Boom. Discovering the joys of deep thinking, a blogger goes beyond the vapidity of "Wankers" and "Wheeeeeee !!!," in commenting on this morning's non-story about a car-bomb attempt in Great Britain:

My main beef remains that much of the cable news media reacts to this nonsense like a fifty year old guy on Viagra or Cialis--they pop major wood. And the same warnings are appropriate--an erection lasting more than four hours may be harmful. Amen.

--Atrios. That's probably the best analogy I've heard for the cable news phenomenum of providing saturation coverage of the non-story, whether it be "terrorist plots" or "kidnapped teens." Is there any better description for the CNN/FoxNews treatment of Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan than that they "pop major wood" when those teen vixens appear, or that such stories can become harmful to the public after four hours of exposure? Anyways, read the whole thing....

Now that the immigration bill is dead, it's time to engage in some post-mortems. As both Kos and Tim from Balloon Juice note, the debate was, from a political standpoint, an unqualified blessing for the Democratic Party. Its contingent in the Senate got to take the high road, mainly supporting the compromise, but with enough defectors opposing the bill on non-xenophobic grounds to scuttle any chance of overcoming a cloture vote. And there's no reason a bill with as many unpleasant compromises as this needed to be passed this year, when the prospects for an even better bill await in 2009.

Republicans, on the other hand, felt the full wrath of the talk radio wingnuts, who aren't going to easily forget the fact that their leaders in the Senate actually showed compassion to a bunch of Mezkins, but will get not any benefit from Latino voters, who now see the party as too captivated by some of the uglier elements in our society. Texas and Florida, two states that have been the bulwark of the Republican majority since 1972, have large populations of native Spanish speakers, and the loss of either state will doom the party to a permanent minority.

As you can see, my week-long, Gentile-version of Shiva has ended, and I have returned to my post. Thanks to all of those who sent their thoughts, including the commenters below, but particularly people like Mike from Berkeley, Matilda from London, and a whole bunch of others too numerous to mention. Just as I was blessed by my grandma, so too am I blessed by having some of the most wonderful readers on the planet.

Shouldn't the headline to this story be not "White House Does Contortions to Defend Cheney Privilege Claim," but instead "White House Refuses to Issue Unqualified Support for Cheney." When a press flack for the White House says repeatedly that she "will not opine" on his argument that he's part of neither the executive nor legislative (or is it both executive and legistative) branch, that's obviously not the same thing as saying that the President backs his Veep; in fact, it's awfully close to what Ron Ziegler was saying publicly about Nixon's position on the criminal charges against Spiro Agnew.

And apparently, I'm not the only one who caught these signals....