If you’re a United States Senator and your house burns down, you don’t have to sleep out on the street. You have money, a staff, and wealthy friends. In other words, you have options.

So it’s pretty telling that when Senator Brownback’s condo caught fire back in 2000, he moved in with the manic, apocalyptic preacher Lou Engle. We know this thanks to a new video unearthed by Bruce Wilson.

Watch Engle explain – as only he can – how his pairing with Brownback came about:

In case you’re not familiar with Engle, he leads the IHOP – the International House of Prayer – which works to hasten the End Times. He’s also the founder (and voice-over talent) of militant, right-wing prayer rallies like this anti-Prop 8 event:

Miraculously, Brownback didn’t come to hate Engle after living with him for 7 months. In fact, the former roomies appeared together last week at the Family Research Council’s “PrayerCast” against healthcare reform. Who knows…maybe having Engle around makes Brownback feel reasonable?

[Bonus footage: watch Engle talk about the “hot blood” of Latinos and claim that his spittle is holy water]

TS here. Lassen Sie uns fortfahren, meine Freunde!

On balance, I’m not nostalgic for the university. The women were gorgeous and plentiful, the hockey team was in its heyday, but all was not bread and roses: the math classes were a real pain in the ass and the administration a mite autocratic. The latter two were the cause of sleepless nights and innumerable semesters on probation.

One in particular – a girlfriend, not an academic torment – was, let’s say, creative to a fault and an incurable Dylan fanatic. She even, to her everlasting credit, made a good case for Bob’s Christian period. I am grateful and tip the cap each time I listen to Saved.

Others were a source of frustration. C. was 23 and spoke French, which, since I was 20, seemed like surefire indicators of maturity. Not so. You’d think after x-number of years my college roommate might let me forget that C. once went through the motions of fellating a Star Market banana.

Good times.

That roommate, in fact, has returned to our undergrad city, and says that we had it pretty good. (He’s got lots of degrees, and is an erudite fellow, so I can’t contradict him without further evidence.) “What the hell happened to us?” he asked me recently. “If I knew,” I said, “I wouldn’t be on Jdate.” Anyway, we do agree that dry spells, which, as it happens, I’m experiencing as I write, are a fact of post-college years and should’ve been foreseen.

You can get me at instaputzen [at] gmail [dot com].

FEMA's Long-Term "Strategic Plans" - My, How They've Changed

The Rude One cleans it up and finds some real eye openers:

"So apparently, under James Lee Witt in 1997 and then under Michael Brown's college roommate and boss, Joe Allbaugh, in 2002, FEMA laid out two very different long-term plans for how the agency was to improve and how its success was to be measured. What becomes evident is a stark contrast between the Clinton-era emphasis on saving people and communities as goals in and of themselves and how the Bush administration's FEMA sees itself as serving "customers."...read on"