CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Funny: The naked truth about senators - Life among the cannibals  Thu Mar 29, 2012 4:42 am | |
| Naked senators, Dick Cheney downing fried chicken and a “hobo” Fed chairman. Former senator Arlen Specter’s new book, “Life Among the Cannibals,” has its moments.
On Tuesday, we brought you the squirm-inducing revelation from its pages that Specter thought vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin “radiated sensuality.”
For those who can’t get enough hotness from Arlen, here’s more:
He has seen Ted Kennedy naked (p. 67). “For years when [people] groused about Senate perks, I’d reply, ‘You wouldn’t say that if you had to see Ted Kennedy naked in the gym.’ ”
More naked Teddy (p. 40): “It was in the whirlpool . . . in 2008 . . . when Ted Kennedy came over and climbed into the bath. Kennedy was one of the Senate’s giants, in many ways. It was as though a giant walrus had plunged into the sea, causing the level to swell.”
And then there’s this (p. 226) on Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.): “John Thune, who looked like a movie star in or out of clothes, was constantly stretching. His lanky body seemed to have some kinks to iron out.”
And also this (p.68): Senate-gym protocol apparently calls for waiting your turn for a massage — but an unnamed colleague broke the unwritten rules. “I was walking undressed to the last [massage] table. Another senator, also naked, walked briskly, perhaps at a slight run, and slipped ahead of me. That was something senators just don’t do,” Specter wrote.
For those not into naked senators, he writes:
In 2000, soon-to-be-vice-president Cheney (p.65) dined with Specter in the senator’s hideaway office. “I worried when he ordered fried chicken, after just suffering his fourth heart attack. But he devoured the bird, even dropping a piece that left a stain on the white carpet,” he wrote.
And Ben Bernanke dresses like a “hobo” (p. 75). Specter, a natty dresser himself, ran into the Fed chairman at a Phillies-Nationals game at RFK Stadium. “I saw a bearded man in scruffy blue jeans, a baseball cap obscuring most of his face. He looked like a hobo.”
Etch a what?
A new poll offers further proof that, yes, the Washington media live in a bubble.
The uproar over Mitt Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom’s Etch a Sketch comment last week — that the GOP presidential candidate’s conservative stances will shift if he wins the nomination — was intense.
The gaffe dominated the news for days. Rivals Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich brandished the plastic toys at televised campaign events — even handing them out at rallies — to highlight their accusations that Romney is not a true conservative and that he flips and flops more than that freshly caught fish in the bottom of your bass boat.
But despite all the hoopla, all that grave chin-stroking about the potential implications, a Pew Research Center poll taken last week and released Tuesday found that fewer than half of those surveyed, about 44 percent, had even heard about Fehrnstrom’s comment. What’s more, among those who had, not all that much was changed.
Hood-lum
When Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) donned a hoodie sweatshirt on the House floor Wednesday, in a show of solidarity with slain Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, the chairman called him to order. “The chairman must remind members of clause five of rule 17,” said Rep. Gregg Harper (R-Miss.), who was presiding over the floor when Rush made his sartorial protest. “The member is out of order.”
But the rule that Harper invoked — contained in the section of House rules governing decorum — bans the wearing of hats on the House floor. That meant that House leaders thought his hooded sweatshirt constituted a hat.
A bit of a stretch? Would that definition include former congressman Jim Traficant’s legendary toupee? The hat ban dates to the 1800s, House staffers tell us, and it recently has been challenged, to no avail, by Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), known for her signature chapeaus.
Harper may have been on safer ground had he stuck to the language in the “Speaker’s Announced Policies,” which mandates “appropriate business attire” on the House floor. But the precise rules have been historically difficult to define.
That standard is interpreted to mean coats and ties for gents. For women, the lines are harder to draw — and the women in the chamber even sport open-toe sandals, sleeveless tops and the like.
Later Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) issued a more general reminder about appropriate floor attire. “You know who you are,” he added.
Take my wife, please
And now a moment of Supreme Court comedy.
Late during Wednesday’s oral arguments over the health-care law, Justice Antonin Scalia channeled an ancient Jack Benny gag in which an armed robber asks his victim, “Your money or your life?”
In the routine, Benny, a legendary tightwad, pauses. The gunman demands an answer. The punch line: “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”
Scalia used the gag as an example of an easy call — you give up the cash. However, he wondered, what if the “choice were your life or your wife’s? That’s a lot harder.”
But later, he seemed to indicate that he’d spare his own life. “Your life or your wife’s, I could refuse that one.”
The crowd laughed, and Justice Sonya Sotomayor broke in, quipping, “He’s not going home tonight.”
Ba-dum-bum.
Chief Justice John Roberts shut down the spousal humor. “That’s enough frivolity for a while.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-new-book-arlen-specter-gives-the-naked-truth-about-senators/2012/03/28/gIQA3e3RhS_story.html |
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