Six degrees of "The Dude".

Ok, so here we are, knee deep in the bullshit of presidential debates. I have made one observation that has now made every debate an even more entertaining laughing stock.

You've seen The Big Lebowski, right? Right. When John McCain answers any question, does he not remind you of Walter Sobchack (John Goodman)? I mean, regardless of the question asked, there's bitter little John with his marionette-like movements always returning to a war story that we've already heard in an effort to connect everything under the sun to his time as POW, never mind how off topic he is.

You think I'm kidding? Just keep an eye out for "Walter" the next time that little John makes a statement. All he's lacking is a .45 ACP, and we all know that under that leatherette skin of his, he's a gun grabbing dick just like the rest of 'em.

Everything I ever needed to know, I learned from Paul Newman

Paul Newman, 83, the actor and sex symbol who surged to stardom by playing loners as well as criminal and moral outlaws -- anything to downplay his astonishing looks -- died of cancer Friday at his farmhouse near Westport, Conn.

Brooding and sinewy, with luminous blue eyes and a husky voice, Newman resembled a preppy Greek God in his earliest screen roles. He quickly rebelled against conventional casting that tried to turn him into a pretty-boy alternative to Marlon Brando and James Dean. He became known as an introspective and nonconformist performer -- a perfect anti-hero idol for the socially rebellious 1960s and 1970s.

In many of Newman's best films -- "The Hustler," "Hud," "Harper," "Cool Hand Luke," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Sting," "Slap Shot," "The Verdict," "Nobody's Fool" and "The Color of Money" (for which he won the Oscar) -- he played amoral rats, genial louts, self-destructive idealists, drunkards and has-beens. Some of his characters redeem themselves by being defeated or killed, and others just continue bumming along.

Newman hated to see his characters triumph on charm alone. No one, he said, would pay money to see such a beautiful man win the woman and save the day. Off-screen, he mocked his sex-symbol status and said that his personality was closest to the vulgar, second-rate hockey coach he played in "Slap Shot" (1977). His approach likely saved his career as he matured into a disciplined performer, one of the most enduring and polished of screen stars.

At a peak of his fame, he gambled on directing small-budget films that often showcased his second wife, actress Joanne Woodward. Their film "Rachel, Rachel" (1968), with Woodward as an aging, virginal schoolteacher, was an unexpected hit.

They had a famously durable marriage. Newman spoke about their relationship by noting how they decided to act in the comedy "A New Kind of Love" (1963).

He told Time magazine: "Joanne read it and said, 'Hey this could be fun to do together. Read it.' And I read it and said, 'Joanne, it's just a bunch of one-liners.'

"And she said, 'You [expletive], I've been carting your children around, taking care of them, taking care of you and your house.' And I said, 'That is what I said. It's a terrific script. I can't think of anything else I'd rather do.' This is what is known as a reciprocal trade agreement."

Despite his powerhouse reputation, Newman had an uneven performance record as an actor. He starred in several critical and commercial duds, including his debut as a Greek slave in "The Silver Chalice" (1954), a role he called "the worst motion picture filmed during the fifties."

Nor was Newman at his best as a Mexican bandit in "The Outrage" (1964), a French anarchist opposite Sophia Loren in "Lady L" (1965) or a sci-fi wanderer in Robert Altman's "Quintet" (1979). He acted in a few disaster movies -- one set in a flaming skyscraper, the other about a volcano -- for the money. He also turned down promising parts if their shooting schedule interfered with his auto racing.

Persistently overlooked by the Academy Awards despite 10 total nominations, Newman won relatively late in his career: for best actor in "The Color of Money" (1986) as aging pool shark Fast Eddie Felson who is equal parts mentor to and manipulator of the character played by Tom Cruise. Newman had reprised the role of Fast Eddie Felson from "The Hustler" (1961).

Newman also received the 1986 honorary Oscar in part for "his personal integrity and dedication to his craft" and the 1994 Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his philanthropic work.

