"I’ve been near God, but I’ve also been near the devil."

"God won."

"Whores. Whores! Whores! Look around you. Look around you. Do you see what's happening?"

"In our town. In our very homes! You know who I'm talking about. You know! You know what's going on in that house! Vice! Perversions! Shamelessness! Cavorting... with that... devil!"

A quote from:

A. Somebody talking to Jerry Brown, who responded "Well, I'm going to use that."

B. David Axelrod, denouncing Christine O'Donnell.

C. Veronica Cartwright, attempting to warn people about what Jack Nicholson is doing.

Today's Drudgedy... Drudge comedy.

Eyes... bucks... Not sure what Drudge is driving at here. Some strange coded message to Ohio? And why show the front and not the back of the dollar bill?

"We need to get out the message that it’s now really dangerous to re-empower the Republican Party."

The Democrats are trying to figure out the best way to scare the bejeezus out of you.

Really, where did the Tea Party come from? Suddenly, it's everywhere. It's all these people congregating at rallies. No leaders. Just spontaneous comings-together. How could that happen? Then, the leaders emerge. Who are these people? They came out of nowhere. And one of them... is a witch!

Christine O'Donnell: " I dabbled into witchcraft — I never joined a coven. But I did, I did. … I dabbled into witchcraft."

She said that in 1999. I don't know when the dabbling itself took place. It bugs me more that she says "dabbled into" than that she actually did it (or claimed to). It's "dabbled in." Here's the clip, from Bill Maher's show:



1. Maher obviously knows her well and likes her. "She's nice," he says. She was on his show a lot, and he's just exploiting the clips he has, which, he tells us, he's going to keep doing until she comes on his show. He's blackmailing her and giggling about what he's doing to this nice person he likes.

2. It's a good attention-getting ploy by Maher. He's got the video and he's taking clips out of context for the maximum shock/comic effect. It's perfectly okay to do that with video, right? Remember when Andrew Breitbart did something like that to Shirley Sherrod, and all the liberals got all righteous about taking things out of context?

3. Did O'Donnell ever practice witchcraft? I doubt it. Even in the out-of-context clip, I'm seeing a young woman trying to get the hipper kids to believe she isn't really a complete square. In the story she tells, she went out with someone who, she thought, was into Satanism, and they had a picnic. A picnic! Even when she's straining to sound cool, she's square.

4. But she "dabbled into" witchcraft — doesn't that mean she did some witchcraft things? Frankly, I don't think she knows what "dabbled" means. The use of the wrong preposition is a hint. I think she means something more like she stumbled into witchcraft. She knew some people who did such things, and I'll bet the point she was making was that she was able to be friends with them, that she hasn't spent her whole life cocooned in squeaky clean conservative religion and she's able to relate to a wide variety of people.

5. Even if she had participated in some witchcraft, she'd only be like thousands of other young people who dabble in such nonsense. Do you want to string them all up? It's typical pop culture junk these days.

"If you’ve got, so to speak, the devil inside the elevator, press the call button. Call Otis."

"You’re trying to make this fun, I can understand that. But I’ve never heard of anything like this."

"Okay, what if one of your fellow passengers bites you?"

"Smack the person across the face."

Elevator expert is questioned a propos of this movie trailer:



Oh, I see. All our ridiculous primal fears about elevators are going to be exploited. IF... and I stress if... we subject ourselves to another M. Night Shyamalan movie.

It seems silly to make big expensive wide-screen movies about a few people stuck in a small space. Such things would do better on a theater stage. Like "No Exit." Or, even better, on TV. Like "Five Characters in Search of an Exit." ("Twilight Zone" video begins here.)

I truly loathe the movie techniques used in that trailer — music, swooping shots, editing — to try to make something inherently small fill the big screen. Our fears are in our heads. Put us in touch with that. Don't hurl screenfuls of flashing lights in our face and blast us with cheeseball music. That just makes me feel bad, and then I get angry. To scare me, you must be subtle.

