Assuming, of course, Wright was actually running for office, other than in the fetid minds of corporate media and Wingnut bloggers.

At the old blog, years ago, we were stunned by the story of an apparent gay Nazi doll collector — both the collector and the Nazi dolls (or at least some of them, anyway) were gay. Here’s a pic and some text from his craigslisting:

here’s Marius the SS officer and Fritz the panzer cadet.
they are gay.
a lot of people in the ‘action figure community’ are mean to me because some of my dolls are gay.
i have around 65 action figures, but only 5 or 6 are gay.
but meanwhile, the people in this hobby act like all my guys are gay.
they are mean to me.

Now, courtesy of “growing extreme right political sentiment in Ukraine” comes the perfect complement to Fritz and Marius — the Hitler doll:

From the Daily Mail:

An action-man style doll of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler has gone on sale in the Ukraine, with saleswomen comparing the doll to Barbie.

Supermarkets in the capital Kiev are stocking the 40 centimetre high figure of the fuhrer, complete with jackboots, leather trench-coat and swastika armband.

The £100 figure has a spare head “with a kind expression on it,” glasses and several changes of clothes.

~~~

One saleswoman said: “It is like Barbie. Kids can undress fuhrer, pin on medals and there’s a spare head in the kit to give him a kinder expression on his face.

“He has glasses that are round, in the manner of pacifist Jon [sic] Lennon“.

Upon hearing of this clear link between Lennon and Hitler, liberal and fascist, Jonah Goldberg reportedly exclaimed “I knew it!” and burst the waistband on his stretch Dockers.

From the NYT obit:

Sherry Britton, whose hour-glass figure, jet-black hair and rambunctious presence made her one of the queens of the burlesque stage in the 1930s and ’40s, died Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 89 and lived in Manhattan. She died of natural causes, her cousin Melaine Britton said.

Along with Lois de Fee, “Queen of the Glamazons,” Betty Rowland, known as the “Ball of Fire,” and Zorita, known for her sensuous snake dances, Ms. Britton was one of the last stars of a once-thriving sprinkling of theaters in Times Square (and other spots in Manhattan) where ostrich-feathered fans fell away to reveal sequined pasties, G-strings and sometimes more. Sometimes Ms. Britton — at 5 feet 3 inches tall with an 18-inch waist — peeled off chiffon evening gowns to the strains of Tchaikovsky; sometimes she balanced glasses of water on her breasts.

Read the rest here.

Photo from Sherry Britton’s myspace page.

Charlton Heston, circa May, 2001:

Given a musket from [the Revolutionary] war, he held it above his head and said, “I have only five words for you: From my cold, dead hands.”

Charlton Heston, circa April, 2008: Dead.

Charlton Heston, who appeared in some 100 films in his 60-year acting career but who is remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo, died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 84, according to his family.

Anybody want a slightly used rifle?

MORE: Heston’s death has a further dimension of tragedy: Pajamas Trainwreck Media Mogul and famously failed former screenwriter Roger Simon has one less celebrity “I met so-and-so” name to drop, as of yesterday.

Go wild!

Science fiction giant dead at age 90.

Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who wrote ”2001: A Space Odyssey” and won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday, an aide said. He was 90.

Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome for years, died at 1:30 a.m. in his adopted home of Sri Lanka after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.

The 1968 story ”2001: A Space Odyssey” — written simultaneously as a novel and screenplay with director Stanley Kubrick — was a frightening prophesy of artificial intelligence run amok.

One year after it made Clarke a household name in fiction, the scientist entered the homes of millions of Americans alongside Walter Cronkite anchoring television coverage of the Apollo mission to the moon.

Gary Gygax is now dead as General Franco:

Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. He was 69.

Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys with vivid imaginations, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.

This is the man who, other than religious figures, is responsible for more teenage boys not getting laid than any other person in history.

But at least he gave them something to do, while not having a sex life or developed social skills.

Michael Kinsley hits the mark in today’s LA Times, at least with respect to the GOP’s love-fest with a mythical Ronald Reagan:

Meanwhile, the Republican primaries have turned into a Ronald Reagan adoration contest.

~~~

Mitt Romney, meanwhile, kept repeating, inanely, “We’re in the house that Reagan built.” Reagan “would say lower taxes”; “Reagan would say lower spending”; Reagan “would say no way” to amnesty for illegal immigrants; Reagan would never “walk out of Iraq.” And, by the way, McCain’s accusation that Romney harbors a secret timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is “the kind of dirty tricks that I think Ronald Reagan would have found to be reprehensible.”

A problem: Reagan actually signed the law that authorized the last amnesty, back in 1986. Romney deals with this small difficulty by declaring: “Reagan saw it. It didn’t work.” He offers no evidence that Reagan had a change of heart about amnesty, and learning from experience was not something Reagan was known for. The proper cliche is McCain’s: “Ronald Reagan came with an unshakable set of principles.” And — pointedly — “he would not approve of someone who changes their positions depending on what the year is.”

