Greetings from Bizarro World

Item 1: From the "Your Tax Dollars At Work" file, we have today's failure yet again of George W. Bush's ballyhooed penis surrogate -- I mean missile defense system. Rarely has so much been spent for so little result outside of the country of Iraq. A catastrophic success indeed.

Item 2: Turns out that Gannonguckert may have been a "gentleman of the night" after all. John Aravosis as the dirt at Americablog; you can read about it at Raw Story if you don't want the pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one is.

I hate the way this story is evolving; because the fact that Gannonguckert received a copy of a confidential CIA memo and was involved in the "outing" of a covert CIA operative (cue our little cybertroll CRB to chime in about how we don't KNOW she was covert and how Joe Wilson is a traitor, yada yada) is far more important than ANY of his leisure-time activities, however tabloid-worthy.

And that's all I'm going to say about it until we start seeing something that the Republicans can't use to jettison this guy as soon as it becomes convenient. Because his background flies in the face SO much of all that Republicans hold dear that it almost seems he was set up to play a role and then take a dive. I mean sure, I love seeing hypocrites outed, but this kind of falls under the "It's OK to Knock Your Own Team But Not Someone Else's" rule.

More solid, and more interesting, is the fact that Scotty McClellan claims that he had no idea for almost all of the two years that Gannonguckert has been lobbing softball questions at C-Plus Caligula that he was using an alias, and was similarly unaware of "Talon News"' connection to the Texas Republican Party. Interesting, because McClellan's office handles the credentialing (especially after the "Senate galleries" Gannonguckert referred to in his NPR interview last week denied him credentials from them.

Something sure is stinky here, but exactly what it means we don't know yet.

And speaking about stinky, we have this entry from the "Family Values" file on this Valentine's Day, this day for lovers:

Mary K. Letourneau, the former Burien elementary school teacher who had an illegal intimate relationship with one of her sixth-grade students, plans to wed the man she was convicted of raping.Letourneau, 43, and Vili Fualaau, 22, plan to wed April 16, according to an online bridal registry.

This is a relationship that has survived arrest, conviction, prison, and two kids. I know marriages among ordinary people that didn't last as long. So do we toast to the happy couple, or put our heads in the oven? And is this a story to make a Republican's head explode, or what?