Well. What a fast turnaround, right?

"Whatever you have thought of me in the past, I can tell you right now that I am one of your greatest friends and I mean for us to work together," he said in a live interview with Telemundo's Maria Celeste. "I hope that will begin with Maria and me and Telemundo and other media organizations and others in this national debate that we should turn into a solution rather than a continuing debate and factional contest."

Mr. Dobbs twice mentioned a possible legalization plan for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., saying at one point that "we need the ability to legalize illegal immigrants under certain conditions."

It's great that Lou Dobbs saw the light, and that he now favors liberalization of our broken immigration and naturalization process.

But—and, you know, we hate to do this two days in a row—fuck you, Lou Dobbs.

Mr. Dobbs couldn't be reached Tuesday. Spokesman Bob Dilenschneider said Mr. Dobbs draws a distinction between illegal immigrants who have committed crimes since arriving in the U.S. and those who are "living upright, positive and constructive lives" who should be "integrated" into society. He said Mr. Dobbs recognizes the political importance of Latinos and is "smoothing the water and clearing the air."

The funny thing, Lou, is that you were the one who attempted to create the impression, without evidence, that all illegal immigrants were criminals. You know-nothing prick.

You made your name on one issue, Lou, and one issue alone: that there are too many Mexicans, that the Mexicans are scary, and that they should all go back to Mexico, because they are disease-ridden criminals. You lied about how many immigrants there are, you called them "an army of invaders," you said they wanted to reannex the Southwestern United States, you claimed they were spreading leprosy, you spent hours of airtime openly, blatantly lying, in order to inflame anti-immigrant hysteria. That is what you did. For years. You doughy, lying, sack of shit.

Video via Anyguey.

Original Video- More videos at TinyPic

Trump, known for mispronouncing "h" sounds as "y" sounds and for making up his own net worth based on a magical fantasy formula, has now been whittled down to a 10% stake in his own Atlantic City casinos. Which are bankrupt, btw. For the third time.

And who was formerly on the board of these failed gaming monstrosities, and "involved in the negotiations with creditors"? Ivanka Trump, currently occupied with her full-time battle against the mean business press, which she is waging on Twitter.

Tell us the secrets of your success!
[Pic: Getty]

NOM raised a zillion dollars or so from hateful bigots across the nation whose names they refuse to disclose, which is, of course, a violation of state campaign finance law. But if it works, who gives a shit? 53% of Maine voters agreed that if the gays get married, they will attempt to force the children to learn, in public schools, that gay people exist, and that they should not be beaten to death for crimes against God.

Once again we learn the shocking truth that putting the civil rights of minority groups to a popular vote does not work very well. Crazy, right?

Here is a classic sketch from The Dana Carvey Show that is more relevant than ever, again:

The Mets-owning Wilpon family actually made money on at leason one Madoff account. How's that for a "home run," EH?

The report shows that Mets LP, one of the team's financial arms, withdrew $570.5 million from two accounts it held with Mr. Madoff's company, $47.8 million more than it put in.

Dealbook notes that they had other Madoff accounts too, so they may come out with a net loss, but still. Pretty nifty. Now they're gonna get sued and have to give all that money back, because that's how it goes for the Mets (Luis Castillo).

Meanwhile the Yankees will clinch their World Series bid tonight. What a contrast. Big, big contrast.

• Posting Calorie Counts on All Restaurant Menus: NYC Overseer and Lord Michael Bloomberg has tried this, but a new study says people are actually eating more at fast food outlets since the calorie postings went up.
• Banning Fast Food Restaurants Altogether: They want to do this is South Los Angeles, at least until enough health food stores open up to even things out. Researchers say it won't accomplish anything.
• Fewer Junk Food Snacks in Schools: The CDC now says fewer American schools are selling candy and soda! Nevertheless—although the American school system produces more NBA players than any other nation's—American kids are only fit in their video game avatars. In real life they are not fit, but rather unfit.
• The Biggest Loser: It's not just a disturbing television show any more—now it's a franchise with cookbooks, a Wii fitness game, and even a god damn "Biggest Loser Resort" weight loss spa where you pay money to go live the life of a loser. Unless 300 million of us can fit in there, it's just a tiny chocolate chip on the vast sea of frosting that is American obesity.

Michael Bloomberg: The guy who will win.

Tony Avella: The guy who will lose the Democratic nomination.

Bill Thompson: The guy who will win the Democratic nomination, then lose.

