After less-than-stellar reviews of Tuesday night's show, American Idol contestant Anoop Desai formerly requested a federal bailout, in the hopes of avoiding the close call Matt Giraud (a.k.a. "Timberlake lookalike") had to suffer through on live TV last week.
Desai filed a TARP application with the Treasury Department Tuesday night, shortly after the show.
"Why would President Obama stop at cars? My fans have rights, too," Desai, 21, told News Corp.'s Fox and Friends Wednesday morning. "Is Simon Cowell somehow above the ruler of the world? You saw how happy people were about Slumdog Millionaire. This will be a good thing for America. And you know this is the story political reporters want to write: 'Previewing a Jindal rise, young Indian American wins.'"
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was unavailable for comment. A spokesman said he was busy prepping for an interview with Katie Couric in London. If you had't figured out by now, this is an April Fool's joke.
Posted by: Mike ||
04/01/2009 10:33 ||
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Latest news has it Pres Obama is demanding Simon Cowell's resignation and will personally be judging next to Paula Abdul. In the press conference Obama has stated that he has been preparing all his life for this most important role, working out 4-5 hours each day to improve his snide comments and bitchy gestures.
Posted by: ed ||
04/01/2009 11:06 Comments ||
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#2
You sure, Mike... after all Hollywood got $450M
Tim Geithners new nominee for number two at the Treasury Department, Neal Wolin, played a key role in drafting legislation in the late 1990s deregulating the banking system, a former Treasury Department official confirms to us.
The law that Wolin helped draft has been blamed by some critics, many of them Democrats, for easing up regulatory pressure on huge financial institutions, tangentially helping create todays mess and his role drafting it could come under questioning at his upcoming confirmation hearings.
Our reporter, Ryan Derousseau, came across Wolins role in researching our big profile of Wolin at WhoRunsGov.com. Stuart Eizenstat, a deputy Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, confirmed that as Treasurys general counsel at the time, Wolin provided the technical and legal drafting for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
As Ryan writes, the Act hasnt been directly blamed for todays meltdown. But it did pave the way for the birth of huge financial companies like Citigroup that were deemed too big to fail when their mortgage bets went belly-up and the credit market evaporated. The government, of course, had to bail out these institutions with billions in taxpayer dollars.
Wolin who was picked after several other candidates passed on the slot did the legal work under then-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who is now Obamas head of the National Economic Council. The difference here is that Summers post, unlike Wolins, is a non-confirmable one, so he hasnt been pressed publicly on Gramm-Leach-Bliley. The question now is whether Wolin will come under sharp questioning over his role in creating it.
The Treasury Department has yet to comment. In other Treasury news first reported this morning by The Huffington Post the department is launching an interesting new interactive website today that is intended to bring transparency to he Obama administrations recovery programs.
#1
Let me guess, the headline, "He did not pay his taxes either" is coming next week. What bad idea is this guy going to push through? All the appointees seem to have one big bad idea.
For months, this newspaper has opposed President Obama's bold, forward-thinking agenda. What a colossal mistake.
We realize now that we were merely clinging to the discredited ideas of the past. Holding on to disposable relics like tradition, religion and the Constitution only delays the glorious new world that awaits us all.
President Obama has shown America a bright, glimmering future full of widely shared prosperity and national nice-to-each-otherness. Only by universally embracing the President's vision can this nation succeed and prosper. Resistance will bring nothing but social distortion, widespread panic and madness.
Obama has shown us all that to achieve the unrealized promise of this great nation, we must transcend outdated values such as public thrift, individual liberty and restrained government. All power must be shifted to Washington and deposited in the hands of a wise and benevolent ruler whose will is never questioned.
We must grant this great man and his helpful lieutenants the authority to control our corporations, redistribute our wealth and otherwise direct the economy as they see fit. To do anything less is to guarantee disaster.
The road to prosperity, President Obama has shown, is traveled by high-speed rail and government-mandated hybrid automobiles, powered by wind, water and air, subsidized by gargantuan energy taxes and paid for by borrowing trillions that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will never be able to repay. It is a road that can be constructed only by an energetic national government unconstrained by law, tradition or actual cash reserves.
The winds of change are blowing, and they smell all flowery. That could be the scent of same-sex marriage. We aren't sure. But we know that questioning change is bad; stepping back and letting it happen no matter the consequences is good.
So let us all stand idly by, mouths shut in obedience to our new rulers, and watch the traditions that hold up our society, like pillars of a great temple, crumble and collapse from the force of great, howling winds that sing hauntingly of a future filled with consequences none of us understands.
Let's all do this until at least midnight tonight. Then April Fool's Day will be over.
