Archive for January, 2009
Welcome to BizarroWorld, because Ann Coulter's making an awful lot of sense these days
h/t AceofSpades for the clip above
In essence George Soros bought the Democratic party.
The media controls the Democrats, not the other way around.
Obama will either cater to the Left and lose in 2012, or stick it to the Left in his quest for a second term.
Much to our surprise, we’re actually listening to Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and agreeing with large parts of what they have to say.
Welcome to BizarroWorld!
Do you have your new flag yet? The boring old flag is just garbage starting January 20th.
It's racist not to write all over the flag and deface it for Obama.
Let the Golden Age of Obama begin!
UPDATE: Here’s another one of those flags defaced Obamafied. Someone is obviously printing and distributing these. The large and small versions match exactly, and the people who have them are in various cities. This one was shown on CNN.com, held by an Obamafile along his train route to Washington yesterday. Is the Obama transition team handing these out?
We've never seen anyone do this to a flag, for anyone.
Another Hedge Fund Con Man Disappears With Hundreds of Millions
Welcome to the ongoing hedge fund mess, already in progress.
Another Hedge Fund manager has disappeared, following New York’s Bernie Madoff and his pre-Christmas grinching of billions in investments. This time it’s Arthur Nadel, from Scoop Management Inc., which oversaw Valhalla Investment Partners in Florida. No one knows how much damage Nadel’s done, but it looks like $350 million has vanished into thin air today.
Hedge Funds are the biggest scam we’ve ever encountered in our adult lives.
There’s a woman we know in New York who’s our age, early 30s, who is truly utterly and completely clueless. She’s rarely held any job for any length of time, but worked at Morgan Stanley for a while in the late-90s, so believes she’s some sort of financial whiz because she made close to six figures there for a while (back when they were practically throwing money out the windows to anyone who wanted it). A nervous breakdown or two since then, she’s worked in nonprofit development for a while, at small community art galleries and the like. She’s managed maybe one or two people under her, tops, and is truly the most emotionally unstable person we’ve ever met. One bad relationship, and she’ll quit her job to move to New Zealand or Italy for months.
Last year, someone asked her to be the CFO of a new hedge fund he was starting up.
If you know this woman, you’d realize that’s as ridiculous as one of us here walking up to NASA and telling them we’re ready and able to be an astronaut. And not just any bozo sent to space, but captain of the Space Shuttle, ready for a mission to Mars. Despite having absolutely no idea how to fly a spacecraft, and no business being anywhere near one. But we’re qualified because we’ve seen Apollo 13 twelve times – and worked at Morgan Stanley years ago.
This woman just wanted the title “CFO”, and couldn’t see she’d have absolutely no idea what she was doing, or that it would be a disaster for everyone.
The only reason that train wreck didn’t happen was the guy trying to put the hedge fund together couldn’t pull enough cash into it to go forward (at least that’s what this woman told us, but who knows what the truth was). We know for a fact they tried soliciting investors and laid all the groundwork, but the hedge fund didn’t happen.
So, this bunch never got to con anybody out of their life savings.
But the most interesting thing about all of it is that we honestly believe the woman we know was being set up to be the patsy for the con. We told her as much, but she wouldn’t listen (so at least she’s consistent, since she never listens to reason in anything she does). It seemed like picking someone who didn’t know what she was doing to be CFO, someone who just wanted the job as an excuse to buy fancy suits and play a power role, was a setup for her to take the fall when the hedge fund went under. Her name was going to be scrawled over all the paperwork — and she’d be the last one standing in the office when the hedge fund manager beat a hasty retreat to Argentina.
It was something out of that 80s miniseries “Billionare Boys Club”, where a group of young California con men created the BBC investment club for the sons of wealthy Californians, where “BBC” stood for whatever anyone wanted it to be. “Bombay Bicycle Company”, “Billionaire Boys Club”, “Banana Berry Cantaloupe”, whatever. Since the company wasn’t real, it was deliberately nebulous enough for you to twist it into anything you personally wanted it to be, whatever your own imagination required. Whatever it took to suck you into the ponzi scheme.
