We had this bright idea the other day to browse Google Street View for the area around Ground Zero, noting establishments that, by lack of national outcry, meet the standards for respectable presence. Happily, someone about three thousand miles closer did the footwork for us.

Less happily, Traditional Serial Marriage spokesman Newt Gingrich won’t shut the fuck up:

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“The Supreme Court has upheld a $20,000 fine against a leader of the movement challenging President Barack Obama’s citizenship. The high court on Monday refused to block a federal judge’s October 2009 ruling that required California lawyer and dentist Orly Taitz to pay the $20,000 fine for filing a ‘frivolous’ litigation.” [AP/TPM]

Buried in a footnote of the appeal of the pending resumption of Armageddon in California is a fascinating claim about what puts the Traditional in Marriage:

Infertile marriages also advance the institution’s central procreative purposes by reinforcing social norms that heterosexual intercourse — which in most cases can produce offspring — should take place only within marriage.

This isn’t just a passing remark — the Prop 8 sponsors spend a good ten pages dwelling on the subject. But it reveals a subtext to the issue that wasn’t entirely apparent in November 2008:

Prop 8 protects the State’s right to regulate fucking.

Not just gay fucking. All fucking. Or, to be more precise: All unlicensed fucking.

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Title: “Hitch-22: A Memoir”

Author: Christopher Hitchens

Rank: 82

Blurb: “If Hitchens didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to invent him.” (Ian McEwan)

Review: “Many reviews and articles about Hitch 22 will focus on the Hitchens’ statements about the high degree of homosexual activity that he says existed in the boarding schools he attended. His claims (which I have no logical reason to doubt) seem pretty stunning to me, a small town boy from the midwest.”

Customers Also Bought: “Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis”.

Footnote: That dead kid in Iraq will see you in Hell, Hitch.

Hitch-22 [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon kickback link]

If you insist upon not being eaten by wolves when you die, or not having your coffee-can-laden ashes blown into Jeff Bridges’ face, there’s an alternative that promises to be slightly easier on land use than traditional casket dumping:

Drill, body, drill.

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“Sacrilege at Ground Zero: A place is made sacred by a widespread belief that it was visited by the miraculous or the transcendent (Lourdes, the Temple Mount), by the presence there once of great nobility and sacrifice (Gettysburg), or by the blood of martyrs and the indescribable suffering of the innocent (Auschwitz).” [WaPo]

“Longshot Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alvin Greene was indicted Friday on two charges, including a felony charge of showing pornography to a teenage student in a South Carolina college computer lab.” [AP/MSNBC]