...There was a time when our government under President George W. Bush believed we would never leave Iraq and would retain some kind of permanent base there. Now we have signed agreements with Iraq's government committing us to leave permanently no later than December 31, 2011, and if any referendum in Iraq requires that we leave by June 30, 2010, we have agreed to do so. If I had my way, we would leave at once.
I believe we will gain nothing by delaying our departure from Iraq to equal the inevitable American casualties. Does anyone think the Iraqis will come to love or even like us? I don't.
...What will make the Iraqis more capable of peacefully running their own country within the next 18 months? I believe the tribal killings there among the Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds based on historic animosities will continue after we leave - unless a repressive dictator akin to Saddam Hussein takes over. Rationally, Iraq should be divided into three separate countries - Kurdistan, Sunnistan and Shi'iastan - either totally independent from one another or, if acceptable to all, loosely confederated.
#3
Does anyone think the Iraqis will come to love or even like us? I don't.
Which of the European countries love or even like us? And yet the European and North African theaters cost us 300,000 dead - in a war where neither Germany nor Italy attacked a single square inch of American territory.
I believe the tribal killings there among the Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds based on historic animosities will continue after we leave - unless a repressive dictator akin to Saddam Hussein takes over.
Just about every country in the world has historical animosities that get smoothed over. Indians had their ancestral lands completely taken over. They're not exactly running around killing the foreign interlopers who took over, are they? Blacks were taken in chains to this country, where they were bred like cattle into generations of chattel slavery. Are they running around blowing up the descendants of their white masters?
#4
Just about every country in the world has historical animosities that get smoothed over. Indians had their ancestral lands completely taken over. They're not exactly running around killing the foreign interlopers who took over, are they? Blacks were taken in chains to this country, where they were bred like cattle into generations of chattel slavery. Are they running around blowing up the descendants of their white masters?
Zhang, aren't you on the side of all those unionist occupying forces?
#5
Zhang, aren't you on the side of all those unionist occupying forces?
I've always favored the Union side, but for un-PC reasons probably similar to Lincoln's and some of the Unionists of the era. If the Confederacy had endured, the importation of slaves might have resumed. Given how breeding slaves was a profitable endeavor, I suspect a Confederate government would have greatly expanded the slave population. As the slave population grew in relation to the white population, they would eventually have taken over the Confederate government, either via slave revolts or eventual enfranchisement. Imagine the black-ruled Caribbean dystopias of today expanded to include the entire South. What the Union did was in the long term interests of the South - the slave-owners were simply too myopic to understand this fact, and the non-slave owners were too enraptured by the rhetoric of state's rights to figure out that a society with an increasing helot population (in relation to non-helots) will eventually be ruled by helots, and much of the non-helot population forced out.
...There is something unavoidably spooky about people who spend their waking hours fretting about overpopulation, and who hand out leaflets saying How many is too many? illustrated with a picture of an innocent-looking schoolgirl (white, of course) doing population sums on a blackboard (black, of course). In a Frequently Asked Questions section frequently asked by whom? Benito Mussolini? the leaflet informs us that there is a severe shortage of water and land on this beautiful planet of ours and then ponders: Whats the problem? The answer, in case you hadnt worked it out from looking at the programme of talks on everything from Scientific solutions in contraception to Population policies for the UK, is us: Sadly, we are. Humans. Every year around 75million of us a population nearly as big as Germanys are added to the Earths surface. Thats another Birmingham every five days. And God knows, one Birmingham is enough.
Looking around the lecture hall of the Royal Statistical Society (a fitting venue for a conference that reduced everything to statistics), I was struck by the make-up of the audience: white-haired demographers; ladies-who-normally-lunch-but-who-today-were-discussing-the-coming-apocalypse; comparatively young but equally posh Soil Association supporters. There was, I think, one person of not entirely white extraction: he was operating the sound system. You can bet that when these well-to-do worriers about the human plague on the planet talk about burdensome people causing congestion, overcrowding and loss of green space, they arent talking about themselves, or their friends, or their neighbours, or their mistresses; theyre talking about them. You know them! The breeders, the not-sufficiently-educated, the dwellers of teeming cities, not only in Africa and Asia but in Europe and America too.
The conference confirmed that, while groups like the OPT (founded in 1991) have tried very hard to spin population control in terms of choice and environmentalism, and to move away from that nasty eugenics of old, still some of the dark prejudices lurk beneath the surface. In her welcome address, Sara Parkin, a former leading Green Party activist and OPT patron, set the tone for the day by complaining: There are no Nobel Prizes for preventing births, only for preventing deaths. Yes, that is because, call us crazy, mankind has traditionally valued the creation of life over the destruction of it. Perhaps the OPT should set up its own annual Malthus Prize, to be awarded to the man or woman who does most to **shudder** prevent people from having as many children as they choose....