That’s the same con deliberately worked into all the Hope! and Change! propaganda of the past year. No one knows what change is coming. No one can define what we are supposed to hope for, or expect. It is different for everyone, with no big picture realization that a major train wreck is coming. Everyone wants to play make-believe.
Just like that woman who thinks she can be a CFO, when she’d have trouble, with her limited professional experience, managing a small store or restaurant — but she hopes she can be in charge of hundreds of millions of dollars in investments. Because she wants that fancy title on her business cards, so she can slip them into a new Armani pinstripe and hit the bars in New York as someone IMPORTANT.
There are many, many more hedge funds that are going to collapse in the days ahead. If it wasn’t for this woman in New York we know personally, we’d have never been clued into the Billionaire Boys Club shennanigans going on, as hedge funds are rarely discussed in the news. If memory serves, this woman was still talking about being the CFO of a hedge fun back in June of 2008…so that means there could be hundreds if not thousands of hedge funds that were still forming up through the summer of last year.
That’s a lot of Bernie Madoffs and Arthur Nadels to come. And more hedge funds with unqualified CFOs at the helm, not even realizing their investment group’s going under, because they only took the job to go shopping anyway.
Hope!
Change!
Brace for impact!
Michelle Obama's Adventures in Chicago Pay to Play Politics
h/t Michelle Obama Watch for the graphic above, and the quoted brief history of Michelle Obama’s magical raise — right when her husband was elected to the Senate…and just before Obama used his position as Senator to secure massive earmarks for Michelle’s employer, The University of Chicago Hospital.
Since Michelle took a leave of absence from her job at the hospital to campaign for her husband full time last year, University of Chicago never filled her position or assigned her duties to others (said duties comprised of diverting poor black patients away from University of Chicago Hospital to lower-quality medical facilities so U Chicago would not be stuck with as many expensive indigent care cases. The Hospital wanted only patients with solid insurance coverage, so Michelle’s “community outreach” was focused on dissuading everyone out there without insurance cards from ending up on U Chicago Hospital’s rolls). We hear they have no intention of hiring another “VP of Community and External Affairs” now that Michelle is gone for good, a position that was created solely for Michelle, coinciding perfectly with the moment in time the hospital wanted to triple her salary, out of the blue, coincidentally a few months after her husband was elected to the Senate.
Imagine the luck!
Everyone keeps talking about what color they think Michelle will wear to the Inaugural Balls on Tuesday.
Will she wear Nancy Reagan red?
Will she wear regal purple?
Will she wear the trademarked (and creepy) Hope! Change! New Kind of Politics! Smurf-blood blue?
HillBuzz on Twitter
We still honestly don’t understand what Twitter is, but are trying to learn more about the latest and up-and-coming tech people are talking about. A friend of ours here in Boystown’s always talking about Tweet this and Twitter that, but we thought those were some kind of rave, or a winter induced skin condition.
Evidently, it’s all some kind of messenging thing, for those portable phones that are out there now (whatever will they think of next!).
We’re going to give this a go, but can’t promise we’ll understand it anymore than Anime.
Tom Hanks calls black people in California un-American!
Do not believe anything this man tells you
Tom Hanks has bravely come out and called black people un-American for openly supporting discrimination in California, since 85% of blacks overwhelmingly supported Proposition 8 this November (more than any other demographic group).
Today in History: January 17th
38 BC – Octavian marries Livia Drusilla
1377 – Pope Gregory XI moves Papacy back to Rome from Avignon
1524 – Beginning of Verrazanno’s voyage to find a passage to China (why didn’t he just start digging a big hole in his backyard?)
1595 – Henry IV of France declares war on Spain (oh no he didnt!)
1605 – First publication of Don Quixote (welcome to Sidetrack on a Monday night!)
1773 – Captain Cook and his crew become the first Europeans to sail below the Antarctic Circle (while Cap’n Crunch becomes the first imaginary person to battle the Soggies)
1893 – United States overthrows the legitimate government of Queen Liliuokalani of the Kingdom of Hawaii via clandestine instrument of the Citizen’s Committee of Public Safety, setting events in motion that lead to the birth of The Lightbringer in 1961.
