just me

This is courtesy of Linda that I work with. I believe the original author is here.

Okay, I’m going to blow your mind here for a minute. I’d advise you to sit down or something because your entire head is about to crack wide open.

Are you ready?

Why don’t we have a Batman yet?

I want you to really think about this.

This has been bothering me for days.

I’m not asking a stupid question. I didn’t just say “Why don’t we have a Superman yet?” or something stupid like that.

Superman is an alien from another planet.

That doesn’t make any sense.

The immigration papers alone…

But Batman doesn’t have any special powers. He’s not an alien or a mutant or anything.

He’s just a rich guy with issues and too much time on his hands.

Don’t we have a whole freakin’ bunch of those running around?

Seriously, you can’t even turn on the television anymore without seeing some rich retard serving no actual purpose.

Why hasn’t one of these guys manned up and gone Batman?

Is it the whole parents killed in front of you thing?

We could totally fix that.

Hell, it should be a government program. If your parents are rich, the government shoots them in front of you and then you fight crime.

Why is the government wasting money on stupid things like education when they could be focusing on the face shooting initiative?

That’s a plan we can all get behind.

It’ll be like gun control only with more face shooting.

All of those spoiled, rich bastards serving no purpose in our society…

Is it so much to ask that one of these useless excuses for people get their act together and do something important?

We already have douchebags.

We have a freakin’ ton of those guys already.

What we need is Batman.

You’re already spending five hours a day in the gym so you can make other people feel bad about themselves.

Why not throw in some kung fu lessons and a utility belt?

Why am I the first person to think of this?

I mean, we haven’t even seen someone take a shot at it. We haven’t seen one person try out the whole vigilante superhero gig.

That moron who climbs buildings doesn’t count.

Spiderman, my ass.

No one has ever tried to be Batman.

Does that make any sense?

There’s a woman who pretends to be Kim Kardashian and charges people money to go to parties.

How the hell do we have two Kim Kardashian’s and no Batman?

There’s something wrong with our society.

You’d think that someone, anyone would have at least tried. You’d think some poor bastard would WANT to be Batman.

I want to be Batman.

You want to be Batman.

Oh, shut up. You know you want to be Batman.

So, why don’t we have a Batman?

I’d do it myself, but I don’t have the unlimited resources or free time.

Or motivation.

I’m pretty sure no one has shot my mom in the face.

I’m pretty sure.

I should probably call her.

There is no good damned reason why we don’t have a Batman yet.

There isn’t.

They let Val Kilmer be Batman for a while.

How hard could it be?

It’s not like it would be a terribly difficult job or anything.

We don’t have actual supervillains. There’s no Joker running around planning overly complex crimes.

Sure, we’ve got lots of really bad people.

That’s what the kung fu’s for.

You see a bad guy, you kung fu him in the face.

Problem solved.

And think of all the perks that come with the job:

- really cool car
- awesome underground lair
- lots of amazing gadgets
- butler

With only one major drawback:

- your mom gets shot in the face

That’s not a bad deal.

You can bury her next to the lair.

Seriously. One of you people put down your Starbucks and get to f–king work.

Congratulations. You’re Batman.

Your parents will be so proud of you.

Maybe you should call them.

Quickly.

posted by [GM]Dave @ 6:32 PM 6 comments

Monday, September 01, 2008

Sometimes Time magazine has some good articles. Take for instance this one on the worst Vice Presidents in U.S. history.

I’m definitely behind a timetable for pulling our troops out of Iraq (I won’t even get into discussing why we should’ve never been there in the first place). But I can’t help but think that Bush’s impending reversal is a clever GOP (i.e., Karl Rove) strategy to take away a key point from the Obama campaign. Not that the only thing Obama has is being against the war in Iraq, but it was a major talking point, and now he’ll have to put more emphasis on other areas and ideas. And Rove is probably betting that it’ll take some wind out of his sails. And McCain can say, “See, we know what we’re doing in Iraq.” Rotten bastards.

Or maybe I’m just a little too jaded and cranky.

Go read this article now: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/21/begala.ticket/

Mr. Begala hit the nail on the head. And Mr. Pickens should be named Energy Czar of the next Administration.

Try to tell me I’m wrong, I dare you.

I still believe that the USA is the greatest country in the history of mankind. The most just, the most equitable, the land of opportunity. But it’s also just as corrupt as any other country out there. Take for example the recent Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac fiasco. Here’s an excellent piece about it from via my good friend Squid.

