Author's posts
Oct 27 2010
Snooki and Barack Discuss Afghanistan
Snooki and Obama are alone in the Oval Office.
Voiceover: “The February assault on Marjah was the first major offensive since President Barack Obama ordered the 30,000-troop surge to Afghanistan and the biggest joint NATO-Afghan operation since the war began in 2001.”
Obama: “I’m the Commander-in-Chief!”
Snooki: “Pickles is my thing.”
Voiceover: “Eight months on, the Taliban are still in Marjah in force, waging a full-blown guerrilla insurgency that rages daily across a bomb-riddled landscape of agricultural fields and irrigation trenches.”
Obama: “Why do we keep having these meetings?”
Snooki: “It’s just a big ball of fuckness. That’s a new word: fuckness.”
Voiceover: “There was peace here before you came,” farmer Khari Badar told one Marine patrol that recently visited his home in Marjah. “Today, there is only fighting.”
Obama: “The strengthened Strategic Partnership Declaration is expected to: reiterate the United States’ and Afghanistan’s shared vision and commitment to Afghanistan’s future; clarify how Afghanistan plans to increasingly take on responsibility for its own security, justice, and development; and articulate how the United States plans to work with Afghanistan to enhance its ability to contribute to regional stability and prosperity.”
Snooki: “My first thought was: I don’t wanna clean this up. My second thought was: I just fucked up dinner. My third thought was: What the fuck am I gonna eat?”
Obama: “Why do we keep having these meetings?”
Snooki: “I thought I broke my vagina bone.. it was terrible. Please don’t tell me I have missing teeth!”
Obama: “Everybody loves me, babies, dogs, ya know, hot girls, cougars. I just have unbelievable mass appeal.”
Snooki: “Where are the juice-heads? I don’t see any fucking guido juice-heads, you woke me up for nothing.”
Obama: “That hater-juice is best served cold.”
Voiceover: “How do you feel about Hamid Karzai, Mr. President?”
Obama: “I want to stab him in the eye with a fucking fork!”
Snooki: “Who said that, me or you?”
Obama: “It doesn’t really matter.”
Oct 25 2010
“Forward” With Obama
Some chump is currently celebrating Obama’s “fine form” on the front page of Daily Kos, in a review of the President’s speech October 22 at USC.
All in all, the president was in fine form, and he hasn’t lost his mojo.
Mojo and fine form! That’s what Daily Kos was boosting month after month in the primaries! What else could you ask for in a candidate for President of the United States? Looks good on TV! Nothing else matters!
Who cares what kind of drivel Mojo Obama mindlessly repeats?
A choice between hope and fear. Moving forwards or going backwards. And Trojans, I want to move forward.
Did you hear that, Trojans?
Mojo wants to move forward! And if you missed it at USC, you could have heard exactly the same meaningless blather June 2 in Pittsburgh.
We can go backward, or we can keep moving forward. And I don’t know about you, but I want to move forward.
This is the choice between falling backwards and moving forwards, and I don’t know about you but Harry Reid wants to move forward, I want to move forward, I think most people in Nevada want to move forward, they don’t want to go backwards.
Forward! Forward! Forward!
That guy talks about moving forward so much, he almost sounds like a progressive.
But he isn’t.
And apparently Obama and Daily Kos haven’t noticed that for millions of Americans, “forward” means…
Lenders seized more U.S. homes this summer than in any three-month stretch since the housing market began to bust in 2006.
Joshua Shapiro of MFR Incorporated points out that today’s jobs report also contained revisions for the March 2009-March 2010 period. Those revisions show that the job market was in even worse shape than previously thought.
With cold weather just weeks away, the District of Columbia has shelved a plan to expand its already packed shelter for homeless families at the former D.C. General Hospital, a decision that advocates fear could leave vulnerable families even worse off than last winter.
