This is a real Life Imitates Seinfeld thing. In one episode, George became a much sought-after hand model, and got very vain about his hands, and also protected them all the time by wearing gloves.

Lots of weird stuff here. She really digs her own hands. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:30 AM | Comments (105)
Post contains 85 words, total size 1 kb.

Round 2 on trying to sell the tax agreement...to Democrats.

Judging from the reaction so far, good luck with that.

He's trying to male lemonade out of lemons by talking down the deal he just cut. He'd love to fight but gosh darn those Rethuglicans forced his hand.

AP question...um, you folded on an issue you've been running on for years. Why should anyone ever trust you again?

Judging by his repeated talking points about this being about governing and not politics, he's aiming for the independents he lost last month.

The most post-partisan President ever just called the GOP a bunch of "hostage takers" who were holding the American people hostage and threatening to harm them. Can't wait for all the editorials decrying the coarsening of political rhetoric.

Obama says he is looking forward to debating the Bush tax cuts starting next year. What the hell has been going on since the first day of his campaign and the first two years of his presidency?

Wow...Obama get's testy and whiny that he didn't get enough credit for passing health care. What a thin skinned idiot. Now he's taking a shot at the NYT editorial page?

Obama always seems to get tripped up on the last, kind of irrelevant question. He was asked about where the left should know he won't compromise and he went on to attack the left for attacking him. He didn't put out fire with his party he tossed gas on it.

It was like the end of the health care press conference that ended on the unrelated, what do you think of the Cambridge PD and Henry Gates question that gave us, "the police acted stupidly" quote that dominated everything.

That was really something.

Oh...Obama says the first 2 years of his presidency was about economic emergencies but they are over. This will be news to a nation facing 9/8% unemployment.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:26 AM | Comments (152)
Post contains 322 words, total size 2 kb.

Via Instapundit, an idea so stupid only a feminist could think of it.

You may have heard of “Movember”, a moustache growing charity event held during November each year that raises funds and awareness for prostate cancer and other men’s health issues, such as depression.

...

Thus, inspired by an article on the popularity of the unibrow in Tajikistan sent in by reader Jess (thanks, Jess!), I hereby declare that the current month shall heretofore be known asÂ….DECEMBROW.

Decembrow is, of course, all about the brow. Specifically, the unibrow.

While women in the U.S. generally rock two groomed brows, I say letÂ’s be inspired by Movember and take this opportunity to let our facial hair growÂ…for a cause.

This month, I encourage you to grow in your unibrow, or, if you donÂ’t have one, use an herbal remedy or a pencil to fake it (as they do in Tajikistan), for the cause of your choice.

...

Challenging cultural norms about womenÂ’s facial hair while raising money for a good cause? Now thatÂ’s just the kind of thing that gets me in the holiday spirit.

How to unpack the stupid? Here's my attempt.

1. This idea that culture is in fact a cultural construct and hence subject to changes in taste and largely arbitrary is the sort of thing that gobsmacks a fourth grader when she realizes it for the first time. Such a simple point should not be continuing to Shock and Awe supposedly adult women who presume to write professionally.

Yes, I suppose we could change our cultural preference from two brows to one. But why should we? If we begin with the premise that the two-brow preference is arbitrary, fine, but then why should we expend effort to displace it with another arbitrary, constructed preference?

The feminist answer, I guess, is that we wish to champion women's beauty in all its forms but... really, isn't beauty the most superficial of traits? Why is such outsized effort being amassed to change the trivial?

2. I enjoy how this girl can't even be bothered to chose a charity this great effort is supposedly in service of. Just choose one, she says. To increase awareness of it. I'm not sure how you can increase awareness of a charity with a unibrow in the first place, but I'm doubly uncertain about how you can raise awareness of a charity when you don't even agree beforehand what this movement is supposed to raise awareness of.

I guess people will have to specifically ask each girl flaunting a Cro-Magnon unibrow what the hell she's doing. Then she can tell them, proudly, "I'm raising awareness for government-provided pet psychiatry."

