I’m beginning to doubt your committment to Sparkle-Motion!
In keeping with my promise to treat St. Barack of Assisi with all the dignity and respect that the American Left treated President Bush, enjoy this image of our new president smashing his head against the edge of Marine One. In my mind I can hear that delicious ‘BONK!’ - like a great big coconut.
I hereby declare Marine One to be my new favorite helicopter.
(Blue Thunder walks away, sniffling.)
Some of you who know me well realize I have a fondness in my heart for crappy cinema. Give me a schlocky sword-and-sorcery flick with warrior women in overflowing chainmail brassieres, please. Can I get a generic giant irradiated beast movie? I don’t know what it is (inner voice: “the bosoms, Krog, it’s the bosoms!”) about these films that makes me love them so, but after watching ‘The Manitou’ I believe I’ve just found the single goofiest piece of cinema ever made.
And from me, that’s saying a lot.
For those of you who don’t know much about Native American spirituality, a ‘manitou’ is their word (in it’s simplest meaning) for ’spirit’. Since they were in many ways animists, the Native American tribes believed that everything (rocks, chili, laundry detergent, Bill Clinton) has a soul or ‘manitou’. Please remember that, there will be a quiz later in the review.
Karen Tandy (played by Susan Strasberg) has a problem — a tumor has been growing on her neck for the past three days, and it’s growing at a geometric rate, a rate that her doctors believe to be completely impossible. Also, the tumor has a strange embryonic character to it. The short story: this is no ordinary tumor. It’s the reincarnated body of an ancient Native American shaman! He’s also evil.
It’s all downhill from there. Follow the jump for more.
St. Barack’s groovy hope-a-palooza train has suffered another major setback.
Nancy Killefer, who failed for a year and a half to pay employment taxes on household help, has withdrawn her candidacy to be the first chief performance officer for the federal government, the White House said Tuesday.Killefer was the second major Obama administration nominee to withdraw and the third to have tax problems complicate their nomination after President Barack Obama announced their selection.
So this is ‘change we can believe in’? Seems to me that you’ve really got to be a true believer in order to think that we’re going to see a ‘change’ in how Washington does business. Let’s review:
Did I miss anything else? If St. Barack can’t even manage to anoint candidates who pay their taxes, how can we seriously expect him to fight terrorism, fix the economy and find scarecrow’s brain? If you ask an Obamaton, they’ll likely tell you that the power of positive thinking is going to save us all. The ‘most ethical administration in history’ (always the incoming administration, natch) is riddled with appointees who not only haven’t paid their taxes, but also haven’t been dragged off to jail by the IRS, as the rest of us surely would have been.
Color me extremely underwhelmed.
They’re offering free software over at giveawayoftheday.com, and today they’re offering something that looks fairly decent — Document Backup 5.1
Only a few more hours are left to download for free.
I don’t know if it’s as good as they say, but it’s free.
Amir Taheri’s New York Post column on Obama’s outreach to the Islamic world is a must read.
Here’s the interview itself:
From Taheri’s column, the following:
IN his “first message to the Muslim world” Tuesday, President Obama on Al-Arabiya TV invited the Is lamic Republic in Iran to “unclench its fist” and accept his offer of “un conditional talks.”
A few hours later, after Obama had appeared on the Saudi-owned satellite-TV channel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a crowd of militants that no talks are possible unless the United States met a set of conditions.
He demanded a formal apology for unspecified US “crimes” against Iran and the Islamic world. The crucial condition, however, was that America should withdraw its troops from other countries, “taking them back to their own territory.”
The contrast couldn’t have been greater. Obama tried to be as conciliatory as possible - asking only for an “unclenching” of the Iranian fist - a change of style. Ahmadinejad asked for concrete US moves, notably a global military retreat that would leave the Middle East at Tehran’s mercy.
We really are looking at Jimmy Carter’s second term.
The “tax refund” is near and dear to my heart because I never tire of seeing how the media (and ordinary people) treat it as sweet manna from government, like free money from their Fairy Godmother. Ironically, the idea of paying your taxes over time, with each paycheck was pioneered by one of my economic heroes, Milton Friedman. He reasoned that it would be better for government to receive a consistent stream of tax revenue, and it would be easier for citizens to budget themselves. The alternative is to make out one huge check for the government and pay your taxes in a ‘lump sum’.
Unfortunately, this has allowed the government to ‘boil the frog’ as it were, by making tax increases so incremental that they are not noticed by most citizens.
And then there’s the question of overpayment. People jump for joy when they get their ‘tax refund’ which is really just their own money that they’ve given to the government as an interest-free loan over the course of the previous year. It’s your money folks, it’s not a ‘gift’ from the government. If you had been allowed to keep that money and put it in a CD over the course of the year you’d have even more of it.
Need more proof that government uses these ‘refunds’ as interest-free loans? California has announced that tax refunds will be delayed several months.
ABC News has learned that tax refunds are now on hold in California for the first time in state history, according to the state controller’s office.
“Unfortunately, we have asked the California Franchise Tax Board not to send over tax refund claims beginning today because we will not be able to process them and have them out the door by Feb. 1 when a 30-day delay in tax refunds goes into effect,” Hallye Jordan, spokeswoman to California State Controller John Chiang, tells ABC News.
During the 30-day delay, the controller’s office estimates that a combined 2.74 million California individuals and businesses will have their tax refund delayed.
The controller’s office estimates that the delay in tax refunds will free up $1.99 billion over the next month to pay for education, debt service, and other payments that legally have first claim to state funds.
California has had no money in its general fund for the past 17 months, and has been paying its bills by borrowing from Wall Street and special internal funds.
Pathetic.
Notice, the state’s creditors have ‘first claim’ to state funds. And if California goes bankrupt, what then? I guess the overpayment of taxes to the state by citizens will never be repaid. The snake has just about gotten its own tail in its mouth. We’ll be bailing out taxpayers soon! How a state as populous as California gets into financial straits like this is incredible — the government has been spending tax dollars like a pimp with one week to live.
At first this made me laugh.
Then it made me feel badly for any man who would find one necessary.
And then it was funny again! This product was even worse.
Hold her and have a good sleep…. The Girlfriend’s Arm Pillow, shaped like a woman’s torso with right arm and breasts, is designed for the single boy in need of some comfort while he sleeps.
In this shocking photo we can see the hat slowly attacking Ms. Franklin’s head. I’m somewhat of an expert on mutant forms of hatwear, and I’m guessing that this species of hat injects a numbing neurotoxin into its prey.
Sure, Obama is going to save the economy, defeat the terrorists, soothe race relations, and then take a rainbow, wrap it in a sigh, soak it in the sun and make a groovy lemon pie — but what about the mutant hat attacking our nation’s musical icons, huh? What’s St. Obama going to do about this crisis?
Buzzfeed has a rundown on the various sightings of the mutant hat here.
If you see the hat, post your photo here!
UPDATE
Now we’ve lost Ryan Seacrest.
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