John F. Kerry might have won lots of medals, but he lacks that essential Presidential quality of being willing to launch costly preemptive wars of choice on regimes that seek to develop weapons of mass destruction related program activities.
Shorter concept inspired by busy, busy, busy from an idea by D-Squared.
On Excite.com earlier today, the Fox News headlines. Uh, is there something going on we don’t know about in Iraq?
Sadly, No!’s official leader of the peanut gallery Frederick opens up a can of whoop ass on the management for its failure to cover Amber Pawlik’s nipple discussions, which have already been discussed by the international woman of mystery in charge of World O’Crap. Amber, as our readers know, is an expert on all matters of human sexuality, having previously written on The Vagina Monologues and Exposure to cock as a source of homosexuality in women, a review of the non-empirical evidence (American Journal of Medicine.)
Amber, as Frederick and WOC point out, is upset. (Anger is a common theme in the Pawlik philosophy.) Anger wasn’t upset that Janet Jackson showed one of her boobs during the Super Bowl’s halftime show however — she’s upset that she can’t provide her friends with a picture so that they can wank off to the material:
“Janet Jackson showed her breast during halftime,” I told him. He offered that in exchange for doing the dishes that I would try to find the image online.
How hard could it be? [No, not Amber’s friend, finding the picture.] Well, really, really hard. [Right, again.]
I looked and looked. Superbowl.com had recent pictures of the halftime show, but no picture of Janet?s exposed breast. Finally I asked myself, “What site would have up-to-the-minute, latebreaking, racy, gossipy news?
Did Amber think of checking out www.sadlyno.com? Sadly, No!
Ladies and gentleman, I found it. The only site that had this latebreaking story within, literally minutes: The Drudge Report.
This inspired me to discuss something that is distinctly absent from our culture: investigative reporting.
It may well be that Amber is confusing “investigative reporting” with “soft core porn” or “material deemed inappropriate by the FCC.” Because after the Super Bowl the problem wasn’t that people didn’t know about the nipple. But Amber has tit on the brain and this leads to an Amber specialty: the rant that manages to be both short and incoherent, combining several unrelated topics to make the point that, uh, well, something we guess. To wit:
Read the rest of this entry »
Writing in The Washington Post, Newsday and Tech Central Station columnist [now there’s a career!] James Pinkerton writes a long piece about growth of government under Bush. What does he manage to do in the process? If you answered “pull out the old Clinton did it” routine,” please pass GO and collect $200:
In the last decade, both parties have discovered that big government can be popular with the middle class — if those big-government bucks are spent on the middle class. Clinton steered the Democratic party away from exotic and fringe concerns; he made the bulk of Americans feel good about getting money from Uncle Sam. Which is to say, Clinton started to transform Washington from the tool of minorities to the tool of the majority. Bush is doing the same thing.
Ah yes, Clinton started all those bad things. Sadly, No! When Clinton was elected, government spending accounted for 22.2% of GDP. By 2000, it was 18.4%, which to our untrained eyes looks like less, but what do we know? (It’s on the way up since, at 19.9% for 2003.) Even if you want to give much of the credit for this to the GOP-controlled Congress, by the end of his second term the government under Clinton was described by one observer thusly:
One of the Clinton administration’s biggest successes was cutting nearly 700,000 federal jobs out of the military and the civil service from 1992 to 1999, said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings.
The “era of big government” may not have ended during the Clinton years, but the size of government was greatly reduced, Sawhill said.
Did Clinton make you “feel good” about getting stuff from the government dear readers? Just like he did by signing welfare reform into law, stuff like that? Right, something like that.
President George W. Bush, from the Oval Office, in his first Sunday morning show presidential appearance.
danger, threat, madman, madman, madman, dangerous, madman, threat, threaten, madman.
Well, it’s Saturday, and all we want to do is… Amber, Amber, Amber!
Sadly, No!’s best friend Amber Pawlik is back, and this time, well, let her tell you:
I am trying to determine who is more evil: the Ayatollah thugs of Iran or Western media.
Which is more evil? The funny thing is that we’ve often asked ourselves this question, imagine that! Just why is Amber so upset however?
First, the show [Nightline] portrayed Iran as being more progressive than its neighbors. Hey, Iran isn?t so bad: compared to Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, or North Korea and Cuba even!
Who here wants to buy Amber an atlas? Amber has more excellent questions though:
What would you think of someone who said that Castro wasn’t so bad, his country has some nice things compared to other dictators? What would you think of a media outlet who interviewed someone during NAZI Germany who insisted the way to freedom was “collaboration” with the NAZIs? Now what do you think of our current Western media, who is intent on confusing and obscuring the situation in Iran?
Yes, what do you think boys and girls? The media or the thugs? Because you know the media doesn’t follow the Amber party line (the Iranian government is pure evil) and you know what they say: if you’re not with Amber, you’re with cock evil.
