Sadly, No!

ok, so the images aren’t showing up anywhere and a lot of things are broken. This is all pretty much by design and will be resolved soon, but not right away soon, this weekend soon.

Gavin adds: Hey, they found a Kenyan birth certificate with the name “Barack Hussein Obama,” dated August 4, 1961.

Above: Apparently genuine

Also, I guess everyone has heard about the inevitable naked pictures of Pam Atlas, but in case they’ve disappeared from the site already…

Above: The “Charlie Chaplin”

Above: “La Grande Odal-EEK!”

Above: Nordic Track should sue

Above: Sher Zieve

Rep. Paul Broun apologizes for telling the truth
Day 9 of Obama Watch

• America has elected a Marxist Hitler to the presidency who is plotting to mobilize a vast totalitarian army of Nazi Gestapo-Shirts, and I must say that male Republican leaders really ought to act more masculine about the whole thing.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Cf.

This song deserves to be stuck in Bush’s head for the rest of his life. I think it succinctly expresses the sentiments of hundreds of millions of Americans:

UPDATE: Because there appear to be a lot of Ween fans in the comments (or at least, like, two of them), it’s time to share some mo’ vids. Most of these songs are barely intelligible in their studio incarnations, but are positively awesome live.

Here’s “Big Jilm”:

Here’s “The Blarney Stone”:

And of course, the immortal “Cover it With Gas and Set it on Fire”:

UPDATE II: Dr. Rock, how can I neglect you?

Months before the election, a particularly insufferable right-wing troll who called himself The Truth told me that he couldn’t wait until America elected McCain president so he could hang out in the comments and gloat. Mysteriously, I haven’t seen him for a while. Anyone know where he is?

UPDATE: Hey Troofie, c’mon out. How bad can it be?

Republican Governors Meet, Glumly

The Republican Governors Association, meeting at a sleek hotel on Biscayne Bay to survey the damage, itself is a thinned version of what it was in the heyday of GOP dominance of national politics. There will be 21 GOP governors come January, a loss of one, and only 16 of them made the trip.

They are convinced that their counterparts in Washington are incapable of finding a formula for resurgence and that the answer lies in the states.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty — passed over by Sen. John McCain for the No. 2 spot on the presidential ticket and one of nine GOP governors who preside over states won by Barack Obama — offered a summary of his party’s predicament at the governors’ opening lunch.

“We cannot be a majority governing party when we essentially cannot compete in the Northeast, we are losing our ability to compete in Great Lakes states, we cannot compete on the West Coast, we are increasingly in danger of competing in the mid-Atlantic states, and the Democrats are now winning some of the Western states,” Pawlenty said. “That is not a formula for being a majority governing party in this nation.”

As if that weren’t enough, he ticked off a few more challenges.

“Similarly we cannot compete, and prevail, as a majority governing party if we have a significant deficit, as we do, with women, where we have a large deficit with Hispanics, where we have a large deficit with African American voters, where we have a large deficit with people of modest incomes and modest financial circumstances. Those are not factors that make up a formula for success going forward.”

One of the more baffling aspects of the 2008 campaign was why John McCain thought he needed to appeal to the GOP base. The GOP base are simply notorious assholes who alienate the party from blacks, Latinos and everyone living on either of the coasts. Hell, they’ve even started going after the white middle-class families whom they once claimed to champion.

This is not to say that conservatism is dead or that the Republicans will never come back. But there is a particular brand of conservative — i.e., the immigrant-bashing, torture-loving, family-stalking brand — that probably doesn’t have much of a future in American politics.

In other words, the GOP should find a new base and stick the Malkinites back into the John Birch Society hole where they belong.

Goody:

Obama’s plans for probing Bush torture

With growing talk in Washington that President Bush may be considering an unprecedented “blanket pardon” for people involved in his administration’s brutal interrogation policies, advisors to Barack Obama are pressing ahead with plans for a nonpartisan commission to investigate alleged abuses under Bush.

The Obama plan, first revealed by Salon in August, would emphasize fact-finding investigation over prosecution. It is gaining currency in Washington as Obama advisors begin to coordinate with Democrats in Congress on the proposal. The plan would not rule out future prosecutions, but would delay a decision on that matter until all essential facts can be unearthed. Between the time necessary for the investigative process and the daunting array of policy problems Obama will face upon taking office, any decision on prosecutions probably would not come until a second Obama presidential term, should there be one.

The proposed commission — similar in thrust to a Democratic investigation proposal first uncovered by Salon in July — would examine a broad scope of activities, including detention, torture and extraordinary rendition, the practice of snatching suspected terrorists off the street and whisking them off to a third country for abusive interrogations. The commission might also pry into the claims by the White House — widely rejected by experienced interrogators — that abusive interrogations are an effective and necessary intelligence tool.

Were I in charge of this investigation, I would wipe my ass with the Constitution and summarily round up every single Bush administration official and ship them to Guantanamo for their military tribunals. The incoming Obama administration seems to believe in the rule of law a little more than I do, which I guess is a good thing, but my approach is more efficient (and fun!).

Note: if you ever see me running for any sort of political office, do no vote for me.

