Meeting Noam

A Socialist Responds

The Nation is running a series of respones to the economic crises by self identified Socialists. Here's a small exerpt from one today, responding to the current meme that "we are all socialists now":

"Besides, it wasn't supposed to happen this way. There was supposed to be a revolution, remember? The socialist idea, prediction, faith or whatever was that capitalism would fall when people got tired of trying to live on the crumbs that fall from the chins of the rich and rose up in some fashion--preferably inclusively, democratically and nonviolently--and seized the wealth for themselves. Such a seizure would have looked nothing like "nationalization" as currently discussed, in which public wealth flows into the private sector with little or no change in the elites that control it or in the way the control is exercised. Our expectation as socialists was that the huge amount of organizing required for revolutionary change would create an infrastructure for governance, built out of--among other puzzle pieces--unions, community organizations, advocacy groups and new organizations of the unemployed and nouveau poor."

Make the Best of It

-Bad Religion, "New America"

"Weve got to start to build
Progress and implement
For when we take our fill
And never pay the price
We only build ourselves
A fleeting, false paradise"

A reader writes to Andrew Sullivan:

"I’m a public school teacher and a mom. My husband’s small repair business is closing and our roof is leaking. Because we can’t afford new clothes or toys for our preschooler, we’re getting together with neighbors and hosting a swap meet. Everyone’s bringing old (but wearable) toys, books, and clothes, and without exchanging a single penny, we’ll all be pouring out our bags of stuff and “shopping.” With a coffee pot running and our kids running around, it’ll be one way to celebrate being poor together."

Unemployment Blues

-Mike Anderson, "Unemployment Blues" Real Country

This blog took the past few days off for travel and laziness-related reasons. Travel? Oh yes, travel. Headlining in Buffalo and Toronto was really fun. The crowds were great at both places, and doing 45 minutes onstage was challenging, but not as difficult as imagined.

But now we're back, and we've got some horrible horrible news for you, the reader who was refreshing this website furiously for the past several days, screaming, "where is my under-analyzed news! I want some shoe-horned-in jokes!" Sorry to keep you waiting, lunatics. And the jokes are not shoe-horned in, they are crafted and recrafted to fit perfectly both in tone and structure with the piece at large, like a fart ballooning the seat of a man or woman's slacks. Seamless.

So, yeah, here's today's horrible, horrible news, thanks to the heroic and inspiring work of the Planet Money team over at NPR. They write:

A quick outtake from our podcast interview with economist Howard Rosen:

"Today we learned that there are 12.5 million people who are unemployed, and we have another 8.6 million people who are working part-time because they cannot find full-time jobs. Now, you're talking about 20 million people in this country who are either unemployed or underemployed. I don't want to freak out people, but the unemployed number, we start talking about 15, 16 percent."

Rosen notes that the government typically revises unemployment figures. For now, the broadest measure of unemployment stands at 14.8 percent.

Haha, yay, no one has any fucking jobs or disposable income, great, so long headlining work! because no one can even put gas in their car, even though it costs about as much as the price of bottled water.

[The link above is to a website called "Gas Buddy," which is also what we call our roommate Elliot. The specific map is called the "gas temperature map," which is objectively speaking the funniest map name ever. "Today's gas temperature is a sweltering 98.7 degrees..."]

Here is Andrew Leonard's take on the unemployment numbers for the past three months:

"That's nearly two million jobs lost in just three months. One could, I suppose, look for a glimmer of hope in the fact that the 651,000 jobs lost in February is lower than the revised number of jobs lost in December and January. But if these February numbers suffer a similar revision when March's figures come along, we could be looking at over 700,000 jobs lost in February, the shortest month of the year."

Literally, the only good news anyone (us) can find is that spring is around the corner, which means low-cut shirts and cleavage, unless women had to sell all their spring-wear to survive the brutal winter, in which case this blog declares: GREAT DEPRESSION II HAS ARRIVED!

