In composing Sunday’s Stinque Book Club entry, we were faced with a quandary: What is there to say about professional cretin Dick Morris that hasn’t been said already?

We chose a reader review about Mom listening to an audiobook version filling the presumably lonely rooms of a presumably large house as inspiration: What kind of world do you have to live in for that kind of fetid monologue to fill the air? How thoroughly divorced from reality do you have to be to accept that as anything approaching fact?

We toyed with declaring a significant proportion of Americans to be clinically psychotic, before settling on the observation that the Wingnut Establishment does a much more professional job of turning its audience into cultists than Charles Manson.

And then, Sunday evening, we read this in the Paper of Record:

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Local news: the Psychometer feature is no more.  It has ceased to be.  (Frankly, it has ceased to be for months now.  Now it is official.)

The fault, dear cynics, lay not in the concept, but myself.  We were all gung-ho to track the stupid.  Then real life happened to your humble servant.  Now we look at it and the House segment of the Congressional Record runs to almost 1600 pages.  Sifting through that to find every stupid thing that the GOP said for the record?  Though offers for help came (and thank you, btw), you could put the entire staff of a major metropolitan newspaper to that task, and it would never get done.  Through my overreaching and reality-based sloth, the idea has wasted away, and has now died through my own fault, through my own grievous fault.

So hail and farewell to Psychometer — an ingenious plan that turned into a brilliant mistake.  Sleep well.

So I figured I’d make the drive up from Chicago to see what all the hub-bub was about.  I decided to leave early, as word was that all the downtown and campus parking ramps filled up quickly; come late, and I’d have to park in a fallow field or something.

Turns out I came too early.  Thus I had forgotten one of the most important things I learned in law school — Sunday mornings are dead as a doornail around here.  Saturday night, after all, is Saturday night — if you were up-and-at-em at 9:00 in the morning on Sunday, you were either going to church or you didn’t party hard enough.

But things did get rolling around 11:00 at the Capitol — the Letter Carriers’ union was kicking things off.  A stroll around, and inside, the Capitol gave me a taste of what has been going on here for the past three weeks.  The general impression you get was that this was, exceedingly and without question, a civil crowd.  There were maybe one or two signs that pushed the limits (like one with a picture of Osama bin Laden with Scott Walker’s face superimposed — carried by a firefighter, of all people).  Other than that, the reports of violent overthrow and armed rebellion have been greatly exaggerated.

More visuals, post-jump.

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Title: “Revolt!: How to Defeat Obama and Repeal His Socialist Programs”

Authors: Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

Rank: 41

Blurb: “Dick Morris served as Bill Clinton’s political consultant for twenty years.”

Review: “I received my larger than expected box of cd’s for REVOLT. 9 disks. It is really easy to listen while driving or sitting at my computer. My mom listens to hers in her stereo so it broadcasts across the house while she works.”

Customers Also Bought: “How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda”, by Andrew C. McCarthy

Footnote: Manson was an amateur.

Revolt! [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon kickback link]

Over the past twenty minutes, a mysterious contrail-emitting vessel darkened the skies over Stinque World Domination Headquarters, leaving curious glyphs that we’re sure NASA scientists are already hard at work deciphering. We think that Earthling Ken is in danger of having his heart removed after the anal probe is administered. Or perhaps it’s a warning that anybody found with two hearts should be immediately quarantined. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the world’s most expensive text message.

Who said what?  No peeking until you finish:

1) “The Pepperoni Prophet wears pepperoni for underwear. He knows what he’s doing.”

2) “The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards look like droopy-eyed, armless children.”

3) “The pizza is so good, it makes you put on your clothes like a fish!”

4) “L.A. County is like a huge tortilla.  It spreads everywhere.”

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“Anybody who’s been halfway around the block is aware of In-N-Out’s secret menu,” we are told, forcing us to admit that after a dozen years in California, we’ve only traveled a quarter or a third. In our defense, we have visited an In-N-Out once in somewhat recent memory, which is more than we can recall visiting any other fast-food joint. It’s been a long time since we regularly skipped high-school lunch for McDonald’s.

To join the Cult of The Secret Menu, apparently you just knowingly order a standard item not found on the printed version. Pictured here is what appears to be a “4×2” — four patties, two slices of (optionally unmelted) cheese — the sight of which is sufficient for us to maintain a healthy distance from In-N-Out for another dozen years.

The Ultimate In-N-Out Secret Menu (and Super Secret Menu!) Survival Guide [A Hamburger Today, via Kottke]