3. It's absolutely childish that one single man-only project (a trivial one, that I never heard of) has to be matched by the feminists, even when they can't think of anything useful to do. The men doing this at least had a specific goal in mind; a trivial step towards that goal, yes, but a goal nonetheless. This Feministing writer can't even wait to think of a proper goal before rushing out with her if-boys-are-doing-it-we-must-do-it-too response.

4. Whenever a leftist is undertaking a vanity project -- and I mean that as literally as possible; this crap is pure vanity, pure attention-seeking, pure personal brand-differentiation -- but cannot come up with any tangible, real-world benefit to their actions but still wishes to cast it as somehow enobling or altruistic, she claims it's "challenging" this or that.

Note how vague a verb that is in any context except boxing or MMA. "Challenging" really doesn't mean anything. She doesn't claim to be "changing" cultural preferences -- that would be an insane boast. She's not changing anything.

All she's doing is "forcing people to confront" their own preferences. Like, someone sees her with a unibrow, thinks "That looks dreadful," then doesn't think again about it. Mission accomplished.

5. Gun to my head, I would guess there is a very high correlation between lives without any meaning and these constant, thrashing attempts to imbue trivial actions with deeper meaning. Show me a person with skin in the game -- someone who derives meaning from family, faith, work, or duty to country -- and I'll show you someone who most likely doesn't feel the need to assign grand meaning to the act of letting his appearance go to hell.

6. I'm sure the unibrow is all the rage in Tajikistan, but a) this isn't Tajikistan, and b), why not agitate the Tajiks to broaden their own sense of what can be beautiful in a woman by including the "diversity" of two eyebrows?

7. The unibrow? Are you kidding? Here's how unattractive the unibrow is considered by those who share western cultural norms: The unibrow is sooo unnattractive that 90% of all men did not bother to see Frida, a biopic of unibrow enthusiast Frida Kolko (pictured above), even though that movie promised (IIRC) Salma Hayek fully naked and getting it on with a chick.

Nope, I never saw it. And yes, I am a fan of Salma Hayek. But the unibrow? Pass. The unibrow so challenged my conception of female beauty I never bothered to even record Frida when it was on HBO, so I could fast-forward to the good parts.

That crap out of the way, here's the funny, not from me, but from reader David McC, who offers this list of rejected Feministing let's-give-meaning-to-our-empty-lives-by-renaming-months proposals:

Januacne
Flabuary
Ju-leghair
Haagen D'August
Septembitch
Octodor
Novembathe

I would just propose my own little idea to "challenge" accepted cultural norms of beauty: I'm calling it Camel Toe Tuesdays, and I think you should give it a shot.

Also Challenging Cultural Norms: Remember the woman who threatened to cut someone's throat unless, cleaned up for general readership, someone ate her cookies?

She was sentenced to 90 days.

That bit about overpowering odor -- that is challenging cultural norms. Why isn't this woman a hero?

thanks to some reader who used a pseudonym.

Raising Awareness, One Boob At A Time: Now this is how you do it.

PS, you're welcome.

Posted by: Ace at 10:02 AM | Comments (146)
Post contains 1030 words, total size 7 kb.

He vowed he'd do the wrong things, and contended mightilly to do so.

Now with the economy in tatters at least partly due to his mismanagement, he attempts to do the right thing, because he's all out of wrong things.

Here’s a theory: Obama said, “What the hell.” Once he knew he had to give in, and would get criticized for giving in, he figured he might as well go whole hog. The whole deal seems designed to test conservative arguments about how best to help the economy right now, with the understanding that if the economy improves markedly as a result, he will get more credit for his role from the independents he lost so decisively in the 2010 election. And if it doesn’t, then the GOP will be in the position he was in this year in relation to the stimulus — their desired policy won’t have worked either, and he won’t get blamed for acceding to political reality in going along with it.

Paul Krugman and the Nation and Moveon.org were going to be enraged no matter what compromise he struck. SoÂ…what the hell. Go long. Try the Hail Mary. Nothing Barack Obama could have done indicates just how empty his own economic policy quiver is.

Over at Huffington Post, commenters are surprisingly open to Obama's "bold, relentless experimentation."

Open? Oh wait, I meant openly deranged.