Paul Leonard Newman was born Jan. 26, 1925, in Cleveland and raised in the affluent suburb of Shaker Heights. His father owned a sporting-goods store.

German Jewish on his father's side, Hungarian Catholic on his mother's, Newman once said he considered himself Jewish "because it is more challenging."

During World War II, he served as a Navy radioman in the Pacific. He had been turned down as a pilot because he was partially color blind.

After the war, he studied economics at Kenyon College in Ohio but preferred to say he graduated "magna cum lager" because of his barroom antics. One bar escapade landed him on the front page of a Cleveland newspaper, mortifying his parents.

Thrown off the football team after another bar fight, he turned to acting to find a way to channel his rambunctiousness and performed in summer stock and repertory work after his college graduation in 1949. He also attended Yale University's drama school before his looks helped him win several roles on television and his breakthrough part on Broadway.

Director Joshua Logan cast him as a wealthy playboy in William Inge's "Picnic," the drama about sexual tensions that erupt in a Midwestern town when a charismatic stranger arrives. Logan told Newman he could not possibly play the stranger because he did not "carry any sexual threat at all."

The part went to Ralph Meeker, a loss that motivated Newman to begin exercising regularly. Newman spent considerable time with the play's female lead, Joanne Woodward. He divorced his first wife, actress Jacqueline Witte, in 1957, leaving her with custody of their three children. He and Woodward married in 1958, and they did 15 movies and television projects together. She survives him, along with their three daughters and two daughters from his first marriage.

While in "Picnic," Newman joined the Actors Studio, where he learned "the Method," a style of acting that requires actors to plumb their own lives for motivation. He studied with Elia Kazan and Martin Ritt, both of whom would later direct him on stage or film.

Film studios kept calling Newman, and he resisted many of the initial offers because he considered their contracts stifling. "And then somebody, after a couple of Budweisers, said, 'You know, they knock and they knock, and at some point they stop knocking,' and that stuck in my head," he later told New York magazine. "I thought, 'When will they stop?' And the last knock was 'The Silver Chalice. ' "

Wearing a toga -- a "cocktail dress," as the actor called it -- and spouting ludicrous dialogue, he received humiliating reviews. When a Los Angeles station aired the movie years later, Newman took out a large newspaper ad apologizing for the film.

Back on Broadway in 1955, he earned enthusiastic reviews in "The Desperate Hours," playing a ruthless criminal who holds a family captive. That same year, he replaced James Dean, who died in a road accident, as a washed-out prize fighter in a television version of Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Battler."

Seven years later, Newman sought out the same, but much-diminished role in the film "Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man" (1962).

"They screamed at me out there," he once said, referring to Hollywood advisers. "I was cheapening myself by playing a bit part, they said. I was a star and couldn't play a bit. . . . I wanted to do it again for myself. I wanted to sit down and look at the kinescope of the TV show, and then look at the movie and see what I've learned about acting over the years."

Meanwhile, Newman had built up a critical reputation of imbuing stock characters with an intelligent restraint that often was not associated with the more flagrant of the Method acting followers.

As examples, reviewers pointed to his work as boxer Rocky Graziano in "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956) and an Army officer accused of enemy collaboration in "The Rack" (1956). He brought a vulnerability to roles that emphasized his physique, notably in "The Long, Hot Summer," based on stories by William Faulkner, and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (both 1958), from the Tennessee Williams play.

Starring opposite Elizabeth Taylor in "Cat," Newman played hard-drinking Brick, who refuses his wife's sexual advances because he is mourning the death of his gay friend, Skipper. The homosexual theme is played down in the film version, but Newman was well-aware of the subtext and tried to enliven the set with jokes about Brick's repression.

In one scene, he secretly pushed his wife's nightgown to his face out of deep longing for her. During rehearsal, he once said, "I suddenly tore off my pajama top and started to climb into my wife's nightgown, crying, 'Skipper! Skipper!' There were 20 people on that set, and do you know, not one of them laughed.

