You’d think that being married to actress Tea Leoni would be sufficient to cure any man’s addiction to sex, but apparently not David Duchovny, who announced yesterday that he was checking into sex rehab.

“I have voluntarily entered a facility for the treatment of sex addiction,” the actor told People yesterday. “I ask for respect and privacy for my wife and children as we deal with this situation as a family.”

Respect and privacy? Geez, we’ve never heard a statement from a celebrity asking for those two things before. At some point these attention-whore celebrities should seriously recognize that begging for people to look at them and then bitching when they do is a little hypocritical, particularly when the subject in question is as ludicrously inviting as “sex rehab,” which as far as we can tell is a direct plea for people to make fun of you.

MORE SARAH PALIN – Props to USA Today for the most self-evident headline in history …

Experts: Palin chosen for women’s votes

Hold up … who are these experts? For we must follow the star and sit at their feet immediately.

JINDAL JOURNAL – We were going to write about this earlier (and more extensively), but damn if Sarah Palin’s legs (oh, and her VP selection) didn’t distract us. Anyway, Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana (and another formerly potentially transformative veep prospect) was also in the news today, touting how his state has used the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to strengthen its fiscal well-being.

Obviously, we’re big fans of Bayou Bobby, who has done a remarkable job turning Louisiana around. In this case, however, we would recommend that he be careful what he wishes for. With another dangerous hurricane headed straight for New Orleans, his state may be facing another not-so-pleasant impetus for an otherwise welcome fiscal conservative revival.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER STATE TO OFFEND

We’re sure this post will bring the same politically-correct reaction from certain presidential campaigns as our famous “Michigan is Retarded” headline, but let’s be honest – we’ve got a point on this one. Other than picking a smokin’ hot governor, there clearly aren’t a lot of marbles rolling around in Alaskans’ heads these days.

At least not Alaska Republicans, anyway …

Alaska Republicans gave U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens a primary victory despite being indicted by federal prosecutors.

Stevens won Tuesday’s primary with 63 percent of the vote.

Jeez … these people should be throwing Stevens in jail, not re-electing him. So what’s the deal? Perhaps this little bit of elucidation from Citizens Against Government Waste will help put things in perspective …

Sen. Stevens helped take home a total of 1,452 pork-barrel projects worth $3.4 billion between 1995 and 2008, and Alaska has been the number one state in pork per capita every year since 1999. Some of Sen. Stevens’ more infamous earmarks include $25 million for a supercomputer to study how to trap energy from the aurora borealis; $750,000 for grasshopper research; $500,000 for the Alaska Spruce Bark Beetle Task Force; $200,000 for the city of North Pole for recreation improvements; and $176,000 for the Reindeer Herder’s Association. Sen. Stevens also defended the $223 million earmark for Alaska’s notorious “Bridge to Nowhere” on the Senate floor in 2005, threatening to resign his seat if Congress removed funding for the bridge.

Grasshopper research? A bark beetle task force? Reindeer herders?

Obviously Alaska Republicans have the same definition of “less government” that Republicans have here in South Carolina …

CHARLOTTE’S UNITED WAY SITUATION GETS WORSE

FITSNews – August 28, 2008 – Judging from the Kevin Siers cartoon above, it would appear that the PR disaster currently engulfing the United Way of Charlotte is going to get worse before it gets better. That’s because after getting busted paying an exorbitant salary and benefits package to its CEO, the organization’s board has now decided to fire her – while shelling out $20,000 a month for an interim replacement.

From the Charlotte Observer , which has been on this story like white on rice:

For months, the United Way of Central Carolinas board said Gloria Pace King was worth every penny of her controversial $1.2 million pay package.

Tuesday, 37 of those board members unanimously called on their longtime CEO to resign or be fired.

King’s fall was breathtakingly quick, but not clean.

Critical questions remain. How the board handles them will affect 91 nonprofit agencies and the thousands in need that they serve.

Can the board regain enough public trust to rescue its ongoing fundraising campaign?

How will it settle accounts with King, even as it pays her interim replacement $20,000 a month?

Even worse, the board has refused to provide the public (which it routinely begs money from) with access to its records, stonewalling the Observer at every turn of its investigation with a recalcitrance typically reserved for government agencies.

