"[D]oubling down on the bland, middle-aged white guy quotient on the Republican ticket could be a major mistake."

Writes Chris Cilizza, giving 3 reasons why Rob Portman is the wrong VP choice for Romney. One of the reasons is "Boring":

Portman is not exactly Mr. Exciting. (When your calling card for charisma is a chicken impersonation, it’s pretty slim pickings in the personality department.)

Must everything be about chicken? I would invite everyone to read "15 Genuinely Interesting Things About Rob Portman." The "great impression of a chicken" is in there, and in fact, there's another one with chickens:

He assembled a chicken coop for his wife's Christmas present this year and he gave her four chickens that live in their backyard. They lay four eggs a day.

To be fair to Cilizza, he also wrote a column about why Portman would be a great pick. In that analysis, boringness was a plus:

The rap on Portman is that he’s a boring guy who no one knows. That fact virtually ensures that if Portman is the pick the narrative that will emerge will be along the lines of “he’s more interesting that you might think!”. It’s just how these things tend to work.

I see that column links to the "15 Genuinely Interesting Things" that I remembered.

By the way, will it ever become politically incorrect to say white men are boring? People assume that it's safe to be racist and sexist when you're insulting traditionally privileged groups, but if you are one of those people who's felt the comfort of that insulation, I'd like to invite you to consider the way those insults always contain an implicit stereotype insulting the traditionally disadvantaged groups. If you say white men are boring, you're also saying something about women and about black people.

Oh, but it's a compliment — you say — to call someone interesting.

Is it? And there's a big difference between saying that a specific person is interesting and asserting that a particular group is "interesting." Black people are interesting — Is that something you think is acceptable to say?

ADDED: Remember those pathetic people who ate rats in an art gallery and imagined that they were adding to their interestingness? In the linked post, the commenter t-man said:

The sad man who lives in fear of seeming to be uninteresting brought to mind the classic Bugs Bunny lines:

My, I'll bet you monsters lead in-teresting lives. I said to my girl friend just the other day, 'Gee, I'll bet monsters are in-teresting.' I said. The places you must go and the things you must see -- my stars! I bet you meet lots of in-teresting people too. I'm always in-terested in meeting in-teresting people. Now let's dip our patties in the water!

 Now let's dip our patties in the water!

MSNBC takes Romney's "WaWa" remark out of context for the purpose of mockery.

Shame on Andrea Mitchell and Chris Cillizza for their clown work in this travesty of journalism.

You've got to watch the clip, knowing how completely out of context it is. Look at the bullshit blank disbelief mugging they do for the camera. How embarrassing!

Here's something else out of context:

Now I don't need no WaWa
And I know how sweet life can be
So I get myself free... of WaWa
I don't need no WaWa

IN THE COMMENTS: t-man said:

Wawa is the best convenience store chain in the country!...

Also, it isn't WaWa, that would be ridiculous. It is named after the town of Wawa, Pennsylvania.

Yes, there's no internal capital W. I  checked the company's website. I was carrying over the error made a the WasHington PoSt website.

ADDED: Rush Limbaugh is opening his show today with this story. MSNBC is doing it again, he says, connecting it to the doctoring of George Zimmerman's 911 call. "It was blatant and they got caught... and now everybody is ridiculing them."

Chip unlocks a dirty visual secret.

"That painting is subversively pornographic. It's shocking my eyeballs."

Later:

See what I mean.

I was going to make her head bob and then I thought, no, you must consider the children. And then I thought, if I would make the head bob then I might learn where it is that Photobucket is drawing the line about taking down my stuff. Since they never tell me.

Wow! I haven't seen such a convincing animation since Ra^thergate.

IN THE COMMENTS: t-man corrects:

That's a dude, Chip, not a woman.

Concealed carry comes to Wisconsin.

From the comments section at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

1. "If you are so insecure that you feel you need to carry a gun, YOU ARE A NUT CASE and need PSYCHOLOGICAL HELP. If you feel the need to carry a gun, YOU ARE A NUT AND SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO DO SO!!!"...

2. "You people who are going to cc, please do not accidentally shoot us regular people or your self. Although it will be interesting to hear about the 1st cc person who shots themselves in the leg or testycles."

IN THE COMMENTS: t-man said...

The comment is clearly a parody, filled with "NUT"s, "NUT CASE" (scrotum), and testycles.

Either that or the writer's subconscious is trying to work through a few issues.

Oddly, these are 2 different comments, by different individuals, and they are separated in the thread by other comments. Either it's just a funny coincidence, or the term "nut case" somehow influenced the other guy to think about testicles. As for the misspelling, now I'm having flashbacks to the nude bicycle ride I witnessed last Saturday and which I cannot unsee.

"Check out the Drudge photo that makes it look like Obama has wings over the story: 'White House: Obama is obviously Christian.'"

Today's Drudge comedy — Drudgedy — was found by commenter t-man/wurly/henry buck. Screen capture:

The Drudge links go to:

1. That poll we talked about yesterday.

2. "White House says Obama is Christian, prays daily."

3. "President Apostate?"

4.  "Obama a Muslim? Rumors gain steam, defying facts."

ADDED: Rush Limbaugh begins his show today (Friday) talking about the Drudge angel wings. He should at least say "hi" to me.

At the Bowl of Oranges Café...

... you can have milk and toast and honey.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ricardo asks: How many oranges are in the bowl? See if you can guess.

AND: The answer, after so many low guesses and finally mainly by flailing, was arrived at by t-man. I demonstrate the surprising capacity of the bowl here:

"Obama should be better than Cheney. But aides are not helping the president prevail in what ought to be an easy competition."

In The Nation, John Nichols slams the man he calls the "Whiner-in-Chief":

When Dick Cheney kept giving "exclusive" interviews to Fox "personalities," there were those of us who ridiculed both the personalities and the former vice president for going through the ridiculous exercise of lobbing softballs and swinging at them.... Cheney saw newspapers such as The New York Times and news channels such as CNN as little more than branches of his Democratic opposition.

When [White House communications director Anita] Dunn was asked whether the president refused to accept interview requests from Fox because the White House sees the network as "a wing of the Republican party," the communications director responded: "Is this why he did not appear? The answer is yes."

It's wrong of Obama to shun the media he perceives as oppositional, but it's even worse, Nichols says, "to try and 'whip' relatively like-minded writers and reporters into line." (Why did Nichols put "whip" in quotes? So we wouldn't picture Obama with an actual whip or because he really wanted to say "pussy-whip.")

[T]hat appears to be what the Obama team was trying to do with the silly "policing action" of having a White House "adviser," speaking on condition of anonymity, encourage liberal bloggers to "take off their pajamas" and get serious about politics...

The bloggers should also take the criticism as confirmation that they are right when they suggest that this administration is increasingly out of touch with the progressive base that secured Obama the Democratic nomination and ultimately propelled him to the White House.

The fact is that the results of the 2008 election did not reveal "a closely-divided country." Obama arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the most muscular mandate accorded any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide.

("Muscular mandate"... I love that.)

IN THE COMMENTS: t-man said:

How can they say he had a mandate when no one even knew what they were voting for?

I think he's doing exactly what he got a mandate to do: vagueness, dithering, pleasing without really doing anything. Give the man some credit! That's why I voted for him.