"To them, this was the Method in action and they stood in respectful silence. So, having bombed out on that mission, I mumbled something about, well, no, I guessed I wouldn't do it that way, after all."

Tired of mediocre studio assignments, Mr. Newman wanted to confront studio chief Jack Warner with an ultimatum. Newman's agent, the powerful Lew R. Wasserman, persuaded Newman of a better idea. Wasserman went to Warner and offered him $500,000 to buy out Newman's contract, saying the actor would "never amount to much."

It worked. Newman was free and paid his debt to Warner within two years. He returned to the stage, in Tennessee Williams's "Sweet Bird of Youth," directed by Kazan, and won terrific reviews as an ambitious gigolo.

He acted in the 1962 film version of the play as well as "The Hustler," the first in a series of roles that explored what he called the "corruptibility level" of people. He said that theme spoke to him as a socially conscious actor.

As Fast Eddie Felson, he played a soulless and self-centered rebel who competes against the legendary Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). For the role, Newman took lessons from the pool superstar Willie Mosconi but apparently had not learned well enough.

On the set, Gleason hustled him in a real life pool game. "I beat him three straight games in pool for a buck each," Newman said. "And then we played for two hundred dollars, and he beat me easy."

"Hud" (1963), based on Larry McMurtry's novel about a man with a "barbed-wire soul," as well as "Harper" (1966) and "Cool Hand Luke" (1967) made Newman the prime interpreter of selfish rebels.

"I tried to give Hud all the superficial external traces, including the right swing of the body," Newman once said. "I took out as many wrinkles as possible. I indicated that he boozed very well, was great with the broads, had a lot of guts, was extraordinarily competent at his job, but had a single tragic flaw: He didn't give a goddamn what happened to anyone else."Newman added that some reviewers faulted him for having "a face that doesn't look lived in." But Newman said the character's smoothness was exactly what made Hud dangerous.

His insight into character motivation was one of his finest traits. To play the self-destructive detective in "Harper," he said he "simply got drunk" as he read the script.

By the late 1960s, he began to feel like he was duplicating himself as an actor. He tried producing films in a short-lived partnership with Barbra Streisand and Sidney Poitier, but directing proved more his forte.

For his debut, he chose "Rachel, Rachel" and won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for directing.

Reviewers praised his clean, lucid style and technical skill, and he directed Woodward again in movie or TV versions of several Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. She was a middle-aged widow raising two daughters in "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds" (1972) and appeared in "The Shadow Box" (1980), a television drama about hospice patients.

From the start of his career, Newman limited his social time in Hollywood, telling an interviewer he did not want to fall into the trap of material success that came so easily in the film world. He made an effort to appear grungy, wearing jeans and running shoes as well as a beer-can opener as a necklace.

He shunned Hollywood for an 18th-century farmhouse in Westport, with an apple orchard and pool. Newman hated signing autographs or being asked to display his best-known physical feature, his blue eyes.

"I try not to be hurtful," he said. "I say something like, 'If I take off my glasses, my pants will fall down.' Or, if they're insistent, I say, 'Sure, Ill take off my dark glasses if you'll let me look at your gums.' Fair's fair."

Asked once about his looks, he said his children called him "Old Skinny Legs."

Newman's biographer, Eric Lax, wrote that the actor liked to confound the Hollywood elite by driving a Volkswagen in which he had installed a Porsche engine.

His cars became a joke with friends such as Robert Redford, who once gave Newman a Porsche as a present. The car, however, was a wreck -- dented from an accident and missing its engine. Redford paid a dump truck driver to deposit the car in Newman's driveway with a note attached: "Happy birthday."

