Archive for April, 2009
Sweet Jesus
Ali G has always been my favorite Sacha Baron Cohen character, but Brüno, the gay Austrian fashion reporter is a very close second. The good news is that Brüno is Cohen’s next movie, opening July 10th. To watch the trailer, you have to verify your age, but I promise it’s 100% worth it. And here, [...]
Call the Waambulance!
Obama laments loss of privacy as president – AP (4/3/09): At a town hall meeting Friday in Strasbourg, France, Obama was asked by a Hungarian student whether he ever regretted running for president. Obama lamented the loss of “privacy and anonymity” that comes with the job. Cry me a fucking river. Or alternately, allow me [...]
Wish-List
Things I would very much like to see: — George Bush receiving offers of extremely lucrative speaking engagements in Europe (say, Western Europe), offers of several times more than his normal fee of $150,000 a pop, offers that he is reluctantly compelled to turn down — Douglas Feith suddenly turning up in the Spanish countryside, [...]
Nothing-Has-Changed You Can Believe In
Remember the time of Bush? That was when the administration would ride roughshod over the legal rights that detainees should have been granted, and the courts would have to come along and slap the administration down. That was then; this is now: A federal judge ruled Thursday that prisoners in the war on terror can [...]
Larry Summers: Economic Charlatan
Larry Summers is not just an prize asshole, but a charlatan too. That considered judgement is based on what his speech orifice emitted to the Brookings Institution: Although there could be many ways to question this calculation, that the market would be at essentially the same real level as it was in 1966 when there [...]
We’re Fighting Economic World War 1 (And We’re Winning!)
I had planned to write about this last week. But something else got my attention instead. And I figured that everybody concerned would just quietly move on to less embarrassing behavior. But I obviously sold Michele Bachmann short. The mistake I made was not so much ascribing remotely rational behavior to her, but assuming that [...]
Hand Picked
Obama’s choice for chairman of the DNC: Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has signed a bill into law banning the use of some state funds for embryonic stem cell research. The move puts the DNC chairman at odds with President Obama, who signed an executive order earlier this month [...]
Does Size Matter?
Once upon a time, people could go to university to study economics. Then, as higher education got bigger and better, you could also study political economy. Well, now we are at biggest and best. You can get in on the ground floor of a brand new (but certain to grow) discipline: political mathematics. That’s a [...]
Fiscal Children
There’s physical child abuse. And then there’s fiscal child abuse, which apparently occurs only when a Republican governor starts to see visions of himself in the White House: BECK: But your point, if I’m not mistaken is, no, no, no, you’re taking care of the children in South Carolina by not taking it (the $700 [...]