollie Snow and Lugar's former Senatorial co-mummer, Evan "Dick" Bayh, at least had the wisdom God gave the blind pig and floated off on a river of tears. Hell, Lisa Murkowski, another Senatorial Republican with a reputation for independent thought--though hers actually comes with a tiny bit of "evidence"--had the wit and political acumen to call the bluff of Teabaggers in an even Teabaggier state.

Lugar's pallid advisers, however, went right for the mudslinging and shit-stomping, beginning with "I hate Barack Hussein Obama as much as y'all" and working down from there. One of his latest series accuses Richard Mourdock of gleefully accepting out-of-state money.

Sure, sure, it's the same Dick Lugar who opposed McCain-Feingold, who wants union money out of elections, but lobbyist money delivered to his office on time, but I like to think of him as the same Dick Lugar who's headed an Indiana Republican delegation that for thirty fucking years included Dan "The Congressman From Bahamian Offshore Accounts" Burton, without his ever saying a word.

It's interesting; I recently saw someone chalk all this up to "election year politics", and I wondered--it's the eternal juvenile in me--why we expect politicians to behave even worse in such situations than the average divorcing parent? Lugar doesn't have to be 100% consistent. But shouldn't he have shown some previous objection to a thing he now, evidently, considers tantamount to piracy? Remember when the big uproar was over how Bill Clinton's hummer enthusiasm would influence Our Youth? What do they learn from the rest of these fucks?

• Speaking of Mourdock, the benighted state of which he deservingly is Treasurer just found another $200 million which had been lost to an accounting error, a near-twin bookend to the $300 million it found in December. That's $500 million, or roughly something between two-thirds and 2.5 times the "deficit" Mitch Daniels "inherited", depending on how much the teller needed to inflate it. The difference being that that was product of an accounting practice, and this is the product of accounting malfeasance. Daniels, who's off on a private trip to Israel, could not be reached for comment. Not that any of the local media would have bothered doing anything more than wait for the press handout. (The earlier discovery of $300 mil, still officially described as "a mistake", led to Daniels telling every microphone in the region "Well, it's better to've found the money than not have it." And this was the end of the story. Mitch and his hench legislature successfully fought off Democratic calls for an independent audit. Oh, I meant "laughed off".)

• In case you've missed this story, allow my to have my Poor Wife provide the quick overview:

"The reason we still fight over the Sixties is that these people hate women and minorities. That's it."

• I was on my way home from my morning bike ride yesterday when this semi-notorious and month-old David Brooks column ("No, the contraception frenzy in my party isn't just stunted and religiously-mazed sexuality on display. There's also an intellectual and economic quotient, provided you're careless with facts") jumped into my head for some reason. Actually, for one reason: so I could ask, "How come the perfect market solves all problems of human need, but gets flummoxed by birth rates?"