We’ve been focused on crafting audio delights lately, but fear not — we will never neglect our mission to find and curate the best GIFs to ensure your happiness!

Carrying us this month is our GIFLord, C. Dave, and we also received a timely GIFtip from our pal DBuu.

As usual, we drew from the many GIF aggregators out there, plus message boards from some of our favorite sites, such as Get Off My Internets and Casual Hoya.

Three…two…one…Animate!

(If anything hangs, click through to view)

Forum Gems

Alison isn’t the only one who suspects Jason Russell is hiding something.

Coffee is good…

Shaq’s Trip

Flip, Flip, Flipadelphia

Dinklage dominating

Who Wants Breakfast??

I surrender!

Valerie, you bitch!!

Psssssh…!

White Butler loves Bonny Bear.

Cuthbert Digs In

Squeeeeeeee!!!!

Whoops

Comic Timing =

Soft-Serve Santorum.

Opportunistic Doghump

Jousting GIFs never end well for the participants

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here’s our regular wrap-up of the goings-on at the ROTI Facebook page. If you haven’t signed up for regular delivery of great links and videos, you should probably do that right now.

Last week, we learned that hundreds of college students actually play the “sport” of quidditch: wearing capes, horseying around on brooms, and tossing various athletic balls through hoops. It’s incredibly embarrassing to watch.

This horrifying sport’s season culminated in the Quidditch World Cup this weekend in New York, but ROTI’s Facebook posse got a preview with this cringeworthy video featuring the Harvard Quidditch Team.

However, Harvard and all the other teams were no match for the Yankees of the Quidditch world, the dominant team from Middlebury that created the embarrassing pastime of “muggle Quidditch.”

Here’s a music video they made to celebrate themselves. The really bad part starts around the 2:10 mark. How these tools justify mocking the lacrosse team when they themselves are 1000 times lamer, I have no idea.

Okay, now let’s forget that ever happened.

Reader CVD sent along this amazing collection of bootleg DVD covers from I Heart Chaos.

It’s tough to pick favorites from this photoset, but I particularly enjoyed the back cover of a pirated “Catch Me If You Can.”

Inspired by the great tracks I listened to while studying and writing the articles for Deep Cuts Week, I posted a ton of great hip hop jams to the Facebook page.

Here they are for your listening pleasure, starting with Die Antwoord, the best South African rap group ever:

An amazing live performance by Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz featuring MF DOOM:

Another Wu banger:

And last but not least, a genius video sent along by Schmentz in which R. Kelly lays down some “Real Talk.”

Pontiac went out of business, and we celebrated the late car brand by highlighting one of the best car commercials ever:

She might have lost her Senate race, but Christine O’Donnell won our hearts forever with her potent blend of witchcraft and tea party crazy.

Here’s the conservative sweetie expounding on the evils of Halloween in a video clip made especially ironic by her subsequent ladybug antics.

Speaking of tea party hotties, Sarah Palin launched her new reality show…

Finally, here’s a dark chapter in Republican party history — in fact, George W. Bush called this the low point of his presidency. Nope, not 9/11 or the bungled intelligence that led us into Iraq, it was that one time when Kanye West was mean!

Mike Myers delivers the funniest work of his career in that video. It’s pure cinema verite.

Let’s conclude this roundup with a palate cleanser — the most hilarious recipe I have ever seen online.

It’s Rachael Ray’s blueprint for Late Night Bacon, presented by the Food Network!

I should note that I have heard very positive things about Ray-Ray from those who have encountered her in person. She’s apparently pretty cool and looks out for her peeps.

This recipe might not be among her most sophisticated, but it brought a lot of happiness to all who experienced it.

Here are some amazing reviews from the Food Network site:

As always, you can ensure prompt delivery of these gems by signing up as a fan of our Facebook page.

And if you’re really awesome, you’ll take it one step further by suggesting the Rumors on the Internets Facebook page to your friends. Just think, now you’ll have something to talk about at your otherwise banal get-togethers!