Charities are important, people. There are far too few people on this earth doing the “Lord’s work,” and we should support those who genuinely strive to help those in need. But as it stands now, you’d be better off buying guns for Charlotte gang bangers than giving to these idiots …

Besides, as U2’s Bono once said, “The God I believe in isn’t short of cash, Mister …”

OVER-THE-TOP REPUBLICAN ADS CAN BE AMUSING, EFFECTIVE

FITSNews – August 26, 2008 – We’ve never heard of Jeff Merkley (apparently he’s running for U.S. Senate in Oregon), but it takes a special kind of idiot to let the idiots running Republican campaigns in this country make you look like … well, an idiot.

But that’s what Merkley manages to do in this clip … although in fairness to him we made the same foreign policy error ourselves a few weeks back.

Anyway, in predictable hackneyed fashion, the cookie cutter GOP admongers did their level best to dilute the ad’s effectiveness with a lame script and cheesy female voice over, but when you’ve got raw footage like this, it’s really hard to produce a completely ineffective spot.

Of course the good news for Merkley is that Oregonites can certainly appreciate moments of forgetfulness … or for that matter, having a mean case of the munchies.

HURRICANE GUSTAV IS PLOTTING A FAMILIAR COURSE

FITSNews – August 26, 2008 – The good news? It’s highly unlikely that the federal government could possibly do a shittier job than it did three years ago in botching the Hurricane Katrina disaster …

The bad news? The federal government has a history of failing to meet even the lowest expectations we set for it.

Seriously, the only thing Washington does even remotely well during disasters these days is sending its politicians to get their pictures taken amongst hastily-assembled crowds of racially-diverse victims.

Anyway, (c)lick on the map above to get the latest on Gustav from BoatUS.com, the best hurricane trackers on the web … and let’s hope this thing hits some other country. Like Mississippi …

UPDATE – Jeez … the Mississippi thing was a joke, people.

CHARLOTTE UNITED WAY DIRECTOR RAKING IN SOME SERIOUS COIN

FITSNews – August 26, 2008 – Ever since former Indianapolis Colts’ left tackle Tarik Glenn began appearing in United Way television commercials a few years back, we were under the assumption that the charitable organization could do no wrong.

Boy were we gullible … because according to today’s Charlotte Observer , they can do a lot of wrong – like paying their local presidents exorbitant salaries and benefit packages.

Take Gloria Pace-King, for example, who earns $365,000 a year as the United Way’s Charlotte president, a package that includes $822,507 in “benefits” as well as $35,862 in expenses each year. King will also draw a full, lifetime pension of more than $200,000 a year, after 17 years of service …

Experts say that level is typically reserved for 30-year employees. King, expected to retire within three years, would receive it after 17.

In 2007 the board of directors of United Way of the Central Carolinas increased King’s benefits contributions more than sevenfold to $822,000.

Amazingly, there are three local United Way presidents around the country who are actually raking in more cash than King.

We hate to hate on people who are supposedly doing the “Lord’s work,” but these sorts of salaries and benefits for “non-profits” are obscene.

HE IS FROM SOUTH CAROLINA, PEOPLE

By Mande Wilkes

FITSNews – August 25, 2008 – In the aftermath of several monumental government bailouts, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke wants to ease worries that such government intervention will continue. How does he propose to mitigate public concern?

By promulgating more market regulation, naturally!

Bernanke, the beleaguered beneficiary of Al Greenspan’s bittersweet legacy, is right to acknowledge that recent bailouts have instilled worry in the public. Government takeovers of conglomerate behemoths indeed prompt concern that intervention will become permanent.

But only a governmental agency could argue that the best medicine for anxiety caused by too much intervention is more intervention …

As for what kind of increased regulation Bernanke seeks, he’s predictably not saying. Engaging the proletariat in such esoteric matters would be … gauche, that whole “representative democracy” thing notwithstanding.

Bernanke does hint at the nature of the increased regulation, though, warning against “excessive risk-taking” as a precipitate of “yet greater systemic risk in the future.”

While these phrases seem like nothing more or less than predictable platitudes, they show how clueless the Fed chief is.

The problem is not with risk-taking – that’s the fuel for capitalism – but with government intervention that invariably ends up squelching it.

