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April 29, 2008
The prosperity: it's everywhere!
When I was very young, long ago, one of the posters on my bedroom wall showed a skinny, curly-haired dude sitting down to dinner. A newspaper on the table had the headline "Beef Shortage Critical!" The guy was spooning canned Alpo onto a plate of spaghetti while his dog made sad eyes up at him.
I found this hilarious. Imagine, a person eating Alpo!
Did anyone happen to catch this hilarious article in Sunday's NY Times?
Here's a representative sample:
“People have started to shift spending as if we were in a recession,” said Michael McNamara, vice president for research and analysis at MasterCard.Such trade-offs were on vivid display last week in Ohio, where layoffs have been rampant. At Save-A-Lot, a discount grocery store in Cleveland, Teresa Rutherford, 51, chided her sister-in-law, Donna Dunaway, 44, for picking up a package of Sara Lee honey ham (eight ounces for $2.49).
“We can’t afford that!” she said. “Get the cheap stuff.” They settled on a 16-ounce package of Deli Pleasures ham for $3.29, or 34 percent less an ounce.
The women said that soaring prices for food and fuel had changed what they buy and where they buy it. “We used to eat out at Bob Evans or Denny’s once a month,” said Ms. Rutherford, who works in an auto-parts factory. “Now we don’t go out at all. We eat in all the time.”
Ms. Dunaway, a homemaker, used to splurge on the ingredients for homemade lasagna, her husband’s favorite, before food prices began to surge this year.
“Now he’s lucky to get a 99-cent lasagna TV dinner, or maybe some Manwich out of a can,” she said. “I just can’t afford to be buying all that good meat and cheese like I used to.”
...
Burt Flickinger, a longtime retail consultant, said the last time he saw such significant changes in consumer buying patterns was the late 1970s, when runaway inflation prompted Americans to “switch from red meat to pork to poultry to pasta — then to peanut butter and jelly.”
“It hasn’t gotten to human food mixed with pet food yet,” he said, “but it is certainly headed in that direction.”
Something to think about as you savor your $6 Corona at the indie rock show, my fellow plutocrats.
The fine lady and I on a recent morning clearly heard an NPR reporter refer to "the current economic downturd" just before the segue to the bottom-of-the-hour jocularity moment. "Downturd" is now a household favorite.
Oh, and by the way—
April 28, 2008
You've got to give her credit for getting straight to the point.
Someone thought highly enough of this song to shoot a video. Who says the music industry has fallen on hard times?
Personally, I'm a little confused that Riskay chose to phrase the initial hook in the interrogative as opposed to the imperative. But hey, that's just one more reason I'm not a famous hip-hop artist.
April 27, 2008
OK, Hillary's chafing my ass now.
I'm done pretending that I'll be happy with whichever of the two final Democratic candidates gets nominated. This post showed up on Daily Kos the morning after Hillary Clinton took Pennsylvania by just under 10 points, and I think it sums things up very well.
I was never a Clinton fan, in this campaign. I have previously stated my deep discomfort with the notion that the person most deserving of the Presidency of the United States just miraculously happens to be the person married to the last Democratic President of the United States; it smacks far too much of the usual intra-Washington narcissism, and carries the strong whiff of American monarchy, something already wafting through the air after the ridiculous rise of the Boy King. At the same time, however, there seems little value in debating whether Clinton should or should not leave the race. That is entirely up to Clinton, and any candidate with a mathematical chance -- even if slim -- of pulling out a win has every right to see the race through until that last fateful day. I don't buy the notion that the campaign is hurting the Democratic party: any election that generates this level of excitement among Democratic voters is hardly a bad thing.What bothers me, however, is the increasingly insulting quality of the campaign and surrogate spin as each successive campaign day wears on. It is fine to celebrate a Pennsylvania win -- by all means, a victory is a victory, and a significant and hard-fought one at that -- but all I ask in politics is that the spinners of each camp try their best to not make it quite so obvious that they think the rest of us really are a spectacular new species of rubes, able to be led by the nose to whatever ridiculous and improbable conclusion would best benefit a particular camp.
...
Listening to Clinton campaign surrogates on television, before the PA votes ever started to trickle in, was truly painful. Suddenly one state was the only state that mattered. All those other states were merely prelude: if Clinton could eke out a victory in this state, trailing in the delegate count would no longer be significant, and it would be a brand new race, and Obama would be on the ropes, and Clinton would suddenly win a billion dollars, a pony, and the moon; attention must be paid. It is not enough for Obama to simply be winning the nomination according to the rules laid out in advance: no, he must win the "right" way, according to the Clinton campaign and surrogates, or it doesn't count.
...
