So join us why, don’t you?
I know, I know…I’m an addict. I’m not doing myself any favors here, but I canNOT keep away from the tossed word salad that is Meghan McCain’s Daily Beast column.
I can’t fisk the whole thing or I’d teach my keyboard to fly. Gah! It’s like stream of consciousness lightly sprinkled with punctuation.
Only someone as rich as Meghan could uncritically accept the story that a New York City schoolteacher made $15,000 a year (the first woman she talked to). Or that birth control is somehow harder or more expensive than bearing that lady’s six children.
But most of the people who I spoke to had real stories of hardship and despair. Tom Quigley, a 23-year-old college graduate from Buffalo, N.Y., said he couldn’t find a full-time job after graduating from college. He’s taking a cross country bike trip, and he plans on stopping at all the various Occupy Wall Street gatherings across the nation.
That’s a real story of hardship and despair? Really? I couldn’t find a full-time job right out of school, either, so I slung donuts for Dunkin’ for a couple of years (I won’t lie; I loved that damn job).
I’m the daughter of one of the most long-standing senators in politics and I have been given every opportunity that anyone could possibly dream of.
Quick, get John McCain a chair!
I was given those opportunities as a result of the hard work from both sides of my family.
No, Meghan, you were given those opportunities because of money. You inherit money. You don’t inherit hard work. Your forebears may (or may not) have worked hard for the money, but you just woke up under a pile of it. If you want credit for hard work, you’ll have to do some of your own.
What struck me more than anything is that for the first time possibly in history, people aren’t being given the same opportunities that my parents and grandparents had.
First time in the history of what? Oh, god, this is such a tragic mess.
The last paragraph…oh, you just know how great it sounded in her head. All quirky and Cohn-brothers.
As I was leaving Occupy Wall Street, I spotted a man who was attending the festivities wearing a giant cape made of tin foil. He was pretending that he could fly, but the tin foil just kept blowing around him, making an empty crinkling sound. He isn’t the kind of superhero that these people need.
Aluminum cape, tin ear. Not sure the dude in the picture is Meghan’s bud, but he’s the only hit I got for foil and Occupy Wall Street (nicked from Weasel Zippers).
Okay, I’ll stop now.
October 25, 2011 — 10:21 pm
Comments: 34
Our incurious press
Did you see this thing on the front page of Drudge last week? Drudge’s headline writer saw this picture and wrote “Protesters in Pakistan burn Hillary…”
Me, I saw the picture and thought, “wow! Cousin Mamoud has a really, really nice color inkjet printer.”
Seriously, that’s a sharp print (click for color). I make that an A1 size at least (max width 33.1″). A printer like that’s going to run you, I dunno, at least a thousand quid (that’s $1,500 for you Yanks). How much is that in goats?
The pic is Hillary’s State Department bio portrait. It’s the first in line if you do a Google images search and specify ‘large’ – though the actual image is the Wikipedia version. Spec: (2,070 × 2,588 pixels, file size: 3.69 MB, MIME type: image/jpeg). So, decent internet connection; comfortable on the web. Copy of Photoshop, most likely.
I wonder what they do with that rig between Hillary burnings.
Paper for those printers ain’t cheap, either, so they must’ve made sure the photographer was in place and ready to go before they touched it off (all’s I’m saying is, these things look very different when you step back and include the photographer).
No, no big point. It’s just, we have a press that is obsessed with “the narrative” — they decide on a good story, then go looking for some shit to back it up. They’ll go on forever mechanically recording this boneheaded tribal street theater without ever looking behind the curtain, because it suits them.
Call me crazy — when I see dudes in the quaint native costume of goat-riddled Durka-durkastan holding up a flaming giclée print, I’m thinking what the hell? Why not make a little scratch running off Justin Bieber posters with that thing instead?
October 24, 2011 — 9:46 pm
Comments: 31
Warner Brothers thanks you for your custom
I haven’t seen V for Vendetta, either in its comic book or movie form, but from the plot synopsis, I can see why anonymous glommed onto the mask as a fitting symbol.
But, geez, Guy Fawkes? Wanted to blow up parliament because he hoped the next king would be nicer to Catholics. Not really a man for our times. Oh, and he failed. Also, drawn and quartered.
Even better, those masks are made by Rubie’s Costume Company of Long Island, under license to Warner Brothers. They reckon they’ve sold 100,000, list price $9.99.
So, the delightful question is, just how much money has the anti-corporate-greed crowd generated for one of America’s richest corporations?
October 20, 2011 — 10:00 pm
Comments: 43
I will force spiders and badgers on the enemy
“Now you got me whispering to a freak who thinks that fish have menstrual cycles.”
I’m always late to the party, so y’all have probably seen the Bad Lip Reading people. File this under “ideas I wish I’d thought of” — except that it takes some skill and hard work to overdub video as convincingly as these are.
They’re all worth a browse, but my favorite is still the Mitt Romney one that made the rounds yesterday. Not because I hate Romney (though I’m kind of working toward it), but because he’s such a polished character, it’s extra special fun hearing bugfuck crazy things come out of his mouth.
So — let’s go out and shop and grease a big nickel!
October 19, 2011 — 9:28 pm
Comments: 8
My favorite sign so far
Heh. Here’s somebody taking Occupy Wall Street with an appropriate amount of seriousness. Also, she’s going to get her wish.
If you’d like to join me bobbing for nutcakes on Flickr, the official keyword is occupiedwallstreet.
Or if you’d rather indulge in a little light reading, Breitbart is crowdsourcing some of the 49 megs worth of #ows emails that mysteriously turned up on Mediafire.
