Sadly, No!

“You must leave now, take what you need you think will last,
But whatever you wish to keep you better grab it fast…”

It’s too bad, really. If he weren’t a plagiarist, I’d have no problem with WaPo hiring a wealthy, politically-connected 24-year-old to blog on behalf of blue-collar heartlanders. In fact, the entire concept is so hilariously weird that I’m kind of sad we won’t get to see it play out.

Gavin and I will give our suggestions for potential replacements later today…

UPDATE: 3Bulls! steps down as well. It’s a sad day for Internets journalism.

==update===update===ditditdit===update===

Please click here for the funniest thing ever written in the history of human consciousness.

Oh God, here’s an even better one. Oh holy Jesus on a Segway…

And then click here and definitely here and here.

The text from the first two links is copied after the jump, because it’s so intoxicatingly, life-affirmingly splendid and perfect that we’re afraid it will be cruelly taken away and lost forever.
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We’re gonna miss you, Ben. Your time with the Washington Post will be even shorter than Jeff Gannon’s stint as a White House correspondent. And let’s face it: That’s really sad.

Check this out:

American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology.

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.�

We’re more hated than the gays and the Muslims??!!! What the fuck, man!??!! Why do y’all hate us so much?

Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. “Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,� says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher.

I don’t get it. We non-believers are about the least-threatening group of folks around. Are people really this scared of the idea that humanity is alone in the universe and that life is utterly pointless? Whoda thunk?

Edgell also argues that today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past—they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society. “It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common ‘core’ of values that make them trustworthy—and in America, that ‘core’ has historically been religious,� says Edgell. Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.

Guys, you can put a camera in my room 24-7 and I guarantee you won’t see any rampant materialism, cultural elitism or criminal behavior (unless you think masturbation is criminal, and I hope you don’t).

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Thanks to a push from a certain Evil Squid Scientist, a certain Professor of Dangeral Studies is threatening an unacceptable all-categories sweep of the Cobb Awards.

The committee was dragged out of bed to issue a ruling, and it was decided that the Most Super Worst Professor EVAR-INFINITY!1!!! award be reinstituted.

Raphael, ‘School of Athens’ (1510-11): Horowitz lectures
Plato on the dichotomy between knowledge and opinion

Voting continues apace.

Now that I’m thoroughly riled up, can anybody tell me what the hell the Patriots think they’re doing letting McGinnest and Vinatieri walk? Who the hell can they possibly replace them with who’s still on the free agent market? Unless they have a draft akin to the Steelers in ’74 (when they selected a whopping four future Hall-of-Famers), they look s to tha’ crizwed next year.

To make matters worse, the Dolphins finally found themselves a real quarterback. Grrrrrr…

I just did a Lexis-Nexis search for articles printed in 1999 that contained comparisons of NATO’s bombing campaign in the Balkans to the war in Vietnam. Here is a sample of what I found:

One:

In World War II, the German blitz forced England to surrender. The 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi toppled the communist regime and secured the independence of South Vietnam.

You missed that, didn’t you?

In reality, strategic bombing alone has never decided anything. Yet Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright still think they can bomb Slobodan Milosevic back to the conference table, as Lyndon Johnson used to say.

-Don Feder, Boston Herald Op-Ed, 4/14/99

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If I hear one more wingnut blame THE MEDIA!!!!! for Bush’s low poll numbers, or for falling public support for the Iraq war, I am going to scream.

Look, wingnuts: the dreaded liberal press was around in the ’80s, no? And going by your “MSM OUT TO GET ALL REPUBLICANS!!!1!” theory, they should have been out to get Ronald Reagan, no? But did their biased leftist loser-defeatist coverage stop Reagan from being a broadly popular president across the country? Nuh-uh. In fact, when Reagan was president, he didn’t have the alternative wingnut media like FOX News, Powerline or talk radio to pimp for him- he had to deal with Helen Thomas and Dan Rather all by his fucking lonesome. And unlike the current crybaby-in-chief, “he had a pair” (to use one of Peggy Noonan’s most glorious phrases).

OK, so if the press isn’t responsible for Bush’s low approval ratings, could it be that maybe- just fucking maybe- most people think Bush is doing a shitty job? Or that the Iraq war hasn’t been worth all the blood and treasure we’ve put into it? Just wondering.