After Chris, Jonathan Horn, and I learned about the president’s $700-billion-bailout proposal and drafted the remarks announcing it to a stunned nation, Ed said the president wanted to see us in the Oval Office. The president looked relaxed and was sitting behind the Resolute desk. He felt he’d made the major decision that everyone had been asking for. That always seemed to relax him. He liked being decisive. Excuse me, boldly decisive. The president seemed to be thinking of his memoirs. “This might go in as a big decision,” he mused.

“Definitely, Mr. President,” someone else observed. “This is a large decision.”

The president asked his secretary, Karen, to bring him the Rose Garden remarks he’d just delivered that day, September 19, announcing his action plan. He got slightly exasperated when she was delayed in printing them out. When he finally got them, he put his half-glasses on and looked at them. “See, this was fine today,” he said. “But we got to make this understandable for the average cat.” He proposed an outline for another speech that talked about the situation our economy was in, how we’d gotten here, and how the administration’s plan was a solution.

“This is the last bullet we have,” the president said at one point, referring to the bailout. “If this doesn’t work…” He shook his head, and his voice trailed off. That wasn’t good enough for me. If this doesn’t work, then what? We’re done? America is over? I looked around at everyone else. What does that mean?

Just when you thought the flood of GWB Administration tell-alls had slowed to a trickle, one last gem comes rolling down the drainpipe.

It’s the work of Matt Latimer, who came to the White House as an ambitious young movement conservative, only to suffer severe disillusionment as he watched the Bush posse fumble helplessly with an economy sliding into ruin.

He’s written a piece called “Me Talk Presidential Some Day” for GQ, and it is bonafide.

The first inkling that Latimer is about to lower the boom on GWB comes when he describes how his dream job turned into a surreal sideshow:

In 2007 I finally made it to the Bush White House as a presidential speechwriter. But it was not at all what I envisioned. It was less like Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing and more like The Office.

After watching Karl Rove’s bizarre farewell to White House staffers and hearing the president dismiss the conservative movement I believed in (“I know it sounds arrogant to say,” he told me, “but I redefined the Republican Party”), I thought I could muddle through till the end.

Washington might not have been the city I had dreamed of, but I figured things couldn’t get much worse.

The job mostly consisted of penning “legacy speeches,” touting the accomplishments of the administration in its final days. They’d plan to boast about how “the fundamentals of the economy are strong,” but after a while it became patently obvious that it wasn’t the case.

Pretty soon, Latimer found himself in a full-on crisis situation, as the White House tried to lead the country out of a disaster that it had helped precipitate with its happy-go-lucky economic message.

It didn’t help things that the GOP presidential nominee, John McCain, was trying to thread the needle between sticking close to the President to fire up the base and distancing himself from the President to attract moderate voters.

And then there was his brilliant idea to “suspend the campaign” when the economic poo really hit the fan. That did NOT go over well at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave:

Ed and the president decided to give a prime-time address to the nation, and Vice President Cheney was sent to the Hill to argue for our bill (a bill he may or may not have believed in) and was apparently hammered by House Republicans. There were reports that only four Republicans out of nearly 200 supported the plan. From what I was starting to glean about the whole scatterbrained operation, four seemed like too many. Hours before the president was to speak to the country, Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign informed Josh Bolten that McCain was going to phone the president and urge him to call off the address and instead hold an emergency economic summit in Washington. If the president did speak that night, the McCain campaign didn’t want him to outline any specific proposal.

Of course, this threw the proverbial monkey wrench into our plans—and at the eleventh hour. I overheard the president call McCain’s plan “a stunt.” Dana Perino said the negotiations were nearly over, and suddenly he was going to swoop in and muck things up?

The president’s political adviser, Barry Jackson, was blunt, calling McCain a “stupid prick.”

[...]

When the president came into the Family Theater to rehearse the speech in front of a teleprompter, he didn’t like the idea of just talking about principles. It sounded like the administration was backing away from its own plan (which it was).

“We can’t even defend our own proposal?” the president asked. “Why did we propose it, then?” This was not bold decision making. There were about a dozen people gathered in the theater to watch him rehearse, and all of us remained silent as the president looked at us for an answer.

