Buying, Selling, Living in Houses Totally 2007

Here's some good Christmas cheer for all of you jobless bean-eaters. According to the NY Times, sales of new and existing homes dropped at a greater rate than expected in November, and those homes that were sold were bought with pocket change and a poem scribbled on a cocktail napkin. From the report:

"Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, said that 45 percent of all home sales were so-called “distressed sales,” meaning that the sellers faced foreclosure, or they were forced to sell their home for less than the value of the mortgage.

The numbers released Tuesday show that the housing market, which is at the center of America’s financial crisis, is displaying no signs of a quick recovery.

“They’re about as god-awful as they can get,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at ITG. “This is pretty breathtaking stuff.”"

If you do have a house right now, the only smart thing to do is to burn it down for warmth. This will also cut down on your heating bill, which you can't pay anyway because you're burning your money too. As the prophetic Talking Heads sang so long ago:

"Hold tight wait till the party's over
Hold tight were in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house"

Time Off

Posting here at ComedyandPolitics will be irregular until Jan. 5th, at which point we will resume as normal. Until then, please enjoy this clip of Orson Welles trying to get through his lines in a commercial and failing miserably.

It's a Wonderful Life

This was really the only possibility for Sunday Afternoon Classics here at ComedyandPolitics. It's a Wonderful Life is one of the greatest American movies of all time, and one of the few that gets better every time you watch it. It's also one of the most misunderstood movies in our culture.

Frank Capra's ode to disappointment is often thought of as a sentimental movie, when really nothing could be further from the truth. Movie Guy extraordinaire and friend of the blog Ben Sachs once told us that Jonathon Rosenbaum, the movie reviewer for the Chicago Reader, wrote that It's a Wonderful Life argues that only divine intervention can save the Idealist from himself, which is about as grim as it gets.

This scene below is amazing. The tension simmers until George (Jimmy Stewart) explodes in frustration directed at, but not towards, Mary (Donna Reed). He delivers his monologue through clenched teeth until he finally says, almost begging, "I want to do what I want to do." It's heart-wrenching. Enjoy.

Reserve Your Tickets Now

This is pretty cool. We're going to be doing stand up comedy with Mike Drucker and maybe a few other people at the 2009 American Atheists Convention. We're listed as speakers! Richard Dawkins, here we come.

The Turd in the Punchbowl That Keeps on Giving

Here is the clip of the Minnesota Review Board talking about whether or not to include the Lizard People ballot. It is 9 minutes long, but it feels like it lasts for days. The board is debating whether or not the ballot is valid, based on whether or not "lizard people" could be a real person, which, if you think it is, you are retarded. Sorry, we never use that word, but...seriously. One of these buffoons brings up Moon Zappa as an example of a name you wouldn't think would be real but is, to prove nothing. The best part is this exchange:

"What did we do when someone wrote in 'Jesse Ventura'"
"Well...[dumbfounded silence] he's a real person."

The only way to get through this is for you monsters to make a drinking game out of it, so every time someone says Lizard People, take a shot of turpentine because our country is over. This will be our last post on Lizard People. [via Wonkette]

Scary Graph

The only thing the Mainstream Media is actually good at is fear-mongering. They are second-to-none when it comes to making wildly irresponsible assertions about what will kill you either immediately or at some scary, unknown but inevitable, time in the future.

Well, this blog is dying to be legitimized by Serious Journalists like epic-ly cockblocked Luke Russert (google his name; "cockblocked" is one of the suggestions), so we're going to do a bit of the Chicken Little routine ourselves. Here is a scary graph that we can neither contextualize nor analyze--but, guys, let's just say things don't look good:


HOLY FUCK! SWEET SHIT ALMIGHTY! GUYS! FUCK! OUR DEBT WILL EXPLODE! WE'RE ALL FUCKED!

What you just read was a tool that Journalists call "exaggeration for effect." Judy Miller, who is a bag, is especially well known for it, and when she did it it was even funnier.

