Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.
You can sort of understand why Republicans repeatedly rip off music from artists who don’t support them — if they stuck to those who did, they’d only be able to play Ted Nugent and shitkicker country songs.
-John Gruber, on the Foo Fighters asking John McCain to stop using their song “My Hero”
It’s easy to forget this amidst all the political excitement surrounding the bailout, but the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street is going to ensure that many people who worked their whole lives to build up sufficient savings lose everything. Seniors living off investments and near-retirees will be particularly hard hit, and they will have done nothing to deserve it. Meanwhile, those who caused the crisis will still be rich, and most of them will still have their jobs. That we’ve not seen mass resignations on Wall Street is fair evidence of how sick and self-absorbed and irresponsible our financial culture has become. Hell, in another age or country, some trader or another would have had the decency to jump out a window by now.
I’m aware that Congress is under enormous pressure to agree to the Paulson plan in the next few days, with at most a few modifications that make it slightly less bad. Basically, after having spent a year and a half telling everyone that things were under control, the Bush administration says that the sky is falling, and that to save the world we have to do exactly what it says now now now.
But I’d urge Congress to pause for a minute, take a deep breath, and try to seriously rework the structure of the plan, making it a plan that addresses the real problem. Don’t let yourself be railroaded — if this plan goes through in anything like its current form, we’ll all be very sorry in the not-too-distant future.
–Paul Krugman, on Treasury Secretary Paulson’s bailout plan.
Right now this is just a job. If I advance any higher in this company this would be my career. And, uh, well if this were my career…I’d have to throw myself in front of a train.
-Jim from The Office
This is ugly stuff. And this is an ugly person. There’s clearly no level of sleaze this guy won’t stoop to to win this election. And let’s be frank. He might win it. This is clearly a testing time for Obama supporters. But I want to return to a point I made a few years ago during the Social Security battle with President Bush. Winning and losing is never fully in one’s control — not in politics or in life. What is always within our control is how we fight and bear up under pressure. It’s easy to get twisted up in your head about strategy and message and optics. But what is already apparent is that John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest and race-baiting campaign of our lifetimes. So let’s stopped being shocked and awed by every new example of it. It is undignified. What can we do? We’ve got a dangerously reckless contender for the presidency and a vice presidential candidate who distinguished her self by abuse of office even on the comparatively small political stage of Alaska. They’ve both embraced a level of dishonesty that disqualifies them for high office. Democrats owe it to the country to make clear who these people are. No apologies or excuses. If Democrats can say at the end of this campaign that they made clear exactly how and why these two are unfit for high office they can be satisfied they served their country.
–Josh Marshall, inspired by McCain’s disgusting (and false) new ad.
Indeed, what she must do tonight isn’t even hard: She must come across as sentient, as human, and as critical of Barack Obama. It is widely agreed that she is, in fact, sentient, human, and critical of Barack Obama, so unless she wanders out in an octopus costume and reads a poem, tonight’s going to go well for her. Indeed, it should go better than well. A couple cutting lines about Obama’s experience, an emotional retelling of her struggles to balance family and governance, and she’ll be judged a success. And not wrongly. She will have been asked to give a speech, and she will have given one. Odds are it will have been a very good one.
-Ezra Klein, on Gov. Palin’s speech which occurs in approx. 10 minutes.
At the beginning, this song sounds like a typical Usher song: he talks about meeting a girl in a club & making love (& the listener is led to assume that Usher means later on in the evening). Then Young Jeezy comes in with a rap that, beyond any shadow of a doubt, sets the listener straight with respect to the immediacy of Usher’s intentions. Jeezy conveys his point through the use of analogy, such as his reference to a grocery store situation. Finally, Usher comes back on, reiterating the immediacy of the situation, leaving not a single doubt in the listener’s mind with respect to the urgency of his desires.
–Wikipedia summery of Usher’s “Love in this club”. via
Proving once again that being demonstrably and disastrously wrong on the most important national security questions of the day is no barrier to influence in American politics — provided, of course, that one is always careful to err on the side of war — the Washington Post gives Richard Perle yet another opportunity to be wrong again, this time on Iran.
–Matt Duss on the Washington Post allowing Richard Perle to say dumb things about Iran on their op-ed page.
The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating …and you finish off as an orgasm.
–George Carlin (sounds very similar to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)