Robert Burck, The Naked Cowboy: Now we're talking! A real live fakey fake candidate! He stands out in Times Square impressing tourists for sure! He is a neat freak who lives in Secaucus! For these and other reasons people who actually live in New York City despise him as a symbol of the city's Disneyfication and he will surely do terribly, even by joke vanity candidate standards.

Reverend Billy Talen: Reverend Billy! You have surely seen him leading a choir of anti-consumerists in Union Square or taking over your local Starbucks, with preaching. He is now running on the ticket of the Green Party, which, in some counties out West, is considered a borderline real political party! He will garner the meager urban hippie vote.

Frances Villar: Candidate from the Party for Socialism and Liberation. "The Billionaires are not our friends!" she exhorts. Correct. Not your friend, especially, as it is a billionaire who will handily defeat you in the mayoral election. She will finish in the top 4 in the lesbian vote.

Jimmy McMillan: Candidate of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, or, as Jimmy puts it conversationally, the Rent Too Damn High Party. He has an AOL email address and a MySpace page. Could threaten late.

You just wonder, sometimes: Hillary Clinton seems like a reasonable and smart person who is trying very hard to be good at her job, so is she embarrassed by her continued association with amoral, universally reviled hacks like Lanny Davis and Mark Penn, men who did more than almost anyone else to make her presidential campaign into a sad, unfunny joke?

So, yes. Lanny Davis. He does some "crisis management" work, which is a thing we can't even call a "necessary evil" because honestly it is not necessary, just inevitable. He is a senior adviser for the crazy-right-wing Israel Project and a lobbyist for the government of Pakistan. He is everything bad about Democrats, dating back to his days as a young Yale graduate working for Ed Muskie, to his support of Joe Lieberman against that terrible insurgent real Democrat, to, finally, his insisting that Hillary Clinton would surely win the election once she got 200% of the Mighigan and Florida delegates counted, which she should get, because Barack Obama is a cheater, and he's mean.

He is just bad, for the country. And not just our country! He is now being bad for Honduras, where the military recently seized power, on behalf of the business elite, who were worried that some of their wealth might be redistributed to that nation's poor. (Yes, yes, the President wanted to have a Constitutional Referendum about term limits which means he was basically morphing into CASTRO before their eyes.) So these business leaders, who just installed their own, hand-picked president hired a powerful lobbyist with ties to the Secretary of State, by the name of Lanny Davis!

"This is about the rule of law. That is the only message we have," Davis said, adding that Zelaya "was acting unconstitutionally and illegally" when he pushed for a voter referendum to change presidential term limits.

Yes, the military frog-marching the democratically elected President to a waiting plane, seizing power, and arresting journalists, all on behalf of the moneyed class, is a very good way to go about this "rule of law" stuff.

Thousands voted! But Ruth did not win.

[Pic: AP]

Nobody wants to be in the "middle class" any more. Nowadays most people describe themselve to pollsters as "professionals." Even though they are not, by traditional standards! Just look at some of the riff-raff trying to up their social stations now:

But the definition of professional has expanded. Most people in the fields of advertising, communications, health care and computer science consider themselves professionals

Ha, that would make Mark Penn a professional, which is prima facie ridiculous. Of course, the fact that his whole new Professional class is an illusion doesn't stop Mark Penn from declaring them to the new Soccer Moms, which is a Microtrend. Tell us, Mark Penn, what are the secret characteristics of this laughably inclusive made-up group?

Today's new professional is better educated, better read, more plugged-in, more socially tolerant, more environmentally conscious — and while they like individuality in how they dress and act, they are much more open to having government solve our problems. Jobs like "network" engineer are all about improving collaboration.

No price is too high to pay for such insight.
[WSJ. Pic via]

Are you still getting emails begging for money for Hillary Clinton's failed presidential campaign? Yes? You sucker. Well don't give her one gaddamn dime because the one outstanding debt is to Penn, Schoen, & Berland Associates LLC. This is the Mark Penn market research and polling firm that helped make Hillary Clinton our nation's not-44th President! And Hillary still owes them $2,307,740.82 for coming up with that brilliant "I am the only person who can win this race because I'm white" strategy.