Foggo Gets Jail-o

The CIA is a criminal organization that operates out of a barn in Virginia, and has failed at pretty much everything it has ever tried to do. That it's ranks are overflowing with violent thugs is widely known and celebrated both in Liberal Hollywood and in Real America, but today one of their many goons is facing the electric-testicle shock of justice.

Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, a man so hilariously surnamed that a nickname seems entirely superfluous, was sentenced to 37 months in prison today on bribery and fraud charges. He is the highest ranking CIA bag to be convicted of a felony, though he is without question NOT the highest ranking CIA bag who deserves to be thrown in jail.

Let's hear the sexy spy details, you're thinking, you pervert. Ok, then, here we go. The New York Times reports,

"[that] the exact conduct for which Foggo pleaded guilty is still somewhat murky.

Prosecutors say the fraud encompassed a years-long scheme in which Foggo's old friend, contractor Brent Wilkes, showered Foggo with tens of thousands of dollars worth of gifts and luxury vacations in exchange for steering multimillion-dollar contracts in Wilkes' direction.

They also say the fraud includes Foggo's efforts to get his mistress hired by the CIA at a six-figure salary for a job for which she was unqualified."

He probably shouldn't have been doing that, but considering the crimes of the CIA for the past 8 years this seems a little like an Al Capone Tax Evasion case.

Iceland Now Womanland, Still Icy

What many consider to be our greatest fear has finally come to pass: Women are running a country. In some sort of Alice In Wonderland-esque nightmare scenario, women have seized power in Iceland, and they have enslaved all the gentle-menfolk. The Guardian has a firsthand account of this hell, that chillingly states:

"...for a generation of fortysomething women, the havoc is translating into an opportunity to step into the positions vacated by the men blamed for the crisis, and to play a leading role in creating a more balanced economy, which, they argue, should incorporate overtly feminine values."

AAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!LOL!!!!1111! Run for the hills! These women will kill us all! Gasp in horror as they torture their captive men with food not fit for a rush-week prank:

"On Bondadagur, or Husband's Day, the menfolk of Iceland are spoiled by their wives and girlfriends, who serve them with traditional delicacies such as ram's testicles and sheep's head jelly, a recipe for which is handily included in the latest online edition of Iceland Review, alongside the latest bulletins on the economic meltdown."

Quick! We must save the innocent men of Iceland before these power-crazed women cut off their testicles and feed them back to them for dinner, creating some sort of testicle-feedback loop, probably, that would build and build until the world economy comes crashing down under the weight of too many testicles.

"This Person You Call President Obama"

Wowowowow. The first video we tried to post today didn't work, because Fox News knows that blogspot is full of Keynesians and hates all of us, but we're trying again with a new video. Here is Alan Keyes trying his best to get himself forcibly committed to a mental hospital by insanely repeating "this is insane" dozens of times in 4 minutes of insanity.[via Wonkette]

"Snark" Gets Dismantled

Walter Kirn has a fantastic, and hilarious, review of David Denby's new idiotic book Snark over at the New York Times' Sunday Book Review. We recommend it highly. Here's just one of the great turns of phrase:

"[Denby] wants to correct and restrain, using scholarship and logic, perhaps the keenest, most reflexive, prehistoric and anarchic of simple human pleasures, short of eating or achieving orgasm. The act of laughter, this would be."

Wonkette has already leveled their own correct, and hilarious, criticisms at Denby. One of those posts can be found here, and contains this lovely passage:

"First he references one of your male associate editor’s posts about Chelsea Clinton and suggests that the “young women” who wrote it must have some catty jealousy issues, with their vaginas. Then he writes that we made fun of Ted Kennedy on the day of his brain tumor surgery, citing a post about something else entirely that was written seven months before Kennedy even got cancer. Damn those bloggers, always trying to ruin other peoples’ reputations with false information!"

The moral of this post is that David Denby is a big idiot who wanted to work at SPY but never got to and now he dresses up in leather and asks to be spanked like a bad boy. Or rather, that's what we heard from some blogger in a David Denby mask.