1899 – United States claims Wake Island
1904 – Chekov’s Cherry Orchard premieres
1917 – United States buys Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million, despite greivous false advertising
1929 – Popeye the Sailor Man makes first appearance
1945 – Soviets capture decimated city of Warsaw
1946 – UN Security Council holds fist meeting
1949 – First US sitcom airs, “The Goldbergs”
1950 – Great Brinks Robbery, 11 thieves steal more than $2 million
1961 – President Eisenhower warns of dangerous military industrial complex in farewell address
1966 – Nuclear accident: B-52 bomber collides with Stratotanker over Spain, dropping 3 unarmed nukes near Palomares, and another into the ocean
1982 – “Cold Sunday” in US, when temperatures dropped to 100-year lows in numerous US cities. Curse you, anthropogenic Global Warming!
1985 – Britain begins retiring red telephone boxes in its myopic campaign against awesome.
1991 – Saddam Hussein fires 8 Scud missiles into Israel in unsuccessful attempt to widen the Gulf War through Israeli retaliation
2001 – President Clinton posthumously raises Meriwether Lewis’ rank from Lieutenant to Captain
Things HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy is celebrating today:
1973 – Ferdinand Marcos declared President for Life of Phillipines
1991 – Harald V becomes King of Norway, because his father was King before him, and, you know, he really, really wanted to be King, you know
2002 – Mount Nyragongon eruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo (the mother of all tantrums)
Two more Zombie Banks revealed – with hordes more to come
Two more Zombie Banks were revealed today: The National Bank of Commerce (Berkely, IL) and the Bank of Clark County (Vancouver, WA) — at a cost to taxpayers of $200 million (but as long as Obama and Congress have the Gold Card out, who cares, right?).
There are many, many more of these to come.
We first became aware of Zombie Banks in the summer, when several Obama supporting financial big wigs here in Chicago explained to us that Republicans were keeping many banks afloat until Bush left office, so they’d fail in the next administration, not in 2008.
Take the conspiracy part out of there (that Republicans in the financial sector were trying to help McCain by keeping banks from failing as long as possible), and you still have the fact that financial experts here in Chicago talked openly about many banks failing in 2009.
Large banks.
With a sizeable concentration of them in the South and Southwest, and particularly high numbers expected in Florida and California.
They’re “Zombie Banks” because they should be dead and buried, but are still propped up and rattling around. For whatever reason.
Something like 4,000 banks failed during the Great Depression. 1,000 or so banks failed during the crash of the 1980s. Some in the media claim our current economic predicament won’t be so dire because ONLY a small number of banks are failing now…but think about this: after more than a decade of consolidations, and unprecedented real estate speculating, doesn’t it seem like a smaller number of bank failures localized in areas where the real estate market has run amok the most could actually have a larger national impact than the larger number of failures in the 1980s?
The Zombie Banks of today, to us at least, seem more dangerous than the Savings & Loans of the past — they seem like they could take a lot more businesses and private citizens down with them.
Especially, since, when most people hear “real estate” they think “condos” or “sub-division” and not “skyscrapers” and “strip malls”. What happens to all the businesses officed in buildings that default on their mortgages and are foreclosed? What happens to all the stores in those commercial shopping centers?
What happens to all the people who work in those buildings?
What happens to the condos and subdivisions once those workers lose their jobs?
Do more banks fail after that new round of foreclosures?
And when those banks fail, do they trigger a new round of commercial failings, with a corresponding additional round of condo and subdivision trouble, with more bank failures after that?
Where does it end?
Are ALL banks “Zombie Banks” to some extent now?
It’s really, really scary stuff. Much more frightening than anyone’s wedding videos, that’s for damn sure.
Legoland Inauguration — brought to you by Gary the Otter!
Here’s a fun story we’re posting — and not just because the fuzzy-faced guy who plays with Legos all day is so darn cute that we’d kind of like to buy him a Happy Meal or a Blizzard or something, for being so good at tinkering around with ubiquitous plastic blocks in worlds of his own creation. Come on, admit it, you’d TOTALLY cut the crusts off his PB&J sandwiches too. Is it wrong to crush on a guy whose favorite things in the world are those tiny bricks that hurt like a m**********r when we step on them barefoot? ‘Cause if that’s wrong, then we don’t want to be right (but should probably start wearing shoes around Buzzquarters, in case Gary ever pops over).
