Wall Street Is Occupied... By Douchebags

Best picture ever.

Can someone find Cartman to deal with these lousy hippies?

Can We Chant Overrated At Him?

Noemie Emery's article on the President concludes that his political skills are vastly overrated.  That may be so, but the real problem is that they may be the only real skills he brings to the job.  Read the whole thing.

Those Wacky Germans

A few thoughts in reaction to this story about a German couple having sex in the stands during a soccer game, with the rest of the crowd having no issues with it...

1.  Take it away, Stan.



2. Did you really expect the rest of the crowd to stop them?

3. Overheard in the crowd: "I think he's gonna pork her, Dad."

4. I'm surprised that no pictures have surfaced, which makes me think that we have an answer to the question of why no one reported it -- no one wanted to watch.

5. I sympathize on one level -- who really wants to watch a soccer game anyway?

6. Cartman's warning makes me think better of making more jokes about German people...



7. Then again, Mr. Burns got away with it.



8.  The best part was that the couple did not get kicked out initially -- they were told to stop, agreed, and then started again after halftime, leading to them getting ejected.  So they got one freebie.  Spectacular.

Paging John Connor

Now that the new Iphone is self-aware, how long until Skynet takes over?  I'd really like to have advance notice, so I can quit working well in advance and gorge on fatty foods.

Elitism

Shikha Dalmia discusses the ongoing battle between the intellectual "elite" and the common folk...

The most depressing spectacle on the political landscape right now (besides a potential second term for Barack Obama) is the party of Lincoln entertaining the presidential ambitions of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann—women with better hairdos than heads. One needn’t be a GOP-hater like Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd to be dismayed by the growing anti-intellectualism of the party. Even David Brooks, a conservative commentator, has observed that Republican disdain for liberal intellectuals has morphed into a disdain for all intellectuals.

But modern intellectuals, having abandoned honest inquiry for unabashed activism, must themselves bear some blame for the backlash.

The GOP’s descent into mindlessness began when the gaffe-prone Dan Quayle prodded a sixth-grader to misspell “potatoe.” The more the media lampooned Quayle, the more Republicans circled the wagons around him. Since then, Republican intellectual defensiveness has hardened into intellectual goofiness.

...But the bigger reason for this anti-intellectual animus is that every time really smart people run the country, things go spectacularly wrong. 

...The prize for discrediting intelligence, however, goes to President Obama. Unlike Bush, he wore his intellect on his sleeve, raising hopes that he could fix the country with sheer brainpower. But he has presided over a deterioration on every front: Deficits are worse, unemployment is higher, a double dip is imminent, and we have added another foreign misadventure.

So why do intelligent people consistently make such a hash of things? Because they are smart enough to talk themselves into anything. Ordinary mortals don’t engage in fancy mental gymnastics to reach conclusions that defy common sense.

There's a couple problems with Dalmia's formulation as it relates to the GOP's disdain for the intellectual elite.  First, I don't think it's fair to lampoon either Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann as dumb.  You could make the case that neither should be entrusted with the position of President of the United States, but I watched the Democratic Party nominate Kerry and Edwards in 2004, men whose hairdos really were far better than anything inside their heads.  Edwards was still a contender in 2008, and you'd have trouble convincing me that he is substantially more intelligent than either Palin or Bachmann.  And yet I never get to hear how Democrats' decision to embrace a smooth-talking huckster like Edwards demonstrates their contempt for intellectualism.

Moreover, I don't think the GOP has disdain for all intellectual elites any more than Democrats do -- they just have a disdain for elites who disagree with them and mock them as stupid for doing so.  The left has its blind spots on things that should be settled science.  The same people who regularly admonish the GOP for ignoring the allegedly settled science on global warming still believe that raising the minimum wage doesn't have a deleterious effect on low-income workers.