Robin Maynard of the Soil Association sounding like a trendy public-school teacher said too many people are scared to mention the P-word these days in case someone accuses them of being British National Party supporters or extreme ignorant racists. Then he said that if there were to be two more beers per person in China, [then producing that beer] would take the entire Norwegian grain harvest. I make no judgement. Suffice to say that judging the Friday-night drinking habits of the populous Chinese by the impact it will have on a responsible, sparsely populated Scandinavian country just about sums up the scientific vacuousness, scaremongering and fetishism about everything being finite that run through the veins of the modern Malthusian lobby....
There is one thing that the New and Old Malthusians unmistakably share in common: both make the schoolboy error of treating population growth as the only variant, and everything else food production, progress, human ingenuity as fixed entities. That is why every Malthusian, from Malthus himself to Paul Ehrlich to todays doom-mongering poshos, has been wrong in his dire predictions of collapse: because he didnt take into account humanitys creative streak. The OPT, utterly unable to see humans as the potential makers of a better, more fruitful society, says that on its currently existing resources Britain can only environmentally sustain between 17 million and 27 million people, way less than its population of 60 million. But what if we create more resources? Build more cities? Invest in nuclear? Build factories? I reckon if we did that, Blighty could take around half a billion people. No, that isnt a scientific fact; its an optimisitc guess....
Posted by: Mike ||
04/01/2009 12:05 ||
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Of course, the people attending these conferences don't need to die; quite the contrary, they need to stay around to make sure enough of the rest of us die. Vital work. Can't be left to amateurs, you see.
Posted by: Jonathan ||
04/01/2009 12:13 Comments ||
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If these folks wanna go home and stick their heads in the oven, or bathe with their blow dryers in order to reconcile their moral dillemma about overpopulation, please, feel free. A win-win for everybody.
Funny thing is? They ain't doing it.
But seriously, it amazes me that people don't realize how much of our civilization requires a high population. Cut the population by half, then check to see how many specialty foods they sell in your local supermarket. Did I say "supermarket"? Only in major urban centers. Mass transit? What "mass"? Universal electrical service, 500 channels on TV, drugs for rare illnesses -- the list goes on an on.
#5
Two birds with one stone: Save the planet - feed a polar bear.
If you truly want to prove your dedication to the planet and lead by example, head on up north and feed yourself to a polar bear.
There was a ST:TNG episode, forget its name, where I think a planet's sun was going to explode or something and the one person who had a chance to solve that problem was required to be put down at a certain age according to custom.
#6
..and in that episode they explained that it was done because the 'cost' of up keep on the 'old' people became too economically expensive. Took too much of the budget. They didn't realize all they had to do was implement Dutch/British/Canadian universal socialized health care and bureaucratic rationing scheduling to achieve the same effect. I guess the prime directive inhibited them from communicating the concept.
#8
Well, if somebody started a global nuclear war, that would certainly reduce the population to a "sustainable" level. First nuke all the big cities, so you get the most kills from the soft targets. Even if you didn't kill all the residents right away, many of them would die from starvation, since the transportation and energy transportation and energy systems would be destroyed, leading to mass starvation.
Not to mention, that a nuclear war would cause a nuclear winter, which would be an effective antidote to global warming.
I'm surprised that no one at the conference suggested this. If you look at it from a purely statistical view, it would be quite effective.
Please note that I am in no way really suggesting this. People have been screaming since I was a child fifty years ago that the world was overpopulated, and we had to "do something" to put a brake on population growth to prevent an apocalypse by the end of the twentieth century.
The world has essentially infinite water. What it may not have is adequate fresh, drinkable water. It is merely an engineering problem to produce fresh water from sea water and distribute it. A few nuclear powered distillers could probably supply all the water the world needs.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
04/01/2009 17:05 Comments ||
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EP5370,well, we won't know for sure until we try, now, will we. Even if there isn't a nuclear winter, there will still be mass starvation, since there will be no way to transport the food to market, or fuel or fertilizer for the farms.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
04/01/2009 21:19 Comments ||
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Maybe they should talk to the Chinese and Indian people about the problem.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...There was a time when our government under President George W. Bush believed we would never leave Iraq and would retain some kind of permanent base there. Now we have signed agreements with Iraq's government committing us to leave permanently no later than December 31, 2011, and if any referendum in Iraq requires that we leave by June 30, 2010, we have agreed to do so. If I had my way, we would leave at once.