Gary McIntire, the dashingly bearded 27 year old man-child (or, otter, if he ever finds himself in Boystown), is adding Inauguration figurines, made of Lego blocks, to Legoland California’s Washington, DC display “to teach children about government” (or scare them into doing their homework and listening to their parents, lest they be miniaturized into plastic Cubists too, or turned into salt in Biblical Lego displays).
In addition to being a complete otter hottie, Gary’s a “Master Builder”, because he works on these miniature projects at Legoland. That looks much, much better on a resume than a lateral move to Model United Nations Land, or CSPAN Land, since his equivalently prodigious verbal skills would make Gary a “Master Debater” (a position in which he’d sadly spend all his time in the dark by himself, with nothing but chafing and calluses to show for it, and his only opportunity for advancement would be a promotion down the line to “Cunning Linguist” someday, where he’d certainly boldly go where few of us in Boystown have ever gone before).
CNN’s videos are embarrassingly terrible, just like the network itself (they spelled Gary’s last name wrong (as McIntyre, with a “Y”, as in “why spell and fact check?”) in the piece they ran, which isn’t surprising since they DO willingly employ Campbell Brown, who can barely spell her own name correctly). So, here are some screengrabs from our favorite parts, including ample shots of nerdy, adorable, hotness in the form of Gary (who is a better hot nerd than Marshal, from NBC’s Chuck, or the other Marshal from ABC’s Alias, or Marshall Fields here in Chicago, which was a store and not a nerd, technically, but they did once sell Legos there, so it basically counts). The video itself is at the link above. The guy who makes all of this stuff is at Legoland California, where he’s equal parts adorable and genius — and, sadly, married.
Lego Obama
Lego George H. W. Bush and Barbara (George Sr. is asleep because "he's been to so many of these", according to Gary)
Lego Hillary and Bill Clinton
Gary McIntire being super cute playing with Legos before snack time
Gary McIntire, still playing with Legos, making a Lego Michelle. The first Legos in her adult life that she's ever been proud of.
Gary, being super cute in front of the Lego Capitol in his most favorite red shirt ('cause he likes fire trucks)
Lookit what Gary's building. All by himself!
Lego Cheneys, Bushes, Obamas, and Bidens on dais. Gary made it!
Hey lady, we saw him first. Leggo our Gary!
Lego John Roberts, Gary-style!
The most expensive Lego Inauguration ever produced
The unfinished Lego Oprah (there weren't enough bricks to make her butt)
Legoland Park officials claimed 5 million people would turn out for the most expensive spectacle the nation's ever seen --- considerably less showed up
Gary included a Lego Aretha Franklin too! We can tell because of her prominent, uh, microphone. Yah, that's right, her microphone. Right there next to her, uh, dress. Yah, that's right. Her dress.
The mystery of who gets Hillary Clinton's Senate seat is in its final chapters
Trying to figure out what New York Governor David Paterson is doing with Hillary Clinton’s vacated Senate seat really fascinates us. It’s like reading a great Agatha Christie novel, with plenty of red herrings, a memorable cast of characters, and motives and countermotives that are impossible to map out (well, only if you believe the media and get your news squarely from Politico.com). So, in terms of intrigue, we have to say, well played Paterson, well played. Ms. Christie would approve (though we bet she’d follow your clues and arrive at the same conclusion we have).
We still have no definite idea whether Paterson will appoint HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy to the Senate, giving in to the Kennedy family’s royal demands in the face of all sense and reason in terms of what’s best for not only the people of New York, but the state’s Democratic party itself (and Paterson’s own election bid in 2010, which is of obvious self-interest to him). Kennedy is a bad choice for appointment if Paterson wants to keep his job; she should at the very least run for statewide office (or even a House seat) before demanding an express ride to Senator with no mundane public service stops along the way. Nothing she has done with her life, despite unparalleled privilege, warrants a Senate seat because, suddenly, you know, she wants one.
You know?
Now, in the above linked Politico.com article, Paterson makes unusual statements that are revealing clues in the best Christie tradition — yet again making it appear he’s leaning against Kennedy.
