These are pretty clever shots.
Category Archives: Humor
Correlation
This one tickled my funny bone.
It Was Inevitable
President Obama’s teleprompter has started blogging:
Well, last night didn’t go well. What can I say? I was tired. By the time Barack and the Irish PM stood up, the President and I had already done two major policy speeches, three nomination announcements, and light dinner banter for a table of twelve. And by the way, that “ad lib” last night about Guinness? Mine.
So why am I going public now, when for the past two years I’ve let others do the talking? Well, this is a thankless job, and I sure don’t want to take the fall for communications missteps. But more important, I expect you’ll be seeing a lot more of me over the next few months and years. Barack and I don’t go anywhere without each other; we even complete each other’s sentences … well, more mine than his, but let’s not split hairs.
I sense new text being loaded now, so I’ll have to be going.
Hail to the TOTUS! Next stop, TMZ!
[Early afternoon update]
I wonder who the teleprompter’s picks are for the final four?
Obama spent part of Tuesday making his tournament picks for ESPN, which posted his completed bracket online Wednesday and showed the First Fan filling it out with Andy Katz on the noon edition of “Sportscenter.”
Of course, the president’s choice drew a reaction from the Tar Heels’ most intense rival.
“Somebody said that we’re not in President Obama’s Final Four, and as much as I respect what he’s doing, really, the economy is something that he should focus on, probably more than the brackets,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said from the Blue Devils’ first-round site in Greensboro, N.C.
Actually, given how disastrous the president’s plans for the economy are, I’m glad that he’s distracted from them by something.
The Dummy Killer
Lileks reviews (his assessment) the greatest comic-book cover ever.
If he’s really a dummy killer, we need to send him to Washington.
Also, a screed on the NEA:
The Federal-funding argument was lost a long time ago. As with so many things, opposition to Federal funding is equated to opposition to the thing itself. The existence and healthy survival of these things before Federal intervention is meaningless; what seems to count above all is the satisfaction some get from knowing there is a National Something or other, complete with assistant special directors for coordinating things, because God knows we couldn’t produce art if someone in Washington wasn’t coordinating it all.
But before we go on, consider the National Endowment. I’m just guessing, but I’ll bet the National Endowment for the Arts was conceived as some sort of middlebrow self-improvement program – sending Pablo Casals LPs to schools, helping small towns put on “Our Town,” subsidizing museums so they could put on challenging works like gigantic Calder mobiles, and paying off the survivors when the damned thing snapped a cable and carved a tour group in stir-fry slices. I’m sure it still funds good things. But let us risk a headache and try to think of a few art forms we managed to create without its assistance:
Jazz
Blues
Rock and Roll
Every movie made in America
Skyscrapers
Painting that looks like something
Sculpture that looks like someone
As it happens I like modern art, so this isn’t some philistine sneer at funny pitchers what don’t look like Whistler’s Mama. I’m not even opposed in principle to state funding of the art, for two reasons: 1) the monarchs and the church did a fine job of it for millennia, and 2) if some small town wants to help defray the cost of a play in the school gym, fine. But I have to draw a line, because if I say it’s good to support orchestras in large cities with Federal money, then anyone gets to support their favorite kind of art, even if it happens to be guillotining paper-mache replicas of the Founding Fathers on Presidents Day. You get your art, I get mine.
Read all. The banks are discovering what artists should have long understand — when you start to take handouts from the government, your integrity is hopelessly compromised.
I should note that it gets better:
What does he propose?
. . . and move into a broad, far-reaching series of projects that question the role of religion and commerce in the life of the nation
Ah. Of course. It’s the perfect distillation: take the money from people who have used commerce to succeed in the arts, so we can question the role of commerce in the life of the nation. Ideally, common people will become Aware and have Consciousness Raised from its gutter-state to the Olympian heights where one can see a magnificent future, a time when the role of commerce has been questioned with the force and incisive detail you only get from people who can’t get anyone to pay them for what they do.
To quote the Iron Lady, the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples’ money.
Treacher Twitters
Message For The Cultists
Obama isn’t Jesus. Jesus could actually build a cabinet.
Heh.
Healing
Here’s a little poem that I just got in email:
The election is over
The talking is done
My party lost
Your party won
So let’s be friends
Let arguments pass
I’ll hug my elephant
You kiss your ass
It kind of chokes you up, doesn’t it?
More Words Of Conservative Wisdom
T. Coddington Voorhees VII is guest blogging at Iowahawk’s place again:
That conundrum of electoral calculus was the topic of much discussion two weeks ago, when my Nassau confreres and I were summoned to the White House for an intimate repast with the new President and his inner circle. Mr. Obama was radiant as ever, still basking in the afterglow of his historic victory. I admit to a recent wobble or two in my faith in him, as the severe beatings suffered by my various family trusts have necessitated some unanticipated cutbacks in my household staff. But that easy, commanding elegance was a bracing reminder of why I endorsed Mr. Obama as the true conservative presidential choice. After dessert (black walnut dacquoise with sections of quince) we retired to the Blue Room where chief of staff Rahm Emanuel entertained us with some droll tales of his days as terpsichorean with the Mossad ballet auxiliary, even treating us to a few thrilling, if f-bomb laced, arabesques. He was followed by Vice President Joe Biden, who put on a fine display of his famed wit and penchant for unpredictable cerebral infarctions. Amid the sparkling bonhomie the President solicited our views on the causes of — and solutions to — conservatism’s sad state. Seizing the opportunity for a tete-a-tete with the world’s most powerful, popular, and beautiful man, I explained the tragic plague of rubes who stand athwart our modernization program.