Just a barrel, a dark depository where are kept the counterfeit, make-believe pieces of plaster and cloth, wrought in the distorted image of human life. But this added, hopeful note: perhaps they are unloved only for the moment. In the arms of children, there can be nothing but love. A clown, a tramp, a bagpipe player, a ballet dancer, and a major. Tonight's cast of players on the odd stage known as the Twilight Zone.

A dubious album cover.

Via Roger Ebert's twitpic page, which is also the source of the previous 2 posts.

I remember when most girls tried to get their hair to do that. It's not easy, and it takes nerve — or possibly help from Jesus — to tease your hair that big. Funny... it was considered wrong back then — in the early 60s — to tease your hair. There were all sorts of warnings, notably that your hair would fall out, but also that insects would grow in it.

I remember one particularly harrowing — hair-rowing — story about a girl who kept teasing her hair, day after day, teasing and spraying, without washing it. One day, at school, blood suddenly began streaming down her face. Then, she died! Her hair detached from her head in one big clump. Somebody picked it up and then, in horror, threw it against the wall. Thousands of roaches ran out of it!

Think about that when you're teasing your hair. This was back in the days before the coining of the term "urban legend." It would give you pause. Most of us went for a relatively subtle "bump"...



... and denied that we achieved it through teasing.

Anyway, The Faith Tones... What I don't get is... Christian music, but they don't look wholesome. Maybe I'm still scarred from the adolescent lessons about hair-teasing. It would make boys think you were a bad girl. Is this the way to present yourself to Jesus? Sincerely? I couldn't find any Faith Tones music on Amazon or iTunes. They seem to exist entirely as an internet meme, based on mocking this album cover.

Are The Faith Tones themselves an urban legend? Or — alternate theory — is this album cover the work of the devil, who is tempting you to laugh at religion?

At the Purple Rock Café...

... we felt the cold breath of the devil, but we got away!

Is radical Muslim the new Goth?

You can upset your parents and teachers by masquerading as a zealous devotee of other people's religion.

[Zachary Adam Chesser] was a "loner," a former classmate said, one who frequently drew pictures of Satanic figures in his notebooks and had just a few friends, most of them male.

"He was definitely sort of weird," the classmate told FoxNews.com. "He was very into violent industrial music, borderline Satanic bands and stuff like that. He had dark undertones in his interests."

Two years later, Chesser is literally a changed man. He now uses an alias and has a new set of hobbies. He now likes to be called Abu Talhah Al-Amrikee, and his primary interest in this world appears to be Islamic radicalism.

This is a much greater mockery of Islam than a drawing of Muhammad! Nice work, Chesser, you loser.

ADDED: Eugene Volokh notes the historical resonance.

"It's true they took stupefying substances; overwhelmed by success they lived dissolute and uninhibited years..."

"... in an excess of boastfulness they even said they were more famous than Jesus; they had fun launching mysterious messages, even Satanic, according to improbable declarations ... sure they weren't the best example for young people at the time, but neither [were they] the worst."

There's some confusion and consternation over whether the Vatican was absolving The Beatles.

Photographs of a baby girl dressed up as Hitler, Idi Amin, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin, and Pinochet.

It's the work of Norwegian-Danish artist Nina Maria Kleivan:

Kleivan said she was inspired to begin sewing infant-sized costumes soon after the birth of her daughter, who is now 11 years old. She said complications from her pregnancy had left her and the baby sitting at home. Looking at her daughter, she recalled, she considered that each human life begins as a blank slate, with opportunity to do good or evil....

Her husband was supportive -- until he spotted a tiny swastika armband.

"'I'm aware that you're an artist, but this is wrong,' he told me," Kleivan recalled him saying. "I've pondered that a lot myself: Could I really do this? I agree it's on the verge, especially Hitler, whom I and most others view as the incarnation of evil. He and Stalin were the hardest to do. It hurt."

Yeah, Hitler. That's when you went to far. Or does the problem go back to that time when you were home, postpartum, and gazing at the infant set off ideation about evil.

The baby's name is Faustina — the feminine version of Faust (who sold his soul to the devil).

Pat Robertson: "Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it."

"They were under the heel of the French ... and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.' Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another."