This is bad:

Goldman forecasting biggest rise in joblessness since WWII

The unemployment rate is expected to rise to 8.5% by the end of next year and inch even higher in early 2010, economists for Goldman Sachs wrote Friday. The cumulative trough-to-peak increase of more than 4 percentage points in the jobless rate would be the most since World War II, they said. Goldman analysts lowered growth forecasts for the next three quarters, and said they now expect the Federal Reserve to cut its interest rate target to 0.50% by December. “The main reason for these changes is the accumulation of evidence that U.S. domestic demand and production are dropping sharply,” they wrote. “We do not see a resumption of anything close to trend growth before 2010.”

While I don’t implicitly trust all of Goldman Sachs’ projections, I think this one is likely very on-target.

And here’s the thing: the Democrats aren’t going to be able to do anything to stop it. The bed has already been shat, and they’re the one party in control of the whole government now. If we’re facing 9% unemployment at the start of 2010, a bunch of Dem congressmen can start packing their bags.

What I’m trying to say here is the Dems have a roughly two-year window to enact policies that they think will be for the long-term benefit of the country. They need to hit the damn ground running and hope that the economy starts recovering by 2012. Otherwise, we could be looking at a Sarah Palin-Joe the Plumber dream ticket. Just sayin’ is all.

Perfesser Zywicki

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I hadn’t heard of Professor Todd Zywicki until last weekend when I shared with you SadlyNauts his post at The Volokh Conspiracy about how teh mean fags were being ugly to the Mormon Church for no reason at all other than the belief by gays that Mormon underwear was a major fashion violation. In case you thought that the Professor’s inane (and grammatically-challenged) post was simply an aberration, this subsequent post from Zywicki indicates that it is not and that Zywicki drinks deeply from an inexhaustible well of preposterous stupidity.

In that post, Professor Zywicki is all teary-eyed and sniffly about the imminent departure of George Bush and wants to remind his readers of the two great achievements of the Bush Administration:

First, if you had told me on September 12, 2001 that seven years later we’d be able to say that there would be no major terrorist attacks on American soil in the next seven years I would’ve thought you were naive or crazy. Now I don’t know how much credit the Bush Administration directly gets for this. … But in retrospect I really do think it has been a major accomplishment that we have not been hit by another terrorist attack in that time.

In other words, the Professor doesn’t know how much credit goes to Bush for the absence of any attacks, but he is going to give all the credit to Bush for it anyway and claim that it is one of the most important accomplishments of the Bush presidency. You know, there hasn’t been an attack on U.S. soil since I started blogging at Sadly No!, and I don’t know how much credit I directly get for the absence of attacks, but it’s really a major accomplishment of mine that we haven’t been attacked. Woohoo! Everybody owes me a deep debt of gratitude and should either send me lots of money or elect me to national office.

Now if you thought the first memorable achievement that Professor Zywicki attributes to W is a serious snortfest, wait until you hear the second:

Second, I give him credit for using his political capital trying to raise the issue of social security reform. He did so in a ham-handed and bungling way, but right at the outset of the second term he tried to address the long-run solvency of social security. For which he had his headed handed to him and then gave up

This is stupid that not merely burns, it produces a thermonuclear explosion that melts the brain of anyone who reads the quoted passage and the brain of anyone nearby the person reading that passage. Sorry about that. Sue me. Of course, the irony here is that the Perfesser doesn’t understand that, by saying that Bush’s second greatest achievement was to completely fuck something up, this says all you need to know about the Bush legacy — and not in a way that Zywicki intends.

For bonus fun with Zywicki’s post, find the numerous grammatical errors and lampoon them in the comments section. As a hint to get started, pay careful attention to the use of the word “had” in the first sentence of the post and its conflict with the verb tenses in the following clauses.

‘Intellectuals’

• Intelleckshuals is stoopid. Just becuz I haz PhD an git payed by the Hoohah Hoover Institushun for doin nuthin but inteleckshualizin, don’t mean I is an intellechual, but if it duz, I is teh only smart intelexual.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

I don’t even know what to say to this, so I’ll just respond to it with YouTube clips:

The Importance of Being Careful

[…]

Obama thinks he is a good talker, but he is often undisciplined when he speaks. He needs to understand that as President, his words will be scrutinized and will have impact whether he intends it or not. In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush never gets sloppy when he is speaking publicly. He chooses his words with care and precision, which is why his style sometimes seems halting. In the eight years he has been President, it is remarkable how few gaffes or verbal blunders he has committed. If Obama doesn’t raise his standards, he will exceed Bush’s total before he is inaugurated.

That’s carefulness we can believe in, my friends!

In all seriousness, expect the Powerline boys to lead the charge over the next few years to re-imagine George W. Bush as this generation’s answer to Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Jesus combined. Unfortunately, since Bush became preznit at the dawn of the YouTube age, I doubt they’ll have much success.

(Via.)

Ah, Mittens:

First, America must substantially improve our education system.

Needless to say, Mitt has lots of good advice:

He [Obama] should dismiss the people who helped him win the election and bring in people who are above politics and above party.

Yes, once he’s done getting rid of the people who got him elected, Obama should go out and hire the wise angels of that partisan- and politics-free utopia Mitt envisions (they can usually be found in Ann Althouse’s driveway or hiding behind David Broder’s glasses). Because if there’s one thing the election has shown, is that voters have absolutely no preference when it comes to the major political parties and the policies they have campaigned on. (Or is it for?)