Sgt. Tamara Sullivan pulled out her cellphone charger and braced for a night of tears. She called her children in North Carolina, ages 3 and 1, and told them she would soon be going to work in a place called Afghanistan. For a year. She reminded her husband to send her their artwork. She cried, hung up, called him back and cried some more.
.
Oct 22 2010
The Chapel at Abu Ghraib
Oct 21 2010
Garbage-Art in the Times, and the Real China
Nadav Kander is the darling of photo-editors at the New York Times, which is currently devoting a whole issue front-to-back of the New York Times Magazine to “Obama’s People,” a long, long, long series of trendy snapshots by the egregious Mr. Kander, and as usual his photos impart a sense of “formalness and unease,” because “formalness and unease” is Nadav Kander’s gimmick.
For example, Kander has imbued his photo of Valerie Jarrett with the signature “formalness” of surrounding her with a big empty frame, and his signature “unease” is introduced by super-saturating her magenta suit and de-saturating her face.
And so what? “Formalness and unease” would be a more appropriate attitude around the Obama White House than Obama’s repulsive self-righteousness, but in Kander’s snapshots it’s nothing but aesthetic posturing, and most of his subjects are perfectly relaxed and informal.
And so what again? As Jay Leno once said, politics is show-business for ugly people, and although the ultra-telegenic Mr. Obama has made a career out of contravening that principle, there probably isn’t much that anybody could show in posed portraits of “Obama’s people,” and…
This diary is just a pointless rant!
Oct 18 2010
Obama’s Sock-Puppet Jacob Freeze Picks a New Cabinet!
Greetings!
This is Barack Obama, President of the United States, blogging from the Oval Office through my sock-puppet Jacob Freeze.
Jakie was supposed to play my conscience in “Obama 2012: The Sequel” but Axelrod erased that role, and now my sock-puppet posts horrible insults all over the internet! I’m a “sociopathic con-man” today, and yesterday it was “bullshit Messiah!”
And now he’s appointing a Cabinet from Hell that I’m supposed to live with, and I’m not even talking about Krugman as Secretary of the Treasury or Greenwald as Attorney General!
He wants to replace Hillary Clinton with Wesley Clark as Secretary of State!
Dude! Hillary Clinton is my comic relief!
Half the time she doesn’t even know what country she’s in! She makes me look like a genius!
She told the Russians “It’s time to push the overload button!” What the heck does that mean? Nuclear war?
Harharharhar!!!
Worse yet, Jakie wants to replace my National Security Advisor, Whosis K. What’s-His-Name, with James Fucking Hansen, that gloom-and-doom weatherman from NASA, as if catastrophic climate change was more of a threat to national security than a bunch of raggedy tribesmen in the hills of Afghanistan!
Harharharhar!!!
But seriously, folks!
What did I ever do to deserve a paparazzo for a sock-puppet?
Oct 15 2010
A Choice Between Stupidity and Bullshit
At the top of the stack, Barack Obama is a sociopathic bullshitter and Sarah Palin is even stupider than Dan Quayle, the previous champion of stupidity in national politics.
Get out and vote! It’s your choice! Hurrah for America!
But cultural products like Barack Obama and Sarah Palin don’t just spring into being from the back of your flat-screen TV, and both of those monstrosities evolved out of a long and dismal history of cultural disintegration, desperately opposed on the left and right by…
The Quest for Intelligent Design!
Is that a sign of intelligent design in this hideous panorama of Los Angeles?
“Architecture is rediscovering its social conscience,” says the New York Times. “That’s the message behind “Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement,” an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.”
The show, which looks at 11 projects around the world that have had major social impacts despite modest budgets and sizes, is a rebuttal to the familiar complaint that the profession is too focused on aesthetic experimentation and not enough on the lives of ordinary people.
Brilliant! Apparently the profession of architecture just noticed that downtown Los Angeles is a desert after 6PM, and except for the Hills above Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard, the rest of it isn’t much more than a wasteland of slums and suburbs.
But what about all that “aesthetic experimentation?” Doesn’t it possess some redeeming value apart from whatever afterthought of a species may run in and out of it?