When so many in Haiti have died or are dying and suffering, how can anyone think this is the time to say such a thing? Does religion give Robertson the gall? I'm not going to ask why a belief in God doesn't frighten people out of such heartlessness. It's too sadly obvious that it does not.

Michelle Cottle is really getting on Barack Obama's case about playing golf.

She writes:

Why would a leader vowing to shake up Washington--to alter the very nature of politics--sell his soul to a leisure activity that screams stodgy, hyperconventional Old Guard?

Sell his soul? Golf is not the devil. Isn't it possible that he golfs because he enjoys it? Unlike basketball, you get some leisurely strolling time. You can talk. You can smoke! And you're outdoors.

There are signs that Obama has been nursing a creeping golf addiction for some time now.

If there's an addiction involved, I bet it's smoking.

He took up the game a little more than a decade ago as a newbie state senator hoping to bond with more rural, conservative colleagues. Next thing you know, he was hooked....

So he actually has something genuine in common with the clinging-to-guns-and-religion crowd. That's horrible to Cottle, who'd like him to play basketball, like a good urban liberal.

Golf is a dying game--on the skids for nearly a decade, according to a 2008 report by the National Golf Foundation. The number of Americans who golf has fallen by some four million.... One observed problem: evolving family dynamics. Men once free to spend all weekend on the links are now expected to help shuttle the kids to soccer, walk the dog, and generally pull their weight on the home front. The first lady may be understanding about her man’s special recreational needs. But does President Obama really want to be associated with a game so antithetical to modern life?

Cottle is really hostile to golf.  She doesn't mention Tiger Woods, but I'm sensing a Nordegrenesque female rage — even though Obama is as uxorious a politician as I've ever seen. Though Cottle presents herself as the modern woman, she's mouthing ancient female complaints. (What is less hip than a "golf widow" cartoon?)

Let the poor man play golf if he's too tired to look cool playing basketball, needs a long walk, and loves his fresh air well-mixed with tobacco smoke. As long as the golf course is close to the White House — leave him alone!

"Jose Flores Pereira, 44, who carried a Bible and a small box wrapped in packing tape, explained that the date - 9/9/9 - was the number of the Beast upside down."

"He forced the pilot of AeroMexico Flight 576 from Cancun to circle Mexico City seven times before landing, and demanded to talk to Mexican President Felipe Calderon. 'He had a revelation that Mexico was threatened by an earthquake,' said public safety minister Genaro Garcia Luna. The hijacker released all 104 passengers unharmed before SWAT teams stormed the plane, freeing the crew and capturing Pereira without firing a shot."

So he was only a lunatic. But he showed us that it's still pretty easy to hijack a plane.

"Satan is content in letting us profess Christianity."

"As long as we don't practice it."



Canah Chapel, Freewill Baptist Church, is in Erwin, Tennessee.

But we weren't there either to profess or practice Christianity. We went here...



... to pee, drink coffee, and access the internet. Satan let us do all that, but we don't know whether or not he was content. I understand why Satan — if he existed — would be happy to see folks professing but not practicing Christianity. I think he wouldn't care one way or the other about urination, but that he'd be pleased to see us drinking coffee, even as I think God gave us coffee in the hope that, energized, we'd turn to the good.

As for the internet, I'd say it depends on which websites you go to, and the subtle preferences of God and Satan are unknowable to us, but perhaps they are both keeping track of the entire history of all of our website visits and that we'll be called to account in the end.

But it was not the golden arches anymore than the cross that got us to take that exit. It was the sign for the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site. But then another sign said it was 31 miles away, and Satan made us go to McDonald's instead. This morning — the morning after — I sorrowfully regret not making the pilgrimage to the dishonored President's place of honor.

"Want to go back?" Meade says. No, no, we've gone too far ahead. We got all the way to Berea, Kentucky last night, where we walked around until night fell...

"I have it on pretty good information from the marines on detail in Iraq that they showed Saddam the movie."

"Over and over again – which is a pretty funny thought. That's really adding insult to injury."

So say Trey Parker and Matt Stone, about their movie "South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut" (which depicts Saddam as Satan's gay lover.) They also say they received an autographed photograph of the overthrown dictator.

Something wicked....

(At the museum.)