I3addog—Obama’s nothing more than a shill for big business. Sold out once again. I have never regretted a Presidential vote as much as this one. Go ahead. Unfan me.

...

Mea25—In 2 words: hope shattering. Remember “HOPE”? Was $arah right? I think she was. I feel sick and violated.

...

Richard Dial—This is awful. The Audacity of Hope indeed. I am disappointed yet again by the timidity of this President, for whom I was so very excited and for whose presidency I had such high hopes. Who’s going to run against him in 2012? I need to start contributing now…

Tribal Knowledge—I wanna play poker with Obama. I need the money.

Belogical2010—What a contrast, Julian Assange standing tall against all the ev*l power of the world gov’t and he’s getting arrested. then we got Wimp Bama trying to convinces us he’s done a great job again. This victory is right up their with saving the economy and healthcare

foxinretreat—CLASS WARFARE and some civil unrest , brewing in a neighborhood near you. Hey oligarchs how it turns out is anybody’s guess. I hope Wikileaks unleashes its info on the banks ASAP, I could care less if WS has to tank to stop this madness.

More quotes at the link.

I like the bit about "$arah" being right.

At Hot Air, a quote from Charles Hurt, suggesting that Obama really might be a one-termer after all.

The left is apoplectic that their savior would turn around on them and adopt Bush’s most “draconian” tax policies that “only favor the rich.”

If they were frustrated before, now they are palpably angry and publicly voicing their disillusionment with Obama.

Without those voters rocking with enthusiasm, Obama could not have won in 2008.

Now, ask yourself this question: How many people do you know who voted for Obama in 2008 but now express regret about the vote or reservations about his leadership?

Probably plenty.

Now ask yourself this: How many people do you know who voted against Obama in 2008 but have since been won over?

Probably not a single one.

All that math adds up to a very lonely number: One, as in One Term.

That said, businesses/markets/banks are likely to gain some confidence from this deal, and that means that money that's been sitting out and being hoarded might start being spent and invested. That would help Obama a bit, but it would also help the Republicans, and probably more, since any recovery that happens from this point forward can be credited to Republican ideas and Republican governance.

Posted by: Ace at 08:47 AM | Comments (179)
Post contains 676 words, total size 4 kb.

Updated and bumped: Assange denied bail by magistrate and jailed pending extradition hearing. Again, from CNN:

"London (CNN) -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange handed himself over to police Tuesday, promptly appeared in court where he was denied bail, and left for jail in a police van. A judge will now decide whether to extradite him to Sweden to face questioning over allegations he had sexual relations with two women without their consent. He has not been charged with a crime."

"The judge at the City of Westminster Magistrate's Court ordered Assange jailed until December 14, despite several celebrities coming forward and offering to pay his surety, or bail. It was not immediately clear if the court would decide on that date whether to release him. The judge repeatedly said the case is "not about WikiLeaks," but about serious sexual offenses that allegedly occurred on three occasions with two women."

Maybe they're just funnin' with him. Still not sure if it's flaming skull-worthy, but getting closer. Original post below the fold.

more...

Posted by: Genghis at 08:18 AM | Comments (100)
Post contains 368 words, total size 3 kb.

Performing for the troops, alleged entertainer Kathy Griffin decided to attack Bristol Palin.

This was selfish. Even ignoring the nastiness of her pounding on Bristol Palin, it was selfish to show up for a show, supposedly "for the troops" and rip into someone the troops had some affection for. Has she never heard of getting a sense of the room? Once the troops started booing her non-jokes, she went into Andy Kaufman villain mode and just antagonized them further.

Remember, she was there "for the troops."

Or was she? No, of course she wasn't. The audience consisted of troops but Kathy Griffin didn't go there for them; she went there because she is in fact D-list and will show up wherever they ask her to come. She was actually performing only for the VH-1 broadcast, and of course for her gay-only audience.

Why is her audience gay-only? I don't know. Apparently they dig being pandered to (seriously, gays, enough with this cheap-date stuff where any performer who panders in the slightest becomes a Gay Legend). And they seem to like her "act," which as far as I can tell, consists of no actual jokes, just talking about details of her shabby life at a quick pace with the occasional 2004-just-called-they-want-their-hack-schtick-back "Oh, bitch, it's on" sort of button.

