Here’s a fun diversion which some of you may remember.
Step 1: Go to Google. Type in a letter or two, a word or the start of a phrase. Wait for the box to pop up with suggestions
Step 2: Screenshot the hopefully hilarious suggestions.
Step 3: Profit! Continue reading
I’m sure that I’m not the only one that had an email from the White House land in my inbox today, pimping the President’s Twitter Town Hall. Today at 2pm Eastern time, President Obama will answer questions generated by the Twitter-verse. Allegedly, the folks at Twitter have worked up a way to make sure that he gets questions that are being asked frequently and hit with the #AskObama hashtag. I’m sure they actually have, I just stink at technology. Continue reading
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, newly minted as the leader of a majority federal government for the first time in his life, has taken this week’s G8 summit as an opportunity to throw his weight around a little. The only problem is that his behavior is completely at odds with every other G8 leader. From the issue of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks to North African aid, Harper is insisting on taking a contrarian position. Unfortunately, it is coming across as unproductive and pointlessly self-indulgent. And at a G8 summit, that is really saying something.
Like a great many folks who found themselves caught up in the wave of Obama fever that permeated the Internet in 2008, I’m still a part of the mailing lists that were used to drive the President’s (amazingly well-financed) 2008 grassroots campaign. In the intervening three years, I’ve dutifully remained on that list, a fact borne as much out of laziness as my hope for some niblet of insider-y information that presidents are well-known to share with a mailing list of a few million strangers ahead of the rest of the world. Continue reading
When he’s not releasing his birth certificate to you racist bastards, or personally flying Blackhawk helicopters into Pakistani airspace to kill Bin Laden with his bare hands, Barry H. Obama is taking on the important shit that’s affecting our world, like college football’s playoff system:
(CNN) — In a letter to the NCAA disclosed Wednesday, the Justice Department said it has received several requests for an antitrust investigation into the current Bowl Championship Series system…
“Serious questions continue to arise suggesting that the current BCS system may not be conducted consistent with the competition principles expressed in federal antitrust laws,” Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney told NCAA President Mark Emmert.
If President Barry kills Osama and delivers us a PROPER GODDAMN COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFF SYSTEM in a single week, it will go down as the greatest achievement since Bristol Palin’s son Trig singlehandedly destroyed Wonkette out of pure vengeance and wrath.
One of the more interesting wikileaked cables to come out in the few weeks is a cable from 2008 detailing prisoner files from the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. In the document released last week it names the courier who we tracked to find Osama, and his working location, namely Pesahwar and Abbottabad.
Continue reading
In spectacular fashion, the Internet has produced some hilarious .gifs, memes and photobombs after the news broke that after a decade of a “intense” manhunt, Osama Bin Laden was located and killed by US Navy SEAL forces this past weekend. Here’s a collection of the funniest:
Warning: Yes, this makes light and finds levity in a serious and profound moment in United States history and the War on Terror. Do not proceed if you’re offended by this.
Fearing that the Republicans would stop looking for excuses to attack him, and desperately in need of the attention, the President jumped into the 2012 campaign on Monday. With a paltry 19 months to go until the election, Barack Obama released a short video on his website announcing that he and Vice President Biden will seek reelection against ”Koch Brother’s Puppet Candidate TBA.”
In addition to announcing his re-election bid to the world, the Obama campaign machine has already swung into full fundraising mode. Appropriating a version of an old Democratic strategy, it seems like Obama and Co. are asking donors to “give early and give often.”
Given that some estimate that the campaign will need close to $1B (yes, that’s a ‘B’, as in ‘billion’), it is a sensible move. If I want to pay cash for a medium ticket item next year, I’m smarter to put $20 a week away starting now. There’s not exactly a credit card for big media buys that I’m aware of.
So, it was little surprise to me when the package asking for money for the campaign landed in our mailbox this week. After all, Organizing for America (the outfit that the 2008 Obama campaign morphed into) scarcely goes a week without emailing me, hat in hand, for cause ‘x’.
What may surprise Obama/Biden 2012 is this: My wallet is closed to them for the foreseeable future.
Why? Simply put, he campaigned as a progressive Santa Claus, and gave me a Blue Dog for Christmas the last two years. Sadly, I’m just not excited about a watered down health care bill or milquetoast finance reform, which were two big issues for me in 2008. Add in zero movement on gay marriage and the disinterest in paring back a bloated military, and I question what side the guy is even on sometimes. The Great Tax Cut Capitulation of 2010 made me want to strip the “Yes We Can” sticker off the bumper of my neighbor’s Prius.
Before someone throws the “What the f*ck has Obama done so far” website in the comments: I get it, he’s gotten further on some important issues than Clinton ever did. He also folds like a Walmart tent the face of even token GOP opposition. That’s not the guy I thought I was voting for, or donating to, in 2008.
He’ll undoubtedly get my vote, and that of my spouse. We live in a battle ground state that went all crazy red in 2010, and I’m not dumb enough to risk throwing double-digit electoral votes to Mittchelle Huckawlenty (the GOP-zombie creation who appeals to creepy Evangelicals and big-business) in service of my progressive pouting.
Rather, I’m voicing my displeasure in the same way I do when my favorite sports teams make a series of moves I dislike. Taking money out of their pockets, or rather, refusing to ever put it in there in the first place. It is the only other way I know of to get a politicians’ attention. Watch the way the 2012 campaigns (or any recent campaigns, for that matter) court the big money, and you’ll get evidence of this in abundance.
Do I expect that the loss of whatever relatively paltry sum my family would donate will have much effect on the Obama campaign? Am I suddenly going to get an audience with the big guy to air my grievances? No, of course not.
Yet, between a still-sagging economy and a general malaise among progressives, I sincerely doubt that we’re the only small money donors from 2008 whose checkbook stays on the sidelines in 2012.
Besides, if there’s a GOP victory in 2012, I’ll need to save every cent I can to pay for my privatized Medicare.
Wall Street sighed a collective “meh” today following President Obama’s release of the FY 2011 Budget. The Dow closed down 5 points to end at 12,268. The NASDAQ gained 7 3/4 to end at 2,817 and the S&P 500 gained 3 to end at 1,332. Following yet another flat day of trading, some analysts wondered why they even bothered going into work with some going so far as proposing that pants be optional for floor traders.
Meanwhile in Washington, President Obama’s budget proposal was greeted with tepid hatred. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, who chairs the House Committee on Batshit Crazy, rambled about how it proved the President was a secret Muslim, citing the use of Arabic numbers as proof of her latest idiot theory. Meanwhile, freshman wingnut Rand Paul spoke for several Tea Party members while voicing complaints that the proposed budget didn’t do enough to establish complete anarchy.
In entertainment news, Glenn Beck used his radio program to complain that Esperanza Spalding is the vanguard on a jazz-based attack on American liberties aimed at creating a post-modernist bebop caliphate in the United States. He then blamed her and Neil Young for making Christina Aguilera botch the lyrics to “Baby.” When reminded that “Baby” is by Justin Bieber, Beck went on a 30 minute stream of consciousness tangent linking Canada to the decrease in playing time of folk-rock albums, ezplained by increased sunspot activity and fluorine in the water supply.
Open comment thread below.