The president walked over to sip some water from one of the bottles on the table near his lectern. “This speech is weak,” he said. He looked at me and Chris. “Frankly, I’m surprised, to be honest with you.”

There was more silence.

“Too late to cancel the speech?” the president asked into the air. He was joking…I think. Finally, Ed (who hadn’t exactly rushed to jump into the line of fire) explained that we had to make this change to the address because the proposal the president liked might not end up being the one he had to agree to.

“Then why the hell did I support it if I didn’t believe it would pass?” he snapped. There was yet another uncomfortable silence.

The most brutal part of the tale comes when Bush realizes that his conception of the bailout plan is totally wrong, and it’s not the sweet deal for America that he’d tried to believe it was.

Try explaining THAT to the average cat.

Finally, the president directed us to try to put elements of his proposal back into the text. He wanted to explain what he was seeking and to defend it. He especially wanted Americans to know that his plan would likely see a return on the taxpayers’ investment. Under his proposal, he said, the federal government would buy troubled mortgages on the cheap and then resell them at a higher price when the market for them stabilized.

“We’re buying low and selling high,” he kept saying.

The problem was that his proposal didn’t work like that. One of the president’s staff members anxiously pulled a few of us aside. “The president is misunderstanding this proposal,” he warned. “He has the wrong idea in his head.” As it turned out, the plan wasn’t to buy low and sell high. In some cases, in fact, Secretary Paulson wanted to pay more than the securities were likely worth in order to put more money into the markets as soon as possible. This was not how the president’s proposal had been advertised to the public or the Congress. It wasn’t that the president didn’t understand what his administration wanted to do. It was that the treasury secretary didn’t seem to know, changed his mind, had misled the president, or some combination of the three.

[...]

After finally getting the speech draft turned around and sent back to the teleprompter technicians, we trudged back to the Family Theater, where the president rehearsed. In the theater, the president was clearly confused about how the government would buy these securities. He repeated his belief that the government was going to “buy low and sell high,” and he still didn’t understand why we hadn’t put that into the speech like he’d asked us to. When it was explained to him that his concept of the bailout proposal wasn’t correct, the president was momentarily speechless. He threw up his hands in frustration.

“Why did I sign on to this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?” he asked.

The president was clearly frustrated with what was going on, but there was little he could do at this late hour. He went up to take a nap, saying he was beat. He looked it. I’d never seen him more exhausted. His hair was out of place and shaggy. His face looked drained and pale. Even more distressing, he was wearing Crocs. As I looked at him I thought to myself, how many more crises can one guy take?

Probably the juiciest delights from Wareham’s account pertain to GWB’s takes on the 2008 presidential candidates. They were universally negative.

After all, GWB felt that he had personally transformed conservatism, and how could any of those chumps fill his shoes?

John McCain, the temperamental media darling, had spent most of the past eight years running against the Republican Party and the president—Republicans on Capitol Hill and at the White House hated him. Choosing John McCain as our standard-bearer would be the height of self-delusion. It would be like putting Camilla Parker Bowles in charge of the Princess Diana Foundation.

As it turned out, I was the one who was deluded. The people I worked with in the White House were the most loyal of the Bush loyalists. Dana Perino was so sensitive to criticism of Bush that she once said she couldn’t watch the Democratic convention because it would be “too mean” to the president. Yet I watched them embrace McCain enthusiastically—backing a guy who’d worked so hard to undermine them. It was a cynical bargain.

The president, like me, didn’t seem to be in love with any of the available options. He always believed Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee. “Wait till her fat keister is sitting at this desk,” he once said (except he didn’t say “keister”).

He didn’t think much of Barack Obama. After one of Obama’s blistering speeches against the administration, the president had a very human reaction: He was ticked off. He came in one day to rehearse a speech, fuming. “This is a dangerous world,” he said for no apparent reason, “and this cat isn’t remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you.”

He wound himself up even more. “You think I wasn’t qualified?” he said to no one in particular. “I was qualified.”

[...]