It's not that she's entirely not funny -- it's that she's not professionally funny. She's the kind of funny that would be funny if it were your friend raging about this or that TV show in a quick-patter way (with 2007-just-called-they-want-their-catchprase-back mentions of "bee-yatch"). This is the sort of funny that you are willing to pay $2.35 for ("Here, let me get that coffee for you"), not the sort of funny you seek out on TV or, even more absurd, you spend $50 a ticket for and make special plans to see.

We all are lucky enough to have someone in our lives funny like Kathy Griffin. Like, civilian funny. Some of us are lucky enough to have three or four such people. But rarely do we listen to our funny friends and say, "Man, I have to get this guy on the stage at Vegas." There's a difference between pro-funny and civilian-funny, and Griffin is definitely the latter. (If that. Can you say "tired schtick"? Oh yeah, I went there. (2005 just called to say they want their "I went there" back. And then 2004 called, and they want their whole "2004 called, they want their x back" schtick back.))

Anyway, so, Bristol's fat, according to Griffin.

And Kathy Griffin wanted to do something "for the troops," so she came out in a bikini. Because that's "for the troops," showing off a surgically altered aging body which was never all that to begin with. Like, you remember when Phyllis Diller gave the troops a thrill in 'Nam, right? She did that "for the troops," and not, say, for her own personal vanity.

But since we're talking about fat... Ann Althouse noticed a picture taken from the rear view.

Now here's some comedy.

It's the ass equivalent of a busted-up stretched-out tangled-in-knots Slinky. You sort of can guess at its original function, but what remains is just a slaggy mess for the trash.

Just To Prove The Point... If Griffin was there "for the troops"... let's just put aside Bristol Palin entirely for the moment.

If you're really performing "for the troops," do you really come out and do a bit about that well-known troop-fave Dancing With The Stars?

Can you imagine a show less beloved by 18-to-30-year-old manly sort of men?

What was Kathy Griffin's encore? A tight ten-minute set on Gossip Girl?

"For the troops"?

Posted by: Ace at 08:01 AM | Comments (204)
Post contains 644 words, total size 4 kb.

As DrewM reported last night, the White House and congressional Republicans cut a deal on the imminent tax hikes. The GOP walked away with a two-year Bush tax cut extension for all incomes, a two percent reduction in payroll taxes, and a limitation on the resurrected death tax -- 35% with a $5 million exemption. Obama got his unemployment benefits extension, but only for 13 months (and he was going to get that anyway). He also expanded the wealth-redistributing Earned Income Tax Credit (and he was going to get that anyway too).

When news broke last night, there were already rumors that congressional Democrats were considering mutiny and "progressives" on the internet were freaking out that Obama got "rolled" or "suckered." This post is representative if you'd like a little schadenfreude with your Wheaties this morning.

With his allies having conniptions over his "symbolic presidency", I expected the White House to lash out at Republicans. Something about "Party of No" and making "hard decisions." It's the standard move, especially when the President needs Democrats to get in line and vote for this thing.

Instead, the White House seems to be declaring war on the Democrats in Congress:

"We wanted a fight, the House didn't throw a punch," a senior White House official tells ABC News, pointing out that for months before the 2010 midterm elections, President Obama was making the case against the Bush tax cuts for wealthier Americans. "The House wouldn't vote before the Senate, and the Senate was afraid they'd lose a vote on it."

"It was like the Jets versus Sharks except there weren't any Jets," the official said. "Senator Schumer says he wants a fight? He couldn't hold his caucus together."

"This isn't a debate in a lab somewhere," the official continued. "People's taxes were going to go up, and then we were going to have a Senate with a slimmer margin and House under Republican control."

Message control is not one of this White House's strong attributes, is it? Vermont Independent Senator Sanders is already threatening to filibuster the tax deal.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:38 AM | Comments (230)
Post contains 362 words, total size 3 kb.