Paterson says:
(1) He will name Clinton’s replacement “right after the Inauguration”, which could be late in the day Tuesday January 20th (which is right after the actual swearing in ceremony), or early Wednesday January 21st (the day after Inauguration Day itself). Either way, The Mystery of the Vacated Senate Seat is resolved, satisfactorily or not, by Wednesday.
(2) He hints he is still considering others besides New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and socialite Princess Caroline. Why keep hinting he is considering others if he intends to appoint Princess? That’s the biggest mysery to us. We don’t know what purpose that kind of hinting serves him if he’s already picked Princess…frankly, it makes Paterson seem rather stupid if he really picks Princess. So, he just strung people along and made the expected pick anyway, creating drama for nothing. Paterson doesn’t strike us as the type who needs to be an attention grabbing Drama Queen (and girl should would look heinous in drag).
(3) He made a really bizarre remark about the polls in New York for the Senate appointment. He said, “The polls go up and down. I think that’s more name recognition”. The reason that’s so odd is that no one has more name recognition than Princess Caroline. EVERYONE knows who she is, and who her parents were. Fewer people know who Andrew Cuomo are, both nationally and in New York state, and Cuomo is supported by 40% of voters, while Princess gets a measley 25% when asked whom New Yorkers want to take Clinton’s seat. Unless we miss Paterson’s drift, it seems to us that the person with the most name recognition would have the most support, and that should be Princess. So, taken in totality of everything else, it seems that Paterson is going to appoint someone other than Cuomo OR Kennedy…meaning someone who is scoring in the 6% or so range in those polls, like Kirsten Gillibrand or Carolyn Maloney, because those people are the ones who lack name recognition, and thus are not doing well in the polls (that go up and down) — and thus Paterson’s remark that he “think(s) that’s more name recognition” really only applies to people like Gillibrand or Maloney. That seems to indicate Paterson’s going to appoint a relative unknown without major name recognition.
(4) Paterson then makes the statement that, “There are some great candidates who have distinguished themselves but aren’t so well known”. Why say that if he intends to appoint Princess? If Princess had this in the bag, we’d just tell the press, “The announcement will be made after the Inauguration. Until then, let’s extend our thanks to Senator Clinton for 8 years of dedicated service, look forward to the start of a new administration, and after wishing Senator Clinton the best in her new endeavor, we will join together in supporting our new junior Senator from New York when I make the announcement after the Inauguration”. That is all he has to say, and can just keep repeating that ad nauseum. ALL politicians do this, and Paterson has done that in the past when he’s not particularly interested in giving more information than he has to. So, why keep mentioning other qualified candidates? To us, since he keeps on doing this, if he DOES pick Kennedy, he would have succeeded only in ticking off all those “other qualified candidates”, who weren’t even really considered in the end. That makes us think of prom, and Mr. Big Man on Campus tomcatting around the lunchroom, telling everyone he’s got many people in mind to grace his arm at the big dance, and the cheerleader, the honor student, the student council president, and the goth queen all think they’re in the running — and then Mr. BMoC ends up going to prom with the captain of the hockey team instead. All those hopes were raised for nothing, when he could have been noncommittal all the time, if he knew he wanted to go the hockey route all along.
(5) There’s one bit in that article that could be taken both ways and it’s: “My job is not to pick the person who is popular today,” he said. “It’s the person who is going to be popular in 2010, when they run for re-election”. We notice a couple things in that sentence. (a) It could mean Princess is the pick, because she is the one who is not popular today, but could be in 2 years when it’s re-election time. (b) That could mean Paterson’s talking about Gillibrand or Maloney again, since they’re only winning 6% in the popularity polls right now. (c) Paterson deliberately used the grammatically incorrect “they”, when the pronoun should be either she or he, since the pronoun is referring back to the noun “person” in that sentence. It seems like he chose “they” so he wouldn’t be boxed into a “she or he” choice that would tip his hand.