UPDATE: Even Andrew Sullivan hates David Denby, and Sullivan, depending on the day, will agree with anyone.

M CHammer's Tweets Are a Joy

It takes a lot to put a smile on this blog's face, and no one does that more consistently lately than former dance-sensation M CHammer. We follow him on twitter, because that's just how the world is now for some reason. Here is a tweet of M CHammer's from this morning:

Top 5 things to do today : 1. Gym 2. production meetings . 3.Dancejam 4. rehearsals. 5. Be grateful and appreciative to be among the living

That's right, people, DANCEJAM! What is that!? It's probably so much fun! We bet that M CHammer says, "dancejam" a lot during his dancejam. Also, you're goddamn right that "dancejam" is one word. M CHammer don't want to see no hyphens dorkin' up his dancejam time.

Also, is it just us, or does number 5, "Be grateful and appreciative to be among the living," imply that M CHammer could potentially be among the Undead? Isn't there a strong suggestion of the existence of zombies inherent in the phrase, "among the living?"

Guys...we just figured out what M CHammer's 6th thing to do today is: ZOMBIEDANCEJAM! Yeah, yeah, one fucking word. Zombiedancejam.

Glenn Beck Hoping for Civil War II

Greenwald, on Sunday:

"...nothing can match -- for pure, illustrative derangement -- the discussion below from Glenn Beck's new Fox show this week, in which he and an array of ex-military and CIA guests ponder (and plot and plan) "war games" for the coming Civil War against Obama-led tyranny. It really has to be seen to be believed."

There is no better way of describing the clip presented below than "pure, illustrative derangement." The a-historical lunacy on display here is really quite shocking in scope. Glenn Beck's hysterical gasping belongs on public access, not a major network, even if it is Fox News.

You're gonna want to have a stiff drink at the ready for this segment. It's very uncomfortable.

Goddammit, we always forget here at ComedyandPolitics that at blogspot you can't embed flash videos. God bless it. Here's a link to the thing. Watch the clip out of morbid curiosity.

Michael Steele Really Hitting His G-Stride

Michael Steele is the head of the Republican National Committee and a total loonball. It doesn't take a genius to realize that the Republican party needs a new image, but it DOES take a genius to suggest that that image should be ghetto-fabulous. The Washington Times (a dubious news outlet to be sure, but we'll go with them here) article begins:

"Newly elected Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele plans an “off the hook” public relations offensive to attract younger voters, especially blacks and Hispanics, by applying the party's principles to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings."

Steele, who is black, and also apparently insane, clearly has some sort of political death wish. There is no other explanation for why you would think that the party of the racist, white, exclusionary South suddenly wants an injection of the hood in it. But hey, if you're gonna go down, may as well go down in sort of real life version of a Method Man vehicle. Also, what the hell does "urban-suburban hip-hop settings" mean? That's a pretty sweeping phrase. What isn't included in "urban-suburban"? Farm rap?

Steele mystifyingly closed by saying (for real):

“we need to uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets.”

Welcome to a new age of openness and sensitivity. [via Wonkette]

Jim Carrey's Only Good Dramatic Performance to Become Reality

This blog laid low on Valentine's Day, keeping posting to a literal minimum of zero posts. Now that a few days have gone by, two or three or whatever it's been, let's do a quick recap.

Here is a rejected Onion headline of ours that we didn't write specifically for V-Day, but works:

Area Couple Marries After Not Finding Reason to Break Up

Take that, scared institution. Also, the This American Life this week was fantastic.

Returning to the title of this blog, let's discuss this story, [via Balk] whose headline reads:

Pill to erase bad memories: Ethical furore over drugs 'that threaten human identity'

If it feels reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine to you, then you're not alone. The article prominently features a screen-shot from the film, and gives a brief summary of the story, leading the casual idiot-reader to assume that the science fiction of that movie has now become the science fiction of reality. Guys, the future is here!

