Line of the Day

"I’m off to the Mall to sell razor blades so people can scrape off their “Question Authority” bumper stickers"

More here from Lileks.

H/T: Baseball Crank

Is it too late to re-enlist, er..., re-enroll?

We suppose this is what Obama meant by that civilian defense corps or whatever the hell he was talking about. This from the change.gov website:

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.

(emphasis ours)

Except that the Obama people must’ve got word there was a Constitutional amendment that prohibits the government this sort of behavior so they changed the language to “setting a goal” with a $4,000 college tuition rebate at the end of that rainbow.

Bad parent, KT, ponders what it is his children did to subject themselves to this mandatory volunteerism and also what sort of work, er, community service you’re getting from a 16 yr. old at $40/hour.

And we wonder what’s to keep colleges and unis from simply jacking up their tuitions the corresponding $4,000. Almost wish we were back in high school again to subvert all this non-sense.

Skipping breakfast this morning means...

...11 A.M. carne asade taco combo from Burritos Santana. Hooray, Us!

What..? No lesbian cracks.

Right out of the box: here’s the President-elect at his first news conference handling hard-hitting questions like what sort of dog he is going to buy for his daughters when he drops a Nancy Reagan/séances reference when answering a question about what living ex-Presidents he has talked to.



Check out the quizzical reaction of the guy over Obama’s left shoulder who is thinking Obama meant to say Eleanor Roosevelt because the guy probably knew Eleanor Roosevelt.

Oh well. We look forward to at least 4 years of these moments of comedy gold.

Because sometimes one's inner muse is best left there

If you’re big fans of college football as we are, then you’re probably aware that the folks in the southeastern quadrant of the nation take things a little more seriously than elsewhere. It’s this seriousness that leads to passion and it's that passion that leads to, uhhhh, “artwork” that is best rendered on velvet.

Here a leathery and completely unsuspecting Steve Spurrier is viciously attacked by, my god, the school mascot while (not flinging his visor) on the sidelines.



Pic courtesy Deadspin... with reader comments and more awsome artwork.

Our favorite: "I liked the one of Knowshon Moreno and Matt Stafford playing poker better." -Bobby Big Wheel

Dear Obama, please protect us from your supporters Pt.III

Video below is from a Finnish doc on Obama fans and in demonstrating a strong case for home schooling, the featured North Carolina teacher makes the election a “teachable moment” by ridiculing those kids with the balls to admit they were pulling for McCain.

Amazingly, she claims on camera that she plays it straight with the McCain kids.



If schools want to ban bullying, they would do well to start with this woman.

And you think that is bad? Wait four years when people may have audacity to vote for someone in order to dethrone Obama as the sitting President.

H/T: Hot Air

Really..? The whole team?

Coming to a Late Show with David Letterman near you, Oxford University researchers have compiled a top-10 list of irritating phrases...

The phrases appear in a book called Damp Squid, named after the mistake of confusing a squid with a squib, a type of firework.

The researchers who compiled the list monitor the use of phrases in a database called the Oxford University Corpus, which comprises books, papers, magazines, broadcast, the internet and other sources.

The database alerts them to new words and phrases and can tell them which expressions are disappearing. It also shows how words are being misused.
As well as the above expressions, the book's author Jeremy Butterfield says that many annoyingly over-used expressions actually began as office lingo, such as 24/7 and "synergy".

The list:

1 - At the end of the day

2 - Fairly unique

3 - I personally

4 - At this moment in time

5 - With all due respect

6 - Absolutely

7 - It's a nightmare

8 - Shouldn't of

9 - 24/7

10 - It's not rocket science


Can we add “thrown under the bus” and “in the tank” which have been beat unmercifully into the ground in this past election cycle and which we vow to never use again as we may have been guilty of aiding and abetting.

Our all-time favorite/irritating, though, is sports announcer guy stating: “He has literally carried this team on his back” Blood-boiling irritating.

A preview of Coming Attractions

The thought that Obama may govern from the center took a hit as in his first move as President-elect, he has tabbed one of D.C.’s most notorious partisans to be his chief of staff.

"[T]he night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting “Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!” and plunging the knife into the table after every name. “When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape,” one campaign veteran recalls. “It was like something out of The Godfather. But that’s Rahm for you.”

Rahm… what a card.

H/T: Sweetness and Light

That Joe Biden is some sort of clairvoyant

"Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pledged on Wednesday to station new missiles near Poland's border in response to U.S. plans for an anti-missile system and proposed extending the presidential term to six years from four."