Not surprisingly, many Clinton allies are decidedly unsympathetic to Penn's situation. Fumes one: "He should have to eat it." But it isn't that simple. The money is owed not to Penn personally but to his company, which is a subsidiary of the worldwide public relations and advertising firm WPP Group, based in London. The bills the Clinton campaign ran up included $5 million for the polling that apparently failed to pick up on the public mood. And then there was the cost of sending out 20 million pieces of direct mail, with postage alone reaching $8 million, according to an official for the firm. Many would argue that it was money ill-spent. At a minimum, that big a bill for snail mail suggests that Clinton's campaign was relying heavily on tactics from the 20th century, while Obama was running circles around her by using the far more cost- (and politically) effective Internet.

Of course, as Ezra Klein points out, the Clintons are fucking rich, so it's unclear why, if they insist on making sure Mark Penn gets his cash for being a pathetic, out-of-touch loser, they don't just pay him with Bill's Burkle money or something. That would seem a little more morally defensible than asking your broke-ass donors to continue helping you pay the man whose work made their candidate fuck up what shoulda been her race to win!

DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS (AND MIKE BLOOMBERG) BE ADVISED: if you're at Union Pool and the bartender hands you a cocktail napkin from "Microtrend Jordan" reading "I want to give your campaign a winning media strategy with my mouth" alert the authorities immediately.

Michael Steele won on the sixth ballot, because some elements of the Republican National Committee really, really didn't want to vote for a black guy. Not that Steele is particularly smart or accomplished, but the other candidates were some crazy racist from South Carolina, a guy named Saul, and Ohio loser Ken Blackwell.

Steele represents a "new face" for the Republican party, because even though his "brain" is full of the same old doctrinaire conservative nonsense as the rest of the Republican party, his "face" is black.

Here, in this video, Mr. Steele says "those of you who wish to obstruct, get read to get knocked over." So watch out, South Carolina.

Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey just wanted to squeeze in one more bonehead move before the end of the year, having launched his stupid "Bloomberg will run for president" campaign as 2007 dragged to a boring close. That furor lasted well into the beginning of this year, even though no one on the planet besides some billionaires on the coasts ever thought Bloomberg would appeal to anyone besides rich people on the coasts. Sheekey kept pushing the non-story to the press, and the press kept lapping it up, and look, we made a joke about it more than a year ago, we were so young then.

Then Sheekey, Bloomberg's top aide, remember, fucked up his boss's third term egofest, because he thought it was a dumb idea. Bloomberg went through with it anyway and the dailies, usually supportive of Mike, piled on him.

He finished up the year with this weird little pet project, supporting Caroline Kennedy. His master plan was to quickly drum up massive popular support for Kennedy, bypassing Paterson and eventually forcing him to give in to the public will and give this lady the seat her name earned her. Hah.

Today's made-up microgroup that Penn tenuously connects to current events: "Impressionable Elites." These are the types of rich folks who lost all their money to Bernie Madoff—the guy who's been in the news lately. Here are several outrageous things about this column's content and very existence:

• By Mark Penn, "With E. Kinney Zalesne." Is this column really more than a one-man job?
• This column is just a dressed up ad for Penn's ridiculous book. Seriously! He puts the full, overlong title of it right up front in the third graf. And he uses this technique, which should never be allowed in a newspaper:
  

  ...but rather the Impressionable Elites* of country clubs...

  * "Impressionable Elites" is the term we used for educated, affluent people who focus more on personality than issues when it comes to evaluating political decisions. For more, please see pages 131 to 135 in "Microtrends."

  AN ASTERISK. Which jumps to, essentially, another ad for his crappy book! There are many other qualified columnist candidates in the world, WSJ!

• "At a recent meeting of my condo..." Shut up.
• You know who is really an "Impressionable Elite?" Anybody who hires Mark Penn.

[WSJ]

"Chinese Democracy," the notoriously long-in-coming Guns N' Roses album, hasn't turned out to be the big hit that Best Buy Co. expected when it scored the exclusive rights to sell the CD in the United States.

That's bad news for the nation's biggest electronics chain by sales, which paid millions of dollars up front for 1.3 million copies of an album that has sold just 318,000 copies in the U.S. during its first two weeks in stores — and looks destined for bargain bins.

GnR blames the internet! A devious blogger just pleaded guilty to leaking tracks from the album early, and he has received his punishment from the US justice system. So starting tomorrow, sales better take off.

Why does Axl Rose wish coal in the stockings of Best Buy employees' children? [WSJ]

This is the first half of the first sentence of the article, and in our fantasies, publishing this where people can read it would actually be illegal!