But Dalmia does hit upon a key point here -- that the biggest problem the intellectual elites have is their contempt for the common man.  As the article notes, Obama spent time selectively citing CBO figures for support for his ludicrous assertion that a massive expansion of availability and utilization of health care benefits would lead to lower costs, when most Americans looked at that claim and rightly called bullshit.  The elites want to trick the common man into agreeing with them, because they think they can fool them. That's not a good way to get them on your side.  And being right about a problem (say, global warming) does not mean that you're right about the solution -- and common folks will rightly view with suspicion elites who claim that carbon emissions are a crisis issue when the same elites fly all over the world on private jets to discuss the all-important issue.

You don't need to go to an Ivy League school to get a good education, and you don't need a degree from those places to prove your arguments are worthy of serious consideration.  Start with that, and the elites may get the respect they allegedly want.

Something Rotten in Denmark

Denmark is definitely off the tourist destination list.  And if you don't think they're try crap like this here, you're wrong -- the minute we decided to let government pay for things like health care, we started giving them the right to nag us to death about all our personal lifestyle choices.

The good news? I'm guessing that when politicians here try to tax deep-fried Twinkies, tar and feathers will become very popular. 

I Wonder If He'll Rename It The Hope and Change Bank

President Obama has done such a bang-up job as President, that he's thinking of branching out into bank management...

Banks should accept a lower profit so their customers won’t have to pay for debit cards, President Barack Obama told an ABC reporter today, when asked about Bank of America’s decision to charge its customers $5 per month for use of its debit cards.


... The bank’s decision to charge customers for its services “is exactly why we need somebody whose sole job it is to prevent this kind of stuff from happening,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “If you say to banks, ‘You don’t have some inherent right to get a certain amount of profit if your customers are being mistreated, that you have you have to treat them fairly and transparently,” then some will hopefully get the message, he said.


Obama used the question about the Bank of America’s decision to charge $5 for the use of its debit cards to champion extended government oversight of the banking industry, adding, “Without those kinds of protections, we’re going to continue to see these kinds of problems.” He also called for the Senate to confirm Richard Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general, to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.


“Banks can make money — they can succeed the old-fashioned way — by earning it by lending to small business and by lending to consumers, by making sure we are building the economy together,” said Obama, who worked for non-profit groups in Chicago before being elected to the U.S. Senate.


Leading Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said Monday the Bank of America’s action is an “outrage.”


...The bank levied the monthly $5 charge after Durbin led a successful effort to enact legislation that curbed banks’ ability to levy debit-card charges on retailers. Once those curbs came into force, the financially strapped bank shifted the levy from retailers’ prices over to customers’ monthly accounts, prompting the political complaints.

You know how President Obama gets offended when people call him a socialist? When a government official starts telling private companies how much profit they're entitled to earn, that smacks of socialism.

As an aside, this relates to my personal favorite thing about the Tea Party supporter who confronted Obama this summer.  Ryan Rhodes was offended about Joe Biden's seeming acquiesence to Congressional Democrats calling Tea Partiers "terrorists" following the debt ceiling standoff.  Obama's response was that he was in favor lowering the rhetoric, since he'd been called a Socialist.  Not to discourage the comparison, but it's unfair to equate Socialists with terrorists -- not all Socialists are terrorists. All Socialists follow a stupid economic philosophy, but that doesn't make them terrorists.

In any case, it's borderline offensive to have politicians instructing banks on how much money they're allowed to make, even after TARP, especially after the politicians created the situation by caving in to retailers.  And it's especially offensive when the same people can't even do their day job of running the government.

This Will Be My Only Post on Amanda Knox

I'm never going to understand the competition for getting this result out on your website first -- is anyone going to go back and say, "Man, they were 8 seconds behind the other guys!  Let's stop checking their website!"

There's No Need To Fear! Underdog Is Here!

President Obama calling himself an underdog reminds me of sports teams going with the "no one believed in us" mantra...

Calling himself an "underdog," President Obama today said the faltering economy is a drag on his presidency and seriously impairing his chances of winning again in 2012.

"Absolutely," he said in response to a question from ABC News' George Stephanopoulos about whether the odds were against him come November 2012, given the economy. "I'm used to being the underdog. But at the end of the day people are going to ask -- who's got a vision?"

The American people, he conceded, are "not better off" than they were four years ago.

...Obama would not handicap the 2012 election, but objected to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's comments that he divided people more than united them. Republicans, he said, have stood in the way of working with him time and again to fix the economy.

