jerseyhoya wrote:Unemployment up to 6.5%. Yikes.

Say it with me now, the Bush-Pelosi-Obama recession. I'm just practicing for 2010.

jerseyhoya wrote:Unemployment up to 6.5%. Yikes.

Say it with me now, the Bush-Pelosi-Obama recession. I'm just practicing for 2010.

dajafi wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Unemployment up to 6.5%. Yikes.

Say it with me now, the Bush-Pelosi-Obama recession. I'm just practicing for 2010.

Someone always has to walk behind the elephants, cleaning up.

Wizlah wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Unemployment up to 6.5%. Yikes.

Say it with me now, the Bush-Pelosi-Obama recession. I'm just practicing for 2010.

6.5%? Piss. I remember when it was 20! 20 I tells ya!

VoxOrion wrote:

Wizlah wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Unemployment up to 6.5%. Yikes.

Say it with me now, the Bush-Pelosi-Obama recession. I'm just practicing for 2010.

6.5%? Piss. I remember when it was 20! 20 I tells ya!

That's your wack euro-socialism for you!

In '75 unemployment was in the 8's, in '82 it was in the 10's!

Fun wonky list

Franken's critics are aware of his political satire, but that, too, has become another count in the indictment—Al Franken, trash talker. "He lampooned Rush Limbaugh as a 'big fat idiot,' and he dismissed Ann Coulter as a 'nutcase,' " clucked U.S. News earlier this year. Critics who take note of Franken's political books treat them as the left's answer to Coulter or Bill O'Reilly. But this misses the satirical point. To get the joke of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, you need only to look at the cover, which features Franken posing in a tweed jacket in front of a wall of musty bound volumes, clutching a pipe, looking comically pompous. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right has the joke in the title itself. Coulter writes books with titles like Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, whose charge is meant to be taken at face value. Franken's title mocks the accusation itself with over-the-top redundancy and subverts its own claim to truth by appropriating the corrupted slogan "Fair and Balanced."

Franken does resort to invective on occasion, but this hardly defines his satirical style. (You could just as easily cherry-pick Jon Stewart's most obscene sentences—he recently said "Fuck you" to Sarah Palin—to paint him as a foul-mouthed ranter.) His books are laced with wonky disquisitions on economic policy that are themselves laced with jokes. He evinces vastly more knowledge about domestic policy than most members of Congress or national political reporters I've met.

To be sure, Franken skewers his targets, a habit which has contributed to his reputation as a raging left-winger. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Franken's politics "neatly mirror" those of the "liberal base." There's a misperception at work here that conflates blunt opposition to the Republican right with left-wing beliefs. As a confessed Bush hater who's not enamored with the left, I'm a fellow victim of this confusion. Franken is actually a moderate who initially favored the Iraq war and has praised the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

Indeed, what Franken reveals of himself in Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot confounds a lot of blue-state-elitist stereotypes. Franken recounts having said a prayer for George H.W. Bush upon his election, defending Bob Dole's honor to a European journalist, and making multiple overseas trips to entertain American troops. The Franken persona is best summed up by the instance when, upon hearing National Review Editor Rich Lowry claim that liberals had sissified politics, Franken challenged Lowry to a fistfight. When Lowry refused, they met for an amiable lunch. If, say, Jim Webb did this sort of thing, it would be seen as rough-hewn, populist authenticity.

Woody wrote:Obama just gave a pretty funny answer at his press conference about what dog he's going to buy for the girls... he played it totally deadpan as though it was a most pressing issue of national importance. Good stuff

VoxOrion wrote:That, and he just isn't funny. I remember when he would do weekend update bits for Dennis Miller and the comedy train would just veer right off the tracks and crash mercilessly into a lava flow of unfunnyness.

Bakestar wrote:

Woody wrote:Obama just gave a pretty funny answer at his press conference about what dog he's going to buy for the girls... he played it totally deadpan as though it was a most pressing issue of national importance. Good stuff

Sooo... what kind of dog is he getting?!!?