Wonkette

• Ned Lamont not dissimilar from another famous Lamont, have more than just selling junk in common. [Hot Johnny]

• Congressman Ralph Hall “loves bush” wants to “pull down his britches” and show him how much. [Pink Dome]
• Blair and Bush: one is working hard, the other’s hardly working. [ThinkProgress]
• Americans go AWOL in culture war. [The Carpetbagger Report]
• Deserters to form own Army whose central tenet is unwavering belief in all internet conspiracy theories. [Shakespeare's Sister]
• A double barreled shotgun: when you absolutely must shoot every motherfucker in the room, in the face. [Andrew Sullivan]
• ExxonMobil uses loser who lives in his parent’s basement as cover for their An Inconvenient Truth parody. [The Raw Story]

As a public service to our readers in Ohio, if your funds are a little low at the moment, you might want to lend a hand to Jennifer Black, better known as Congressthing Jean Schmidt’s evil twin. And it’s easy! All you have to do is find those meanies who keep defacing and/or destroying the pro-life signs on the grounds of the no-doubt ultraswanky Schmidt family farm. Heck, that doesn’t sound very hard: a couple of nights hiding in a field with a shotgun for five franklins? It’s like shooting cultural warrior fish in a barrel. And the opportunity to stand that close to Jean Schmidt’s shared gene pool? Heck, we’d do that for free. MORE »

* The mumbled threats and nonsensical ramblings of crackhead love. [vividblurry] MORE »

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* White House shake-up is directed at the midterm elections; Bolten is following a five-point plan that includes an “extremely visible enforcement crackdown at the Mexican border.” Bush advisor: “If we don’t keep Congress, there won’t be a legacy.” [Time]
* Osama Bin Laden releases new audio tape; analyst says intention is to provide a global posture for al Qaeda: “Bin Laden is a master craftsman at recognizing issues and knowing how to exploit these issues for his own purposes. He’s trying to enlarge the global conflict and is trying to incite and anger the Muslim world against the West.” [WP]
* Eight American troops have been killed over the past two days in Iraq; April will likely be the deadliest month this year. [AP]
* West Wing is said to feel “really weird right now” because “people are worried about their jobs,” says a senior official; aides “are on edge.” Mark McKinnon: “Karl has more bandwidth than anyone on the planet, but with the elections coming up, we have to make sure he has the time to concentrate on the big message.” Nicole Wallace on Bolten: “It was nice to cut right to the chase. He set a very honest and direct tone. It was kind of, ‘We’re going to get through all this together, and we need to step it up.’” [Newsweek, NYT]
* White turnout in the New Orleans mayoral election was double the norm; Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu could be the city’s first white mayor in nearly three decades. [NYT, WP]
* CIA is cracking down on leaks by subjecting dozens of employees to polygraph tests; top Democrats suggest a double standard exists about leaking for political purposes. [NYT, WP]
* Los Angeles Times editorial board calls for Bush to boot Cheney: “Having changed his tune, the president should also think about changing the company he keeps — big time, as Dick Cheney would say.” [LAT]

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Come to think of it, America is just like a medium rare steak: it’s red in the center.

Government Investigators Smuggled Radioactive Materials Into U.S. [CNN] MORE »

At last, World magazine gets to the root of the problem :

They’re actually characterizing the opposition’s view, but we think there’s a certain amount of projection involved… MORE »

Many thanks to Thailand for being the first country to take steps against the epidemic of out-of-wedlock panda births. The Thai zoo’s two pandas are presumed to start mating soon, “But the zoo wanted them to be married first.” Of course. Single-panda motherhood is well known to be the root cause of rising panda unemployment and high crime rates in panda neighborhoods. Did you know that in America, there are more pandas in zoos than in college? Look at what’s going on with our own poor bastard Butterstick: Has a deadbeat dad living off the state and he’s an immigrant whose been here for ten years and he still doesn’t speak English. Without a traditional family, a young panda will look elsewhere for their role models, and, you know, recruiting Butterstick is probably right at the top of the gay penguin agenda. MORE »

The Kaiser Family Foundation has just released a study on depictions and references to sex in television; they show that “70% of shows had some sexual content, averaging 5 sex scenes per hour.” Jesus. No wonder my Tivo thinks I’m gay. You know, comparatively. But hold on: “The study counts as a sex scene talking about it, kissing and fondling, and intercourse when those are the emphasis of a scene.” Well, if you count talking about it… I should be making a lot more money. MORE »

The Washington Post reports today:

Slightly more than half of American teenagers ages 15 to 19 have engaged in oral sex, with females and males reporting similar levels of experience, according to the most comprehensive national survey of sexual behaviors ever released by the federal government.

Maybe a woman can be president after all! MORE »