"At every step of way, I have tried to get the Republican Party to work with me on the biggest crisis of our lifetime. And each time we've gotten 'No,'" he said.

That last part is hysterical.  He had two years with a fully Democratic Congress in charge, and he spent 18 months trying to convince the members of his own party to pass Obamacare. During negotiations on his infamous stimulus package, his style of trying to "get the GOP to work with him" included telling them, "I won", so they needed to vote for it or get out of the way... and the GOP got out of the way, allowing Obama and the Democratic Congress to claim credit for that disaster.

He's also not an underdog; he's an incumbent, with all the powers that come up with such status.  The mere fact that he's on track to lose anyway, after a smashing victory in 2008 and sky-high approval ratings when he entered office, is a testament to the crappy job he's done.  At this point, perhaps Frank J. Fleming is right -- we need to re-elect Obama, or he'll never like us...

I think the ultimate way to get Obama to like us is to reelect him. Maybe this first term is just a test, and if we pass it and reelect him, then he’ll finally be nice to us and try to help the country. That’s why it’s super important that we  all vote for him, because what if he just barely gets reelected? He’ll be humiliated and will be even meaner to us in his second term — he’ll start giving Mexican drug cartels huge discounts on guns, and we’ll never see another rainbow. You don’t even want to know what he’ll do to the economy.

You mean it could get worse?

This Executive Is Brought To You By The Letters NPR

It's like NPR wants me to make jokes...

Gary Knell, who helped introduce Sesame Street to children abroad, is the new head of U.S. public broadcaster National Public Radio.


NPR announced the appointment Sunday, with Knell to step into the role of president and CEO on Dec. 1.


"Gary is an extraordinary leader with extensive experience in public media, programming and education," board chairman Dave Edwards said in a statement.


"As CEO of Sesame Workshop for more than a decade, he has led a large, complex organization through a tumultuous media environment, helping it grow by providing innovative, engaging content in new and creative ways."

Maybe he can employ Elmo and Grover to explain why we need NPR. Or hire them as hosts to save money. I hear puppets work cheap -- look at the hippies occupying Wall Street.

Too Fast Too Furious

This is probably not good for the Attorney General's job security...

New documents obtained by CBS News show Attorney General Eric Holder was sent briefings on the controversial Fast and Furious operation as far back as July 2010. That directly contradicts his statement to Congress.

On May 3, 2011, Holder told a Judiciary Committee hearing, "I'm not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks."

Yet internal Justice Department documents show that at least ten months before that hearing, Holder began receiving frequent memos discussing Fast and Furious.

...The Justice Department told CBS News that the officials in those emails were talking about a different case started before Eric Holder became Attorney General. And tonight they tell CBS News, Holder misunderstood that question from the committee - he did know about Fast and Furious - just not the details.

The old saying that's the coverup is worse than the crime almost certainly doesn't apply here, because the operation itself led to the death of a Border Patrol agent and allegedly a large number of Mexican citizens.  But that excuse at the end certainly won't fly -- what's the "different case" they're referring to?  And he didn't  understand the question Congress asked him?  Yeesh.  Allahpundit has a better take on what the emails reveal...

Either Holder didn’t want to know more after reading that July 2010 briefing or he read it and simply didn’t recognize the gravity of what he was reading. Big, big trouble either way.

Given this administration's penchant for throwing people under the bus, I'm surprised Holder hasn't been forced to resign yet.  But if this starts gaining traction and impacting the President's poll numbers, he may want to update his resume, because "fast and furious" might describe the speed of his departure.

What Annoying Song Is Stuck In My Head Today?

If I need to suffer with a song stuck in my head, why shouldn't you have to do the same? Sometimes they're good, most times they're bad... but no matter what, they make you suffer. So I like to share the suffering whenever it happens.

I've never spent a lot of time listening to Fuel, but they are technically a Pennsylvania band, so I probably should give them a little love on that basis.  And this is actually a pretty good song, even if it was hideously overplayed in the early part of the last decade... actually, this was about the time I stopped listening to music on the radio regularly, so this is one of the last songs where I can make that statement.