Bush seemed to feel considerable unease with the choice of McCain as well. I think he liked Romney best. (The rumor was that so did Karl Rove.) My guess was the president hadn’t so easily forgotten the endless slights he’d suffered, but there was little he could do. To him, McCain’s defeat would be a repudiation of the Bush administration, so McCain had to win. The president, who had quite a good political mind, was clearly not impressed with the McCain operation.

I was once in the Oval Office when the president was told a campaign event in Phoenix he was to attend with McCain suddenly had to be closed to the press. The president didn’t understand why when the whole purpose of holding the event had been to show Bush and McCain together so the press would stop asking why the two wouldn’t be seen together. If the event was closed to the press, the whole thing didn’t make sense.

“If he doesn’t want me to go, fine,” the president said. “I’ve got better things to do.”

Eventually, someone informed the president that the reason the event was closed was that McCain was having trouble getting a crowd. Bush was incredulous—and to the point. “He can’t get 500 people to show up for an event in his hometown?” he asked. No one said anything, and we went on to another topic. But the president couldn’t let the matter drop. “He couldn’t get 500 people? I could get that many people to turn out in Crawford.” He shook his head. “This is a five-spiral crash, boys.”

We tried to move on to something else. But the president wouldn’t let go. He was stuck on the Phoenix event. At one point, he looked off into space and said to no one in particular, “What is this—a cruel hoax?”

Chris and I were tickled by that comment. For weeks, we would look for ways to use it. “They are out of Diet Pepsis at the mess. What is this, a cruel hoax?” I went to dinner with a friend. “They don’t have cheeseburgers?” I said, looking at the menu. “What is this, a cruel hoax?”

Bush’s take on Palin was equally amusing. We’re so used to thinking of the former POTUS as a dunce, so it’s always great when a moment of pure clarity pokes through.

Even the normally levelheaded Raul Yanes, the president’s staff secretary, was overtaken by Palin mania. He’d been slightly annoyed with me for not jumping on the McCain bandwagon and for saying aloud that I thought McCain would lose. Now, of course, I had to be enthusiastic about the ticket. “You still think we’re going to lose?” he asked me laughingly.

“Yep,” I replied.

Raul looked incredulous. “Well, you obviously don’t believe in facts!”

I was about to be engulfed by a tidal wave of Palin euphoria when someone—someone I didn’t expect—planted my feet back on the ground. After Palin’s selection was announced, the same people who demanded I acknowledge the brilliance of McCain’s choice expected the president to join them in their high-fiving tizzy. It was clear, though, that the president, ever the skilled politician, had concerns about the choice of Palin, which he called “interesting.” That was the equivalent of calling a fireworks display “satisfactory.”

“I’m trying to remember if I’ve met her before. I’m sure I must have.” His eyes twinkled, then he asked, “What is she, the governor of Guam?”

Everyone in the room seemed to look at him in horror, their mouths agape. When Ed told him that conservatives were greeting the choice enthusiastically, he replied, “Look, I’m a team player, I’m on board.” He thought about it for a minute. “She’s interesting,” he said again. “You know, just wait a few days until the bloom is off the rose.”

Then he made a very smart assessment.

“This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for,” he said. “She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out.”

Thank you, Matt Latimer, for giving us this glimpse of Dubya’s last days, and showing him at his best and his worst. History owes you a debt of gratitude.

To read the full article – including a tasty gem about how a top economic advisor was best known for deploying whoopie cushions around the West Wing – click here.

Who remembers the 2008 South Ossetia war?

It was the kerfuffle that happened during the Olympics.

Remember when Bush and Putin were checking out the opening ceremonies, and Putin’s all “Yo by the way I’m invading Georgia right now,” and Bush was like “WTF dude?” and Putin was basically all “Try and stop me you numbskull,” and Bush backed down…

The deal was essentially that Georgia, a smaller former republic of the USSR, was being a thorn in Putin’s side by getting all Westernized and trying to get into NATO, buddying up with the USA and possibly threatening to host a nuclear missile shield that could diminish Putin’s global might.

As if Putin is going to let this happen?

