NOLA Monkey

The NOLA potluck tweet-up is set for Saturday, Dec. 13. Twitter duo @NOLAnotes and @BSIcomics have volunteered to host. Please leave a comment to say you’re coming and tell us what dish you’d like to bring. Everyone can check to see that there won’t be any repetition in dishes.

By leaving your comment, we’ll get your email address and it will remain private (you need to enter it to comment; it does not show up in the comment itself, though). Real-life contact information, address and directions will be sent by email once it’s determined you are a real person and, hopefully, not a psycho serial killer, etc.

So use comments in this post like a bulletin board, and hopefully we can get this thing organized outside of the limitations of the Twitter.

Here’s and exchange of comments on MediaBistro’s FishbowlDC blog post about Obama’s first press conference. We’re in trouble if half of the country still feels this way.

• 1 day ago 3 points

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  The fact that you don’t like us here really breaks my heart!

  You say Sarah had no experience? And BHO? I still can’t figure out what his experience is.

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  molloybe 1 day ago 2 points

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  His experience:
  3 years as a community organizer, first black President of the Harvard Law Review, 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees.

  You’ll notice that “Sportscaster” and “Beauty pageant contestant” don’t appear on that list.

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  idigsarah 1 day ago 1 point

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  Ok, here’s my resume
  4 years petroleum relocating technician (pump jockey)
  3 years resident stationary engineer (janitor)
  10 years foreign and domestic relation operator (C.S. Rep)

  I can make any useless position sound interesting!!

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  molloybe 1 day ago 1 point

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  Sorry. Constitutional law professor, senator, and member/chairman of several government committee’s aren’t exactly useless positions made to sound interesting. Or do you consider veterans to be unimportant? Try again.
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  ChangeThis 1 day ago 2 points

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  His flimsy voting record….”Present”?

  You do not know who your cult leader is but you are not alone nobody does.

  He is a fake, a fraud, an empty suit street punk South Chicago political hack.

  BTW, what was his executive experience on that extremely flimsy resume you embellished? You know executive experience like say oh Gov. Palin has for instance.

  reply edit

Here’s the deal. If Obama is elected, I’m betting the Bush administration will start running scared and the president will begin handing out pre-emptive pardons. The pool is to guess how many of these will be handed out between now and January 20, 2009, inauguration day. To qualify, the pardon has to go to a Bush administration official who has not, as of November 3, 2009, been formally charged with any crime.

Leave your guess as a comment. Leave any side bets as well, like, what are the chances the inauguration will be put off due to some sort of emergency created by the administration between now and then?

If McCain wins, all bets are off. There may be a bunch of pardons after he’s elected, but who cares then?

Update: Obama won. It’s on, like the proverbial Donkey Kong.

Update 10/2/2008:

I was beginning to doubt whether, as I said in a previous post, the McCain campaign was aware of Ifill’s book when she was approved by both sides to be moderator. McCain’s comments suggest he did not have a clue about it. But proof comes from the most conservative “organ” out there, in today’s Washington Times:

However, the book’s release was publicized in a Washington Post profile of Miss Ifill, along with a July 23 Associated Press article published in hundreds of newspapers nationwide, including The Washington Times and Mr. McCain’s hometown paper in Arizona.

Miss Ifill wrote an Aug. 21 article for Time outlining her upcoming book. That same day, the McCain and Obama campaigns released a joint statement saying they had agreed on terms and moderators for their three debates.

Implying ignorance of his staff’s pre-clearance of Ifill, McCain said:

“Frankly, I wish they had picked a moderator that isn’t writing a book favorable to Barack Obama — let’s face it,” McCain said on “Fox & Friends.” “But I have to have confidence that Gwen Ifill will handle this as the professional journalist that she is. … “Life isn’t fair, as I mentioned earlier in the program.”

Again I ask: Creative victimy™ or just stupidity? I’m leaning towards the latter.

Paul Krugman is a columnist for the New York Times. He also happens to be a professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, after, according to his biography, he “received his B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He has taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford. At MIT he became the Ford International Professor of Economics.”

Well, that obviously makes him some kind of elitist. So I guess I’m just not going to finish this post.

Alright, for the sake of argument, I’ll give him benefit of the doubt and let everyone know what he said in a column back in August of 2005 entitled That Hissing Sound. That hissing sound he referred to back then was the housing bubble not bursting, but beginning to deflate.

He wrote a blog post today, pointing out conservative bloggers who, at the time, denigrated Krugman in typical fashion.

After analyzing housing prices in various parts of the country, and looking back on how past bubbles ended, he said:

…the U.S. economy has become deeply dependent on the housing bubble. The economic recovery since 2001 has been disappointing in many ways, but it wouldn’t have happened at all without soaring spending on residential construction, plus a surge in consumer spending largely based on mortgage refinancing. Did I mention that the personal savings rate has fallen to zero?

What did the conservative bloggers at Power Line have to say about the thoughtful and prescient analysis and conclusions Krugman presented? It was typical of all the ra-ra rallying behind Bush’s policies that held sway up until Bear-Sterns collapsed. “Well, if we believed anything Krugman writes, we’d be worried all the time. Or at least until we have a Democratic administration, when everything will be rosy again.”

What were they trying to prove? Probably dismissing Krugman’s first point, that the recovery during Bush’s term had been disappointing, was high on the list. Everyone out there was supposed have gotten the memo. Bush’s policies were right. If you say otherwise, you’re not to be taken seriously. The next point Krugman lays bare is that unlike in the past, when the U.S. economy recovered from bad times through productivity, now the economy was driven by activities financed by individual debt. The last point, that savings have dropped to zero, pretty much speaks for itself.

