From Lawrence (The Big Deal):
My friend’s friend visited President Bush last night. Wanting his autograph, he pulled out the most recent photo he had of the 43rd President, the cover of the New York Post where Bush is getting a shoe lobbed at him by an Iraqi journalist at a press conference. Bush actually signed it, showing he has a sense of humor about an incident which was originally intended as an insult.
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Maybe, maybe not. But filthy, dirty, smelly, stupid hippies do and it’s the sound of crying:
ADDED: I’d like to add some more color commentary. And by “color”, I mean it. Notice every single one of these idiots is white. This is the only problem in the world to them. Bloodshed in Darfur? Torture in China? Opression in Quebec? No. Yet all these kids feel anything for are trees. Dead trees, which nature strikes down on its own. However, if you’re browner than a paper bag and your government is shooting at your children, these lily-white priviledged kids are totally silent because they’re too busy sitting in the forest crying over dead leaves.
When Sarah Palin conducts a coup d’etat (and you know she will), these people will be hunted down like moose. And you know what? I may just join in.
Yesterday, my friend Sean called me up and said, “Hey, you know that voice you do, the parody of a typical Northeast Democrat voter? She’s real! There really are people like that! You have to check out this clip on YouTube of some woman named Harriet Christian. I thought it was you dressed up in drag or something.”
”Yeah, well, I wasn’t making it up. It’s just what I hear all day long in my town. And my town is pretty Democrat.”
Anyone who wonders why I’m NOT a Democrat, it’s because of people like this:
NOTE: This is a highly theoretical post. This Web site and its author take no responsibility for any actions taken as a result of this piece. Or of anything. We are, in fact, highly irresponsible and it’s not our fault if you lose money based on something you read on the Internet. That means you’re an idiot, not us.
Stressed out about high oil prices? Confused about the direction of gold prices? Don’t care about anything other than tonight’s season finale of “Lost”? Well there’s a way for you to make a couple of bucks anyway. You’ll need the following:
An explanation of what it’s all about and what to do after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »
….or so say Bob Novak and Tim Carney in a recent blog post.
According to their piece, McCain will get 270 votes in the Electoral College versus Obama’s 268. That will make the 2000 Election look like Reagan’s landslide in 1984. For people like me who enjoy the sport of politics, this is going to be the most fun year I can remember in a long time. For people like you who think the world will actually change if either one of them gets elected, you’re gonna sweat some bullets. It’s much easier to be me than to be you. And, I’m also always right.
Oh, and by the way, Bob Novak is known as “The Prince of Darkness” but Tim Carney has a much more ominous title: John Carney’s little brother.
On a side note, did anyone catch Scott McClellan, former White House spokesman, on ”The Today Show” today? He recently wrote a book trashing the Bush Administration, its handling of the war and the whole Valerie Plame incident. He made a bried comment which I’ve heard from Democrats before and it’s something I’m becoming more convinced of: Barack Obama is the George W. Bush of 2008.
As McClellan points out, George W. Bush campaigned on the same themes as Obama: being a uniter and not a divider, wanting to take government on a new course away the gridlock in Washington, and whatever sort of feel-good b.s. people need to hear before pulling down a lever. Bush often pointed out his ability to work with Democrats in Texas when he was governor and, as McClellan pointed out, that ability led to his 70% approval rating in the Lone Star State before he left office to become President. Once he got there, says McClellan, Bush and everyone around him got caught up in the partisan rancor that infests the Potomac ever since they rid the place of mosquitos by draining the swamp and called it D.C.
What makes you think Obama will be different? The answer: He’s not. You’re cheering for his label but, in the end, you’ll be getting the same results. So, sit back and enjoy the fight. The only thing anyone will actually change is the name of the person you’ll be fuming about.
…But, in the meantime, this is a riot:
(Hat tip to John Carney and the folks at DealBreaker.)
Some of you may have turned on your TV in the past 24 hours and asked, “Gov. Spitzer? In trouble? I thought he was Mr. Clean”. Others asked, “WTF? Why is Gov. Spitzer in trouble? I thought prostitution was legal”. And still others – probably a majority on the Lower East Side – asked, “Gov. Spitzer? We have a Governor named Spitzer? I thought the only Spitzer in New York that mattered was Spitzer’s Corner on Rivington”.
To clear things up for you, here’s a quick rundown on the WTF with FAQs:
What happened?
New York’s Governor, Eliot Spitzer, got caught hiring a $5,500/hour (!!!) hooker to go down to DC last month to service him – the night of Valentine’s Day, no less. Spitzer paid for her train fare and hotel, too, which I guess was gentlemanly of him. I mean, not that his wife would appreciate such a romantic getaway on V-Day. After all, she just bore his three kids and had to put up with his ridiculous ego all these years….
