Ethically ambiguous journalist Joe McGinniss has rented the house next to Sarah Palin’s to help him write his unauthorized biography of the former VP-candidate former governor (see article). Assuming she thought of this herself, you have to give Palin points for posting a photo of the rented house online with the caption “Hi, Neighbor! May I Call You ‘Joe’?”
I was reading today how the New York State Assembly and Senate are just now finishing up their respective 2010-11 state budgets and how the two versions still have to reconciled and voted on. If this isn’t done by April 1, the state essentially has no money and state workers and teachers among others likely won’t get paid. The deadline is unlikely to be met, though, since the legislators start their week-long Easter-Passover holiday this weekend.
Now, here’s a goofy thought, so crazy that nobody seems to be mentioning it. How about… they don’t get their week-long vacation? This seems rather obvious to me, so no doubt I’m missing something — but passing a budget is probably the most important aspect of their jobs. You don’t go home leaving it undone.
I’ll take this a step further, which I wrote about elsewhere last year when the Pennsylvania Legislature was weeks past deadline in getting its state’s budget passed: If a state budget is one week past deadline, the legislature should be dissolved. Automatically. New election scheduled for one week later. If the electorate wants their old guy to stay on, then fine — but he has to earn back the remainder of his term. He has to explain his role in schools and state offices and parks being closed, and state employees not being able to pay their rent.
But this will be a moot point, because I can pretty much guarantee that no state budget will ever be late again.
Okay, personally… I found this amusing until I saw the “debt” caption in the snow. and that was just too much going on at once. If they’d just shown Obama trying to dig his way out of the snow (debt) without the elephant and his comments, that would have made a valid and timely point — but as it stands, there are two different cartoons here, pushing against one another.
As always, your results may vary.
Sarah Palin complained that this week’s Newsweek cover is sexist, and… well, I think I sort of agree, though we might be dealing with semantics here: Certainly Newsweek chose this particular photo with the inten of trivializing Palin (the photo is real, but was taken earlier this year as part of a spread for Runner’s World magazine). And they probably wouldn’t have used this sort of photo to trivialize a male politician (can you imagine a cover story about Obama’s domestic policy agenda being illustrated with this?
So if using a “sexy” cover photo of a female politician is a context where you wouldn’t use one of a male politician is sexist, then I find myself in the odd position of siding with Palin.
Of course what I found most interesting about all this was Palin’s comment on the cover, ending with “If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin” — clear proof, I guess, that she writes her own material. I mean, I sort of maybe know what she’s kind of getting at here, but…
And actually what makes that quote more interesting is the fact that it was written (apparently) on the same day that she vigorously defended racial profiling on the Sean Hannity show.
I’m wondering whether anybody knows… When the President travels to campaign for, say, a gubernatorial candidate, who pays for the Air Force 1 expenses, security for the President, police overtime onsite, etc?
And just for the record, I can’t speak for Virginia, but no matter what you might hear, the New Jersey election was not a referendum on either Obama or the Democratic Party: it was a referendum on Jon Corzine. When New Jerseyans went into the voting booth yesterday, Barack Obama was the last thing on our minds: We were too busy holding our noses as we decided whether the thought of reelecting Jon Corzine was distasteful for us to vote for Chris Christie.
Personally, I voted for Chris Daggett, since in this case voting for the third party candidate wasn’t taking a vote away from any decent candidate. He had me at “I’m not Corzine or Christie.”
As it happens, despite recent polls predicting up to 20% of the vote for Daggett, he ended up with about 5%. Which means, God help us, New Jerseyans got the governor we deserve.
I got a message from my son’s high school this afternoon assuring me that he would not be forced to watch Obama’s speech next week, and that the school would provide an alternative educational program for all students whose parents opted them out of watching the speech. I understand this sort of thing is going on in schools all across the country.
Is there any explanation for this other than mass insanity? I could understand it if Obama were intending to ask children to tell their parents to support his health care reform, or suggest they go through their mothers’ pocketbooks and send him all those little pieces of green paper with presidents’ pictures on them… but apparently he’s only going to offer a pep talk about working hard in school.
Just the sort of underhanded thing you’d expect from a native-born Kenyan!
Does anybody sincerely think this is controversial? And if so, why not just follow with an opposing viewpoint such as a clip from Ferris Bueller?
“I’m sorry it’s happening, of course. Obviously I don’t like the idea of people losing jobs, or being worried about their 401(k)s. On the other hand, the American people got to know that we will safeguard the system. I mean, we’re in. And if we need to be in more, we will.” -George W. Bush, December 1, 2008
I find it interesting how often newspapers and other media are nearly unanimous in telling us in large print that this public figure or another is apologizing for such or such (and I’m not even talking about the insipid, meaningless “I take full responsibility for” comments), when in fact they’ve done no such thing.
According to Newsweek magazine, one of Hillary Clinton’s staffers told one of the magazine’s reporters during the primaries that everybody after a certain point everybody was “fed up with the Bill Clinton mishegoss.”
This word has always been a part of my personal vocabulary, but does the quote make any sense to most of Newsweek’s audience? I’ve noticed that New York City-based magazines and (to an even larger extent) Hollywood screenwriters seem convinced that the entire country is familair with Yiddish (which I suppose, if these magazines and screenwriters keep using it, might eventually be the case).
You don’t think so? Then try rewriting it with the colors reversed and see how it looks.
The reality is, the majority of white voters — or close to it, anyway — will probably be voting for Obama today; and according to the most recent polls, upwards of 95% of black voters will be voting for… Obama.
So with all due respect, Mr. Billingsley… Okay, actually I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes trying to complete this sentence. I can’t. This comic is just ugly and I’m sure Senator Obama would feel the same way.
Is the joke here that McCain wanted Joseph Lieberman as his running mate but got Sarah Palin by mistake? Far Left Side happens to be a very liberal (well, “Far Left Side,” duh) and a rabidly anti-McCain strip, but that still doesn’t explain this comic.
Barack Obama, referring to John McCain: “And now he tells us that he’s the one who’s gonna’ to take on the old boys network. The old boys network? In the McCain campaign that’s called a staff meeting.”
Gotta love this. This guy made up a handful of Sarah Palin quotes. Says they’re made up. Lists them under the headline “Fake Governor Sarah Palin Quotes“… yet they’ve been forwarded as genuine quotes to e-mail boxes across the country, attributed to such sources as MSNBC.
It’s not often that we can pinpoint exactly where these things originate.
Rob Eboch III: So I don’t know if this qualifies since it’s not a comic, but I couldn’t help but submit a commercial I just saw for ChadWatch. It’s the new Maytag repairman commercial. Dozens of people are crowded impatiently around a voting machine complaining about being delayed when the Maytag repairman comes out with a stack of papers in his hand. He states that he just fixed the machine and hands the papers to an employee at the voting center. The employee looks down and sees a bunch of partially punched ballots and yells “oh no, not again!”