Krugman was right on all points.

So the lesson learned is that maybe we should start looking at elitists for guidance in difficult times.

Creative victimy™. It’s a phrase I invented to describe one aspect of Rovian/Gingrinchian shenanigans.

Just to recap, I think the fury today over Gwen Ifill’s having written a book on Obama is a perfect example. The fact that the book was written, and scheduled for publication inauguration day, was known to the McCain campaign when they approved her to be moderator of the VP debate Thursday. But it wasn’t “out there” until Drudge and Malkin and their ilk started screaming about it yesterday, claiming she would inherently be unfair to Gov. Palin.

Creative victimy™ is the theory that the McCain campaign planned on starting this outrage at the same time they approved Ifill’s choice. They can act gracious and above board when choosing her, knowing all the while they can play the victim when the debate is close at hand, setting up their candidate for excuses when if she tanks it.

What do you think? Creative victimy™ or just stupidity?

Yesterday was National Talk Like a Pirate Day. Today, the Coen brothers movie “Fargo” is on the tube; famous for it’s northern nasal twang accents and euphamisms. As we are exposed to Sarah Palin, republican vice presidential candidate from Alaska, we can’t help noticing that her nasally accent and northernisms. It hit me: National Talk Like Sarah Palin Day.

It’s stupid, it’s silly, and non-productive. But I had to get it out while there were no results on the Google for it. National Talk LIke Sarah Palin Day. You betcha.’

Remember LP records? Replaced by the compact disc. Remember Betamax tapes? They barely existed; displaced at the beginning of the home video age by VHS, which has since been replaced by the DVD, that soon will be replaced by Blu-Ray (forget HD-DVD, it barely got started). Remember all those long distance carrier commercials? Everyone’s got unlimited long distance on cellular phones, etc.

What happened to all those things? What else had we taken for granted that’s now disappeared, with nary a look back by the public?

I just saw this Opus cartoon on Salon.com that made me think of something else that’s ingrained into the American psyche that could go the way of the LP, and that thought felt good. An end of the age of the American gasoline automobile?

While waiting for the cable guy to arrive Wednesday, I watched the Columbian hostage release story unfold, first on CNN and then on MSNBC.

I had clicked over to CNN and caught the “breaking news” alert. The talking head said they were switiching to CNN International and a correspondent in Columbia. This on-the-scene reporter listed who the hostages were, who it was who held them and how long they had been held. Journalism, right?

He went on to explain the hostages had been RELEASED. The government had not yet explained the details of the whatever negotiations led to the hostage release; he was very curious because negotiations with the captors over the years had been fruitless. Nonetheless, the hostages had been released.

Click over to MSNBC.

The story there, without an on-the-scene reporter, is not of a hostage release, but a hostage RESCUE. One of MSNBC’s “experts” was on hand. He said this had to be some sort of surgical strike operation. They would not want to hurt any hostages, and the rebel camps were in remote locations that were difficult to spot. They had to know exactly where the hostages were. It would have taken a lot of daring and skill. Oh, and did we mention John McCain was in town, visiting Columbia? We don’t know what connection that had with the rescue, if any.

Well, later in the day everyone got their story straight. You see, the Columbian army had infiltrated the rebels and, using subterfuge, tricked them into believing the top rebel guy wanted the hostages moved, then the army sent in a helicopter to pick them all up.

I shouldn’t say everyone got their story straight just yet. The White House said the operation had the full support and cooperation of the U.S. government. News outlets speculate this meant the U.S. provided intelligence and surveillance. The Columbian government said, no, that’s not right. The operation was, just like Juan Valdez’s coffee, 100% Columbian.

So, to sum up: CNN’s man on the scene says hostage release, MSNBC says daring military raid. After the dust settles, the official line is some sort of hybrid: military subterfuge leading to a release/rescue. John McCain’s presence may or may not have something to do with it; the U.S. government may or may not have assisted in the operation.

I thought that something fishy was afoot, and today, I see this by Forbes, no less:

Leaders of the Colombian FARC rebel movement were paid millions of dollars to free Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages, Swiss radio said on Friday, quoting ‘a reliable source’.

The 15 hostages released on Wednesday by the Colombian army ‘were in reality ransomed for a high price, and the whole operation afterwards was a set-up,’ the radio’s French-language channel said.

Saying the United States, which had three of its citizens among those freed, was behind the deal, it put the price of the ransom at some $20 million.

Everyone is vehemently denying there was a ransom involved. It’s going to be interesting how this shakes out, don’t you think?

Sen. David Vitter (R-La) wants to know if he can use campaign funds to pay his $207,177.50 in legal and public relations expenses associated with the Deborah Palfrey (deceased) affair, according to Da Paper. Since he actually admitted using her prostitution services, we can call it what it was, his admitted whore-fucking.

Vitter incurred the legal expenses after his number came up in Ms. Palfrey’s phone records. The FEC normally allows campaign funds to be spent on expenses associated with holding elected office.

How, you may ask, are expenses arising out of one’s whore-fucking associated with holding office? In a tour-de-force of mental gymnastics, Vitter’s position is that it is only because he is a senator that there was such a big fuss raised and Ms. Palfrey subpoenaed him to appear at her trial.

Now that’s old-school person responsibility in action.