11.21.2008

Pie charts

Andrew Sullivan @ Atlantic Monthly

Peter Schiff calls the recession 18 months ago

Listen to tools like Ben Stein mock Schiff.

5:19
Stein: "Subprime is a tiny, tiny blip"

6:32
Stein: "Merrill Lynch is an extremely well-run company" The stock is "cheap" at $67 a share.

It's all over the place her,e and not just Ben Stein. The supply-siders mock Schiff and in retrospect look like totally incompetent fools.


And now Schiff on 11/20/08:
"There's notihng government can do, let it happen... A lot of people are going to lose their jobs, but we have to go back toa sane economy"

This is not good.

11.20.2008

Palin does interview in front of guy slaughtering turkeys

(Huff Post)
On Thursday, Alaska Governor Oblivious Dipshit Sarah Palin appeared in Wasilla in order to pardon a local turkey in anticipation of Thanksgiving. This proved to be a slightly absurd but ultimately unremarkable event.

But what came next was positively surreal. After the pardon Palin proceeded to do an interview with a local TV station while the turkeys were being SLAUGHTERED in the background!!

Fast forward to 1:15 and stay glued. If it weren't so gruesome, it would be funny.

Around 1:45, the guy in the background apparently snaps the turkey's neck. Around 2:05, Dipshit Palin says that "you need a little levity in this job" as the turkey behind her starts kicking in it's death throes.

If SNL did this as a skit, no one would believe it and the right wingnuts would say that the liberal media had gone too far.


UPDATE: 11/21 This asshole asshole was TOLD she was standing in front of the turkey's being slaughtered and didn't care. Not that she should have stopped it, but she seems to be flaunting her God, guns and guts stance. Fine. She wants to be hard? She'll find out what hard means as her career goes down in flames.

A VP with a verifiable sense of humor



Jeebus, isn't it nice to have a VP that can laugh? Man it feels good.

Oh...and Happy Birthday Mr. Vice-President Elect.

Yesterday, Obama threw a little party for Biden.

(Huff Post)
What does an accomplished man of the world get for his 66th birthday?

Well, President-elect Barack Obama already gave Joe Biden the vice presidency. So, for his birthday, Obama gave Biden two ball caps and a rendition of the birthday song.

Biden's birthday is Thursday, but Obama surprised his No. 2 after their weekly lunch Wednesday at the transition office in Chicago. According to staff, Obama presented Biden - a Delaware senator with decades of foreign policy experience - with a dozen cupcakes decorated with candles and teased, "You're 12 years old!"

Staff reported that Biden, ever astute in the art of politics, laughed at the his boss's joke. He responded: "Maybe in dog years!"

Obama led the rest of the staff in song, then handed over some Chicago-themed gifts: a White Sox cap, a Bears cap and a bucket of Garrett's popcorn, a hometown favorite.

More from the Life archives

French leader Georges Clemenceau, US Pres. Woodrow Wilson and British PM David Lloyd George during the Paris Peace Conference, June 28, 1919


Ulysses S. Grant, Cold Harbor VA, 1864


Eric Clapton with his grandmother Rose in the house he bought her, Surrey 1971


Search the entire Life photo archive

11.19.2008

Kathleen Parker: GOP's biggest problem is G-O-D

(Washington Post)
As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth -- as long as we're setting ourselves free -- is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

The choir has become absurdly off-key, and many Republicans know it.

But they need those votes!

So it has been for the Grand Old Party since the 1980s or so, as it has become increasingly beholden to an element that used to be relegated to wooden crates on street corners.

Which is to say, the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows. In the process, the party has alienated its non-base constituents, including other people of faith (those who prefer a more private approach to worship), as well as secularists and conservative-leaning Democrats who otherwise might be tempted to cross the aisle.

Here's the deal, 'pubbies: Howard Dean was right.

It isn't that culture doesn't matter. It does. But preaching to the choir produces no converts. And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party -- and conservatism with it -- eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one's heart where it belongs.
Keep digging

145 Years Ago Today. . .

read by Sam Waterston:


Transcript:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.