As the financial crisis swept across the nation these past few months, one of the first microtrend groups to emerge is

We bet you're excited to read further! Mark Penn should be ashamed to show his byline in public, as the pollster is famous for being one of the worst political minds of his generation, inventing meaningless demographic groups instead of winning elections. He took over Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton's campaign and then she lost to a completely untested outsider (and it was all his fault!). Let's read the rest of that first sentence:

the New Mattress Stuffers — people who have lost their trust in the financial world, and are preparing for the next meltdown.

The proof that this cutely named demographic group exists? Anecdotal evidence, plus a Holiday Spending Survey that suggests that people are spending less. And also they're using cash they have, instead of credit cards, not because they're a crazy new demographic group but because people finally wised the fuck up. Anyway Mark Penn suggests you invest in guns and safes!

Since time immemorial the New York Times has kept its rich old conservative readers slightly satisfied with some token conservative voices in the Op-Ed section. For many, many years there was reliable old Bill Safire, the Nixon speechwriter, a member of the smart old educated class of Republicans who were able to write up support for disastrous policy implemented by the corrupt and incompetent with smart, almost plausible-sounding arguments. He left, replaced with John Tierney, a libertarian-leaning sort who didn't last long on the op-ed beat and now writes "researchers say a counterintutive thing" features instead. And there is David Brooks, a quietly doctrinaire Republican who fancies up his usual party line with armchair sociology. But Brooks broke with the party this year, calling Sarah Palin a cancer, leaving only poor, dumb, Bill Kristol. Bill Kristol, who tried to sell America on Sarah Palin, and ended up repeatedly embarrassing himself, over and over again, and losing John McCain his election.

Now he just mumbles about hating the mainstream media, to all his mainstream media friends, in the pages of the New York Times. Already the vultures are wondering who'll replace him—you can be terribly wrong and stupid and remain a Times columnist indefinitely, but you must be terribly wrong and stupid in the service of the conventional wisdom. So Tom Friedman's Iraq columns get a pass, as does Maureen Dowd's constant stream of nonsense.

But Kristol is no longer merely just a hack, he's a failed hack. No one bought his line this year. So maybe someone nutty and anti-Palin like, say, David Frum is next for the Affirmative Action Conservative Slot?

As the 1980s began, the Republicans introduced and perfected their massive, modern fundraising apparatus, utilizing direct mail and donor targeting to build a database of party supporters willing to shell out cash whenever and wherever it was needed. In 1980, the GOP raised millions more from hundreds of thousands more than the Dems could manage. And they kicked the Democrats' asses. So, heading into the 1984 elections, the Democrats knew they needed a lot of cash to compete. The GOP had more than a million active donors, the Dems had almost 300,000. So the Democratic National Committee somehow decided that a star-studded telethon on NBC would solve the problem.

They spent $5 million on the program, hoping to raise an initial $10 million over 18 hours on Memorial Day weekend. And it was a star-studded affair! As the AP reported:

The telethon's lineup of about100 entertainers is being developed by the Pasadena, Calif., production company of Russ Reid. Among many signed up so far are Paul Newman, Jack Lemmon, Mary Tyler Moore, John Forsythe, Kris Kristofferson, Sally Kellerman, Dennis Weaver, Helen Reddy, Woody Herman, Hal Linden, Rita Moreno, Carmen McRae, Bea Arthur and Jean Stapleton, said Ron Holder, assistant to talent produce Bob Precht.

But not all the celebrity appearances worked out!

Jane Fonda has failed her fund-raising audition with the Democratic National Committee. The DNC plans to edit her out of the portions of its Memorial Day telethon that it will rebroadcast as campaign specials next year. Fonda was deemed too controversial for the shows, which will be test-marketed next month. Her appearance on Memorial Day generated hundreds of hostile telephone calls and letters. Apparently, many still think of her in the role of the left-wing activist who visited Hanoi, and not that of the physically fit liberal she now plays. Says one DNC official, "It's as if they saw Jane Fonda on the screen and suddenly it was the '60s again."

Nor did the telethon itself work out, at all. First, Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority jammed the phone lines. But they probably didn't even need to, considering how amazingly stupid the whole idea was to begin with. The telethon grossed $2.75 million, which was $2.8 million less than it cost to produce.

In the end, it's amazing that the Democratic Party ever won an election again.

So think of those bygone days of astounding incompetence as you watch (or don't watch, whatever) smooth Barry Obama close the deal tonight, thanks to his amazing fundraising abilities and massive donor list. It only took 25 years to catch up!

(If anyone, anywhere, has video evidence of the 1983 telethon, we'd love to see it.)