How did he get caught?
Emperor’s Club call girls – the service Gov. Spitzer used – weren’t cheap. At $5,500/hr (though Spitzer supposedly only paid $4,300… must’ve been a frequent flyer or something because he was quoted as saying he’d make the payments “as usual”), you had to come up with some serious dosh and quick-like. The service was run out of an apartment in Cliffside Park, a couple of blocks away from both my parents and my best friend Gina Bon Jersey, though none have admitted any knowledge of the operation. It also operated five minutes away from where I live but I also deny involvement at this time. Anyways…
Yeah, so, Spitzer moved some money around in a few accounts in an amateurish way to cover his tracks and that unwittingly set off the red flags with the bank. At first, the bank though there was some weird money laundering scheme going on so they contacted the IRS. Upon further investigation, they traced the accounts back to Gov. Spitzer. Then the investigators thought they had a serious bribery situation going on. That led to a wiretap and it was from the tap that they figured out Spitzer was tapping ass.
When the complaints were filed with the courts, he was identified only as “Client #9” and was said to have been a “difficult” customer who requested a girl named “Kristen”, a 5’5” brunette hooker who was specialized in committing a dangerous (though unnamed in the complaint) sex act. However, if one were to go by what a former NJ Acting Governor (NOT McGreevy but another a-hole who will not be named but, c’mon, you can figure it out) allegedly enjoyed, one can assume it was autoerotic asphyxiation, a sex act which requires skill, particularly not talking to the press.
So? He had a hooker. Big deal, right?
Well, see, it is. Not only is prostitution illegal in New York but hiring a hooker to cross state lines is a violation of the Mann Act, which is sometimes known as the “White Slave Traffic Act”. Charlie Chaplin was charged with it and it led him to self-imposed exile in the 1950s. It was even the alleged inspiration of “Lolita” – the book, not the LES bar.
Spitzer also stands charges on trying to hide money for illicit purposes. That’s apparently illegal so, if you’re my accountant, make sure you fix that problem before you file my taxes.
Why is everyone so happy?
Because Spitzer is srsly a Class A Douchebag. As attorney general, Spitzer went after corporate CEOs and Wall Streeters with a vengeance, sometimes without merit. He ruined reputations left and right to make a name for himself and didn’t care what happened. When news came out that this happened, former NY Stock Exchange direct Ken Langone couldn’t contain his glee and said, “We all have our private hells. I hope his private hell is hotter than anybody else’s”.
This is particularly fun to watch because Spitzer was Attorney General, he busted two big prostitution rings and acted all indignant in press conferences when he did it. Can you say hypocrite?
But Spitzer is also hated because of his general arrogance. A lot of you think George W. Bush is a jerk and an idiot (though he had higher SAT scores than Rhodes Scholar/Presidential candidate Bill Bradley and higher grades at Yale than John Kerry). However, Spitzer is a jerk and a genius (1590 on the SATs, perfect LSATs, and was editor of the Harvard Law Review). This combination made him one of the most arrogant pricks anyone has had to deal with. Ever. Plus the fact that his father was a bazillionaire who made gave the snot-nosed spoiled brat Eliot everything he ever wanted made him even more hated. No one liked the guy, not even fellow Democrats. He has virtually no friends in Albany. However, Jim Cramer likes him ‘cause they went to school together. So does my friend Debbie, who’s a cop in Upstate New York. When her dog died, he paid a shiva call to her parents (I’m not kidding; they sat shiva for the dog. They really loved it). Then again, her old man runs his county with an iron fist so I guess Spitzer needed to visit if he knew what was good for him.
But the guy who’s most happy right now is State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, the state’s leading Republican. A few months ago, Spitzer directed the NY State Troopers to spy on Bruno so they could catch him using state helicopters when he went out fundraising. However, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, found that Bruno did nothing wrong and it was clear Spitzer was abusing his power as Governor in a Banana Republic-style manor – the Third World-type, not the retail store. Yesterday, Bruno’s office allegedly held an impromptu party.
What happens now?
Lt. Gov. David Paterson becomes Governor if Spitzer resigns. Notice the use of the word “if”. As of this writing, it’s fairly probable that he will. However, he may be holding out to cut a deal. Plus, Spitzer may have spent all last night shredding documents pertaining to all sorts of misdeeds such as the Bruno affair amongst others. You can bet emails were deleted, servers destroyed, and a host of other crap went down last night at his offices. That stuff takes time. Plus, he may be trying to work out a deal. Who knows?