Newman had the car compressed, then placed in a wooden box at the Redford estate with a nasty letter. He conceded that Redford won the gag by never acknowledging the box.Newman had discovered auto racing while acting in the race-track film "Winning" (1969). "I cannot be competitive about acting, because there's no way to compete as an actor. What are you competing against?" he once said. "In auto racing, you either win or lose. You go across the finish line and come in first or second or ninth -- or not at all."

In 1976, he won his first national amateur championship, and the next year began racing with professionals. In 1979, he and two co-drivers finished second in the Le Mans 24-hour road race. He continued participating in pro races in the 1980s and 1990s, reaching speeds of 220 mph.

Newman also made forays into politics, often providing sex appeal to liberal campaigns. He volunteered extensively in 1968 for Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy (D-Minn.) and protested the Vietnam War at the U.S. Embassy in London.

Newman occasionally was ridiculed as out of his element. He was roundly criticized in 1978 as unqualified when President Jimmy Carter asked him to attend a U.N. General Assembly session on disarmament.

By the early 1980s, Newman made a decision to refocus his acting career after years of bloated disaster films and other undistinguished projects. Among the best films were the police story "Fort Apache, the Bronx" (1981) and the courtroom drama "The Verdict" (1982), in both of which he played deeply flawed heavy drinkers.

He was a stuffy old WASP in "Mr. & Mrs. Bridge" (1990); an aged ne'er-do-well in "Nobody's Fool" (1994); and a gangster chieftain in "Road to Perdition" (2002), a film that brought him his final Oscar nomination.

Articles have suggested that Newman's film choices were influenced by his troubled relationship with his father as well as Newman's estrangement from his son, Scott, a budding actor who died in 1978 of an overdose of alcohol and Valium.

In honor of Scott, a son from his first marriage, Newman organized in 1988 a camp in Connecticut for children with cancer and life-threatening illnesses. His most famous philanthropic venture began in the early 1980s when Newman and author A.E. Hotchner began a food business, Newman's Own, with products including salad dressing, spaghetti sauce, popcorn and cookies.

With profits from Newman's Own, he gave more than $250 million to charities and social welfare organizations. He joked that his salad dressings and pasta sauces earned more than his films.

Newman continued to act in recent years, notably as the stage manager in a 2002 Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," but he was certain acting was not his whole life.

He said that over the toilet bowl in his office bathroom he hung a letter from a fan -- of his tomato sauce. The letter ends: "My girlfriend mentioned that you were a movie star and I would be interested to know what you have made. If you act as well as you cook, your movies should be worth watching."

Castrating Congress, one unlawful billion at a time.

I'm going to continue my recent practice of keeping it short.

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." So the White House wants its Secretary to have total power over the funds, however much that ends up being. In other words, the White House wants to take the power of the purse away from Congress in this matter and center it in the executive branch.

Lockstep towards tyranny.

Somebody do me a favor...

Check John McCain's wrist and see if he's still wearing SPC Matthew Stanley's KIA bracelet. I'm just curious.

Batshit crazy!!

Yeah, that about sums it up.

In an address last June, the Republican vice presidential candidate also urged ministry students to pray for a plan to build a $30 billion natural gas pipeline in the state, Palin says, "God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that."

And... Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war because, "Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God," she said. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan."

Ever heard Megadeth's "Holy Wars"? No? Give it a spin.

Bandit this here's the Snowman, you got your ears on?

Jerry Reed, 71, a Grammy Award-winning country guitarist, singer and songwriter who played a mischievous, good old boy sidekick to Burt Reynolds in "Smokey and the Bandit" and other movies, died Sept. 1 at his home in the Nashville suburb of Brentwood. He had emphysema.

Mr. Reed's trademark Georgia baritone drawl and relaxed manner in film and television roles brought his ingratiating presence to a wide audience, notably as trucker Cledus "Snowman" Snow in "Smokey and the Bandit" (1977) and its two sequels.