You're welcome.

The Coming Crisis

Michael Lewis writes terrific books, and he may have the start of a new one if he wants.  His article on the municipal pension crisis is incredibly depressing and borderline terrifying; here's an excerpt of the discussion about San Jose's issues...

When he was elected to the city council, Reed says, “I hadn’t even thought about pensions. I can’t say I said, ‘Here is my plan.’ I never thought about this stuff. It never came up.” It wasn’t until San Diego flirted with bankruptcy, in 2002, that he wondered about San Jose’s finances. He began to investigate the matter. “That’s when I realized there were big problems,” he says. “That’s when I started paying attention. That’s when I started asking questions: Could it happen here? It’s like the housing bubble and the Internet bubble. There were people around who were writing about it. It’s not that there aren’t people telling us that this is crazy. It’s that you refuse to believe that you are crazy.”

He hands me a chart. It shows that the city’s pension costs when he first became interested in the subject were projected to run $73 million a year. This year they would be $245 million: pension and health-care costs of retired workers now are more than half the budget. In three years’ time pension costs alone would come to $400 million, though “if you were to adjust for real life expectancy it is more like $650 million.” Legally obliged to meet these costs, the city can respond only by cutting elsewhere. As a result, San Jose, once run by 7,450 city workers, was now being run by 5,400 city workers. The city was back to staffing levels of 1988, when it had a quarter of a million fewer residents. The remaining workers had taken a 10 percent pay cut; yet even that was not enough to offset the increase in the city’s pension liability. The city had closed its libraries three days a week. It had cut back servicing its parks. It had refrained from opening a brand-new community center, built before the housing bust, because it couldn’t pay to staff the place. For the first time in history it had laid off police officers and firefighters.

By 2014, Reed had calculated, a city of a million people, the 10th-largest city in the United States, would be serviced by 1,600 public workers. “There is no way to run a city with that level of staffing,” he said. “You start to ask: What is a city? Why do we bother to live together? But that’s just the start.” The problem was going to grow worse until, as he put it, “you get to one.” A single employee to service the entire city, presumably with a focus on paying pensions. “I don’t know how far out you have to go until you get to one,” said Reed, “but it isn’t all that far.” At that point, if not before, the city would be nothing more than a vehicle to pay the retirement costs of its former workers. The only clear solution was if former city workers up and died, soon. But former city workers were, blessedly, living longer than ever.

This wasn’t a hypothetical scary situation, said Reed. “It’s a mathematical inevitability.” In spirit it reminded me of Bernard Madoff’s investment business. Anyone who looked at Madoff’s returns and understood them could see he was running a Ponzi scheme; only one person who had understood them both­ered to blow the whistle, and no one listened to him.

That's just fabulous -- our cities are running miniature versions of Bernie Madoff's schemes... and hardly anyone's ready to pay attention.

Yet.  Read the whole thing.

Yeah, We'll Worry About This Some Other Time

Seriously, if we discover intelligent aliens, I'm guessing the problems that world religions have reconciling the existence of extra-terristrial life with their beliefs will wind up somewhere down on the list of issues we need to discuss.  Hell, I'm guessing the Zen Buddhists won't care.

Off With Their Heads, Because We Don't Have Any Brains

Wait, Roseanne Barr is still alive?



Awfully generous that you get a chance to go to a re-education camp before the guillotine.  Ed Morissey has the right take...

Imagine if anyone had said anything remotely like this at a Tea Party rally about socialism and socialists, even in jest.  And this isn’t just some unknown provocateur — Barr is one of the most successful entertainers and producers in Hollywood, or at least she was at one point in time.

...Just remember that when conservatives organize into grassroots movements, it’s almost always about protecting their own property and individual liberty.  When leftists decide to start grassroots movements, like OccupyWallStreet or Barr’s example of leftist populism, it almost always involves seizure of property, threats of violence, and eventually re-education camps and the guillotine.

I'll predict that the Wall Street protestors and their ilk will do a tremendous job recruiting... new members of the Tea Party.

Damn Hippies

Apparently, hippies are back and trying to stink up New York...