All of this is what Democrats these days would refer to as a fairy tale. There is no evidence that Reagan was bothered by the rough and tumble of political campaigns. Mischaracterization of an opponent didn’t even qualify as a “dirty trick” to Reagan, because of his fantastic ability to believe anything helpful.

~~~

Would Reagan “walk out of” Iraq? Far from clear. He scurried out of Lebanon in 1984 after things got hot there. During the Reagan years, the United States was pro-Iraq in its war against Iran, although we also sold weapons to Iran to raise money for a terrorist war we were secretly financing in Nicaragua, while denouncing terrorism. It’s hard to find any “unshakable set of principles” in this mess.

~~~

But the biggest fairy tale about Reagan is the most central one: about taxes and spending. It is one thing to sit in a North Vietnamese prison in the early 1970s, dreaming of a California governor who one day will balance the federal budget. It is another to imagine that it actually happened.

When Reagan took office in 1981, federal receipts (taxes) were $517 billion and outlays (spending) were $591 billion, for a deficit of $74 billion. When he left office in 1989, taxes were $999 billion and spending was $1.14 trillion, for a deficit of $141 billion. As a share of the economy, Reagan did cut taxes, from 19.6% to 18.4%, and he cut spending from 22.2% to 21.2%, increasing the deficit from 2.6% to 2.8%. The deficit went as high as an incredible 5% of GDP during his term. As a result, the national debt soared by almost two-thirds. You can fiddle with these numbers — assuming it takes a year or two for a president’s policies to take effect, or taking defense costs out — and the basic result is the same or worse. Whatever, these numbers hardly constitute a “revolution.”

This is a point I made several months ago, about Republicans fetishizing a mythical version of Reagan, one who possessed Solon-like judgment instead of incipient Alzheimer’s, and who practiced Periclean statesmanship instead of crude cowboy interventionism:

Reagan’s foreign policy with respect to the Middle East was extremely confused and ineffective. He led an ineffective intervention in Lebanon which ended in disaster and withdrawal. His administration brokered illegal arms deals with Iran, though the extent to which Reagan was even compus mentos is brought into doubt by Reagan’s later testimony during which it appeared he was unaware of much that was transpiring due to the early onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s. The Reagan administration also gave money and arms to radical Islamists in Afghanistan, much of it to groups which later formed al Qaeda. His administration fostered cozier ties to Saddam’s Iraqi regime as well.

Reagan was popular, and his presidency was regarded as a successful one in large measure, certainly in comparison to the debacle of George W. Bush’s, but it also had marked scandals, its own misadventures, and serious moral failures. Moreover, as Kinsey again points out, it never embodied the specific virtues attributed to it by the clot of dim, fetishistic current GOP presidential hopefuls.

ARCADIA, Calif. - Richard Knerr, co-founder of the toy company that popularized the Hula Hoop, Frisbee and other fads that became classics, has died. He was 82.

Knerr, who started Wham-O in 1948 with his childhood friend Arthur “Spud” Melin, died Monday at Methodist Hospital after suffering a stroke earlier in the day at his Arcadia home, his wife Dorothy told the Los Angeles Times.

Knerr and Melin got their start in business peddling slingshots. They named their enterprise Wham-O after the sound a slingshot made when it hit its target.

They branched into other sporting goods, including boomerangs and crossbows, then added toys that often bore such playful names as the Superball, Slip ’N Slide and Silly String.

When a friend told them in 1958 about a large ring used for exercise in Australia, they devised their own version and called it the Hula Hoop.

Around the same time, they bought the rights to a plastic flying disc invented by Walter “Fred” Morrison, who called it the Pluto Platter. Wham-O bought the rights and renamed it the Frisbee.

The rest is amusement history.

“If Spud and I had to say what we contributed, it was fun,” Knerr told the Times in 1994. “But I think this country gave us more than we gave it. It gave us the opportunity to do it.”

Melin died in 2002 at age 77.

Besides his wife, Knerr is survived by three children from a first marriage that ended in divorce, two stepchildren, and eight grandchildren.

Services will be private.

Superelasticbubbleplastic was my very first drug! I loved to huff it.

No, not Hillary Clinton, Sir Edmund Hillary, the first (along with Tenzing Norgay) man to climb to the top of Mount Everest.

We are as yet unable to confirm reports that Sean Hannity became engorged and tried to couple with a distraught and terrified Alan Colmes when he heard report that “Hillary is Dead.”

In order to assist those who have difficulty distinguishing between Hillary and Hillary, we offer the following.

Comparison: Hillary Clinton to Sir Edmund Hillary

Famous for:

Sir Edmund — being the first to climb Mount Everest

Ms. Clinton — being married to the first President impeached for a blowjob

Subsequent use of fame:

Sir Edmund — used fame garnered by being first to climb Everest to create trust to benefit native Nepalese Sherpas to the tune of 27 schools, two hospitals and 13 village health clinics, plus bridges, drinking-water systems and scholarships.

Ms. Clinton — used fame garnered by being married to Presidential fellatio recipient to successfully run for Senator, raise a shitload of money to support her own political candidacies, then launch a viable Presidential campaign.

Current Status:

Sir Edmund — Deceased, but still famous

Ms. Clinton — Alive, and running for President