… I needed a bloody good laugh.
Saturday Night Live does Sarah Palin’s CBS Katie Couric interview:
Isn’t she just precious?
UPDATE: Bugger, it got pulled. Try this instead.
There Is No Obe Wan
With the news this morning that the Bradford & Bingley building society is to be nationalised, no wonder people are getting exceedingly jittery and very, very angry.
The banking system as it stands is a crumbling edifice of avarice, dishonesty and jaw-dropping incompetence, on the verge of falling apart and hurting millions. No amount of panicky governmental tinkering and emergency taxpayer-funded bailouts will slow the accelerating collapse; the foundations were rotten from the start. That rock of financial security? Just shifting sand.
How tempting it is to want to wipe it all out and start again. Let’s blame it all on Gordon Brown and vote in the Tories! That’ll show Labour, the hypocritical bastards.
But although no one has clean hands in this, least of all the Tories, Cameron, his sidekick Osborne and the Conservative Party are actually precipitating the bank crash to ensure their own political and financial survival:
The Tories were accused last night of being bankrolled by a City ‘wolf pack’ after it emerged that the party was receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds from hedge fund managers who have been making vast sums of money from plunging bank shares.
After the Financial Services Authority had, in effect, barred the controversial practice of short-selling bank stocks and the Treasury was forced to draw up a rescue package for Bradford and Bingley, it emerged that a small group of City financiers who have made fortunes from falling stock markets are paying at least £50,000 a year to the party.
The Labour party should wish they had such donors. No wonder Brown & Darling banned short selling; it’s been directly enriching Tory party coffers. Remember Bush’s Pioneers’ Club?
Bush Pioneers are people who gathered $100,000 for George W. Bush’s 2000 or 2004 presidential campaign. Two new levels, Bush Rangers and Super Rangers, were bestowed upon supporters who gathered $200,000+ or $300,000+, respectively, for the 2004 campaign, after the 2002 McCain–Feingold campaign finance law raised hard money contribution limits. This was done through the practice of “bundling” contributions. [1] There were 221 Rangers and 327 Pioneers in the 2004 campaign and 241 Pioneers in the 2000 campaign (550 pledged to try).[1] A fourth level, Bush Mavericks, was used to identify fundraisers under 40 years of age who bundled more than $50,000. [2]
Nineteen of the original Pioneers became ambassadors in 2001. Three Pioneers have been convicted of politics-related crimes.
David Cameron, aping Bush, has a Pioneers Club of his very own:
Their donations entitle them to membership of an elite supporters club called the Leaders Group, which bestows invitations to functions attended by David Cameron, something that has prompted allegations that the Tory leader is supporting ‘cash for access’.
[…]
Hedge fund managers whose donations entitle them to membership of the group include Michael Hintze of CQS, who has given £662,500 and whose organisation shorted shares in Bradford and Bingley. Two other men who qualify as members of the group are Paul Ruddock, who has given almost £210,000, and David Craigen, who has donated £50,000. The pair’s investment firm, Lansdowne, was exposed last week as shorting shares in HBOS.
[My emphasis]
The Tories are profiting directly from and are implicated in bank collapses, and it’s a below the fold squib? Shows how Labour and their rapidly dwindling gang of media supporters have lost the plot: once they’d’ve been on a story like this like white on rice.
At least the Lib Dems noticed:
Yesterday critics were quick to attack Cameron for taking money from hedge funds. ‘Now we see that the same hedge fund wolf pack who brought HBOS to its knees are bankrolling the Tory party,’ said Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman.
Ah yes, the Lib Dems. Help us, Vincey Wan Cablekenobe, you’re our only hope!
Not:
The Liberal Democrats are facing an embarrassing High Court battle with a lawyer who says that the party wrongly accepted £632,000 of his money as part of a donation. Robert Mann, 60, claims that the party failed to carry out adequate checks on the money which was received as part of a £2.4m gift from the financier Michael Brown.
So much for Lib Dem fiscal integrity. There are a couple more words that suffice to sum up the totally useless Lib Dems: Nick and Clegg.
Oh gods, we really are in the shit, aren’t we, and voting won’t make a ha’porth of difference.
A Palpable Hit
Anyone watching the debate last night could see – even Bob Shrum of all people – that Obama is the next president. Judge for yourself:
To mix images and genres – and why the hell not, I can be just as deconstructuralist as any other poseur – it’s like Will Smith in Independence Day taking on the Simpsons’ crusty, raddled old Mr Burns (or that creepy old nonce with the zimmer frame on Family Guy…). It’s no contest.
There’s only one person on that screen that comes across as Presidential, and it sure isn’t old Get Off My Lawn, who can’t even bring himself to look the better man in the eye. And what’s with the continual blinking? “Mr McCain, it’s time for your tablets, dear, I SAID IT’S TIME FOR YOUR TABLETS!”
The networks, even CNN and Fox, nearly all called it for Obama; even their paid shills, sunk in cynicism and whorishness as they are, can see the utter disaster McCain/Palin would be.
I cannot wait for the Biden/Palin VP debate. If Moosealini comes off as small minded, airheaded and petulant as she did in her Katie Couric interview on CBS, it’ll be a complete trainwreck and great tv.
A Bit of A Cock-Up On The Existentialist Front
I’ve been thinking of changing my nom de blog for quite a while; it really is a bit of a cheek to be pontificating on the internet under a name of a nation you have no connection with other than besottedness with its wildlife.
It came about in 2003 as a joke in a comment thread at the late lamented News Blog, a riff on Bush’s long forgotten quip ‘You forgot Poland’ – because of course they also forgot Palau, which was also a member of the ‘coalition of the willing’. Somebody had to speak up for plucky Palau…and it stuck.
I’ve been fancing a change anyway, what with 7-ish year blog itch, and I’m open to suggestions as to a new monicker, but keep it clean please, and at least a little bit suitable. Something SFnal would be nice. (None of this of course has nothing at all to do with an address at ocianiatv.palaunet.com turning up in the blogstats and me being rumbled, oh no…)
I’m leaning towards ‘Marie Of Roumania’ but I feel it might also be open to charges of misappropriation, even though she is decidedly dead. It’s also a bit lengthy to keep typing and has probably already been used by 20,000 other middle-aged women who like Dorothy Parker.
Much easier would be ‘Pilau’, the tasty rice dish, which would have the advantage of needing only the substitution of another vowel to effect a total change in meaning.
But there’s also the blog’s title too; when we started, the word ‘progressive’ was by no means mainstream and the liberal blogosphere had yet to explode and go corporately massive. Until around 2005-6 we could still do a daily digest of the best of progressive and left writing online on the transatlantic web and yet still be reasonably comprehensive.
But not now: put ‘progressive political blogs’ into technorati and it brings back umpteen zillion results. To be still be calling ourselves ‘Progressive Gold’ now seems more than a tiny bit vainglorious.
Then again, that’s the name all our links and pagerankings are in. What to do? Discard a blog identity that no longer fits (IMHO, Martin may feel differently) and start all over again, or keep flogging something that no longer does what it says on the tin?
The Swift-Pucking Has Commenced
Hockey Moms Against Sarah Palin:
Heh, indeed.