Wentalot
Welp, thar he blows. The last of the Kennedys.
I can’t believe I turned up every two years to vote against this douchenozzle — hopelessly, doggedly — only to have him give up with a whimper as soon as I leave Rhode Island. Makes you wonder if he survived DC strictly by way of his dad’s protection.
Something wrong with that boy. Something bad wrong. He’s dumber than several dumb things stacked on top of each other, and he’s got the weirdly asymmetrical face of an inbred.
The last Patrick Kennedy campaign ad I saw was about some unfortunate bureaucratic screwup — a kid not getting into a special school or something — and how he fixed it.
For that one kid. He didn’t tackle the underlying systemic problem so the same issue wouldn’t happen to anybody else. That’s how he saw himself — a political fixer, doing small things for little people.
Go away now, Patches. I have drawn the ugly picture, and I am done.
February 12, 2010 — 5:40 pm
Comments: 23
Goofin’ on the first lady
You know, sometimes having the mind of an illustrator is a curse. When I saw Michelle Obama’s new thing, I totally didn’t get that the child with the circle under it was an exclamation point. I saw a small child hurtling knees-first at one of those red rubbery kickball balls. Remember them?
And then the whole action sequence played out in my head, see above.
You know, I don’t think Mrs O should be picking on fat kids. I mean, sure, she’s got those terrifyingly toned arms, but then there’s the…you know.
Though I can’t really tell if she really has a Hugh Jazz, or if the combination of the boob belt and a moderate hinder just makes her look like a giant Bartlett pear.
February 11, 2010 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 24
Will somebody please tell me what the heck I’m talking about?
I was surfing around recently (Wikipedia, I think) and I came across the most marvelous term. It was something like the “national park effect” and it had an alternate version that mentioned a specific park. Yosemite, maybe. Does this ring a bell with anyone? I’d love to know the exact phrase.
What it means is, whenever a bureaucrat is ordered to cut back, he immediately chooses the most beloved or most important programs and threatens to disembowel them, as though it’s the only possible way to cut costs. Walk right on by all the useless cash-eating bullshit government sponsors — tax cuts mean drastic changes to the national parks or the military or highways.
Here in the UK, it’s usually schools and hospitals. Fortunately, those things mean nothing in the Badger household, but they get us with police and trash collection.
I know from my own experience (mostly reading the little area paper) that our local district council has a salaried position to show new-ish mothers at home how to brush a baby’s teeth (only this!), keeps someone on staff to come around and look at your compost heap and tell you if you’re doing it right, floats a full-time rat-catcher (okay, this guy was quite useful and interesting). They recently sponsored a trapeze artist to teach basic moves in the community centre (fitness, don’tcha know).
Don’t forget these employees enjoy salaries well above those in the private sector, benefits often equal in value to their salaries, and pensions...well. Pensions are the killer. Carrying civil servants through their golden years is murdelating our budgets. And, even worse than the States, government is the only part of the economy that has continued to grow and grow as the private sector shrinks.
We’re coming up on an election here, probably in May, and the Tories are probably going to walk it, though they richly undeserve to win. Already the BBC and Labour (but I repeat myself) are full of “ZOMG, Tory cuts in services!!!!!” and already the Tories have responded by deciding that cuts really don’t need to be deep.
Ugh. We are drowning in tax over here.
So what I like to do — it’s a little masochistic game I play — is mosey over to the Guardian jobs section and spot the most useless, expensive government job opening on the books. Lesbian outreach workers and sustainability officers and like that. Our entire household tax expenditure probably isn’t enough to support one of those useless parasites, and that makes me feel as warm and fuzzy as goat testicles.
Interesting to note, by the way, that the government’s favorite place for classified ads is a highly left-wing paper with tiny circulation. They know their constituency. Although today’s winner is from that once-great conservative paper, the Daily Telegraph.
February 1, 2010 — 7:10 pm
Comments: 36
I can has metaphor?
Hours before Obama’s State of the Union yesterday, perky Katie Couric tweeted this:
Just had lunch with the president who seems pensive, slightly deflated, realistic, aggravated and resolute. Didn’t eat his pie.
I haven’t really got the hang of Twitter yet, but I’ve figured out this much — with a 160-character message limit (less if you want to leave room for people to forward or “retweet” your message), complicated ideas are right out. A thought of even the teeniest ambition comes out like something your senile Aunt Irma might mutter in her sleep.
Katie’s first sentence? Excellent. Katie’s second sentence…oh god, it just cracks me up. Every time I think about it. Didn’t eat his pie.
“Pie” is a comedy word, like “pants” or “Schenectady.” It’s inherently funny. You don’t ever want to couple “pie” with someone whose stature and dignity you wish to preserve.
I can’t help thinking what a wonderfully useful metaphor that’s going to be in the next few years. Any time Barack Obama just has been or is just about to be thwarted, smacked down, brought up short or otherwise disappointed — who wants some pie?
The latest Rasmussen numbers were released today; Barack Obama didn’t eat his pie
Pie not on White House menu after April unemployment figures soar
Pie? No, thanks. Dems’ electoral hopes fade in latest round of voter polls
Oh, we’re going to have SO MUCH fun. Thanks, Katie!