So what does this graph mean? Well, we saw a link to it on Marginal Revolution, and those guys get to talk to Paul Krugman all the time, so it seems unlikely they'd pass along something that was pure horseshit. MR picked it up from Ezra Klein, who we aren't especially familiar with. He quotes CBPP, the firm responsible for the scary graph, and they write:

"If we continue current policies," they conclude, "the federal debt will skyrocket from a projected 46 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) at the end of fiscal year 2009 to 279 percent of GDP in 2050. That would be more than two and a half times the existing record (which was set when the debt reached 110 percent of GDP at the end of World War II) and would threaten serious harm to the economy."

What that means to us is that 300% of the population is going to rot in debtors prison like in the good old Russian days, where your only source of amusement will be cockblocking Luke Russert.

War Criminals Should Be Prosecuted for War Crimes, Claims Dept. of Obvious Things

Two days ago the NY Times published an editorial calling for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate the highest levels of the White House and the Pentagon under the Bush Administration. His or her job would be to determine if war crimes were committed and if any charges should be brought against senior officials.

If you're reading this blog, you're probably jobless, high, and somewhere between Socialist and Anarchist on the political spectrum, so this op/ed probably won't tell you anything you bomb-throwers don't already know. The piece is still worth reading though, if only to take satisfaction in the fact that the paper of record is calling for an investigation of the President and his top advisers concerning torture and war crimes. It begins thusly:

"Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons."

As usual, Glenn Greenwald has a devestating analysis of why pursuing these investigations is so important, and why mainstream calls for a Special Prosecutor should be cheered on loudly. You Anarcho-Syndicalists would probably rather just occupy some factories (that would be fun), but let's take baby steps guys.

Sadly, the only certainty that rivals the Bush Administration's guilt is the unlikeliness that they will be held accountable. The Times admits this in their editorial near the end:

"Given his other problems — and how far he has moved from the powerful stands he took on these issues early in the campaign — we do not hold out real hope that Barack Obama, as president, will take such a politically fraught step.
...
We expect Mr. Obama to keep the promise he made over and over in the campaign — to cheering crowds at campaign rallies and in other places, including our office in New York. He said one of his first acts as president would be to order a review of all of Mr. Bush’s executive orders and reverse those that eroded civil liberties and the rule of law.

That job will fall to Eric Holder, a veteran prosecutor who has been chosen as attorney general, and Gregory Craig, a lawyer with extensive national security experience who has been selected as Mr. Obama’s White House counsel.

A good place for them to start would be to reverse Mr. Bush’s disastrous order of Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the United States was no longer legally committed to comply with the Geneva Conventions."

Yes, that would be a great place to start. It would also be great not to start your presidency with a bag like Rick Warren giving the invocation at the Serious Inauguration for Adults. This blog has no hope whatsoever that any of the highest government officials will be held accountable for their criminal actions in court, but limited public outcry must be better than nothing. Right?! Right?








That said, the piece is a good review and recap of attrocities you're familiar with,

Douchebags Begone

Gawker is suggesting a formal retirement of the word douchebag, and we here at ComedyandPolitics agree that that's a good idea. We are essentially a poor man's Gawker/Wonkette anyway (very poor man's), so why not jump on this bandwagon. Do yourself a favor and read the comment section in the above link. It is very funny.

As far as our recommendations go for what should replace it, we're unsure. Ideally, a new word would appear organically and just fit. Trying to shoehorn a new phrase into your everyday vocabulary is quite annoying, and in general that's something only a you-know-what would do. That said, expect to see the following words around here a bit more:

Dipshit (or Dip Shit) (Nope, nevermind. As 2 words that is disgusting. One word only.)- An oldie but a goodie that was suggested to us as a replacement for dbag some time ago. We like it, and at Comedy Free Williamsburg we once said, "You heard it here first, dipshit is the new douchebag."

Assclown- Makes an appearance in a joke of ours, so it has a special place in this blog's heart.

Asshat- The impossibility alone renders this word combination hilarious.

