Awesome Sarah Palin Sex Tape!!

well, sort of....

It’s enough to make a fat man scream….

8 )

Stockbrokers don’t use the window anymore…

Not in Brazil, anyway. Reuter reports that a proactive trader brought activity to a halt last night, by dealing with his blues the old-fashioned way.

SAO PAULO, Nov 17 (Reuters) – A Brazilian trader shot himself on Monday in the open outcry pit of Sao Paulo’s commodities and futures exchange in an apparent suicide attempt, the exchange said.

Paulo Sergio Silva, 36, a trader for the brokerage arm of Brazilian banking giant Itau (ITAU4.SA: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz)(ITU.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), shot himself in the chest during the afternoon trading session, the exchange said, and hospital staff said he was in critical condition.

Silva was given first aid on the scene before being transported to the hospital, BM&F Bovespa SA (BVMF3.SA: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), which operates the exchange, said in a statement without providing further details.

Traders said the incident happened in the interest rate futures pit, a raucous circle where on average $21 billion worth of contracts exchange hands every day.

Reuters forgot to mention that the company motto at Itau trading house actually is ‘buy high, sell low, shoot yourself in the chest’.

Australian media link Obama to Crack

The Sydney Morning Herald has reached a desperate new low today, and it is anybody’s guess why. This paper is on one hand trying to promote itself as cool and edgy, with colourful stroboscopic TV ads soundtracked by a theme plagiaristically close to Rage Against the Machine’s ‘I won’t do whatcha tell me!’ On the other hand, it also frequently runs conservative snootiness masquerading as irony and continues to question and even deny the very actual reality of devastating climate change.

So when they try to associate Barack Obama with crack cocaine is it because they think destructive drug references are edgy and cool (which they aren’t), or because their increasingly conservative editorial agenda finds something satisfying in making a racist slur against the new US President-elect?

What? Crack cocaine use is much more common amongst lower income brackets in America. Blacks in America are still more likely than white Americans to be economically disadvantaged. And American courts treat crack much more harshly than cocaine, which is generally used by people with a much higher disposable income.

Odds are that if you’re in America and your problem is crack, you’re black, and you’re going to get a harsher sentence than Wall Street when he gets caught with uncut Peruvian coming back from his Obama inauguration party. Statistically speaking.

The New York Times has been running this story for the past couple of days: Lose the Blackberry? Yes he can, maybe. It’s a very interesting article about how the US President is, in a way, locked in the watchtower. When Obama takes office on Jan. 20, he may well be denied his mobile phone and even email access because of laws relating to communications from the President of the United States.

Today (timely, as always) the Sydney Morning Herald is running exactly the same story, and the are attributing it to The New York Times. Except that they have changed the title to

Obama might have to kick his CrackBerry habit

and inexplicably altered the line

For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry.

to instead read

For years, like legions of other on-the-move professionals, Mr Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry – or CrackBerrys as they are sometimes called for exactly that reason..

As you can see, the sloppy Herald insert is evident by the appearance of two fullstops.

Now – and I’m just guessing here – writers in New York have seen a lot of the social problems and devastation of crack addiction across poorer areas of their city. They have seen that many black communities have been deeply affected by it in an almost cancerous manner. And they have seen a number of other American media outlets repeatedly tie black skin to crack addiction and drug abuse generally in a pervasive and decidedly racebaiting manner. So it would never even occur to them to use the term “Crackberry” in writing about anybody, let alone their President-elect.

The Sydney Morning Herald, on the other hand – just what the f#$% are they trying to say?

Aussie Captions Needed: Malcolm Turnbull…

.......................... ?

no prizes, plenty of reasons, pretty self-explanatory, and……GO!

one bloody good example from Glass Wall Observer that hassurprisingly little to do with penises:

Turnbull displays both his level of concern for “working families” and the extent to which his own living standards will be affected by any economic downturn.

Lovin’ it.

More!!

Now!!!!         8 )

PATRIOT Act Repealed!! Iraq withdrawal commences.

A very special edition of the New York Times was freely distributed to 1.2 million Americans as they raced to or from work today, in commemoration of an end to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Web traffic for the special edition has been so high that a number of pages have been forced offline, but the special issue is certainly worth visiting, for the stirring cover art alone.

Iraq War ends! Cars run on gasoline recalled.

Awesome!! This bulletin just in from New York Times:

Early this morning, commuters nationwide were delighted to find out
that while they were sleeping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had
come to an end.

If, that is, they happened to read a “special edition” of today’s New
York Times.

In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million
papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged
pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass
them out on the street.

Articles in the paper announce dozens of new initiatives including the
establishment of national health care, the abolition of corporate
lobbying, a maximum wage for C.E.O.s, and, of course, the end of the
war.

The paper, an exact replica of The New York Times, includes
International, National, New York, and Business sections, as well as
editorials, corrections, and a number of advertisements, including a
recall notice for all cars that run on gasoline. There is also a
timeline describing the gains brought about by eight months of
progressive support and pressure, culminating in President Obama’s “Yes
we REALLY can” speech. (The paper is post-dated July 4, 2009.)

“It’s all about how at this point, we need to push harder than ever,”
said Bertha Suttner, one of the newspaper’s writers. “We’ve got to make
sure Obama and all the other Democrats do what we elected them to do.
After eight, or maybe twenty-eight years of hell, we need to start
imagining heaven.”

Not all readers reacted favorably. “The thing I disagree with is how
they did it,” said Stuart Carlyle, who received a paper in Grand
Central Station while commuting to his Wall Street brokerage. “I’m all
for freedom of speech, but they should have started their own paper.”

Some people just don’t get it….

updated reports here

Malcolm Turnbull’s ego shames Australia on the B.B.C.

Malcolm Turnbull tells.... um... does this even need a caption?

Malcolm Turnbull, leader of Australia’s well-deserving federal opposition has been banging on and on for nearly 2 weeks now about a joke about George Bush.

Firstly, Turnbull has taken on the role of playing wounded, feigning shock that anybody could consider the least competent American President in history an idiot. It’s a strange position for an allegedly intelligent man to take, especially given that his unending melodrama of the last fortnight would have made better sense coming from a 7-year old boy with wet underpants.

Secondly, Turnbull has been flouncing on for so long about how some joke about George Bush, allegedly made by Kevin Rudd, will so hurt our international standing, and so harm Australia’s international security clearance, and so upset the rest of the world, that now the media of the world have walked into the story thinking it’s actually a story and thereby treating it as such. So after two weeks of hard and useless work, Turnbull may well have achieved that of which he has endlessly accused Rudd.

Thanks to Lord Snot’s ceaseless self-serving dummy-spit, the BBC world service is now carrying this ill-informed article freshly posted by Reuters.

“[It was] an account so self-serving that it presented him as a diplomatic encyclopaedia, a font of all knowledge, and the president of the United States, the chief executive of our greatest ally, as a fool,” Mr Turnbull was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.

Aren’t parliamentary privilege and political power wonderful? You can be the gutless leading puppet of a rejected gaggle of climate change denying visionless racists focussed only on finding fault in everything that everybody who is actually doing anything puts forward, intent only on one day adding “Prime Minister of Australia” to your resume because it’s the one thing you haven’t been able to buy – yet – but if you spin the same irrelevant line long enough, the world will listen to your vacuous side of the story for, ooh, maybe fifteen minutes?

But that’s opposition isn’t it – so little to do, so much time.