A couple of weeks old but it doesn’t have too many views to show for, especially considering the sheer degree of awesome which is this video [Nancy Pelosi's YouTube Channel, via somebody's LJ]:
Archive for the ‘n00bs’ Category
This stimulating video brought to you by the Speaker of the House
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009Hottest Air
Thursday, February 5th, 2009Do you know what’s all the rage (not really) in the blogosphere this moment? Ed Morrissey throws up some article pipe dreaming about an “F-22 stimulus” spending, and in the comments a bunch of Lockheed engineers and DoD procurement people are really going at it about how many G’s the planes can do, etc. Of course this being the internet it has turned into a flame war between some pilot jocks. [Hot Air]
Sorry, Hugo. It’s been done.
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008The United Socialist Party of Venezuela, the result of a cooptation union between the leftist parties of the country, has released a CD with the latest revolutionary hits. President Hugo Chavez is the featured star in one of the songs. [Fox News, PSUV Wesbite]
But Hugo isn’t the first Latin American leader to sing in public to promote his goals. The region has a long history of cheap populists, socialists, and occasional right-wingers who stage these shows to gain popular support. The most famous politician who did this in the 1990s was Abdala Bucaram, former President of Ecuador. Called the “madman,” the Ecuadorian Congress eventually declared him mentally unfit to rule and removed him from office less than a year after his election. He danced, sang, and released his own music CD as capital fled the country and inflation began to wipe out the middle class. Here he is onstage with the Irancudos, an Uruguayan band:
Not to be outdone, Alberto Fujimori, former President of Peru, also released a song. This is a real advertisement from his 2000 campaign:
Note that the commercial calls him the “Chino” (Chinese) even though he is ethnically Japanese. He was popular in the early 1990s in part because he wasn’t perceived as a member of the small, white oligarchy. Fujimori later fled the country to avoid charges of corruption and human rights abuses during his presidency. He became involved in Japanese politics at one point to avoid extradition.
Bucaram and Fujimori met in the mid-1990s to negotiate a peace process between Ecuador and Peru. What people saw on TV that day was an ethnic Japanese and an ethnic Lebanese dressed up in indigenous garbs, complete with alpaca hoods and native ponchos, eating roasted guinea pigs and other local delicacies. This is what Gabriel Garcia Marquez must have envisioned when wrote about magical realism in Latin America.
So Chavez isn’t the first and probably won’t be the last political figure in Latin America to lend his voice and image for the cause, whatever the cause may be at the moment. He has practically been doing it for years on his seven-hour long Sunday talk show. The only noteworthy part is that the PSUV finally put up an mp3 of Chavez singing on their website, which makes us wonder why it took them so long to capitalize socialize on this.
The real question is: when will he sing about Obama? [CNN]
Elizabeth Dole doesn’t have faith that she can win
Friday, October 31st, 2008John McCain knows a few Joes
Saturday, October 25th, 2008Hot on the heels of Joe the Plumber, we now have Joe the McCain:
Hey, at least he’s sorry. [Yahoo! News]
Who dick bigger? Part II
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008We wrote recently about the “my building is bigger than yours” war between Saudi Arabia and Dubai. Now Moody’s Investors Service reports that Dubai may need help from Abu Dhabi to finance the borrowing that led to, among other things, the construction of the Burj Dubai, their first record-breaking unnecessary skyscraper. Dubai promptly denied the allegations, of course. [Bloomberg]
All things considered, this is the market equivalent of taking Viagra and trying to hide it.
CNN: Paris Hilton John McCain’s first choice for running mate
Monday, October 13th, 2008…or at least the caption on a photo says that Letterman said so. [CNN]
Apparently McCain has decided to make amends by doing his 10000th late-night comedy appearance with Letterman rather than Jon Stewart. Will McCain admit to having made a mistake in not choosing Hilton?
Who dick bigger?
Monday, October 13th, 2008A Saudi Arabian prince announces plans to spend 26.7 billion dollars to build the tallest building in the world, over 1 km high. Not to be outdone, Dubai, which currently holds the record, also says they plan the same. [CNN]
Look here, this is getting a little insane. There hasn’t been some sort of a major materials engineering breakthrough. What has happened is a massive accumulation of capital in the hands of a few people that collect rent on minerals extraction.
But this is at least a whole order of magnitude smaller than the amount of capital that Americans burned on housing. Three hundred million idiots are better than one.
Kazuyoshi Miura dead
Saturday, October 11th, 2008Kazuyoshi Miura was a Japanese businessman who was accused of taking out a hit on his wife during a 1981 trip to L.A. In Japan, he was convicted of murder but then acquitted on appeal. Apparently after that he figured that he was off the hook, and made trips to Saipan, a U.S. Territory, where he was arrested earlier this year. He was extradited to California to face conspiracy charges, and committed suicide within a day of arrival. [CNN]
Apparently, with Mark Geragos as your attorney, even a 27-year-old case, in which you’ve already been acquitted of the main murder charge, is pretty hopeless.
The U.S. authorities had to catch him on U.S. soil rather than try him for conspiracy in Japan, why? Because conspiracy is not a crime in Japan. I know nothing about Japanese law, but I’ve heard that bit because Jack McCoy said it in a Law & Order episode, “Gaijin,” in which a Japanese businessman is accused of taking out a hit on his wife during a trip to New York. Rather than try him in Japan or extradite him, Fred Thompson Arthur Branch is able to arrest the suspect by fooling him into a voluntary trip to New York—by convincing him that he’s off the hook with an announcement that they have the murderer and an invitation for him to be a witness.
This episode aired in 2004. And life takes after fiction, as U.S. authorities in 2008 make a surprise arrest of the Japanese suspect during a voluntary trip to American lands.