Bag- Removing the douche, or "d," from the phrase in question and leaving only "bag" might create a new word worth using, eg, "That guy standing in line for that club looks like a bag." Or, "Put down that Axe body spray, you smell like a bag." (Yes, everyone loves that smell but you cannot deny that it is the smell of a bag.) One thing that "bag" has going for it is its vagueness. Is that ex-banker a bag of shit? A bag of assholes? It also conjures up memories of the fantastic Louis CK bit about a guy telling him to, "suck a bag of dicks." We would google that bit and link to it, but, you know....HR policies. That's a hard google search to explain.

Dick- Simple can be more than sufficient. "That personal trainer who keeps buying drinks for my girlfriend is a fucking dick." Simple, to the point, almost classy, even.

Please leave suggestions in comments, and we'll work them into every single post about Rick Warren that we ever write. That guy is a total bag.

Minnesota Recount Refuses to Get Less Funny

Lots of big news coming out of Minnesota today. Nate Silver, the only man in your life other than your father you should ever trust, has been following some of the recount news over at his website FiveThirtyEight, and it just keeps getting better.

You all remember the Lizard People, but do you want to know who else has made an appearance?


That's right suckers, BRETT FARVE! He is probably a lizard person.

Al Franken and Norm Coleman are LITERALLY fighting for every single vote, so their lawyers (who are adults) have to stand in front of a canvassing board (which is comprised of adults) and argue whether or not to count the ballot of a jackass who voted for both Norm Coleman and Jet's quarterback Brett Farve. The judge decided to count that ballot for Coleman, but the real loser was Democracy, and Brett Farve. Also, "Democracy and Brett Farve" sounds like the greatest college course ever.

Now for the reason we're all here, the vote for lizard people. That ballot came before the board today, and they decided to reverse their decision to count it for Franken, which made him cry scaly lizard tears (he's one of them too).

You are probably thinking to yourself, "well, that was fun, but all the happy news is over now." Well, you're wrong and maybe you should just calm down a little and not get so ahead of yourself.

The last funny ballot news is that someone wrote "-stin" at the end of Al Franken's name, thereby attempting to re-christen him "Al Frankenstein," which is awesome. Sadly, they failed, and re-christened him "Al Frankenstin," which is stupid. That vote was counted for Mr. Frankenstein (Al Franken), which gives us an idea. If you can "write in" any goofballery you want after a candidate's name, the prospects are limitless. It would have made voting for John Kerry way easier if we could've written "sucks" after his name. [via Wonkette]

Year of Mistakes

Regret the Error has a wonderful post today (via Sullivan) running through some of the best corrections from newspapers and magazines from 2008. Here is a choice pick from Slate:

"In the June 20 “Culturebox,” Jonah Weiner stated that Lil Wayne was the first hip-hop artist to fantasize about eating his competition. Other rappers have contemplated consuming their rivals."

That's true. In fact, this blog's debut hip hop album, "Turd in a Punchbowl," contained a line about "consuming our rivals":

"Y'all other blogs be hatin' but we say "just go"
'cause we'll drink your blood 'cause we're lizard people"

To make it work you have to say "people" more like "pee-poe." So...it's not perfect, but we did it. Here's another good correction from something called The Age (no link provided, find it yourself):

AN ARTICLE in last week’s Sunday Age, “Born to be, um, mild — and possibly damp”, contained views about biker groups that were inserted in the editing process.
As well, the survey of motorcyclists who rode for about three hours every weekend found that many had problems emptying their bladders.
The story stated that bike riders could be “bedwetters”. The error was made during editing.

And from the Guardian:

We said that, in the American TV drama 24, Jack Bauer, the counter-terrorism agent, resorted to electrocution to extract information. You cannot extract information from someone who has been electrocuted because they are dead (Questioning, the Jack Bauer way, page 1, April 19).

This is the only good "year in review" type thing ever. It makes us very happy, especially because we never make mistakeses. (Get it!?)