No, it's not. In fact, this whole experiment is basically meaningless speculation at this point. To quickly and poorly summarize the study, a bunch of quack docs showed a bunch of morons with nothing better to do pictures of spiders and then gave them electro-shock. The morons associated these two events and thought, "spiders: bad," and got scared whenever they saw pictures of spiders and cried like women. Then half of the morons were given a pill, and the next time they saw spiders they were brave, like women who decide they're not going to be victims of spiders anymore!

To quote a SCIENTIST who is not impressed by this study in the least:

'All they've shown so far is that the increased ability to startle someone if they are feeling a bit anxious is reduced,' he said.

The drug may also do bad things. Some other scientist who is also not impressed says,

"that the unintended consequences could include the eradication of positive memories."

Boo. BUT! Then there's some good news too [emphasis added]:

It might also help patients overcome phobias, obsessions, eating disorders and even sexual hang-ups.

So, no more positive or negative memories, but no sexual hangups. HMMMMMMM. I think this drug exists, and it's called oh I DON'T KNOW WAIT YES I DO IT'S CALLED ALCOHOL! Until this pill comes out for general consumption sometime after the great Fall of America in 2013 you guys can just erase your memories the old-fashioned way: drunken electro-sex. Happy Valentine's Day e'erybody.

More Doppelgangers

In the last two days, I (dropping the ed. "we" again briefly) have been told that I look like two people that I've never been compared to before. Neither one of these comparisons live up to the "fat dude in a John Knefel costume" post from a few weeks ago, but they are worth passing along nonetheless. It's a Friday afternoon, and the growing concensus on the left that the stimulus package is going to be a miserable failure has left me looking for escape from politics for an afternoon.

On Wednesday, I was told that I bear a resemblance to Ezra Cornell, founder of Cornell University. I don't see it, but there you go.

Here's me.


And here's a statue.


And Noah helpfully informed me that I look like Jimmy Carter did in high school.


So there you go.

Legitimacy of Twitter Now Undeniable

MC Hammer has a twitter account. It has to be seen to be believed. Wisdom comes in 140 character bursts like God himself (yes, HIMself) was tweeting. Coincidentally, M Chammer has been talking to god recently, and he wants you to read about it. Here's a good one:

Ask God to show you your enemies. And be prepared to face some harsh truths and people you never ever suspected. It's know turning back.
about 4 hours ago from web

It is, without question, know turning back. Typo, or prophet? You no.

Here's a question for you. Could God tweet something so inane that even God himself couldn't be interested in it? Hmmmmm?

Other headline options for this post include:
Please Hammer Don't Tweet 'Em
Too Legit to Tweet (Not)
Can't Tweet This
and
MC Hammer's Twitter Account Looks a Lot Like Rick James' Twitter Account.

Here is a Pepsi Commercial from 1991 featuring M Chammer. Someone replaces his Pepsi with a Coke, and he becomes horrifyingly white. The lesson here is keep Coke away from Barack Obama.

One of the Perks

This blog is not above toilet humor, sex jokes, dick jokes, pussy jokes, "stimulus" jokes, or toilet jokes about poop. It is in that spirit that we present the following picture unapologetically.



We've been informed that Joe Biden is out of frame in Furry costume. Also, the photographer in the blue shirt really has the better angle.

Google Gets It Right

This Google screen shot proves what we've been saying all along. It's sort of hard to read, but the last one listed is "i am extremely terrified of chinese people." Via Gawker/Gizmodo

One Less Competitor

Ed Murray, illustrious co-producer of Comedy Free Williamsburg, is now in Seattle. He's got a great post about it here. Million-dollar smile on that kid.

As Economists Lose Jobs, Shouldn't This Blog Be Happy?

Strange is the day when we're posting a story about lousy economists losing their jobs and we're not happy about it. We'll return to that in a minute, but first, a confession. Prior to the Great Recession, we sort of always assumed that anyone who studied economics was kind of a bag who just wanted to get rich and had no real problem with structural class inequalities. They just wanted to understand the process through which wealth gets centralized (late-capitalism), and help it along, skimming a lil bit for themselves along the way. How wrong we were! Ironically, we are the bags.

