Boehner: ‘Beyond My Control’ How Ratings Agencies Treat My Debt Limit Plan [TPM]

Joe Nelms thanks God for his smoking’ hot wife in best NASCAR prayer evah!

And Piers Morgan remains defiant about the whole middle class thing.

“In the latest indication that her sights are still set on a presidential run, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has accepted an invitation to keynote a Tea Party rally in Waukee, Iowa, on Sept. 3, RealClearPolitics has learned.”

So we’re looking for something other than the debt ceiling to riff on, and we’ve already played our Crazy Thomas Friedman card so we can’t play another one, and the Yahoo news blog helpfully offers this headline for our consideration:

Yahoo!, communities across U.S. to honor 9/11 anniversary

There’s nothing unusual about the grammar, as far as headlines go. But there’s something wrong about it. Let’s look at some alternatives to tease it out.

Read more »

Alex Trebek, host of the game show Jeopardy, was injured early Tuesday as he chased a burglar at the Marriott Marquis hotel in San Francisco.  The no longer mustachioed Trebek managed to rally later on Wednesday to be a judge in National Geographic’s geography bee at Googleplex Ground Zero 40 miles down the Peninsula.*

According to Trebek: “It happened at 2:30 a.m., chasing a burglar down the hallway of my San Francisco hotel, when my Achilles tendon ruptured and I then fell on carpet, bruising the other leg in process. Surgery on Friday.”

A 56-year-old suspect, Lucinda Moyers of San Francisco, was arrested.  Purses and wallets taken from Mr. Trebek’s room were found by the ice machine.

[SF Chronicle] 

* No information was provided as to whether on Wednesday morning Mr. Trebek hopped on one of those annoying private buses that clog the streets of the Mission and the Castro ferrying hipsters down 101 to the Googleplex — buses that cause your SF correspondent to engage what is referred to as “The Jersey Horn” and “The Jersey Finger” in driving education parlance.

In a stunning new development in the hacking scandal that is engulfing the Murdoch empire and which now threatens to spread to more of Britain’s tabloids, it is revealed in today’s Daily Telegraph that when appearing on the BBC’s long-running Desert Island Discs international TV personality and one-time editor of The News of the World Piers Morgan was referred to by the interviewer as being ‘middle class.’

The BBC has issued an apology, insisting that the script had him listed as being upper-middle, not middle-middle. “It’s all jolly unfortunate,” said spokesman Nigel Brill. “Gosh, no one wants to give the impression that Mr. Morgan’s some kind of grammar-school boy.”

In the tape of the particular programme, the shock is palpable in Mr. Morgan’s voice, shock which no doubt led him to boast about all the hacking going on around him in the office which he did not personally take part in, oversee, or directly witness.

Reached in her Hampstead flat, Margaret Drabble expressed her sympathy, “I want to be very clear,” she said, “that when I admitted I had middle-class friends I was not in any way referring to Mr. Morgan.”

CNN’s Piers Morgan ‘told interviewer stories were published based on phone tapping’ [Telegraph UK]

[ Flash video not available. ]

Dan Savage threatens to redefine Santorum’s first name, with the help of a few Famous Ricks. Unfortunately — or deliberately, depending on your comedic taste — all the proposed definitions are bleeped.

[via TPM]