Our good friend Kyle Williams watched the Super Bowl, and Kyle no like what he sees:
Dressed as high-school cheerleaders, dancers stripped on stage. Sluts danced before millions of fathers, mothers and children, groping, flaunting and parading.
And that was even before Janet came on (or out we guess.) What happened then?
At the time, my family, friends and I were watching the halftime show when the big moment came. We looked at each other, thinking, “Was that supposed to happen?”
Those who think that was actually happened was “We looked at each other, thinking, “Are you as turned on as I am?,” please raise your hand. Yet where is this leading us? Does anyone want to take bets on whether WorldNetDaily’s favorite “sin” is going to make a special appearance in a column about an exposed boob?
To what end will this take us? Porn on demand ? that didn’t bring satisfaction. So, we adopt homosexuality into culture ? that’s not going make us happy. Should we allow every kind of immorality to invade our lives, hoping for some sort of contentment?
Well we’ll be… You see, “we” “adopted” porn on demand, and now “we” are “adopting” homosexuality (please, no one tell our wife) in order to make ourselves happy, to be content as it were. Because nothing makes a heterosexual content like a homosexual experience. Why, if it weren’t for all those morals and rules, there’d be no straight people at all we bet. We would all be Andrew Sullivan or Ellen DeGeneres. And would that make us happy? Kyle says, Sadly, No! While we’ll give Kyle extra special WorldNetDaily credit for mixing up porn and homosexuality, we’ll continue hoping gays are given the same right to marry straights have, and just take our chances with the consequences.
In the Wall Street Journal, Steve Liesman authors an article that bears the following headline:
No Matter the Nominee, One Model Says the Democrats Just Can’t Win
Paragraph 5 contains the following:
I’m going to use columnist’s prerogative for a few paragraphs here and leave you hanging as to Mr. Fair’s precise prediction[.]
Oh, all this hanging, it’s just too much for us. It looks like Mr. Copy Editor used his prerogative to give your punch line away Mr. Liesman. A real shame that. Not that the article is especially interesting, mind you. Liesman writes:
[…] and how you can use the formula to make your own forecast, using your own assumptions.
Seriously, [sic] it’s worth it to spend a minute discussing how the formula is produced and what Mr. Fair is trying to achieve.
Right, seriously. Because we were all laughing pretty hard at that great laugh line that was “using your own assumptions.” But seriously[!], how much thinking do you need to do to figure to what Mr. Fair is trying to do? Especially when Liesman told us right in the opening paragraph that Fair tries to predict the respective voting share of the presidential candidates. This isn’t exactly The Bible Code.
We can (mostly) leave aside the fact that some models predicted Al Gore’s victory in 2000 (and right they were, though that’s a different issue,) but it’s worth pointing out that when he looks at specific sets of circumstances, Fair’s sample size becomes too small to be useful:
The formula draws on similar situations — since 1916 — when an elected Republican president ran for a second term after he took the White House away from the Democrats. Those analogs include Ronald Reagan’s manhandling of Walter Mondale, Mr. Nixon’s mauling of George McGovern and Dwight Eisenhower’s savaging of Adlai Stevenson.
Hmmm, three “similar” elections? Not that much to go on, is it? Liesman continues writing something that gets liberals in trouble because, we’re always told, it just isn’t true:
Namely, we’ve had strong GDP growth with lousy job creation. […] Mr. Fair might learn, along with an unhappy Mr. Bush, that the two aren’t interchangeable and growth that doesn’t produce jobs isn’t good economics or politics. […] Whatever the results of today’s jobs report, there’s no changing the weak jobs numbers under the Bush presidency.
You’re preaching to the choir Mr. Liesman, PTTC! Besides,
While Liesman writes that the formula has an impressive margin of error of 2.4%, we’re only left with this indication of the formula’s success at predicting the winner:
Finally, the formula has been badly wrong only once: that was in 1992, when it predicted the incumbent would win with 51.7% of the vote. It was off by 5.1 percentage points. That, of course, was the last time a man named Bush ran for re-election.
We would have liked to know how many times the formula has been wrong, not just badly wrong.
Finishing second in a race, whether it’s by 1 second or 1 hour, means finishing second. It matters little how badly you lose. And until the US drops the electoral college, state-level forecasts seem like a better (if much more complicated) tool.
I said something way stupid when I pronounced the Plame scandal bogus, but it was all Joe Wilson’s fault.
Link via World O’Crap.
On FOX News earlier today the GOP’s Flat Tax Expert, Steve Forbes, was invited to discuss his 1996 and 2000 tax returns campaign finance reform.
Steve Forbes: What we need is full disclosure of campaign contributions, yaddi yaddi yadda.
Linda Vester: Do you really think that’s going to happen?
Steve Forbes: Sadly no.
Hey Steve, get your own clever lines, ok?