We know very little about Paterson and have never met him, but have good friends who fundraise for him in New York and will work on his gubernatorial bid. They told us last month Paterson was going to replace Clinton with a man, despite pressure to maintain the current number of women in the Senate (just as Governor Blagojevich was pressured to appoint another black to the Senate to replace Obama). Paterson, we were told, said he didn’t care about appointing a woman, but would appoint the person he thought could hold the seat in 2010 — knowing full well women will not organize any sort of action against Paterson two years from now for not appointing a woman. As much as we hate this reality, as long as women allow themselves to be divided in half along Roe v. Wade lines, women will never form an effective lobbying block for anything (and a woman will not be president, as much as we hate admitting that, and accepting that this kept Hillary Clinton out of the White House, while blacks organized as a racial bloc solidly behind Obama. Where was women’s solidarity? The same place it would be in a mobilizaton against Paterson for not filling Clinton’s vacancy with another woman: NONEXISTENT. We truly HATE that this is true, but it is: women don’t support other women en masse the way blacks do, and women won’t be outraged and become politically active and organized because Paterson appoints a man to the Senate. Sad, depressing, and terrible: but true).
For political junkies like us, this has been a curiouser and curiouser mystery — and we’ve got the same anxious feeling we always had reaching the last three or four chapters in one of Agatha Christie’s novels. We have absolutely no clue who the Senate appointment will be, but feel Princess Caroline is a royal red herring, and the pick’s going to be a white, male, Irish or Italian downstate moderate who will balance Paterson on the 2010 ticket he will share with not only the new appointment, but with Chuck Schumer as well.
THIS, which no one is talking about, is the REAL clue to solving the mystery.
People keep forgetting that Schumer will be on the ticket as well in 2010 — a bizarre scenario where New York’s governor and TWO Senate seats will be up for grabs all at the same time.
So, Paterson will already have Schumer’s voters turning out, and good little Democrats that they are, he knows he will get their votes. He’ll also get the black votes, because, as 2008 proved, black voters are the most openly racist voters in America, voting for black candidates over white candidates no matter what. There is no way Paterson loses the black vote, not when 95%+ of blacks voted for Obama in not only the general election, but the primaries as well. That will continue in 2010 for Paterson. In addition, Paterson will get the same urban liberals Obama won in 2008, who will support him and Schumer alike — as good little Democrats.
So, Paterson’s got the Democrat’s base sewn up solidly between himself and Schumer. All people who identify as Democrats, and always vote Democrats, can be guaranteed between them.
That leaves Independents and crossover Republicans to address on the ticket. It’s unlikely Schumer would draw many independents, as he’s a fairly partisan Democrat, and Paterson has nothing Independent about him.
We don’t see how Princess Caroline adds anything to the ticket that Schumer and Paterson don’t already bring.
So, who in New York has Independent and crossover appeal?
Kirsten Gillibrand…who is to the right of both Paterson and Schumer, is not widely known, and is a Hudson Valley Democrat in a Republican district who won her seat by reaching Independents and crossover Republicans.
She’s an upstate Democrat, while our gut tells us Paterson will want a downstate Democrat to balance things out geographically, but nobody’s perfect, right?
We’re positive Paterson has strategists and advisors doing what we just did above, and much more, by breaking down all of his options.
Just like in a good Agatha Christie mystery, there is one final clue that reveals the true motive in play and leads to the ultimate solution of the mystery: in our opinon, that final clue is the fact that Paterson’s Senate appointment will be based on the following equations and nothing else:
Paterson’s re-election = Paterson’s supporters + Schumer’s supporters + Hillary’s replacement’s supporters
Paterson’s supporters = blacks, urban liberals, lifelong partisan Democrats
Schumer’s supporters = blacks (overlap), urban liberals (overlap), lifelong partisan Democrats (overlap), ethnic/religious Dems (Catholics, Jews, Irish and Italian Dems)
Senate Appointment’s supporters = needs to deliver Independents and crossover Republicans for Paterson to remain Governor
Paterson has a lot of voter overlap with Schumer, and needs someone who can reach voters the two of them don’t bring in. Princess Caroline is Democratic royalty (an oxymoron if ever there was one), and has limited appeal with Independents, and zero appeal with Republicans.
So, if Paterson wants to stay Governor, she’s the worst choice in our book.
Gillibrand seems to be the best.
But since those Agatha Christie books always had a last-minute twist, Paterson could appoint himself to the seat and stump us all in the end.