This actually was buried in the middle of a lengthy football column I read (Tuesday Morning Quarterback, or TMQ as they call it in the last paragraph) & got me pretty riled up:

Increasingly Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are looking like little more than devices to transfer money from the pockets of taxpayers to the pockets of Fannie and Freddie senior executives. Former Fannie Mae boss Franklin Raines paid himself about $50 million for years in which, we now know, the company lied about its earnings in order to inflate executive bonuses, while management was playing fast and loose with other people’s money. Beginning in 2007, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went off the cliff, their stocks plummeting to less than 20 percent of their previous values, and taxpayers were put on the hook as guarantors of the firms’ bad management decisions. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the Mae-Mac debacle will cost taxpayers $100 billion or more. Yet Freddie Mac CEO Richard Syron was paid $14.5 million for 2007, including a $2.2 million “performance bonus.” Syron has taken home $38 million total from Freddie in the past five years. Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd got $14.2 million for 2007, plus a substantial prepaid life insurance policy and other perks including “financial counseling, an executive health program and dining services,” the Washington Post reported. Hey, $49,000-a-year median U.S. households, you are being taxed for millionaire Mudd’s “dining services.” Bon appetite.

Executives receiving very high pay justify their deals on two grounds: that they are risk-takers in high-pressure situations, and that they have valuable expertise. Now we know that no one at the top of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took any personal risks — everything was federally guaranteed, and all mistakes billed to the taxpayer. Here,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/business/05freddie.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1217953639-Yd9SmkzN5YSr/88nehqU9w
the New York Times reports that Syron was repeatedly warned in 2004 that the organization was taking on bad loans, and did nothing. Syron justified his inaction by complaining to the Times that he was under pressure from various Fannie constituents. That’s why he was paid so much, to take the heat! Yet he took no heat, rather, devoted himself to avoiding responsibility. If things go well, executives are lavished with money and praised as risk-takers. If things go poorly, executives are lavished with money and blame others.

And just what incredible expertise do Syron and Mudd possess? They made billion-dollar blunder after billion-dollar blunder; they failed to realize things as basic as buyers borrowing without documentation of income may not be able to repay loans. People chosen at random from the phone book could hardly have performed worse. Yet the federal bail-out legislation just signed by George W. Bush does not require them to give back any of their ill-gotten gains.

This is the core lesson of CEO overpay scandals: The corrupt or incompetent executive always keeps the money. He may be caught and embarrassed by bad press, but he keeps the money while someone else — shareholders, taxpayers, workers — is punished. Raines recently settled a federal legal complaint by agreeing to return about $3 million of his $50 million, but kept the rest; his employment contract was worded such that even if he was malfeasant, whatever he took from company coffers was his. Hilariously, federal prosecutors claimed victory because Raines “surrendered” to the government a large block of stock options — options now worthless, owing to the Fannie Mae decline Raines helped set in motion by lying about Fannie numbers. Until Congress enacts a law that allows money taken by corrupt or incompetent executives to be recovered, the lying will continue. Lying by CEOs is what society rewards!

Why does Congress tolerate the swindle aspect of Fannie and Freddie? For the standard reason: Congress is on the take. Here,
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11781.html
Lisa Lerer of Politico reports that in the past decade, Fannie and Freddie spent almost $200 million on campaign donations to Congress and on lobbying members of Congress, some of the lobbying money going to former members. This year, for instance, Fannie gave the legal max of $10,000 to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and to Republican House Whip Roy Blunt, neither of whom face meaningful re-election challenge. As for costly lobbying, the implied deal is: Don’t rock the boat while in office and someday you too will be a former member getting easy money to lobby former colleagues. During Senate debate on the Mae-Mac bailout, Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to permit a vote on an amendment that would have barred Fannie and Freddie from giving money to members of Congress. Reid did not merely oppose the measure, he refused to allow the Senate to vote on it — so that members of Congress could remain on the take, without having to go on record about the matter.

Now that taxpayers are covering Fannie and Freddie’s cooked books, the $200 million diverted to Congress in effect came from average Americans, forcibly removed from their pockets — and thanks to Senator Reid, more will be forcibly taken from your pocket and placed into the accounts of senators and representatives. This is what TMQ calls a Sliver Strategy. The Sliver Strategy is a means to disguise embezzlement. Congress looked the other way while Fannie and Freddie approved vast amounts of bad debt, in order to shave off a sliver for itself — in this case, the $200 million in lobbying and donations. Had Congress simply awarded itself $200 million, editorialists would have been outraged. Because the money was slipped in to a larger fiasco of much greater sums wasted, Congress got away with it.

I’m far from a fan of Paris Hilton, but I found her video response to her being (very briefly) included in a recent John McCain ad funny and, dare I say it, a tad bit witty and intelligent.

Fox News has a brief article about the video: “PARIS HILTON GETS EVEN WITH MCCAIN, RELEASES ‘AD’ OF HER OWN”

Tonight is the first night we’ll be spending the night in our new house. Liz and I both took Friday off and moved some stuff over, but Saturday is the official moving-in day. We’re fortunate to have a bunch of friends who have volunteered to help us in this god-awful endeavor. I’d rather have another colonoscopy than move.

The world was a better place because of him.

George Carlin Mourned as Counterculture Hero - AP

The indescent, not obscene, Carlin dies - CNN

…and a nice bio from Wikipedia.

Anyone have a spare $4,147.50 they want to give me?

http://gozerog.com/