William Gross has a disquieting article over at PIMCO that says our current economic problems are profoundly structural and are not going away anytime soon. He even provides his own summary points:

• The global economy is suffering from a lack of aggregate demand. With insufficient demand, nations compete furiously for their share of the diminishing growth pie.

• In the U.S. and Euroland, many policies only temporarily bolster consumption while failing to address the fundamental problem of developed economies: Job growth is moving inexorably to developing economies because they are more competitive.

• Unless developed economies learn to compete the old-fashioned way – by making more goods and making them better – the smart money will continue to move offshore to Asia, Brazil and their developing economy counterparts, both in asset and in currency space.
  

We here in the US have spent the last 25 years or so talking about our transformation from a manufacturing economy to a "knowledge" economy. In retrospect, we appear to have been trying to make a virtue out of an inevitable trend. The problem is, consumers by and large don't buy "knowledge" -- they buy tangible things.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the article is that Gross's solution is for the US to become competitive in manufacturing again:

The constructive way is to stop making paper and start making things. Replace subprimes, and yes, Treasury bonds with American cars, steel, iPads, airplanes, corn – whatever the world wants that we can make better and/or cheaper. Learn how to compete again. Investments in infrastructure and 21st century education and research, as opposed to 20th century education are mandatory, as is a withdrawal from resource-draining foreign wars. It will be a tough way back, but it can be done with sacrifice and appropriate public policies that encourage innovation, education and national reconstruction, as opposed to Wall Street finance and Main Street consumption.

This solution ignores Gross's own analysis, which points out "By many estimates, Chinese labor works for 10% or less than its American counterparts." Furthermore, we have much stiffer quality, environmental, labor and workplace standards here in the United States, all of which increase the cost -- sometimes prohibitively -- of building things to be sold. Short of some truly miraculous breakthroughs in manufacturing technology -- and we're talking about pre-Star-Trek-type breakthroughs -- there is just no way we can rebuild our manufacturing base in such a way as to undercut China as China currently exists.

So while I disagree with some of Gross's solutions and conclusions, that is exactly why I believe his article is well worth reading in full: because it underscores the profoundly structural nature of the economic problems we face here in the West. To a large extent, we can consider the last 30 years to have been a "meta-bubble" in which we burned through a lot of different types of "credit" in building a lifestyle and a level of general public wealth at all levels (leftist naysayers notwithstanding) never before seen in the world.

That meta-bubble started deflating 10 years ago, with the tech crash of 2000. We have continued to pump up other bubbles (e.g., subprime loans, the great equity drawdown, the college education bubble, QE2) to maintain that lifestyle, but they all keep popping as well. We are a bit like the cartoon character falling from a plane who -- after two or three parachutes have failed -- keeps digging through his parachute pack, hoping to find something to stop the descent and coming up with increasingly improbably -- but inevitably useless -- objects.

And beneath our feet, the unforgiving ground rushes up ever faster. ..fritz..

P.S. OK, I probably shouldn't blog at 5 in the morning; I just get a bit too dark.
P.P.S. Did some minor edits to tighten up a few things.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 03:26 AM | Comments (61)
Post contains 647 words, total size 4 kb.

With confidence in our armed forces - with the unbounded determination of our people - we will gain the inevitable triumph - so help us God.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:59 AM | Comments (39)
Post contains 34 words, total size 1 kb.

When you lose 300,000+ customers over 6 months, maybe its time to reconsider the price/value equation you're offering customers.

...Many pay TV customers are making the same decision. From April to September, cable and satellite companies had a net loss of about 330,000 customers. Craig Moffett, a longtime cable analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein, said the consensus of the industry executives he had talked to was that most of these so-called cord-cutters were turning to over-the-air TV. “It looks like they’re leaving for the antenna,” he said...

Blowing off a $90/month cable bill allows for more eating out, some movies, paint to repaint several rooms in a house, etc. Over the span of a year, you could buy enough tools and materials to re-trim a crib with mouldings you made yourself, or build a fancy wall unit, etc.

I find this this new consumer pragmatism encouraging. Cable exec's probably not so much.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 10:53 PM | Comments (78)
Post contains 220 words, total size 1 kb.