Christmas Break to Last Forever Maybe

Here is some bad news for you to read and be sad about, because that's why you come to this weblog. The Washington Post is reporting:

"Struggling U.S. automakers are launching a round of severe cutbacks as they wait for a government rescue, with Chrysler saying yesterday it will idle all 30 of its U.S. factories for one month."

This is good news for lazy poor people whose kids will never go to college, because now they can get into scarcity wars with GM employees who have been laid off also. These wars will be a great source of stories for Ira Glass to sooth us with while we drink hot tap water because tea is a thing of the past.

Obama to Usher in New Era of Hope, Except for Gays, Environmentalists

Barack Obama is an Adult who will Govern From the Center, like a Serious Person. That's why he is having Pastor Rick Warren, an anti-gay, anti-women's rights monster speak at his inauguration. He is very serious about healing our national wounds by bringing in close-minded zealots to, according to the Christian Broadcasting Network, "signal to religious conservatives that he’s willing to bring in both sides to the faith discussion in this country." You know, "both sides" of the "faith discussion," wherein one side recognizes universal, fundamental human rights and one doesn't.

So Rick Warren will give the invocation at the Serious inauguration, because it's better to legitimize these people than to marginalize them.

Also, environmentalists are no fans of Ken Salazar, Obama's pick for Sec. of the Interior. And here's something about how former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who will be the Sec. of Agriculture, sucks too.

Finally, everyone hates Barack Obama and now it's ok to criticize the government.

MTA Announces "F U Commuters" Budget Plan

The MTA is even more broke than you are, unless you owe your creditors $1.2 billion. This is nothing but bad news, and will result in 1 train a morning ferrying 10 million unemployeed bums from Brooklyn to Manhattan, so if you want in get there early. Also, having the pleasure of being crushed by an angry mob like a common Walmart stock-person will cost you $1 million. Today, the NY Times is reporting that:

If the authority does not receive new sources of revenue, it seems likely that the base subway fare could rise to at least $2.50, from $2, starting in June. A monthly unlimited-ride MetroCard could rise to more than $100, from $81.

Ah, hell!

Zadie Smith Writes About Comedy

Thoughtful discussions of comedy are a rare pleasure, so we thought we'd pass this along. It's from a New Yorker article by Zadie Smith, author of the wonderful White Teeth, among other things. She writes about connection she and her father had through their favorite comedies, even at one point calling themselves "comedy snobs," and the piece as a whole has a decidedly morbid flavor. One especially dark passage:

"In birth, two people go into a room and three come out. In death, one person goes in and none come out. This is a cosmic joke told by Martin Amis. I like the metaphysical absurdity it draws out of the death event, the sense that death doesn’t happen at all—that it is, in fact, the opposite of a happening. There are philosophers who take this joke seriously. To their way of thinking, the only option in the face of death—in facing death’s absurd non-face—is to laugh. This is not the bold, humorless laugh of the triumphant atheist, who conquers what he calls death and his own fear of it. No: this is more unhinged. It comes from the powerless, despairing realization that death cannot be conquered, defied, contemplated, or even approached, because it’s not there; it’s only a word, signifying nothing. It’s a truly funny laugh, of the laughor-you’ll-cry variety. There is “plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us!” This is a cosmic joke told by Franz Kafka, a wisecrack projected into a void."

So good.

Federal Numbers Will Explain Why All American Money Is Gone

Every day here at ComedyandPoltics we write this sentence fragment at least once: "no one has any money anymore, so..." hoping that if we repeat it enough the problem will magically fix itself. This is the same reason Charlie Christ tells everyone he's not gay and married a woman. So, here we go.

No one has any money anymore, and although we all sort of know why (sub-prime bonanza!), maybe some numbers and pitchers will help us all understand what's happening. We saw these on this surprisingly good HuffPo article, and thought, "let's steal those."

This graph shows "nonfarm" (hi Iowa!) employment falling off a cliff:



And here is proof that all of you jobless cheapos aren't buying enough flags and BBQ sauce to stimulate our poor economy:



You're not buying, so factories aren't producing:



Combine these graphs with the fact that the first $350 billion that congress allocated for Hank Paulson to swim in is already almost completely gone, and that the federal interest rate is lower than ever before, and things look pretty bleak.

