Froggy, It's Getting Warm in There

• Book review about conservative lack-of-humor.  (Dennis Miller was not the only comic to go conservative/unfunny after 9/11; James Lileks, who had one of those amusing blogs about his job and family, also began dropping right-wing talkpoints into his writing.  The blog is still running, at least when I last looked, and he is still amusing about his family and curmudgeonly about change in the Twin Cities, but I jump over anything else he has to say.)
• Several people have used the term "lies" about Paul Ryan's speech, including Fox News, which lies all by itself:
• Mills River Progressive, who relied on the noise machine and was not wrong;
• Shakesville's RNC 2012 Discussion Thread, with a link to the direct Fox News quote;
• The Daily Howler on dishonesty and misdirection.  And lies;
• Welcome Back to Pottersville, which mentions Isaac.  The storm Isaac;
• ETA:  Pandagon at Raw Story adds another data point.
• Jurassicpork on enabling vs. doing the right thing.
• Jesse Curtis on Mitt Romney's racebaiting. 
• Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) on Romney's time at Bain Capital, which includes this paragraph so you can have no doubt:

  By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. [Emphasis added.]

• Let's have another war!  Thanks, I already have one.
• Just because:  Jon Carroll on authors' looks.