It’s adorable watching hippies community organize in real-time.
October 17, 2011 — 12:56 pm
Comments: 5
Liking the man, the plan…not so much
Point? I don’t need no steenking point. Seriously, I saw the one picture, and the other popped into my head. ‘Sall.
About this here 9-9-9 plan Cain’s got: I don’t like it. It stands for 9% flat tax on individuals, a 9% flat tax on businesses, and a 9% national retail sales tax.
Apparently, the numbers work, but it’s that last one I don’t trust. The mechanism required to collect any national sales tax is exactly what’s needed to impose a VAT. And a VAT, ladies and gentlemen, is bad. (Read that article I just linked).
I’ve lived under Britain’s (20%) VAT for years now without really understanding how it works. Wikipedia has a good but brain-hurty explanation. Weasel version: everything here is really, really expensive.
Check out this helpful graph (from the Wikipedia article). This is what happened to Denmark’s VAT after it was introduced in 1962. See, the problem is, VAT is pretty much invisible to you, the consumer. You know shit is really expensive, but you don’t see the tax.
You think our pols could resist this upward-creeping fustercluck? It won’t be Tea Party guys yanking the levers of government forever, you know. Sadly, two party system, Barney Frank’s going to get a turn at the controls again.
I’m still leaning Cain, though. I don’t like his plan, but at least he put a solid, plausible one out there for us to kick around.
October 13, 2011 — 10:22 pm
Comments: 24
Shhhh…you’re scaring the straights…
I was going for stink lines and flies, but I think I ended up with “smoldering tire fire struck by plague of locusts.” Oh well. Don Martin I ain’t.
Anyhoo, now is probably a good time to remember that most everything you’ve read about the politics of the Sixties/Seventies was written by someone who was there, in the streets, possibly wearing a giant papier-mâché puppet head. Someone who LOVED it. Who looks back at the period as the high point of his/her miserable life. (High point. Heh).
I was ten in 1970 and experienced the era as a giant national everything-lurching-out-of-control. I remember the Kent State shootings, and was most surprised to read this in the Telegraph today:
Shockingly, the public had little sympathy. A Gallup poll found that 58 percent blamed the students for the deaths, 11 percent blamed the National Guard and 31 percent expressed no opinion.
Would you have guessed that was the reaction? The writer adds that two years later, Nixon was re-elected in one of the biggest landslides in election history. American politics didn’t actually lurch left until a few of those hippies got a haircut, put on a suit and ran for office. The normos — the people who get up and drop the kids off at school and go to jobs — they don’t really cotton to this violent street theater shit.
So to the peoples of Occupy Wall Street, I say — carry on, chaps! Don’t lose heart now!
October 11, 2011 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 27
The cheese stands alone
Ohhhhh…how do I love this NY Post article about President Lonelyheart mooching around the White House scuffing his foot (if you’re fussy about your news sources, here’s the Washington Post pushing the same story line).
I mean, no. Probably, on balance, it would be better if the most powerful man in America wasn’t bugshit insane. Or, rather, resentful, sulky and damn well inclined to lock himself in his room, chain smoke clove cigarettes and listen to Joni Mitchell albums all day.
Still, I had to watch the Obama blimp make its great gassy rise above the political landscape, and it feels so damned good to see it sink back to earth.
For all the chanting and styrofoam columns in the world, it will never rise again.
October 10, 2011 — 9:10 pm
Comments: 42
This is me, back when people liked me
I sat down to do a Photoshop of this picture, but I thought — what can I add? What can I possibly do to this picture to make it weirder or more embarrassing than it already is? Dude is reading a picture book about himself to a group of under-fives. (Anyhow, Nice Deb posted a Photoshop derived from the same image before I’d managed to scrape together an idea).
It’s not a book so much about him, actually, as First Dog Bo. The word balloon says “a puppy!!!” which I guess he must have announced from the presidential podium.
I looked it up on Amazon, so I could link to the actual book, but I can’t work out which one it is. It’s not Bo Obama: The White House Tails. I don’t think it’s Bo Obama: First Dog of the United States of America. Doesn’t look like Puppy Power Bo Obama #1 (sayyyyy…did they steal that from Scrappy Doo?). Not First Pooch: The Obamas Pick a Pet. I dunno. Maybe it’s The First Pup: The Real Story of How Bo Got to the White House. Definitely not First Dog of 1600 Pooch’lvania Avenue: My First Year in Arf! Arf! Office! or First Puppy’s New Home. Or First Dog or Bo, America’s Commander in Leash.
Geeeeeeez, people! I know first pets have been a part of the landscape since Nixon were a pup, but — get a grip!
October 5, 2011 — 10:37 pm
Comments: 48
We are all Meghan McCain
I love making fun of Meghan McCain. It’s so pleasantly guilt-free.
Normally, I would feel kind of sorry for anyone so badly and publicly used. Meghan’s friends in the media only love her because she is Republican and deliciously stupid. It is a signal characteristic of stupid people that they are too stupid to realize they’re stupid (really. There’s been science and stuff).
But Meghan pushes herself out there hard, and then is too stupid to realize it makes her a public figure. Fair game. Ripe for the ridiculing.
If you didn’t read Red State’s hilarious McCain parody, there are bits of it left here. Unfortunately, the context is a take-down letter from her lawyer.
This law blog has a most enjoyable (read: bitchy) post on why Meghan’s complaint is bogus and what to do about it.
Short answer: MOAR RIDICULE!
October 3, 2011 — 9:50 pm
Comments: 38