…The new phonebooks are here, the new phonebooks are here! Okay, not really. But still.

I have 30 of ’em. About 15 others I really should pick up. But c’mon, Nothing to Lose…? I’d rather watch Jim Treacher watching a “Mr. Show” marathon. If he’d have me, I mean.

I’ll admit, I’m obsessive about clutter. In fact, it’s gotten so I can’t get anything done until, say, loose papers on the coffee table are neatly stacked or the magazines we keep in the john are smoothed and stored chronologically in the cast-iron magrack. My wife, on the other hand, is a free-wheeling clutter mole, a beautiful hurricane of misaligned envelopes and floor-kept newspaper circulars, of clipped coupons, empty boxes,

“Who is the unilateralist candidate for president this year, the man who’s willing to push our allies away and who questions the patriotism of those who disagree with him? That would be John Kerry, at least on the issue of trade,” argue Cesar Conda and Stuart Anderson in the March 29 issue of The Weekly Standard: Kerry may like to portray himself as a multilateralist, whom foreign leaders are secretly

Here’s how you know your politics have pitched a bit to the right: you’re enjoying a plate of Gino’s Pizza Rolls, watching an early episode of “M*A*S*H,” when suddenly you realize that just about everything Larry Linville says makes sense — and that, given the opportunity, you’d happily bend Alan Alda over a butcher’s table and thwack his self-satisfied ass about a thousand times with a rolled up poster of

From the cutting room floor, ABC News: 20/20’s Barbara Walters: “Teresa. Come November, will your husband beat Bush?” Teresa Heinz Kerry: “Well, I don’t know if he’ll exactly beat it, Barbara. But if he tickles it a little more often you won’t get any complaints out of me…”

Replying to this whiny anti-Bush post, commenter Rae notes (in part), “It matters not what a president does, those who are of his political party are going to excuse and justify any behavior no matter how despicable whether Republican or Democrat” — a tepid observation, and hardly one you’d expect would draw the ire of Allen Brill, a progressive Christian so convinced of his own righteous standing among the heavenly

Capsule review: Two thumbs up, one schlong down. But lay off the hippies, willya Jim? They spook easy. And we suburban types need to buy our weed from somebody.

Speaking of university presidents in need of a good, thorough sterilization, here (via Reason) is Florida State University president T.K. Wetherell in an email letter protesting a proposed bill that would limit the power of universities’ boards of trustees: “Congradulations you have just reinstituted the old Board of Regents […] Where are the strong rolls of the University Boards of Trustees??? Under this arrangement their main roll would be to

So, is Bush’s speech to the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner taking shape as the latest DNC/Katie Couric-driven faux outrage? — a feeble-wristed follow-up to the Donk’s prematurely moribund affaire d’Clarke? Because I just turned on “The View” expecting to hear Joy Behar kvetching about her vagina but was instead greeted by a lot of yentastic hand-wringing about Evil Georgie’s having sent freshfacedyoungmenandwomen off to the Babylonian slaughter —