“Why not just drive them out?” asked the President, elegantly French inhaling his Marlboro Light 100. “Under the old bus, so to speak.”
“Alas, were it so easy,” interrupted Brooks, in a clumsy attempt to draw Mr. Obama’s attentions from me like some cocquettish debutante. Parker, Noonan and Frum were too lost in orgasmic schoolgirl giggling to offer anything more substantive. I ignored their embarrasing faux pas and pressed on with my thesis.
“We’ve tried, Mr. President,” I explained. “But there are unsavory elements within the party who keep bringing them back in.”
My reference, obviously, was to the self-styled luminaries of “populism” who hang like a millstone around the Republican neck — the Sarah Palins, the Plumbing Joes, the Bobby Jindals, the Rush Limbaughs, the motley middlebrow state college pretenders to the conservative throne. A shared contempt for these arriviste oafs unites the Nassau summitteers perhaps even more than our shared fondness for a snifter of well-behaved armagnac VSOP. I have made no secret of my feelings about la Palin and her grim brood of ill-mannered snowbillies, as well that horrid toilet tinkerer from Toledo whose fifteen minutes have somehow refused to expire. The recent emergence of Bobby Jindal and Rush Limbaugh in the intraparty maelstrom yet affords fresh opportunities for conservative dismality.
What is a conservative to do?
Take Your Tea And Shove It
Economy stimulator extraordinaire Iowahawk tells the American Tea Party what to do with their bags:
Thanks to the new federal mortgage bailout bill, Americans like me are finally on track for housing security. Previously facing a $1.2 million debt from three mortgage on a home recently appraised at $43,500, less missing bathroom fixtures and windows, the President’s plan allowed me to renegotiate my payments down to a level that will keep me solvent until at least mid June-ish. Now that my family and various friends from Jimbo’s Tap Room no longer have to worry about having a stable crash pad, we are finally free to resume the spending that will lead America back to economic prosperity.
I wish I could take credit for it, but it took the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of us in the subprime community, working with the financial industry and public sector officials. Unfortunately, there is another group out there who is working to kill important financial bailout reforms just as they are sparking a renaissance in the American housing market. I’m speaking, of course, of the so-called “Tea Party” tax protesters.
I’m sure you’ve heard of them or read their emails: “Wah, I paid my mortgage.” “Wah, I didn’t use my house for an ATM.” “Wah, Dave I need that hundred back I lent you at Christmas.” Now, I’m as sympathetic to a good sob story as anybody, but these whiners have nobody to blame but themselves for their predicament. Anyone who kept track of the Gallup presidential polls last year should have known what was coming, so don’t blame me if you decided to waste your money paying your stupid mortgage. But, in the six-dimensional bizarro world of these noisy tax gripes, they expect me to give up my bailout to pay for their irresponsible lack of foresight! Helloooo?! Beam me up, Scotty!
Some people are just ingrates.
Having Fun With The Speech
Just a few minutes before your opportunity to play O-Bingo.
Well, it’s easier on the liver than a drinking game.
[Update as the speech begins]
I liked this particular subtitle:
“Let me be clear” – Warning to “have your shovel ready.”
I would say that listening to an Obama speech is definitely a shovel-ready project. Hip waders are handy, too.
[Update after half an hour or so]
Well, not that I’m surprised, but he’s laying out a program of every statist/fascist wet dream from TeddyR to present. The State will be responsible for us, from cradle, to early education, to all education, to college for all Americans (is that even a rational goal?) to grave. We no longer have any individual responsibility. The State will provide.
[Update after the speech]
Jim Garaghty notes the irony:
“We are not quitters,” says the guy who left the Senate before serving a full term.
So, what is he running for now?
[Update a couple minutes later]
Matt Welch is already manning his shovel:
The president has not even begun his non-State of the Union tonight, and already (at least according to leaked excerpts) he’s full of s**t…
Wonder what he’ll say now that he’s actually heard it?
[8 PM Pacific update]
I agree:
Oratorywise, so good. Ideawise, so weak. Combination, so dangerous.
Well, the campaign continues. And of course, that’s how propaganda works.
[Update at 8 PM Pacific]
Man bites dog. MSNBC is actually fact-checking the president.
[Updaten at 8:20 PM Pacific]
Apparently, “freedom” isn’t high on the president’s agenda. Not that I’m surprised.
[Update a couple minutes later]
A commenter asks what I thought of Jindal’s speech. I didn’t pay that much attention, but here’s a pan of it.