…because what good would our anti-missile system be without any missiles to shoot down? Thanks, Dmitry.

And we would like to know how this squares with the next Commander-in-Chief’s pledge to cut-off funding for any “unproven missile systems?”

Does batting .500 count as “unproven”? Information Dissemination has more here on Ballistic Missile Defense

Some post-election thoughts (UPDATED)

(The last post was actually written before we had started this one so lest we do not appear to be our usual gracious and magnanimous self….)

We want to congratulate President-elect Barack Obama for his victory last night. A victory of historic proportions that demonstrated, as John McCain said in his acceptance speech in late August and again, last night at his concession speech, “(Americans) never hide from history. (Americans) make history.”

And this, from B-Daddy, "Also, Obama will have the respect that comes from occupying the great office to which he has been elected. All Americans owe him this."

What... no more "Suit?" OK, fair enough.

Now some thoughts on this election:

You are going to hear quite a bit about “the end of conservatism” (we have already) and the end of the “era of Reagan” in the coming months. We will delve into this more later but just one observation to refute that: In the closing weeks of the campaign, what was Obama talking about? He was talking about taxes. Not only was the most liberal member of the Senate talking about taxes, he was talking about a “tax cut for the middle class”. Yes, there will be a tax hike for those who make over $250,000… $200,000… $150,000…? and the middle class tax cut might be hooey in reality but the fact that a person of Obama’s legislative background and political pedigree made this tax cut his closing argument speaks volumes about the “death of conservatism.”

Oh, and speaking of McCain’s speech, here is the transcript. Warm, gracious and humble. After a succession of Presidents who served in active duty during World War II, John McCain remained the best and last hope of the Vietnam War veterans to aspire to the Oval Office. We will draw no over-arching conclusions here but we don’t think its coincidence that none ever made it.
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If Senator McCain had any real shot at this thing, it would’ve had to have come back in September when he suspended campaign operations to return to D.C. to work on the imploding financial crisis… and offering an alternative to the bailout. But he didn’t. Game over.
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Ridiculous sub-headline of the day. From the print edition of USA Today:

(Obama victory) “Taps into the public’s anger over economy and war”

War….? What war?

Big Media's inability to break free of its self-cast template is almost comical.
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We pinpointed Dodger GM Al Campanis’s appearance and unfortunate remarks on Nightline back in April of 1987 (which resulted in his resignation) as that precise moment in time when the National League’s flagship franchise began its slow, grinding descent into mediocrity. So, what was that moment for the Republican Party that went from the Reagan Revolution, Newt Gringrich’s Contract with America and two Bush terms to… what we saw last night?

Off the top of our head and doing no research whatsoever, we are going with the passage and signing into law by President Bush, the $400 billion prescription drug plan as that point when the GOP jumped the shark. When it passed in January of ’04, we cursed the term “compassionate conservative” thinking the bill that was hailed as a victory for Republicans at the time was very much pyrrhic in nature (“wait, this is the type of legislation Democrats pass) but we didn’t think it would ultimately lead to this some 5 years later.

OK, we’ll be doing some more post-mortem type stuff later but this is good for now.

Pax.

(UPDATE #1): Out of respect for the man, the office he will hold and this great country of ours, Obama-bashing is out for the time being. No quarter, though for his supporters. This was hilarious and spot-on.


Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

H/T: Jawa Report

We're beginning to feel better about things already

With all the moping around today, this put a pep in our step and a feeling that maybe things won’t be so bad afterall. Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi offered these words of encouragement in a fatwa published on the eve of the elections:

"Personally, I would prefer for the Republican candidate, [John] McCain, to be elected. This is because I prefer the obvious enemy who does not hypocritically [conceal] his hostility toward you… to the enemy who wears a mask [of friendliness]."
Al-Qaradhawi added: "Whoever thinks that the Democrats are less hostile to [the Arabs] than the Republicans should know that the number of Iraqis killed during the siege [of Iraq] by the Democrat Bill Clinton is twice as high as the number of [Iraqis] killed by the Republican [George] Bush.
"The Democrats kill you slowly without you noticing it - and therein lies the danger. They are like a snake whose touch is not felt until its poison enters your body."

Epic. Smack.

We’re not really sure what this siege of Iraq by Bill Clinton business is/was so we’ll just hang our hat on being encouraged by the sheik’s heartfelt sentiments.

H/T: MEMRI