First, there was that stupid broom, and now this. Will someone please elect this guy before he gets ahold of a falcon or an adorable kitten? Please. 
Incidentally, here’s a little Californian who clearly resents being (ab)used as a prop by a megalomaniacal Hollywood hypocrite with schnitzel breath. You can practically see her on the shrink’s couch bitching about her parents in 15 years.
Our Man Palast strikes gold yet again. After reports covering everything from the August 2003 blackout in the Northeastern U.S. power grid, to the November 2000 “black”out of the Southeastern U.S. voter rolls, Greg Palast now documents the insidious effort by several power utility companies to work around a $9 billion recompensation plan due the State of California after all the 2000-era state energy crises, paying particular attention to gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger’s involvement in this malarkey.
You say you owe us one dollar? Let’s help you out, here — why not pay back one cent instead, after ensuring that your Republican candidate gets elected to manage the world’s fifth-largest economy? Wait a second, that makes this scale much larger: you owe nine billion dollars? Pay back nine billion cents! All’s fair in politics!
“But we’re running a deficit!”, you say. Well, we can cut state social programs, because there’s no way we’re taking money from the utility companies! Let’s deregulate!
Bah, humbug.
It’s more than likely that this is, by now, a familiar image to Los Angeles-area residents and commuters, which can only be a good thing, given the circumstances. If Andre the Giant has a posse, why can’t Arnold the Bodybuilder have a budget deficit to call his own? (By “Arnold the Bodybuilder,” I mean “Pete Wilson 2: The Sequel,” and most definitely not “Cruz the Bustamante”.)
On Friday night, the police found no one home, but talked to a neighbor who complained of large amounts of urine and a strong smell coming through the ceiling. – Alan Feuer and Jason George, “Police Subdue a Tiger in Harlem Apartment”
This just in: Howard Dean leaves Presidential run to work for Klinger’s, a Burlington area supermarket. Reports indicate the former state Governor did not ask customers their bag preference and neglected to place a bottle of bleach in a separate plastic bag to avoid risk of poisoning. At press time, Dr. Dean was unavailable for comment as he was mopping up baby vomit in aisle three.
Ripping a page out of the Coen brothers’ canon, Arnold Schwarzenegger made an appearance this weekend brandishing a broom and promising sweep Gray Davis out of office.
Not bad, but where’s his “little man”? To wit, here’s Candidate Homer Stokes speechifyin’ in O, Brother Where Art Thou?
STOKES
And I say to you that the great state
a Mississippi cannot afford four more
years a Pappy O’Daniel – four more
years a cronyism, nepotism, rascalism
and service to the Innarests! The
choice, she’s a clear ‘un: Pappy
O’Daniel, slave a the Innarests; Homer
Stokes, servant a the little man! Ain’t
that right, little fella?
The midget enthusiastically seconds:
MIDGET
He ain’t lyin’!
STOKES
When the litle man says jump, Homer
Stokes says how high? And, ladies’n
jettymens, the little man has
admonished me to grasp the broom a
ree-form and sweep this state clean!
[Script via Script-o-Rama]
The Antic Muse takes one for the team and sits through an agonizing meeting full of corporate double (and triple?) speak.
Question: Have the speakers been frozen in ice since 1999, or are they like those Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender after WWII?
As noted earlier, I’m a bit fixated on insensitive/unimaginative headlines for The Station Agent and its star Peter Dinklage. Entering the fray yet again is The New York Post with the worst headline I’ve seen since the days of my high school newspaper, The Southerner.
GENTLE MISFIT FRIENDS ARE FIT FOR FINE FILM
I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education up to power. And I admire him for being such a good public speaker. – Future Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger quoted in a book proposal by George Butler
Formerly hard-hitting, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jimmy Breslin once again takes on one of the most important issues… well, ever: why he hates dogs:
“[W]e know that dogs walked by their hideous owners on city streets are repugnant. They turn the place where you walk into an outdoor bathroom. They should be curbed, which means they could be out there among the buses. That is no loss as dogs have no souls.”- “Those Bad Dogs,” Newsday, Sept. 21, 2003
Breslin fans may remember he said something similar earlier this year:
“Out on the streets of the city there is the revolting sight of people walking along with their dogs and then bending and picking up after them. They humiliate themselves in public, and I cannot understand why a person, having done this, can walk with his head up and even look you in the eye if he catches you staring…On the same sidewalk, a woman dressed for the business day was bent down and picking up after a dog so small that he deserved to be crushed and the woman, after making such a sight of herself, should have been shunned.”-As quoted by Gawker
It should be noted that Mr. Breslin has had extensive surgery to his brain in the last decade, as if you couldn’t tell.