But it was in country music where Mr. Reed thrived as a major, innovative artist from the late 1960s to early '80s. Besides " East Bound and Down," the theme song for "Smokey and the Bandit," his hit songs included the propulsive " Guitar Man," the Cajun-inspired funky novelty tune " Amos Moses" and the tender " A Thing Called Love." Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Porter Wagoner were among those to cover his best-known pieces.

Mr. Reed was a dynamic virtuoso who had distinguished himself as a session guitarist supporting Presley, Waylon Jennings and others before emerging as a major solo talent. He was most remembered for using an intricate guitar-picking style known as the "claw" because it used the entire right hand where earlier guitar giants such as Chet Atkins and Merle Travis favored a two or three-fingered approach.

Besides being the title of a song he wrote, the claw was a development that music historian Rich Kienzle called essential to the "wild, untamed and dauntingly complex" country music that followed Atkins and Travis.

Jerry Reed Hubbard, the son of cotton mill workers, was born in Atlanta on March 20, 1937. After his parents divorced, he spent his early childhood in orphanages and foster homes.

He showed his early flair for music by using a hairbrush as a rhythm guitar to accompany the "Grand Ole Opry" radio program. His mother, who had remarried, bought her son a cheap guitar and he showed immediate skill, albeit with unorthodox fingering methods.

Mr. Reed quit high school to perform in local honky-tonks and festivals and impressed an Atlanta radio show host, who took over the young man's management. He won engagements opening for singers Ernest Tubb and Faron Young.

He also wrote novelty tunes such as "If the Good Lord's Willing" that made little impact when he recorded them in the late 1950s.

However, rocker Gene Vincent covered Mr. Reed's song "Crazy Legs" in 1958, and Brenda Lee's version of Mr. Reed's "That's All You Gotta Do" appeared on the flip side of her 1960 hit "I'm Sorry." Wagoner also had a No.1 country hit with Mr. Reed's "Misery Loves Company" in 1962.

After brief Army service, in which he played in a country band, Mr. Reed settled in Nashville and was a session and tour guitarist for Wagoner and Bobby Bare, among others. His own career as a solo artist had withered until Atkins, who headed the Nashville unit at RCA Records, urged Mr. Reed to leave his record label, Columbia, for RCA.

Atkins's idea was not to refashion Mr. Reed to fit public taste but to let him pursue his own sound and identity. The plan worked, with Mr. Reed successfully reaching the charts with "Guitar Man" (1967).

The next year, Presley recorded "Guitar Man" and Mr. Reed's "U.S. Male" with the songwriter doing the backup guitar work.

Over the next several years, Mr. Reed experienced what was arguably his most professionally successful, with Grammy Awards for best instrumental performance both as a solo artist ("When You're Hot, You're Hot," 1971) and with Atkins ("Me & Jerry," 1970). His other hits included "Amos Moses" (1970) and " Lord, Mr. Ford" (1973), a comic look at the plight of car owners during the era's gasoline crisis.

Tall, blond and charismatic, Mr. Reed became a comic fixture on country television programs including the "Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour" and tried to parlay that fame into an acting career. His admittedly modest abilities limited him mostly to broad comedy, and his final role was as a sadistic football coach in "The Waterboy" (1998) with Adam Sandler.

Among Mr. Reed's last hit records, in 1983, was Tim DuBois's comic novelty " She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft)." Although he faded from country music's front tier, he won another Grammy for best country instrumental performance for "Sneakin' Around" (1991) with Atkins.

In the late 1990s, he formed the Old Dogs with Jennings, Bare and Mel Tillis, and the group specialized in singing comic laments about aging. "I'm not one of those flat-belly singers anymore," Mr. Reed told the Associated Press at the time. "The record industry is one of those industries that will discourage you and turn you loose. They sell records to those screaming little girls."

Survivors include his wife of 49 years, Priscilla Mitchell Hubbard of Brentwood; two daughters, Charlotte "Lottie" Stewart of Franklin, Tenn., and Seidina Hinesley of Smyrna, Tenn.; and two grandchildren.