Category: Snark

Obama to Switch Parties*

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President Obama stunned the political world today by announcing he will switch political parties, and soon become a Republican. “It seems the only way we’re going to get bipartisanship in this town is if I lead the way,” he said, in brief remarks before leaving for vacation. “The Republicans have refused to work with me because I’m a Democrat, and Republicans’ biggest strength has always been the ability to fall into line with whatever their leaders tell them, unlike other certain unnamed political parties in America…” (the president appeared to cough several times at this point, although one of his coughs sounded suspiciously like the word “Democrats,” if truth be told…). The president, clear-throated now, continued, “So I will now be the leader of the Republican Party, and they will fall in line with what I tell them to we’re going to do. The Democrats who are interested in bipartisanship can join us to pass Medicare-for-all, instead of the Rube Goldberg machine which they have been attempting to construct.”

…

link

*For the humor impaired, this is satire.

Remember When I Said that George W. Bush Was Forming a Think Tank?

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Well, it gets better, because the person that he has charged with running this august institution is one James K. Glassman, a fact that I did not pay much attention to when I made the initial snark.

Clayton Littlejohn, Wonkette, and Matthew Yglesias caught the obvious irony: Mr. Glassman is the author of Dow 36,000, in which he and Kevin A. Hassett wrote in 1999, which predicted that the index would top thirty-six thousand in the next few years.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed today, about a decade later, at 9,441.27.

Mr. Glassman appears uniquely qualified to represent the ideas of George W. Bush.

Original post here.

Talk About Damning With Faint Praise

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As some of might know, professor Niall Ferguson wrote an article in the Financial Times where he said that, “President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US.“

I saw it, I read it, and thought that it was sophomoric bullsh@$ of the sort you frequently see college students who want to play at radicalism, both left and right.

One of the people who called him out on this was Paul Krugman, who said that he could not, “fathom is how any editor could think this was a good thing to appear in the FT’s pages,” and James Fallows, who suggested that would like to see him, “discussing this over a beer with his Harvard colleague Henry Louis Gates.“

I did not blog about it, because I didn’t have anything to add, but Niall Furguson decided not to let sleeping dogs lie, and he did discuss it with Dr. Gates.

So Krugman offers an apology of sorts:

What can I say? While the Ferguson line was deeply offensive — everyone I know asked, “Did he really write that? Did the FT actually publish it?” — it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with the question of whether Felix the Cat was supposed to be African-American. The mind reels.

For the record, I don’t think that Professor Ferguson is a racist.

I think he’s a poseur.

I’m told that some of his straight historical work is very good. When it comes to economics, however, he hasn’t bothered to understand the basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the impression of wisdom. It’s all style, no comprehension of substance.

And this time he ended up choking on his own snark.

(emphasis mine)

Remind me to never demand an apology of Nobel Prize winning economists.

Best Snark Evah!!!!

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Don’t Make Me Get Out of this Chair!

Columnist and deputy editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Jay Bookman notes a contradiction in the arguments of the “Obama will engage in Nazi-style euthanasia™“.

It appears that one of the widely circulated canards is that if Obama gets his way, he will kill the sick and infirm, and Mr. Bookman, being on the mailing list for retarded libertarian magazine Human Events,* received this missive titled Grandmas and Unborn Babies Face Extermination by Obama’s “Health” Care Plan, which cited an editorial in Investors Business Daily, which claimed that:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.†

The problem here, as Mr. Bookman so ably notes, is that Stephen Hawking lives in the UK, and has lived there his entire life, and furthermore, he has, since the age of 6½, had his medical care covered by that very same National Health Service that is allegedly chomping at the bit to kill him.

The folks writing about this are stupid and evil beyond belief.

That being said, while Jay Bookman is an engaging writer, this is not the “Best Snark Evah!!!!“, that distinction is left to the comments on his blog post, specifically the first comment, from one Brad Steel:

Hawking can talk the talk, but he can’t walk the walk.

I think that I broke something laughing.

*Thankfully, I have avoided this fate.
†You won’t find it there any more, though there is a note there noting the “correction“.

I’d Say It’s Self-Evident, Only Not

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Nemo at Self Evident makes a convincing case that Bernanke and Geithner are not doing anything but trying to protect the incumbent banking giants.