January 28, 2010 — 6:21 pm
Comments: 15
Lose the accessories, maybe?
Christopher Buckley published a State of the Union parody for Barack Obama today.
Nah, don’t bother clicking. For one thing, it’s in the Daily Beast. And for another, it’s Christopher Buckley, who still writes in the painfully cute, brittle style that probably made him the star of his Advanced Placement English class in High School. You can be right and still be a twit.
I only bring it up because commenter Blast Hardcheese remembered the last time I made fun of Buckley and wondered if I could do it again. You know, now that he’s quietly sashayed into the anti-Obama camp without mentioned his earlier…infatuations.
I dunno, dude. It’s hard to mock a man who deliberately chooses for his profile shot that painfully twee photo everyone was snickering about last year. Jeezum crow! Best I can do is point out those accessories no longer go with these slacks.
Maybe Iowahawk will have some better ideas.
Don’t mind me. I’m grumpy today. I took my driving exam this afternoon and flunked.
Worse, I deserved to. I did a lousy hour’s driving. The thing that failed me, I made one of those judgement calls on a right-hand turn against traffic and called it too close. I knew instantly that I’d blown it.
Oddly, though, having gone through it once, I’m a lot less nervous about next time. I thought there were four or five things I should have failed upon, so learning that only my most boneheaded screwup mattered is some comfort. And failing isn’t at all uncommon; only 40% a day pass the test.
But every try is another month’s delay and £100 in moneys.
Fuck.
January 27, 2010 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 29
I hear you, I hear you! But first — health care!
Did you guys see this bit in Politico?
Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.
“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”
That’s Marion Berry talking. No, no…not the crackhead mayor of D.C. — Representative Marion Berry, Democrat of Arkansas, who is retiring this year. Apparently in a cloud of anger, hopelessness and pants-peeing terror. Them Arkansas boys know when to run for the hills.
And speaking of Arkansas boys — when that gem gets back to the Clintons, they’re going to be thrilled, aren’t they? I wonder how much of the Democrat machine they can still influence?
It’s been a spectacle this week, watching the Obama folks scream, “I get it!” while manifestly not getting it even a little teeny bit. I particularly enjoy those pundits who have decided the Massachusetts election went Republican because Democrats didn’t juke far enough left and ram hugely unpopular eye-wateringly expensive transformative legislation through the legislature hard enough. Yeah, people always vote for the Republican when the Democrat isn’t Democrat enough.
I’d be enjoying the hell out of this clusterfuck, if there wasn’t some chance these guys will find a procedural diddle to flick the health care bill over the finish line before they slink off and commit seppuku.
January 25, 2010 — 3:49 pm
Comments: 26
Nancy’s last chance to pass the health care bill
You are getting sleeeeeepy. Your eyes are getting heavvvvvvvvy. You suddenly cannot wait to vote for a career-ending massively unpopular honking huge entitlement program.
January 21, 2010 — 5:58 pm
Comments: 18
Barack Obama whistling
There’s not really a post to go with this. I was flipping through the official White House Flickr stream and, I dunno, it just seems like a picture of Barack Obama whistling is the way to go today.
January 20, 2010 — 6:41 pm
Comments: 26
Not gonna jinx it…not gonna jinx it…
But I would recommend listening to Howie Carr right now. He’ll be on for hours yet. He’s a righty in Boston (if you don’t know Howie) and he’s feeling fiiiine tonight.
You have to sign up to their listener’s club to use their Listen Now link, but I think you can backdoor that by tapping into their player software without going through their link.
I listened to Rush earlier, too. He said that everyone was so confident how this seat would go that nobody bothered to pay for exit polls. However, Rasmusson stepped in at the last minute and offered to sponsor one himself.
So…may or may not learn anything about it tonight, but the general chatter out there is distinctly cheering.
January 19, 2010 — 5:01 pm
Comments: 46
Pull right!
I’ll be honest with you: I had fuck-all in mind to post tonight, so I was paging through some old unpublished draft posteses. I found this illustration I never used (I remember it looked pretty good in color, I just don’t remember what I made it for). Children yanking an elephant rightwards goes nicely with this very interesting article that Ace pointed to today.
It’s about how the Tea Partiers are taking over the GOP from the very bottom: signing up to be precinct leaders, which is a political rung so low it’s often left empty. But precinct leaders get to vote for the people on the next rungs up. And, let us hope, so on up. That is the way to do the thing, rather than haring off into a third party cul-de-sac.
It’s a mistake to look at the Tea Parties as a movement, I think. It’s just the conservatives in the party. We’ve always been there, and we’ve been getting grouchier and grouchier since, like, Reagan.
Bob Dole was not our guy. Neither of the Georges Bush were our guy. John McCain sure as shit wasn’t our guy (but at least he damaged the idea of the electable moderate). I don’t know if Sarah Palin is our guy, but I know I’m sick of GOP ‘moderates’ complaining that the unfair criticism of her is drowning out all the fair criticism of her.
I’m not even going to mention Massachusetts — I don’t want to jinx anything. I am, however, planning to sacrifice several small animals over the weekend. Because, let’s face it, traditional blood rituals have been lacking in the GOP for far too long.
January 15, 2010 — 7:46 pm
Comments: 37