The good news? The cost of living in Salt Lake City is plummeting! Seriously guys, let's go! It'll be like SLC Punk. We can just go and chill out and then return to civilized (non-Mormon) society when this all blows over, which will never happen.

Like Acquaintances, NY Times Booze Blog Impossible to Enjoy if Sober

Here is some good news to start your morning. We wrote yesterday about the annoying and self-aggrandizing "look at me and my New York parties" post on the NY Times' booze blog, Proof, and we were not fans. Turns out no body else likes that blog either.

Today's Proof post is observations of three different "parties" that some guy went to, and is about as engaging as the discarded notebook of a Detroit food critic. Here is the write-up, in full, of one of these crazy New York nights out:

We’d just attended the New York City premier of our pal’s movie, “The Alphabet Killer” in lower Manhattan and hopped my girlfriend’s car to meet at a Mexican restaurant near my old Soho digs for grub and nostalgia. A perfect gang of geeks and nerds cum zeitgeist progenitors of N.Y.C. pop culture: two cartoonists, a novelist, a film editor/photographer, a screenwriter/director, a researcher for “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” a human resources director, an advertising executive,\ [sic] and a health clerk, congregated to wax poetic on post-apocalyptic ’80s movies. We toasted over a group love for “Night Train to Terror,” a truly awful, obscure horror film that only true blue, card-carrying film psychotronics adore.

The margarita was weak but the company was strong.

Well...aren't you all just fantastic. Like we wrote yesterday, it is completely unclear why this was published by the Times' website. Luckily for us, everyone in the comments section was equally unimpressed. What follows are just a few of the many unedited critiques:

-As a pro-bowl NYC drinker myself, this is a rather dull night out. ‘Zeitgeist Progenitors’? Methinks an amateur in the house.

-I have to agree with George, above. And let’s face it, you’re not really drinking if your out with your your “girl.” You’re just socializing.

-Really, why is this online? You weren’t even smoking; boring.

-Even here in Dhaka, Bangladesh, among the mudflats and stinking alleys, we do better that that. You can start before noon at the Raj era club with gin and tonics, to drive over to a lakeside house to guzzle Singapore beers, and end up late into the night and next morning on a rooftop party with whiskeys and vodka…

-Snore.
Back in my day, we would bar hop and intoxicate ourselves with anything at hand until we saw God.
Thankfully he would disappear in the morning.

That last one is especially awesome. We want to read about that guy's night out on the town. Dude sounds like he's got (or had) something interesting going on, unlike, remarkably, people who write for the NY Times.

We should probably just ignore Proof from now on, but it's so hard because it could be really fun/insightful/romantic/silly or any number of other adjectives that go hand in hand with booze, but so far, not so much. May we suggest for next time a stronger margarita?

Africa

"I know my cough sounds awful
Some nights it hurts a bit to breathe..."

That's not from the song we're posting right now, but it's been floating around our head for a while, and maybe that will get it out.

The song we ARE posting right now is Africa, by Toto. We've wanted to post this for a while, because it's awesome, but it was hard to find an excuse. Then today one landed in our lap. A friend who studied abroad in Africa (or maybe just someone with the same name) left a comment today on the Sexy Survey post. That's all we need. Excuse found!

This video is pretty stupid, but it's really funny, and you all love this song anyway so just shut up already if you don't like the video. It will put a smile on your face, which is more than anyone else has done for you today. Don't blink or you'll miss the Hulk.

What Happens When Dick Cheney Crosses His Legs Too Fast

("Press Sec.'s Face Now Metaphor for Bush Administration" was our first headline, but we just had to go and ruin everything with a blowjob joke, didn't we? Don't pretend that you didn't smile. Ok, to the story.)