I agree. While we need a functioning credit system, there is no need for the current banks to continue to exist in their current form, and the Fed and Treasury’s frantic effort to keep these banks on life support is a detriment to the rest of the economy:

If I were in charge and I wanted to prevent banks from failing at all costs, what might I do?

I might relax mark-to-market accounting. This would allow assets to be carried at inflated valuations, both for purposes of regulatory capital requirements and for purposes of getting loans from the Fed.

I might provide non-recourse loans to private equity to create inflated marks where mark-to-market still applies.

I might try to convince the FDIC to exercise forbearance in seizing banks. Of course, the primary day-to-day mission of the folks at FDIC is to preserve the integrity of their insurance fund. So they might object to my suggestion. I might have to give them assurances that they will have the necessary resources should my great plan fail. A $500 billion credit line from the Treasury, say.

If the FDIC agreed, they might suddenly go from 3-4 bank seizures per week to 0-1 per week.

Once my plan leaked to certain troubled banks, they might suddenly halt their attempts to raise capital at $0.20/share.

And of course, once Wall Street got wind of it, shares in financial companies would rocket higher.

Let me know if you notice anything like this happening.

Good point, and good snark.

The Post is Interesting, But the Snark is Prize

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Over at Ares, Bill Sweetman has a post noting the similarities in weights and fuel loads between the Navy’s F-35C and the A-5 Vigilante series.

It’s an interesting read, but his takedown of the Vigilante linear bom bay is just prize:

The A3J-2 or A-5B was designed without that restriction, and had usefully more internal fuel, but by the time it came along two things had happened. The Polaris missile submarine had taken over the Navy’s nuclear strike mission and tests had shown that there was only one version of the Vigilante where the unique linear bomb bay – which shot the bomb out of the tail – actually worked.

Unfortunately, it was this version:

Mr. Sweetman owes me a screen wipe.

How to Fix the Economy

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You know the drill. Credit Crises, housing crash, dollar at all time low.

Then we have Sam Zell, media mogul and drooling moron, saying that the reason that the exonomy is tanking is because Obama and Clinton are talking it down in their campaigns (H/t Will Bunch of Attytood).

Zell has it wrong. The savior of our economy is politics. With Clinton raising $35 million in February, and Obama having raised even more money, campaign spending is the only stimulus package out there.

If we have a contested convention, between the money spent on pundits, feting super-delegates, and advertisements, we should have full employment.

(please note snark tag)

In God We Tryst

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Hmmm…..An 80 year old megachurch leader has been charged with perjury as a result of a sex scandal.

80 years old? I had no idea that the psalms were so “uplifting”.

An 80-year-old leader of a suburban megachurch who is at the center of a sex scandal has been charged with lying under oath for saying he had sex outside marriage with only one other woman, court documents show.

A warrant for the arrest of Archbishop Earl Paulk, co-founder of Cathedral of the Holy Spirit at Chapel Hill Harvester Church, was issued Monday, according to court documents. …

Former church employee Mona Brewer is suing Paulk, his brother and the church on allegations that Paulk manipulated her into an affair from 1989 to 2003 by telling her it was her only path to salvation. In a 2006 deposition stemming from the lawsuit, the archbishop said under oath that the only woman he had ever had sex with outside of his marriage was Brewer.

But the results of a court-ordered paternity test revealed in October that Paulk is the biological father of his brother’s son, D.E. Paulk, who is now head pastor at the church. As part of Brewer’s lawsuit, eight women have given sworn depositions that they were coerced into sexual relationships with Earl Paulk.

I get the sense that super-sizing your church has much the same effect on one’s spiritual fitness as super-sizing one’s fast food does on one’s physical fitness.

Quote of the Day: David Brooks

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Overheard in New Hampshire: David Brooks on Bill Kristol

After last night’s debate, New York Times columnist David Brooks was chatting with a group of people. One of them said: “I hear you hired that conservative Bill Kristol.” David Brooks responded: “More like a pseudoconservative.”

I’m not sure where this comes from, but my guess is that Brooks thinks that Bill Kristol is the beneficiary of conservative affirmative action (nepotism).