Oct 13 2010
Zero US Aid Delivered to Haiti 9 Months After Earthquake
This is the sort of unbelievable fuck-up that I really want to see confirmed from multiple sources, and you can read all about it here, here, and here, and from many other sources, and it’s always exactly the same story.
Not a cent of the $1.15 billion the US promised for rebuilding has arrived.
NONE of the promised 1.15 billion in aid from the U.S. has materialized.
After nine fucking months? Can’t this clown get anything right?
People are coughing, sniffling and their eyes watering. Quiet babies are the norm. Many have skin rashes and vaginal infections. There are several volunteer clinics, but usually only the very sickest are seen because so many people need help. The biggest camps now have some toilets, but not enough. Drainage is a big problem especially now during the rainy season.
Violence against women and girls is widespread. Women who go to the latrines at night are attacked. Some women talk of carrying rape babies. Others will do anything for the crudest abortion.
Oct 12 2010
Obama Undone By His Own Bullshit
Republicans and tea-baggers are winning the public debate about “big government” with the argument that “big spending” has failed to reduce unemployment much below 10%, and why are Obama and the Democrats so pitifully ineffective at refuting the dim-witted rants of a mob of yahoos?
Paul Krugman analyzed Obama’s self-inflicted dilemma in a recent column.
Actually, the administration has had a messaging problem on economic policy ever since its first months in office, when it went for a stimulus plan that many of us warned from the beginning was inadequate given the size of the economy’s troubles.
You can argue that Mr. Obama got all he could – that a larger plan wouldn’t have made it through Congress (which is questionable), and that an inadequate stimulus was much better than none at all (which it was). But that’s not an argument the administration ever made. Instead, it has insisted throughout that its original plan was just right, a position that has become increasingly awkward as the recovery stalls.
And a side consequence of this awkward positioning is that officials can’t easily offer the obvious rebuttal to claims that big spending failed to fix the economy – namely, that thanks to the inadequate scale of the Recovery Act, big spending never happened in the first place.
The real story is clear enough in the graphic below, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, representing the total number of jobs in the USA month by month, in thousands.
The bottom falls out of employment beginning in August 2008, high-lighted in red, 460,000 jobs disappear between August and September, and month after month 550,000 jobs vanish between September and October, then 720,000, then 670,000, and so on until November and December 2009, when the bleeding finally stops, and very modest growth ensues.
This is the story Democrats should have been telling over and over and over and over, on every talk-show and at every press conference. Bush/Cheney cut the throat of the American economy, Obama’s stimulus stopped the bleeding, and now we need another transfusion.
But Obama pretended that his original stimulus was just exactly right, and now Democrats don’t have a story to tell.
Oct 09 2010
World-Record Kill-Shot (Updated)
Old news from Afghanistan, December 30, 2003…
Rob Furlong of the Canadian Army used a TAC-50 to execute a confirmed 2430 meter (2657 yard) shot in Afghanistan, setting the world record for the longest successful tactical shot in combat.
The TAC®-50 McMillan Tactical Rifle package as shown above is available for delivery anywhere at the bargain price of $9,999, including a Night Force 32x56mm Mil-Dot sniper-scope at no additional cost! And best of all…
The bolt action TAC-50 in 50 BMG is legal for civilians to own in all states in the U.S. except California!
One well placed round in an engine block will stop a vehicle. The 50 BMG will penetrate most commercial brick or concrete walls.
You can kill a truck with that thing! It shoots through brick walls!
The two-man Canadian team, coupled with American Sgt. Zevon Durham of Greenville, S.C., made the kill from 2,430 metres, or nearly 2 1/2 kilometres, on the second shot.
The first shot blew a bag from the hand of their target, an Al Qaeda fighter walking on a road.
“He didn’t even flinch,” said Bill, who spoke on condition that his real name not be used.
“We made a correction and the next round hit exactly where we wanted it to. Well, a bit to the right.”