Naturally, he moved to squelch this threat and bring Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili down a peg.

He exploited the problem of two breakaway Georgian regions to foster unrest within Georgian borders…

By hook or by crook, he tricked the Georgians into invading one of the regions, South Ossetia – whether out of hubris or paranoia is still unclear.

Then, as soon as the Georgians advanced into Ossetia, Putin’s forces crushed them (see above) under the guise of protecting Russian peacekeepers. The Russian Navy blockaded the Georgian Black Sea ports and the Air Force bombed the Georgian interior.

Less than a week after Saakashvili gave the order to advance, his troops were routed, and the Russian army was occupying Georgian cities.

And that’s how the business gets done.

The Georgians withdrew, the Russians triumphed, and NATO observers thought that the Georgians started it, screwing everything up for Saakashvili’s bid to join their ranks.

Putin for the win!!

Anyway, this was a good six months and one Michael Phelps bong rip ago.

Water under the bridge, right? No!

Apparently some crap Georgian musicians are pissed and ready to speak their puny minds! With incredibly derivative disco!!

Still smarting from war with Russia six months ago, Georgians have picked a song for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow that takes a swipe at Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

The disco song “We Don’t Wanna Put In” by Stefane & 3G was chosen late on Wednesday by a jury and public vote on Georgian television, and has already caused a stir on the Internet.

It promises to receive a cool reception in Moscow on May 12-16.

The English-language chorus runs:
“We don’t wanna put in,
Cuz negative move,
It’s killin’ the groove,
I’m gonna try to shoot in,
Some disco tonight,
Boogie with you.”

The band has not hidden the fact the song alludes to Putin, the ex-Russian president who evokes strong feelings in Georgia.

“Since we (Georgia) decided to take part, we need to send a message to Europe and first of all to Moscow,” song producer Kakha Tsiskaridze told Reuters on Thursday.

“The song is called “Put In” and its text carries a double meaning,” he said. “I think everyone will understand what we want to say. It’s important for us to say what Georgia wants to say as a country.”

Quite a political statement you made Kakha, a dumbass English-language song about how “negative move is killing the groove”?!

Your pathetic military strategy is what’s killing the groove, you crybabies!!

At least Putin now knows the Georgian people stand as one, defiantly ready to boogie.

Devastating, we’re sure.

What’s worse, the song is totally crap. Check it out if you don’t mind boring music…

Nice try Georgia, but maybe next time you decide to step to Putin, maybe you bring the stones to fight more than five days against a rickety ass Soviet army.

And certainly do not be trifling with a shite, trite disco song that bites.

You may think your little disco number is sending a message, well here’s a message for you straight from the man himself.

MC Putin.

C. Dave sent us a link to a wonderful piece in SLATE: the top 25 Bushisms of all time.

Jacob Weisberg, the chief collector of these nuggets, prefaces them with some thoughts:

People often assume that because I’ve spent the past nine years collecting Bushisms, I must despise George W. Bush. To the contrary, Bushisms fill me with affection for the man—and not just because of the income stream they’ve generated. I find the Bush who flails with words, unlike the Bush who flails with policy, to be an endearing character. Instead of a villain, he makes himself into an irresistible buffoon, like Mrs. Malaprop, Archie Bunker, or Homer Simpson. Bush treats words the way he treated recalcitrant European leaders: When they won’t do what he wants them to, he tries to bully them into submission. Through his willful, improvisational, and incompetent use of language, he tempers (very slightly) his willful, improvisational, and incompetent use of government. You can’t, in the end, despise someone who regrets that, because of the rising cost of malpractice insurance, “[t]oo many OB/GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across the country.”

[...]

Being able to laugh at yourself is a rare quality in a leader. It’s one thing George W. Bush can do that Bill Clinton couldn’t. Unfortunately, as we bid farewell to Bushisms, we must conclude that the joke was mainly on us.