There are plenty of great economists out there. Paul Krugman at the NY Times is the obvious favorite pick of a villainous lefty blog like this one. As Pareene over at Gawker wrote the other day, Krugman's righteous anger was honed during the Bush years, and is now aimed at the potential short-comings of the Obama administration and the obstructionist congressional Republicans. He has become, or maybe he's always been, the de facto spokesperson for liberals when it comes to economic issues.

We're fans of Andrew Leonard, over at Salon, and Tyler and Alex at Marginal Revolution, even though MR is goddamn impossible to understand half the time. They'll run lighter stories, like this one about saying "I love you," (hell of a coincidence in that one, too) that deal with everyday matters through an economics lens. Calculated Risk is a good one to check out when something huge happens. Planet Money on NPR has a wonderful, and jargon-free, podcast and blog.

Why mention all this shit? To return to the beginning of this post, job prospects for economists are looking kind of weak. Owen, at Valleywag, writes:

"The Wall Street Journal reports that the job market for practitioners of the dismal science is dreadful. Columbia University isn't hiring anyone this year. Three other colleges have stopped looking for economics professors. Harvard's hiring one professor, rather than two or three.

And academia is one of the few job options left, with investment banks having disappeared altogether."

We certainly aren't mourning the downfall of inherently irresponsible investment banks. Those guys can all go fuck themselves chapped (gftc) for all we care. Most ended up far better than they had any right to, and those who didn't got what was coming to them.

But there is something ironic about having your eyes opened to the wide spectrum of thought in the econ world right as it is facing a crisis of it's own. The world will be better off if a majority of undergrads decide to dedicate their life to public policy or non-profit work as opposed to studying economics, without question. Some one's gotta do that, though, and if Econ 101 was only taught by one professor, Krugman might not have become the superman he is now.

Here he is in action, opposite Bill O'Reilly, laying down the pipe.

Keith and the Girl

For anyone interested, we'll be on Keith and the Girl tonight at 6:30 talking about comedy, probably, and politics, also probably. You can listen live or download the podcast from their website later tonight.

Also, posting has been light lately because another writing project has been taking up a lot of time. We'll be posting links to in the next few days, knock on wood.

Angry Leftists Outrageously Demand Follow-through on Promises

Few things make this blog more angry than shrill leftists trying hold Barack Obama accountable to the promises he's made. If they wanted actual change, why didn't they advocate violent revolution? It just makes sense.

We here at ComedyandPolitics have such a blog-crush on Glenn Greewald that it's almost embarrassing. The only thing saving us from falling to fanblog status is that basically everyone else in the world (worth listening to) feels the same way we do. His piece today is a must-read, and another sad vindication of the cranks who thought that CHANGE MIGHT NOT BE COMING TO WASHINGTON.

The Obama administration today maintained Bush's policy on invoking the "states secrets" privilege as a way of keeping torture victims from bringing charges against the state in a federal court. Greenwald writes:

"What makes this particularly appalling and inexcusable is that Senate Democrats had long vehemently opposed the use of the "state secrets" privilege in exactly the way that the Bush administration used it in this case, even sponsoring legislation to limits its use and scope. Yet here is Obama, the very first chance he gets, invoking exactly this doctrine in its most expansive and abusive form to prevent torture victims even from having their day in court, on the ground that national security will be jeopardized if courts examine the Bush administration's rendition and torture programs -- even though (a) the rendition and torture programs have been written about extensively in the public record; (b) numerous other countries have investigated exactly these allegations; and (c) other countries have provided judicial forums in which these same victims could obtain relief."

Bmaz, over at FireDogLake, concludes:

In fairness, the Obama DOJ may view this as protecting information on rendition flights, not details of torture; however, the result is the same, and just as heinous. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.