There’s one man who possesses all the skills and experience to get the BP spill under control. Love him or hate him, Dick Cheney is the man. He’s steered an oil services company (Halliburton). He’s been Secretary of Defense, proving he knows how to manage huge endeavors such as Operation Desert Storm. And he takes a heart attack the way the rest of us knock back a shot of Jack Daniel’s, with a wince and a smile.
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President Obama, a role model to our children (I like to think of him as our “Role Model-in-Chief”) set a terrible example to our obesity-plagued children by having a cheeseburger with some guy from Russia.
The buzz around the White House centered much more on the presidents’ unexpected jaunt for cheeseburgers to Ray’s Hell Burger in Virginia — Medvedev took jalapenos — and less about the many substantive matters they discussed.
Did the president check this out with his wife first? Remember, she is the one who created the “Let’s Move” campaign, to encourage fat kids to, well, move.
And also, to not eat so many cheeseburgers.
Often as not, I enjoy Adam Sandler. I remember listening to his album They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! with friends on the school bus over and over whenever we went on a field trip and I think on the occasions when he’s stretched as an actor (most recently in Funny People), he’s been solid, generally better than the films themselves. Yet there is something strange about the way a guy who’s best described as “irresistibly goofy” if you’re a fan — or “stupid and annoying” if you’re not — winds up playing lady-killing, world-class athlete, all-around unstoppable dudes. Let’s check the track record:
In My Little Chickadee the late, great comedian W.C. Fields played a wily card sharp.
In this classic comedy film an eager sucker sees Fields spreading cards across a table and asks excitedly, “Is this a game of chance?”
“Not the way I play it, no,” was Fields’ classic answer. [Read more →]
The oil still gushes from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and washes up on shores, destroying and threatening tourism, fishing, and ecology. The Coast Guard and BP work tirelessly to plug the leak and limit the damage. The U.S. District Court of New Orleans just overturned an Obama administration moratorium on new drilling, citing that this rig’s disaster does not necessarily presage others’. Sometimes it looks like the President is more concerned with punishing big oil than fixing the problem.
If the United States did ban offshore drilling, where would we get the lost oil? These are considerations that the government will hopefully make. In fact, which forms of energy we should develop, where we should develop them, and how we should develop them seem to be the greatest challenge facing mankind in the 21st century. The answers are debatable, but there is one consideration that is not conventionally thrown around. Antarctica. [Read more →]
My father-in-law recently faced up to the adult equivalent of “there is no Santa Claus.” Specifically, he discovered that, if the shit ever hits the fan, nobody is going to wipe his ass for him. Well … Maybe that’s unfair. He actually realized that, in case of disaster, he can’t count on “the authorities” to charge to the rescue.
Hmmm … I phrased it better the first time. [Read more →]
Sometimes you need to see something to grasp its scale — simply stating its dimensions fails to do it justice, no matter how accurately you describe it. That’s the case with the empire of Pablo Escobar. Jeff and Michael Zimbalist’s documentary The Two Escobars offers extensive footage of the late Colombian drug kingpin once ranked among Forbes’ richest men and it’s extraordinary, not only in terms of the toys his money lets him acquire (though those are impressive, with his race cars and helicopters and the like), but the prominence it affords him, as when he stands beaming and seemingly his entire community applauds his opening of a new playing field. The flip side of this is it also lets us appreciate the carnage Pablo helped create: this is a man who took down planes and once blew up an entire city block to make a point, devastation on a level that sounds almost unreal until you see the bodies and the survivors stumbling around the destruction. He was both a generous and extremely dangerous man and, as this doc makes clear, he really liked soccer. [Read more →]
CSPI has threatened to sue McDonald’s if it doesn’t stop offering toys with its Happy Meals. According to CNN:
“McDonald’s is the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children,” CSPI’s litigation director, Stephen Gardner, said in a prepared statement. “It’s a creepy and predatory practice that warrants an injunction.”
That CSPI has a “litigation director” tells you most of what you need to know about the organization. That it compares a business to a child molester — for offering a free toy with its chicken nuggets — tells you the rest. [Read more →]
June 13, 2010
I dream I work on the staff of an enormous entertainment complex visited by hundreds of thousands of people every day. It is coming to the end of an event, and cars tied together with rope move past us in a huge procession. Eric and I hang around until the crowd thins out and Liza Minnelli joins us at our table and starts singing. Later on, Liza performs memory feats. It is getting to be time for me to perform, but I am not wearing my pants. I pull my shirt down to cover my genitals. Meanwhile, an elderly man runs around with his enormous schlong waving and he’s making a big show of it. I am grateful for the distraction.
The Department of the Interior — in the wake of the tragic Gulf oil spill — has created a new government agency to oversee offshore drilling.
Sorta.
Actually, what it did is rename an old agency. An agency that has been cited for its utter incompetence and corruptness. [Read more →]