(from Bob Cesca)
Newspaper reactions to the speech:

"The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly flat and dishwattery [sic] remarks of the man who has to be pointed out as the President of the United States." Chicago Times

“The ceremony was rendered ludicrous by some of the sallies of that poor President Lincoln. Anything more dull and commonplace it would not be easy to produce.” London Times

"We pass over the silly remarks of the President: for the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of.” Harrisburg Patriot Union

"Mr. Lincoln made a joke or two." The York Gazette


Damn liberal media.

Life magazine photo archives online

Google is hosting the entire image archives of Life magazine here. One could get lost for days.

Pablo Picasso in 1967 in France


Hitler in Nuremburg, 1938

11.17.2008

Heath Ledger deserves an Oscar

Let's see how O'Hannity obeys their own rules

(Bob Cesca)
Some quotes to keep in your arsenal. Don't forget -- criticizing the commander-in-chief at a time of war is bad.

"The only ideas that they espouse are ways to undermine the troops in harm's way and undermine their commander in chief while they're at war. Your candidates have no idea how to keep this economy strong."
--Sean Hannity, 10/18/06

"He’s the Commander-in-Chief. And what I find frankly repugnant about you and some of your fellow Democrats – you have undermined our president..."
--Sean Hannity, 03/19/06


"You know, Norman, those comments while we are at war, while troops are in harm's way, while he is the commander in chief, do you not see the outrage in that?"
--Sean Hannity, 11/12/07


"I have had it with members of your party undermining our troops, undermining a commander in chief while we are at war..."
--Sean Hannity, 11/05


"You don't criticize the Commander-in-Chief in the middle of a firefight. That could be construed as putting U.S. forces in jeopardy and undermining morale."
--Bill O'Reilly, 04/04


"Can we do it without distorting their legacies and pandering to anti-American elites worldwide and using their deaths to embarrass and undermine our commander in chief?"
--Michelle Malkin, 11/23/05


"On the other hand, if Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat Congress are successful in undermining the commander-in-chief (thereby emboldening the terrorists to kill more Americans in Iraq)..."
--Tom DeLay, 04/11/07


"And furthermore, one of the fundamental principles we have in America is that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces and attempts to undermine the commander in chief during time of war amounts to treason."
--Pat Robertson, 12/07/05

Frank Rich on the Conservative Crackup

(New York Times)
excerpts:
The Republicans lost every region of the country by double digits except the South, which they won by less than double digits (9 points). They took the South only because McCain, who ran roughly even with Obama among whites in every other region, won Southern whites by 38 percentage points.

Those occasional counties that tilted more Republican in 2008 tended to be not only the least diverse, but also the most rural, least educated and slowest-growing in population.

The Republicans did this to themselves, yet a convenient amnesia can be found in conservatives’ post-Election Day soul searching. There’s endless hand-wringing about Bush and McCain blunders and Abramoff-Stevens corruption, but there’s barely any mention of the nasty cultural brawls that defined the G.O.P. campaign narrative this year as the party clung bitterly once more to its 40-year-old “Southern strategy.”

Republican denial is unabated. In an interview with Palin the weekend before the election, a conservative Wall Street Journal editorialist asked whether “the G.O.P. doesn’t in fact have a perception problem, that it is no longer viewed as a big tent.” A perception problem? Hello — how about a reality problem?

In defeat, the party’s thinking remains unchanged. Its leaders once again believe they can bamboozle the public into thinking they’re the “party of Lincoln” by pushing forward a few minority front men or women. The reason why they are promoting Palin and the recently elected Indian-American governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, as the party’s “future” is not just that they are hard-line social conservatives; they are also the only prominent Republican officeholders under 50 who are not white men.

11.16.2008

Until Obama, I wanted Bartlett

...and maybe I'd still take Bartlett, but only because Bartlett was able to resolve problems in an hour. My thinking is that Obama might require a bit more time than that.