CHANGE OF VENUE DENIED IN SENATOR’S CORRUPTION CASE

FITSNews – August 21, 2008 – There will be no “home cookin’” for indicted Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, the arch-enemy of fiscal conservatism in Washington D.C. and the Republican most responsible for plunging the GOP into its present electoral wilderness.

Stevens – who in addition to blowing billions of dollars on wasteful pork spending over the years was also allegedly taking bribes from companies with business before the U.S. Senate – has lost his bid to move his corruption trial from Washington State to Alaska.

From the LA Times:

A federal judge Wednesday denied Sen. Ted Stevens’ request to move his corruption trial to his home state of Alaska, saying the lawmaker’s plans to campaign for reelection risked improperly influencing potential jurors if the case were to be transferred there.

Lawyers for Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, sought the change because most of the 40 or so witnesses expected to testify are from Alaska. They said Stevens had a right to continue his reelection campaign, which would be easier if the trial was held in Alaska.

But U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said he was persuaded by the Justice Department’s concerns that the publicity surrounding a senator who was running for reelection while on trial “could lead to a significant potential for jury tainting.”

JNo kidding. Stevens owns Alaska, and a trial there would be about as impartial as the Nazi “People’s Court” was. Plus, he’s apparently still got a plurality of Alaska Republicans behind him, no doubt thanks to all that taxpayer largesse he’s funneled up there.

In a perfect world, Stevens would get locked up for life and be forced to repay all that money he wasted. Either that or forced to jump off one of the eleventy kabillion unnecessary bridges that have popped up in his state over the last few decades.

RANDOM “NEW PORNOGRAPHY”

FITSNews – August 20, 2008 – It’s probably not natural to obsess over New Pornographers’ frontwoman Neko Case the way we do, but we’re sure government will pass a law at some point affording her the protection she deserves from our founding editor’s overactive imagination. In the meantime, we’re pleased to have her provide the accompaniment for today’s assorted random smatterings …

SCOOP STRETCH? – Our bud McLovin’ over at Palmetto Scoop claims that Barack Obama has already chosen Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine as his running mate … or at least somebody “in the Beltway” told him that. WTF? Until we get our text message from the Obamessiah himself, we’ll hold off on declaring this a done deal …

SPEAKING OF ELECTIONEERING – The Washington Post has a fun new web page that lets you project the outcome of the 2008 presidential election, one state at a time. Alright, it’s really not all that fun … certainly not as fun as presidential kung-fu …

SPEAKING OF FIGHTING – For those of you itching to see somebody get knocked out today, enjoy this clip.

MORE SCHOOL SUCKINESS – Our friends at The Voice have two solid posts up detailing how South Carolina is screwing over its special needs kids and graduating even fewer people than we thought we were … which we thought was damn near impossible.

MANDE’S STALKER UPDATE – Our non-friends over at Not Very Bright have taken a break from obsessing over our girl Mande’s every word to post this delightful picture of the S.C. Legislature’s vision for our state.

POLLY = REAL – We’ve gotten quite a bit of mail recently related to our newest contributor, Polly, who came back from the Beijing Olympics with gold medals in beauty, brains and bad-assness. To answer all the inquiries, yes, she’s real … and she’s fabulous!

AMERICA’S COLLEGE LEADERS WANT TO PASS EPIDEMIC ON DOWN

FITSNews – August 20, 2008 – When they’re not busy jacking tuition costs, modeling new tweed looks or liberalizing America’s youth with their socialist, anally-PC world view, America’s college leaders can typically be found inveighing against anything that forces them to take actual responsibility for the lives of their students.

Take the so-called college drinking epidemic, which these ivory tower idiots now want to pass down to America’s high schools by lowering the national drinking age.

We’ve always thought the federal government had no business establishing a drinking age (that power should be reserved to the states), but the crassness and self-serving misology of these leadership-averse bureaucrats is truly mind-blowing.

College leaders are smart enough to recognize that lowering America’s drinking age from 21 to 18 won’t change anyone’s behavior. They just don’t want to deal with the issue, preferring to let high school principals inherit that obligation.

Kids are going to drink, people. They’re also going to smoke, experiment with drugs and have as much sex as humanly possible. Local governments can erect whatever laws they wish to try and stop these hormonal and societal tidal waves, but we’re deluding ourselves if we think they’re going to have any effect.

Of course leave it to academia to take the lead in abdicating its share of the responsibility …