It's A Gift, I Tell Ya, It's A Motherfucking Gift**

TALKING SHIT:

"America's best governor today is New Jersey's Chris Christie, who took office despite his opponent's juvenile 'check out the fat guy' campaign ads. Since then, Christie's faced down Jersey teachers' unions and made major budget cuts -- showing the kind of gumption America could use in the fiscal crisis to come. Yet most discussions of Christie's political future end with the observation that he's just 'too fat' to be president.

Celebrity culture has infected American politics. Since the advent of television, we've reliably opted for the taller candidate -- those with receding hairlines need not apply. We seem to have forgotten the purpose of the office. We're not casting a chick flick here -- we're picking a constitutional chief executive."

NUN GOT HIT:

"There was horror in Harlem on Tuesday when an 83-year-old nun was killed and four others were injured in police chase that turned into a mangled mess on Lenox Avenue."

THINK YOU SLICK:

"The US Congress House Energy and Environment Subcommittee’s hearing into the oil spill exposed some of the more sordid features of the performative nature of Western risk culture. The hearing grilled the chief executives of the five largest oil companies about their drilling safety and regulatory standards in the wake of the Gulf oil spill. There was, of course, the usual theatrical grandstanding by politicians determined to demonstrate to their constituents their holier-than-thou credentials by contrasting themselves to grubby oil men. But more revealingly, we also learned that the oil companies’ emergency-response strategies consist largely of what sociologists describe as ‘fantasy documents’."

FRUIT BATS ON A STICK:

"Yeah, and so — and it’s like ... when the drug companies conspired with our government to put natural homeopathic cures out of business at the turn of the century, and bang, they started calling it 'snake oil,' and this and that. And it’s really just a disinformation campaign to discredit this stuff so that people will stop using it. The government has gone so far as to create phony homeopathic remedies so when people use them and they don’t work, people lose interest in them."

**Life.