The Pensacola Beach Blog called it Comedy at the Edge, Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It was the truth; and most of the people sitting in that room can’t handle the truth, they hide from it.

Wikipedia notes that “In British common law, an outlaw was a person who had defied the laws of the realm.” The Shrubbery isn’t acting above the law, he has placed himself outside of the law. The conduct described in Glenn Greenwald’s post makes him the outlaw President, and puts him on the same level as any petty third world despot. He uses money from the Treasury to reward his friends and punish his enemies.

Digby calls it a Constitutional Crisis, but it is a simple case of a man of limited intellect ignoring the rules rather than attempting to understand them. He has never been held accountable for anything, so he isn’t interested in starting now.

I think Digby should retire the metaphor of the “little old lady clutching her pearls” given the reality of Helen Thomas, Madeleine Albright, and the Raging Grannies. I would think that draft-age Republican bloggers, or David Brooks would be suitable substitutes.

Steve writes about the Wall of Secrecy that has been created to hide the crimes. This is camouflage used to cover what they are doing.

As Phinky and PSotD have noted, we use a host of words in American English that have been borrowed from other languages.

Apparently Texans are now supposed to remember the Poplar, in Saint Anthony.

As Николай Васильевич Гоголь said at the end of his краткое содержание Нос: “Кто что ни говори, а подобные происшествия бывают на свете, — редко, но бывают.”

[Edit: everyone should read the short stories of Nicholas Gogol so they can wonder how a 19^th century Russian writer could understand life under the Shrubbery. There are good translations on-line and you can start with The Nose. Come on, you didn’t really think that corruption, cronyism, and incompetence were new? They are part of every empire.]

John Kenneth Galbraith, economist, writer, US ambassador to India, and witty, erudite conversationalist died Saturday at age 97.

Born in Canada, he chose to make the United States his home, and we, as a country, were better for it.

[Update] From the BBC: “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”, and the phrase, “conventional wisdom”, belong to Mr. Galbraith.