If and when Paterson – a professor at my old school, SIPA, along with his former boss Mayor Dave Dinkins – becomes Governor, he becomes the first African-American Governor of New York. He will also become the first legally blind Governor. He might as well be blind because….
What is this “Three Men in A Room” I keep hearing about?
That is the way New York State is really run. The three men who really matter in this state are the Governor, the State Senate Majority Leader (currently, Republican Joe Bruno), and the State Assembly Speaker (currently, Democrat Sheldon Silver). It’s an unwritten rule that the three are to keep out of each others hair while they pillage the state. Traditionally, the Senate’s majority is Republican while the Assembly’s majority is Democrat. State Senators and Assemblymen vote party line with a high amount of discipline so if the leader of the Majority of the Senate or the Assembly Speaker (who is the leader of the majority party in the Assembly) wants something done, it’s usually passed by their respective party. The districts are drawn that way to keep both parties happy, put a little checks and balances in, and, for the most part, give huge patronage machines to both sides. Though they sometimes try to screw each other over, in their own way the two houses of the legislature eventually come up with a ridiculous budget every year which promises more and more goodies to their drones of supporters. For instance, a single State Senator controls roughly 2,200 state patronage jobs. That’s why they have such strong discipline: by falling in line, they keep their jobs in the Legislature which, in turn, keeps all their friends employed.
The Governor’s role in all this has traditionally been to run his own patronage scheme and sorta referee the two houses of the Legislature but, mostly to stand out of the Senate and Assembly’s way as they scrape the marrow out of the state. When Mario Cuomo was Governor, it was pretty easy ‘cause Cuomo was so busy playing Hamlet in the Governor’s mansion (“To run for President or not to run. That is the question”) that he didn’t pay attention. The same was true of Pataki, but only after his first term. Pataki tried to be a decent Governor his first few years as Governor but started getting delusions of grandeur. Plus, he became the laziest Governor New York has seen since… I don’t know. You’d have to go back pretty far. He notoriously barely showed up to work but never missed a chance to show up someplace where his photo could be taken of him doing something meaningless. In short, Pataki was New York government’s spokesmodel. Meanwhile, Bruno and Silver bled the Empire State as best they could.
This all changed when Spitzer became Governor. And not in a good way, either. For one, Spitzer made that sloth Pataki look like a dynamo. He was almost never in the state capital of Albany, preferring to spend most of his time in Manhattan and, when he did work, show up at his Manhattan office instead of trudging up to where the state was actually run. Meanwhile, he pissed off both Bruno and Silver by targeting Bruno. Why would this upset that corrupt a-hole shyster ambulance chaser Shelly Silver? After all, Bruno’s a Republican and Silver’s a Democrat. But, see, Silver doesn’t want a Democrat Senate Majority Leader because that would make a Democrat leader to rival his own power amongst Legislative Democrats. That’s the last thing Silver wants. In a way, Spitzer’s attempt to get rid of Bruno was as much of a way to screw Silver and the Assembly Democrats as a way to screw Bruno and the Senate Republicans.
What happens after Spitzer leaves and Paterson becomes Governor?
All hell breaks loose, that’s what happens. Bruno and Silver will run circles around the guy because they’re the most vicious snakes anyone has ever had to come across. Spitzer won with, like, 70% of the vote and was the terror of Wall Street yet they still made a monkey out of him. They’re going to beat the crap out of Paterson on a regular basis for the remainder of the term. Paterson will be lucky if he doesn’t end 2010 somewhere in a mental hospital, drooling on his straightjacket and calling out “Daddy! Daddy! Help me!” (His dad was a Democrat player in the ‘70s). Meanwhile, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo will be chomping at the bit to take his dad’s old job so expect a fight for the Democratic nomination. It may require a further investigation by the AG of Paterson for allegedly firing a photographer for being white. After all, Andy Cuomo ran for the job before, had to put with the Kennedys when he married and later divorced RFK’s cheatin’ daughter Kerry, and suffered the indignity of serving in Bill Clinton’s cabinet. He took the AG’s job to give himself a higher profile for his eventual move to the Gov’s spot and used it to embarrass Spitzer in the Bruno Affair. He was another one that was thrilled to see Spitzer go.
This also gives Mike Bloomberg a chance to flex his financial and political muscle. Mike’s out of office next year and will be bored as hell. He wants so badly to be President but it’s not happening any time soon. Being governor would give him a platform and something to do to keep him relevant politically. I mean, c’mon… what’s he gonna do with all those $11.5 billion he has? Hire 2,090,909 hookers? He could….
