Ripped from the Headlines

Remember when you were a kid? Dressing up for Halloween was a simple affair. Just put on a Spiderman costume from the local discount store. Or, if you had a generous mother, she'd make you something. My mom once sewed me a delicious Dracula cape of black velour with a red velvet lining. But when you get older, costumes demand more originality. If you are anyone, you've been invited to a Halloween party, and if you're fabulous, you're looking for something original and unique (rather than just renting some crap from the local costume shop.)

Here are some costumes that my friends in Washington may enjoy. Feel free to borrow these ideas if you're attending a Halloween party inside the Beltway and have no clue what to wear. They also work for political science department parties at universities anywhere. All are 100% current and guaranteed to catch people's eye.

JUDITH MILLER


Hero of the free press, or sellout who got tired of prison? Brave crusader for truth, or shill of the Bush administration? I don't know, and to be honest, I don't really care. But she's at the center of one of Washington's hottest topics--the Valerie Plame investigation! Here's what you'll need:

A brunette pageboy wig
Plain black and white striped prisoner outfit
Laser printer, yellow or orange paper, hole punch, string, Sharpie
Copy of The New York Times

Directions: Use Photoshop or Microsoft Word to create a fake "Get Out of Jail Free" card. If you have Photoshop it should be as easy as finding an image of one on the internet and blowing it up to a full page.



Print it out on orange paper (Chance) or yellow (Community Chest) and use the hole punch to make two holes in it. Tie a length of string through the holes so you can wear it around your neck (for a really professional effect, mount it on posterboard first so that it's firm.) Now take your Sharpie and write "To Judy--Remember the aspens! Love, Scooter Libby" across the bottom. There should be enough space for this, because a sheet of paper is wider than a Monopoly card.

Wear the sign around your neck and carry your copy of the Times. You'll be in a LOCK(UP) for best costume!

Harriet Miers


Is she an originalist or a Souter? Does she support gay rights, or oppose them? Would she overturn Roe, or does she think Griswold was rightly decided? No one knows! Mostly because she keeps telling people different things. The White House is mum, too. She's an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, dressed in a K-Mart pantsuit! The nice things about this costume is that you can get most of what you need down at the local thrift store. You will need:

Grandma's old wig (dirty blonde)
A K-Mart pantsuit (royal blue is preferable--it's what she wore on nomination day)
String of fake pearls
A gavel
Some Texas lottery tickets (optional--may substitute a button with Dubya's face on it, available at any souvenir store in town)

Directions: In order to make this costume work, I suggest applying some basic drugstore makeup: eyeliner and lipstick. Don't overdo it. Put on your pantsuit and pearls. Insert the Texas lottery tickets into your jacket/vest pocket (if the jacket or vest doesn't have a pocket, pin them to the jacket with a cheap brooch.) If you cannot obtain Texas lottery tickets, get the GWB button as a substitute. Put a small strip of masking tape under his face and write, in fine-point Sharpie, "HE'S SO COOL!" and wear that instead. Attend the party carrying the gavel. The judgment: one hot costume!

(I feel awful for making fun of this woman's lack of fashion sense sometimes. But then I remember I'm a total bitch.)

TOM DELAY


My personal favorite, and the one I'll be pursuing if I actually attend a party (my plans are up in the air because I may be out of town.) Tom DeLay was an exterminator who became the most powerful man in Congress. But by this weekend, his mugshot will be all over the Internet as he battles criminal charges in a Texas courtroom and struggles to maintain his relevancy. You will need:

Hairspray (NOT gel, hairspray--the aerosol kind)
A suit and tie
Handcuffs
Laser printer, string, hole punch

Directions: In order for this costume to work, your hair must be long enough to part at the side, but not too long. The Hammer's famed coif has not moved an inch since he came to Congress in 1984. So it's the hair that really makes this costume. Take a shower, and BLOW-DRY your hair. Remember, you're going for a certain look here. Then carefully spray it to within an inch of it's life. When you are finished, your hair should be parted at the side, thick on top (thus the blow-drying) and utterly bullet-proof. Using your handy Photoshop (you can substitute Word if you don't have it, by inverting the white and black, but Photoshop produces a much more professional effect) create a mug shot ID plate: DELAY, THOMAS and below that some random numbers. Print it out, and then use your hole punch/string to make it suitable to wear around your neck (you might add a posterboard backing to make it more realistic.) Put on your suit, and your handcuffs. Please note: unless you have the novelty handcuffs which include a latch so that you can release yourself, you should only cuff one wrist, and leave the other cuff dangling free. It is nearly impossible to eat/drink/socialize when your hands are cuffed, and even if your date has the key, he or she may get lost in the crowd. Now, it's Hammer time!

So there you have it. Three 100% topical Halloween costumes. Only a poli sci dork like myself could come up with these (I dreamed all three up in the shower this morning.) I'll post more if I think of them. If any of you wind up on Wonkette, I expect credit!

I am one of the few, the proud, who looks at Harriet Miers and says "Thank God!" Yes, I know it could have been much worse. Bush promised us "another Scalia or Thomas" so the conservative groups say, and while I don't personally have anything against Scalia or Thomas I also don't want the court shifting to the right at a time when Dr. James Dobson thinks he's the boss of us. I have never found the Supreme Court to be "activist" but then I also didn't find Men in Black to be "literature" in spite of Tom DeLay's recommendation of it.