All the spin boils down to a simple truth: Clinton now has almost no chance of winning on the delegate count. Barring Obama getting eaten by a bear, it's not going to happen, so the Clinton campaign wants the superdelegates to overturn the primary and caucus results at the convention and appoint her the rightful winner, even though she is, at this point, clearly losing. That's going to be a tough sell, if all Clinton has to offer is one state's worth of "momentum" or the rather odd logic that, since Obama has supposedly not sufficiently proven his campaign viability by kicking her completely to the curb by now, the superdelegates should instead hitch their wagons to a candidate who has been proven to be less viable than him.
The Rules of Clintonball, at Daily Kos
April 24, 2008
Life in a civilized nation.
This simply rules. No further comment necessary.
Via Streetsblog, and the web in general.
April 20, 2008
Apparently military pensions just weren't quite covering the bills.
Maybe you've read it already, but if not, set aside 20 minutes or so to check out the NY Times report on the Pentagon's remarkable success in co-opting retired military officers to pimp the Iraq war on TeeVee news & talk shows. The economics of the arrangement are brilliant: the military officers get access to the Pentagon in exchange for carrying the Administration's icky water in interviews; those same officers tend to work for lobbying firms that are handsomely paid by defense contractors for that very same access.
It couldn't be more a more obvious journalistic conflict of interest if these guys did their interviews nude and waved their wing-wangs at the camera. Which, in effect, is exactly what they're doing.
Is we learning yet?
Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”
Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.
“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use it.”
-------------------
John C. Garrett is a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.
In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”
At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.
Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand (NY Times)
April 18, 2008
Our galaxy, now available for blowing your mind.
Your friends at NASA serve up a new photo every day. Did you know that they're the happiest of all federal employees?
Not surprisingly, the most miserable work for the TSA.
April 15, 2008
The Taliban went down to Georgia, and got elected.
Weren't we supposed to be fighting them over there so that we wouldn't have to fight them over here?
From Raw Story:
A freshman Georgia Republican wanted to stress the importance of divine oversight of the US as he saw it portrayed in the Pledge of Allegiance.Wikipedia's entry on the pledge is also worth reading.Leading the pledge on the House floor Monday, Rep. Paul Broun lectured others in the chamber about the "correct way" of saying the pledge.
"There should not be a comma between 'one nation' and 'under God,'" Broun told his colleagues before beginning his rendition of a pause-free pledge.
It may seem a minor issue, but some have argued that saying the pledge as Broun prefers -- and as it was written when "under God" was inserted in 1954 -- implies a fealty to religion that is inappropriate in the US.
Someone's been ingesting the THC.
They smoke the weed so you don't have to.
It was Snackcake done pointed this show out to me.
April 14, 2008
Birdbrain: tough target.
Seattle's winged rats are being stalked by a blowgun-wielding maniac who may be more of an unwitting wildlife acupuncturist than fearsome pigeon hunter.
Although the darts appear to have been expertly aimed, the pigeons continue to live and breathe because, according to Dr. Conrad Kornman at the Broadway Veterinary Hospital, the darts “missed all of their vital organs,” and, additionally, “their brains are very small.”
April 07, 2008
A great new gift for your enemies: Bagel-fuls!
Do you know someone who enjoys delicious, freshly-prepared food that hews at all closely to some ethnic tradition, food that nourishes their sense of dignity and self-respect?
And do you despise this person?
Then Kraft has just the product for you to offer them—a box of 2.5-oz frozen log-shaped "bagels" injected with cream cheese and despair.
Yes, they're called Bagel-fuls!
According to the Brandweek aricle introducing them, "they can be toasted, heated in the microwave or served straight out of the refrigerator."
I'd like to add that they can also be thrown away in horror.
Bonus points to Consumerist for referring to them as "bagel twinkies".
Bagel-fuls!
April 04, 2008
They're suppressing voter turnout already.
Or maybe this is promoting Steve Obama's 2009 campaign for dogcatcher.
If so, Steve, please pick up a fucking "punctuation manual" ASAP.
Spotted in a Long Beach boxing gym by Folly and Fun, sent via the American Caliban.
April 03, 2008
A blast from the past, now made funny.
This went up on YouTube last July. How did it not start a slow-mo mania?
Via Slog.
April 01, 2008
An actor stretches his boundaries, and his swimsuit.
You don't really need more reasons to like Sacha Baron Cohen, but here's one anyway.
SEXYDROWNWATCH, via FOD.
They also have a cell phone video of what purports to be Cohen shooting the "Bruno" movie.
Bear in the water!
The evil overlords of the Nuremberg Zoo continue their campaign to destroy productivity worldwide by posting videos of Flocke the baby polar bear.
She's got her own training pool now, and she's still a clumsy swimmer. It's likely that I'll accomplish nothing today.
