Galley Friend J.S. sends along this dynamite profile of alt-wrestling star Colt Cabana. It’s worth reading as a lifestyle piece even if you’re not interested in wrestling.

That said, it reinforces my suspicion that CM Punk’s anti-WWE diatribe of a few weeks ago wasn’t just the greatest worked-shoot in the history of wrestling. (Unless the Montreal Screwjob was really a deep work.) It was also a seminal moment in wrestling: It represented mainstream wrestling’s first attempt to completely assimilate alt-wrestling.

Wrestling has always had minor leagues. Once upon a time, the entire enterprise was nothing more than a collection of minor-league road shows. But in the last ten years or so, there has emerged a kind of wrestling that isn’t just minor league, but fundamentally different. You could think of it like this: alt-wrestling is to the WWE what the Suicide Girls are to Playboy.

As the alt-wrestling subculture grew, the WWE tried to contain it, and sometimes co-opt it (by putting guys like Cabana and Punk under contract). But with the angle they’re currently playing with Punk, they’re doing something more: It’s like they’ve given up trying to subsume it. Instead, they’re attempting to meld the two, incorporating aspects of alt-wrestling into their mainstream product. If it works, it could change mainstream wrestling.

From John Heilemann’s great piece  in New York Magazine:

A month later, when he visited New York on a fund-raising swing, I asked who his political heroes were. ­“Reagan was certainly part of that,” Huntsman said, though he paraphrased Dutch’s ringing anti-statism as a commitment to “making sure government never exceeds boundaries and never gets out of control from a cost standpoint.” He also mentioned Nixon: “I mean, here’s a guy who created the EPA.”

Run, don’t walk, to the astounding story by Nicholas Schmidle in the New Yorker on the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. Highlights include: a CIA operative running an “immunization drive” in Abbottabad, “settling with power,” sandwich platters from Costco.

And “For God and country–Geronimo. Geronimo. Geronimo.”

Tick-tock reporting at its absolute best. Bowden-esque.

Turns out, Mara Hvistendahl is anti-choice. Sort of:

In his review of my book, Last contended the work is “aimed, like a heat-seeking missile, against the entire intellectual framework of ‘choice.'” It is true that I don’t believe absolute choice is a great framing point for the politics of modern reproduction. The range of options available to parents today is simply too great. The rhetoric surrounding abortion in the United States sorely needs to be updated.

(1) It’s nice to see that they read Wired over at Harper’s, too.

(2) The New York Times continues its series on blackness and Marvel summer comic-book movies.

(3) John Judis thinks Republicans are, well, here, let him tell it:

Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today’s Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to, and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery. . . .

The Republicans are, in effect, demanding a major constitutional change in return for not shutting down the government and undermining the American economy. That’s insurrectionary behavior.

Angie Harmon telling Tricia Helfer to get well soon.

Today, Noonan says this about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

[The Republican establishment] spent the first decade of this century backing things a truly conservative party would not have dreamed of—careless wars . . .

Without engaging on the larger question of whether the wars were careless, here she is on Jan. 30, 2003:

This, truly, is a good man. And that is a rare thing. Agree with Mr. Bush’s stands or disagree, there can be no doubting the depth of his seriousness and the degree to which he attempts to do what he is convinced is right, and to lead his country toward that vision of rightness.

And finally, here’s Noonan on Feb. 10, 2003:

At this point Iraq is, for each of us, a gut call. We probably have as much information and hard data as we’re going to get. There are different ways to interpret the evidence, to understand the peril. No one can prove containment will work in the future, for instance, and no one can prove that it won’t. There will be a price to pay if we invade. There will be a price to pay if we don’t. And ultimately you have to go with your instinct, your gut sense of the world and of men.

George W. Bush looks at fact patterns, as they say, and does not shrink from coming to conclusions if he thinks the facts demand them. This can’t be said of all political leaders. Coming to a conclusion means having to take a stand. Taking a stand is dangerous. They would rather observe the drama from a distance (a distance that may not hold, for the drama may come to them) and, if it ends happily, come forth to say this is indeed what they hoped for, what they quietly helped. The success of the American operation was, we feel, partly the child of our criticisms. But it would be wrong to take credit, let us simply say we are pleased. If it ends in disaster they will say: Ah, that is why I could not support it.

That’s politics. President Bush in this respect isn’t a politician. He’s an actual leader. He has come to conclusions and taken a stand.