Professional mediocre liar Dana Perino took a microphone to the face during that Austin Powers reenactment the other day, but it's hard to feel bad for her because she is an awful awful human being. Now, since she is a woman, she will surf the Internet all day to make herself feel better and if any men or women try to sleep with her she'll beat them bloody with a sharpened microphone.

Step It Up Gentlemen, Lesbians

CNN barely qualifies as a news channel, so their daily dose of irrelevant bullspit this morning is neither a surprise nor a disappointment. It seems like every few weeks someone or other trots out some new study about sex, or the Internet, or sex and the Internet, or sex with the Internet, or sex adjacent to the Internet. Here is the latest waste of everybody's time, making the absurd claim that women would choose Internet access instead of sex if they had to chose only one.



What that deceptive little bullet leaves out is that this is over a TWO WEEK PERIOD.

"Nearly half of the women questioned by Harris Interactive said they'd be willing to forgo sex for two weeks, rather than give up their Internet access, according to a study released Monday by Intel,"

Two weeks, come on. As George Costanza says in Seinfeld, "I'm like a sexual camel. I can do six weeks standing on my head." If you're gonna do the survey, make it interesting. Ask people to go a year without one or the other, and we bet you'd get a lot of people spending a lot less time on their computer. Hold on one second. We started writing this post and forming opinions before reading the entire study, and now, upon further examination, it appears that the surveyors did ask that very question. Haha, sorry guys. Here's the response!

Results as of Monday from CNET's related online poll showed that 30.5 percent of respondents would give up sex for one year, while 26.1 percent would do without Internet access for a year. Almost 40 percent of voters didn't want to sacrifice either.

Well duh on that last point. But wait wait wait. More people would go without sex than go without the Internet FOR A YEAR?! What in god's name is happening? Are these people having sex properly? Do they know that after sex you feel [Borat voice] "eh vaaary nahice," and after surfing the Internet all day you feel worthless and headachy? Don't get us wrong, ComedyandPolitics loves the Internet, but given the choice between posting four blogs a day in our downtime and [fill in the sexy blank] 4 times a day in our downtime, it's a pretty easy decision.

As the headline of this post implies, one other interpretation of the data is that these women aren't being satisfied by the men or women they are sleeping with. This blog doesn't mean to brag, but we think we can say for the first time ever that we are not part of the problem. Unless it's like a different Seinfeld episode where Jerry says, "you were like Meryl Streep in there!" in which case, keep it to yourself.

Go back and read this entire post in the Borat voice. It will be very fun and satisfying, unlike the bad sex you are apparently all having.

New York City Now City That Never Drinks, Claims Idiot

Sometimes you read and article and think to yourself, "why was that published?" Today is one of those times. Apparently there's an alcohol blog on the NY Times' website (who knew?) called Proof that's devoted to booze and booze-related activities. This seems ridiculous and unnecessary to us, but what do we know. Anyway, here is a confusing and wrong paragraph from a post of theirs today. The author describes a drunken couple making asses of themselves at a party, and then writes:

"That dinner party was almost 10 years ago; it was the last time I saw anyone visibly drunk at a New York party. The New York apartments and lofts which were once the scenes of old-fashioned drunken carnage — slurred speech, broken crockery, broken legs and arms, broken marriages and broken dreams — are now the scene of parties where both friendships and glassware survive intact. Everyone comes on time, behaves well, drinks a little wine, eats a few tiny canapés, and leaves on time. They all still drink, but no one gets drunk anymore. Neither do they smoke. What on earth has happened?"

What are you talking about? Granted, ComedyandPolitics is only invited to 2nd tier social events where the wine comes from boxes and the food also comes from boxes, but we've seen plenty of people drunk in New York. Hell, we've seen people drunk this morning and it's still early enough to get McDonald's breakfast.

This type of "look at me analyze my fancy parties, look at how I have my finger on the pulse, I'm so great, look at me write for the Times" [that was meant to be read as though the author thought she was just fantastic] is the most annoying type of "journalism" or "opinion" or whatever you would call it we can imagine. The original plan was to make this post a little longer and critiquey-er, but "society" talk is worthless, so screw it.