For further information, just read everything here:
http://dealbreaker.com/eliot_spitzer/
And, just to laugh some more, read the filed complaint here:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0310082spitzer1.html
I’ve been selling all my CDs on Amazon.com for the past year or so. My thinking is that if I already burn them on my hard drive using the best possible settings, there’s no reason for my CDs to take up physical space in my apartment.
Selling CDs on Amazon (or, if you prefer, Half.com does it, too) is pretty easy. All you do is enter the UPC code on the back of the CD in the search box of the site. A page comes up with the details of the CD already laid out for you and it asks you if you want to sells yours, too. If you haven’t already, you have to set up a seller’s profile and that only takes a couple of minutes. You are asked about the condition of the CD with simple pull-down menus and you pick the price you want to sell your CD (or book or whatever). I always pick the cheapest since I’m trying to sell off my stuff quicker. When someone buys the CD, you get an email right away. Amazon calculates the shipping costs and everything and you get a credit of that amount, less the $0.99 commission (plus a few cents more, depending on the price) that Amazon takes. All you have to do is pack it in an envelope and send it off to the address they give you. I’ve sold about 200 - 300 CDs and books this way. My apartment is emptying up fast.
I’ll also say this: You have a moral obligation to sell as many of your CDs as possible. Some CDs are hard to come by. Someone who is desperate to hear a rare CD will pay good money for it. I’ve sold some for as much as $30. Isn’t it better they buy the CD from you than download it illegally off the Internet?
And what about books? You probably won’t reread many of the books you own. Yet they sit in your apartment. Why? So you can impress your date by showing them what your read? Stop being a pretentious idiot. There’s some college kid out there who will have to shell out a lot of money to a school bookstore because you want some dolt with a tongue ring to think you’re some kind of intellectual on the off chance he/she/it comes back to your apartment.
Also, by taking up space, you are paying rent just to store CDs already on your hard drive and books you’ve already read and will never read again. Let’s say you rent a 200 square foot bedroom in a share on the Lower East Side for $1,200/month. That comes out to $72 per square foot a year. If your CDs and books take up five square feet — even in your closet — you’re paying $360 per year for your CDs and books to collect dust. That’s just wrong. And foolish.
Anyways, one CD I put on the market was Sons and Daughters‘ “Love the Cup“, a great EP I bought from the band back when they played NorthSix a few years ago. They’re an awesome band, playing fun music, and you should listen to them more than you do now. Sure enough, yesterday I got an order and, as I’m labeling the envelope, I notice the packing slip was to a judge down South. Like, a real jurist, not a bureaucratic judge in name only. And he wasn’t some young kid but a middle-aged judge. I googled the guy and read some of his opinions. Now, imagine you get busted doing whatever it is you get busted for in the South (like, say, failing to go to Church on Sundays) and you appear in this guy’s courtroom. If you knew that, underneath the robes he had tattoos and a Franz Ferdinand tee-shirt, you’d think you have a shot.Except one thing: I won’t tell you his name. That, after all, is confidential.Here’s a video of perhaps one of the best songs on the EP, “Johnny Cash”:
click!
Maybe you watch the economics reports on the news and wonder, “What is this ‘Subprime Loan Crisis’ they speak of? Why are they interrupting non-stop coverage of Britney? LOLZ….” Maybe you don’t even watch the news at all and are confused by such terms as “money” or “a job”.
Well, worry no more! The folks at The Big Picture have put together perhaps one of the best explanations of 2007/20008’s biggest story (no, not steroids use in baseball OR the Olsen Twins): The Subprime Mortgage Crisis. With the aid of foul-mouthed stick figures, this PowerPoint presentation lays out the the entire fiasco step-by-step in an easy-to-understand format.
Just click this picture and begin the hysterical, frightening, and hysterically frightening journey that has wiped out billions of dollars in just a matter of months!
(Click image to begin; via The Big Picture via John Carney of DealBreaker. Don’t forget to click the right arrow on the bottom left of the screen when you begin the presentation or you’ll miss it. And don’t forget to call your mother. She’s been worried sick about you.)
Though I’m not supposed to submit blog entries today, and though this entry has nothing to do with Tsunami Tuesday election results, I feel it neccessary to do so nonetheless because this link was too great to ignore: “My So-Called Life” haikus, written by my favorite blogger, Stef. Stef’s hilarious blog, “big exit”, is a daily must-read. Today’s MSCL haikus are examples of why that’s the case:
“Rickie is homeless
And yet his black eyeliner
still looks fabulous”
“Angela wrote me
It was a big ass letter
Too bad i can’t read”
“That girl Rayanne Graff
is not allowed in our home
She drank all my booze”
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