Some of the quotations are familiar, but here are five we hadn’t heard that are pure gold:

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
—Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

“It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.”
—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000

“People say, ‘How can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil?’ You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in’s house and say I love you.”
—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002

“I think it’s really important for this great state of baseball to reach out to people of all walks of life to make sure that the sport is inclusive. The best way to do it is to convince little kids how to—the beauty of playing baseball.”
—Washington, D.C., Feb. 13, 2006

“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”
—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

It’s almost over, kids!!

Enjoy these classic Bushisms while they remain relevant and tragically hilarious.

Instead, W decides to pardon John Forte.

Huh!?!?!

Whoever saw this one coming wins a cookie.

WASHINGTON — President Bush granted 14 pardons and commuted two prison sentences on Monday, but the benefactors included none of the big names who had become the topic of speculation as Mr. Bush leaves office.

Mr. Bush has been relatively sparing in his use of pardons compared with past presidents, and the latest round of actions continued that pattern.

The closest any of the defendants came to celebrity was John E. Forté, a hip-hop artist and backup singer to Carly Simon who was convicted of aiding and abetting in the distribution of cocaine. (Ms. Simon put up the bail of $250,000 for Mr. Forté when he was arrested in 2001 at Newark International Airport.) Mr. Forté was sentenced to 14 years in prison, but Mr. Bush commuted the remainder of his sentence.

Amid a flurry of recent clemency requests that reached historic levels, a number of high-profile defendants have looked to Mr. Bush for help. They included Michael Milken, the former junk bond king convicted of securities fraud; Marion Jones, the former Olympic sprinter convicted for lying about her use of performance-enhancing drugs; Randy Cunningham, the former California congressman sent to prison in a bribery scheme; and John Walker Lindh, an American who pleaded guilty to serving with the Taliban.

There has also been growing speculation in Washington that Mr. Bush might issue blanket pardons to government officials and intelligence officers who took part in counterterrorism programs like Qaeda interrogations, to protect them from the threat of criminal prosecution.

But none of that came to pass on Monday. Those issued reprieves had been found guilty of mostly garden-variety offenses; one recipient, Leslie O. Collier, was issued a pardon for a 1996 conviction for the unauthorized use of a pesticide in killing bald eagles. Others who received pardons had been convicted of income tax evasion, unauthorized acquisition of food stamps, drug offenses and bank embezzlement, among other offenses.

While we can’t say the same for his appointment of heads of large government agencies, you have to credit Pres Bush for judicious use of the pardoning stamp.

Now, John Forte’s case WAS something of a cause celebre, and he was aggressively defended by Carly Simon, whose son Ben Taylor was Forte’s roommate at Phillips Exeter. Yet Carly Simon doesn’t strike us as a Republican insider, and if anything the Andover/Exeter rivalry might have worked against Forte here.

Nope, it pretty much seems like W just did the right thing here.

Maybe it was unlikely advocate Orrin Hatch that turned the tide: ““Now is the perfect opportunity for John to be given the chance to provide positive benefits to society through his considerable musical talents,” Hatch wrote to Bush in a January 2007 letter.“

What kind of bizarro world have we entered here?? What’s next, O. Hatch and GWB taping a Stop Snitchin’ video??

Forte’s crime was to act as a go-between on what turned out to be a drug deal; Forte claimed ignorance, although one suspects he had to know what was up on some level, since he was being paid huge money to pick two girls up from the airport. Forte intended to use the money to finance a solo record.

Knowledgeable or not, however, this is exactly the kind of “crime” that represents the worst fallout of the endless, futile War on Drugs. Taking down relatively innocent go-betweens and prosecuting them like drug dealers is an absurd waste of resources, to say nothing of a miscarriage of justice.

So kudos to the POTUS for pardoning a guy who’s definitely done all the time he needs to do.

Kanye West claimed that George Bush doesn’t care about black people, but here he pardoned a rapper convicted of a drug offense; Sean Hannity would go insane if Obama did this. Nope, it seems like the real scoop is that GWB doesn’t care about poor people or a competent federal government. He obviously has a decent amount of love for black people.

Now all we need is a Fugees reunion with Forte producing a few tracks…oh yeah, we forgot, they tried this already and it didn’t work because Lauryn Hill is insane. (Sorry ladies.)