Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown has issued a pair of demands before he will agree to debate his opponent, Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren. The first is that the debate not be carried by MSNBC. Given that the network has become known for hosting mostly left-of-center political opinion shows, this demand could be seen as, perhaps not entirely unreasonable. Just as a Democratic politician might balk at the idea of Fox News broadcasting a debate (imagine your performance being judged by a round-table consisting of half a dozen right-wing demagogues and Juan Williams) one could see a Republican pol. expressing unease at a the post-debate analysis that would immediately follow featuring Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Dylan Ratigan and Michael Steele.

However, it is the second of Brown’s demands that has raised the most eyebrows and for which he receives the title and crown of Stinque’s Douchebag of the Day, for Wednesday, June 20th:

The senator himself was silent on the proposal until Monday, when his campaign manager said Brown would participate only if Vicki Kennedy [wife of former MA, Senator Ted Kennedy] agreed “that she will not endorse or otherwise get involved in this race.”

Demanding a private citizen refrain from endorsing a candidate for political office as a pre-condition for debating your opponent? Congratulations, Scott Brown. You just made yourself look like a frightened little puppy.

Source: Boston.com

Am enough of a nerd to love this:

I call her a talentless fucking hack:

Lose a racist, gain a racist:

There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society – the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we ‘know’ it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically.

That’s David Yerushalmi folks, the new Derbyshire …. Then there’s this:

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I think I spotted Dodgerblue making a cameo in this video shot in a West L.A. Whole Paycheck.

Kevin Drum has trouble believing that conservatives in positions of power won’t do the right thing. Steve M:

If you’re Kevin Drum, you can’t really believe that powerful people who hold positions of great responsibility act like this. You can’t believe, for instance, that they’d saddle their own political primaries with a Sheldon Adelson just because freeing people like him to give unlimited cash pisses us off. Even now, they can’t believe the Supreme Court will overturn a law that reduces government spending, and that Republicans in Congress won’t replace it with something that addresses the country’s real health care problems in some serious way.

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If you’d flipped though the pages of the Washington Post earlier today, you might have stumbled upon an article concerning the firing of University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan. And if you’d read through the article you might have learned that Sullivan was ousted by a cadre of plutocrats appointed to the Board of Regents by the governor and tasked with the mission of cutting the University’s budget to the bone. And in the budgetary battle that pits academic excellence and integrity against a philosophy of Government that sees no room for public spending outside the Defense Department, Ms. Sullivan was seen as favoring the former at the expense of the latter. And if you’d scanned the aforementioned article for an example of Ms. Sullivan’s profligacy you would have come upon the following paragraphs:

The campaign to remove Sullivan began around October, the sources said. The Dragas group coalesced around a consensus that Sullivan was moving too slowly. Besides broad philosophical differences, they had at least one specific quibble: They felt Sullivan lacked the mettle to trim or shut down programs that couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure academic departments in classics and German.

And for a moment you’d scratch your head and wonder “obscure academic departments in classics and German?” And then it would dawn on you: My God.. The Washington Post actually seems to think I’m dumber than a bag of bricks, and what’s more, they seem to believe that even that’s too smart.

But you didn’t of course. Because, I mean, fuck’s sake: who reads so pathetic an excuse for a newspaper as the Washington Post? If you wanted to give yourself a lobotomy, you’d shove an ice-pick through the roof of your mouth and wiggle it around, back and forth and side to side, a few times. Much less painful and frustrating an experience than flipping through the pages of the fucking Washington Post.