Perhaps the clearest indication that stopping the Roberts nomination is now a lost cause:

According to a report from The Canadian Press, Martha Burk, the chair of the National Council of Women's Organizations, said she intends to write letters of protest to the NHL and NBC over the NHL's new ad campaign, which is set to begin next week.

The first spot, titled "It's Time," shows a player (an actor, not an NHL player) in a locker room, surrounded by candles and accompanied by a woman who ceremoniously helps him don his hockey garb. The ads feature quotes from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" along with dramatic camera work and music reminiscent of the film "Braveheart."

Burk told The Canadian Press that the ad is "offensive on many levels."

"The woman is dressed provocatively and when she asks the player if he's ready, it's a double-entendre in my view," Burk told The CP. "She's in the ad as a groomer, a sex object.

"The commercial is clearly selling sex and violence and the last image in that commercial is a young boy watching this, so he's clearly the customer they're after, or it's a misguided attempt to draw in families."

This is stupid on so many levels I really don't want to get into it. At least with Augusta, NOW was taking on a racist country club which hosted a tournament people cared about.

YBK [Part 19]: Three weeks to go. From the Associated Press:

File bankruptcy now -- before the law changes!

That's the message -- or exhortation -- that attorneys are making across the country, in TV commercials, print ads and mailings, urging Americans to seek bankruptcy court protection before a new law makes it harder for them to walk away from their debts.

Debtors are responding. Counting down toward the Oct. 17 effective date for the biggest reform in U.S. bankruptcy law in a generation, personal bankruptcy filings have jumped this month to the highest on record. Filings averaged more than 9,000 per day, up roughly 50 percent from last year's average daily volume, during the first two weeks of September. (emphasis mine)

It will get worse. One wonders whether the devastation to be wrought by Hurricane Rita will finally spur Congress to act on suspending the law, lest we witness a financial panic not seen since 1929.

The greatest Onion article, ever.

An interesting bookend to the Giambi-Palmeiro-Bonds controversy, where another industry suddenly wakes up one morning and decides that the drug use it was previously willing to condone, even encourage, has suddenly become bad for the bottom line. As with steroids and the like, heroin and cocaine provided career advantages to its users on the catwalk, regardless of the resulting medical damage; one set of drugs puts muscle on, the other allows it to wither away.

I doubt we'll see a panel of defiant supermodels perjuring themselves before Congress in the near-future, though....

Three generations of imbeciles are enough! Wouldn't it be a better question to ask which Bush appointees/nominees are actually qualified to hold their positions, rather than listing the endless supply of his mind-numbingly incompetent picks? Perhaps a more fruitful task would be to compare the current crop of hacks with the people his father had in the same position; I don't think it's necessarily a Republican, or even a conservative trait, to staff the government with morons. It bears repeating that the Presidential Medal of Freedom didn't used to be a symbol of failure.

My guess is that it's a lethal combination of ideology and faith that leads a political leader to surround himself with those who've failed in all other aspects of life before they enter public service, but who nevertheless have the right political connections. Someone who believes that "intelligent design" should be taught to our young'uns is not going to be obsessed with having qualified appointees doing the people's business. If the United States is going to remain a superpower and a beacon of freedom and all that, we need to have a good strong dose of elitism. We need to put grown-ups in charge of things again.