My friend Mark has a good takedown of the Miers nomination over in his blog. Mark is at least as qualified to be on the high court as Miers is. He makes a number of excellent points about this nominee, and why the sour grapes of the conservative movement and liberal activists don't really stand up to scrutiny. Harriet Miers may not be John Roberts, but she's more than qualified for a seat on the court. She may not please Ann Coulter (whose entire contribution to jurisprudence is two law review articles that date back to the eighties) but she did a damn fine job in Texas. And while I know that there are others who are probably more experienced, I don't blame them for not wanting to go through a confirmation hearing with Joe Biden talking about himself.

The so-called establishment may be in an uproar about Harriet because she's Bush's crony. And the right wing may be up in arms because her conservative bonafides aren't established. But me? I look at the Miers nomination as an opportunity. This woman has real potential, and she's not scary. Once you understand that, it's hard to oppose her.

Someone needs to bring up Governor Blanco on manslaughter charges for several hundred people she delayed in evacuating. Really, the woman deserves jail time.

But this? Absurd. If the Louisiana Attorney General honestly wants to bring charges in this case, he should look at why they weren't evacuated, which goes back to...well, Nagin and Blanco. Ooops.

And now, for something completely different

Captain Ian Fishback has been instrumental in bringing the military torture scandal to light. He is also being detained by the military with virtually no access to the outside world and charged with various crimes, a typical tactic used against whistleblowers who expose corruption or lies in the military or Pentagon. For a more complete summation of his story (which I have not been writing about, admittedly) you can see Andrew Sullivan's blog, one of my favorites. Sullivan has been covering the torture scandal unapologetically, even as the right resorts to spin and excuses of fraternity-like antics.

The reason I mention all of this is that Sullivan is also maintaining an email address for contacting Fishback with letters of support. His family will deliver them--probably the only way you can let Capt. Fishback know that you're behind him if you disdain torture and humiliation tactics perpetuated by the American miliatary in violation of the Geneva Convention and basic human decency. Please send emails of support to SupportFishback@aol.com, and they will reach the Captain to let him know that many, many Americans are behind him in this effort.

DeLay

Tom DeLay's indictment should come as a shock to no one. And yes, it was (at least in part) the result of a political vendetta by a partisan prosecutor. But that doesn't change the fact that DeLay has seemingly bathed in sleaze for the past few years. His ties to the seedy lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the willingness of his PAC to play a financial shell game with illegal donations (whether or not he was directly responsible) and the continuous House Ethics rebukes leave little credibility for DeLay to hide behind. He's brought this on himself, partisan or not, by making himself an easy target for charges of wrongdoing. Such is the utter arrogance of DeLay's coccooned existense in power.

I for one will not miss Tom. He's been a proponent of pork, leading the charge to drive up government spending with the President's budget team. He's refused to embrace cuts on absurdist grounds, preferring instead to continue funding bread and circuses (make that the Ronald Reagan Memorial Circus.) He has pushed for turning the federal government into a hyper-religious nanny state and eschewed any notion of personal responsibility, both at law and at life, both in his public views and his personal actions. DeLay wants the government to tell you what you can and cannot do based upon his own warped view of what Christianity entails, and somehow believes that his nanny state can be paid for on borrowing alone. He is reckless, arrogant and irresponsible. He deserves a fate no different than his fellow Texan, Speaker Jim Wright.

Big Surprise: Sheehan Lies

In order to get into a meeting with Sen. John McCain, Cindy Sheehan apparently told the Senator that she would be accompanied by some of his constituents. McCain was disappointed to learn once the media whore was in his office that no one accompanying her actually lived in Arizona.

Gosh, Cindy Sheehan lying? What a SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM that is!

I love John McCain but he should have known better than to allow her to use him like this. She left the meeting to call him a "warmonger" and get herself some more press.

Porn Again

It appears that Alberto Gonzalez is attempting to shore up his conservative credentials. I wonder if he's anticipating a Supreme Court appointment? The only people who embrace pornography witch-hunts are the hard-right religious conservatives who screamed loudest when his name was floated for the High Court earlier this year.

Life Imitates The Onion

Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
~The Onion, February 18, 2004

Gillette Ups the Ante, Reveals 5-Blade Razor
~msnbc.com, September 14, 2005

I thought James Taranto might include this in his "Best of the Web" but then I realized that the Onion headline has "fuck" in it.

DIONNE NAILS IT: He declares the end of the Bush era to have come with the realization that the president is really not keeping us safe. If the federal response to a hurricane is so poor, would it have been better in the face of a terrorist attack? Dionne says that the president can no longer count on the aura of invincibility to push his agenda forward.

BREAD, CIRCUSES, HIGHWAYS: Thankfully he can still count on Tom DeLay. Always there to say the absurd with a straight face, Tom reassures us today that the federal government has simply no fat left to cut. Riiiiight. It's very important that Alaska build its bridge to nowhere among the many other billions of dollars in pork projects lawmakers pushed earlier this year. VERY important, right, Tom?