More than 700 protesters demonstrating against corporate greed, global warming and social inequality, among other grievances, were arrested Saturday after they swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge and shut down a lane of traffic for several hours in a tense confrontation with police.

The group Occupy Wall Street has been camped out in a plaza in Manhattan's Financial District for nearly two weeks staging various marches, and had orchestrated an impromptu trek to Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon. They walked in thick rows on the sidewalk up to the bridge, where some demonstrators spilled onto the roadway after being told to stay on the pedestrian pathway, police said.

The majority of those arrested were given citations for disorderly conduct and were released, police said.

Some protesters sat on the roadway, chanting "Let us go," while others chanted and yelled at police from the pedestrian walkaway above. Police used orange netting to stop the group from going farther down the bridge, which is under construction.

...Erin Larkins, a Columbia University graduate student at who says she and her boyfriend have significant student loan debt, was among the thousands of protesters on the bridge. She said a friend persuaded her to join the march and she's glad she did.

"I don't think we're asking for much, just to wake up every morning not worrying whether we can pay the rent, or whether our next meal will be rice and beans again," Larkins wrote in an email to The Associated Press. "No one is expecting immediate change. I think everyone is just hopeful that people will wake up a bit and realize that the more we speak up, the more the people that do have the authority to make changes in this world listen."

Ah, yes, the struggles of Columbia University graduate students are what keep me up at night.  Look, these people are serious...



Roundtable discussions, guys. That's our solution.

Every time I see these people, I'm reminded of this scene...

Die Hippie, Die
Get More: SOUTH
PARKmore...

Oh, wait, it's more like this scene...

Die Hippie, Die
Get More: SOUTH
PARKmore...

Someone get me a digger and a Slayer CD, stat!

Die Hippie, Die
Get More: SOUTH
PARKmore...

The Most Important News... from 1997

Wait, Diddy killed Tupac and Suge Knight retaliated by sending Biggie to the grave?

Well, that's two more 1990's mysteries solved.  Now I can get back to O.J.'s hunt for the real killers.

Next Operational Name is Hudson Hawk

At this point, the ATF's Fast and Furious scandal may actually make the news...

In a classic Friday document dump -- a sure sign of an administration with something to hide -- the feds released to congressional investigators a month’s worth of e-mail correspondence in the summer of 2010 between Bill Newell, then head ATF agent in Phoenix, and his friend Kevin O’Reilly, a former White House national-security staffer for North American affairs.

What do you know? Among the e-mails was a photograph of a powerful Barrett .50-caliber rifle that had been illegally purchased in Tucson and recovered in Sonora, Mexico, raising the possibility of a second “gunwalking” program, this one called “Wide Receiver.”

Like Fast and Furious, the ATF-supervised scheme that saw thousands of weapons “walk” across the Mexican border for reasons no one in the Justice Department has yet satisfactorily explained, Wide Receiver was apparently a joint operation that also included the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the IRS and the US Attorney’s office.

It’s likely there have been others, in such states as Florida and Indiana.

While the back-channel e-mails don’t explicitly discuss Fast and Furious, they do show the White House’s intense interest in the ATF’s and other federal agencies’ activities in Arizona. In one message, O’Reilly asks Newell whether he can share some information with other officials. “Sure, just don’t want ATF HQ to find out, especially since this is what they should be doing (briefing you)!” comes the reply.

"Wide Receiver?"  Seriously?  Who came up with these dumb operational names?

Just remember, it was very important to have a special prosecutor deal with the alleged leak of allegedly classified information during the Bush Administration, and it was a huge scandal when the Bush Administration fired several U.S. Attorneys... but it's not important to have an independant prosecutor or much focus on the illicit sales of guns to international drug cartels (and potentially domestic criminals) as ordered by a component of DOJ, potentially for the political benefit of being able to advocate for gun control.  And before you think I'm pushing the envelope on the last point, I'm not the one who allegedly told gun control advocates the administration was working on gun control "under the radar."  That was... the President.

But hey, nothing to see here.

Yesterday Sucked

I have nothing to say about being a Philadelphia sports fan yesterday, except to say this video feels about right.