Political cartoonist Ted Rall warns us what expects on September 11 as the tenth anniversary of the collapse of the World Trade Center comes around.

I have written before about this weird obsession with public grief in which the media and politicians try to suggest that all of us are, or should be, overcome with grief and emotion by simply remembering a past event. This may be true for those who actually lost loved ones but I suspect that for the rest of us it is just another day that would have passed normally if it were not thrust in our faces by a massive media blitz that wallows in cheesy sentiment.

I myself will ignore all coverage of this staged event.

The avenger who gives banks a taste of their own medicine.

The Daily Show brutally captures Obama’s familiar trajectory. He dangles some feature that is popular with his base as an important, even essential, part of a deal that also gives huge benefits to the oligarchs, and then at the last moment gives it up in return for some window dressing. We saw that before with the single payer and public options in the health care reform debate.

Yes, nobody could have seen it coming.

Keith Olbermann also weighs in on the deal, in his usual shrill way, essentially calling on people to revolt. (Thanks to Chris.)

From Tom the Dancing Bug.

I know everyone has been curious about what Orly Taitz, our favorite lawyer/dentist/performance artist, whose obsession with Obama’s birth certificate has provided many hours of hilarity, has been up to recently.

First up, for some bizarre reason, she now refers to herself as “Dr. Orly Taitz Esquire” everywhere. Maybe she is unaware of the origins and meanings of the word ‘esquire’ and thinks it gives her a certain cachet.

You would have thought that the release of Obama’s long form birth certificate would have ended her quest. You would be wrong. She is nothing if not dogged. She is now demanding the right to personally examine the certificate, no doubt to use her sharp forensic skills to figure out how it was forged.

She also now claims that Obama is using a fake social security number and she is suing the Social Security Administration for, well, something, that will help her prove it.
[Read more…]

What comedian Benny Hill taught us is that footage of almost any chase can be made funny by speeding it up and adding the tune Yakety Sax as the sound track. Here the theory is applied to a chase within a prison as captured by the closed circuit surveillance cameras. (Via Boing Boing.)

I just love the tune Yakety Sax. It never fails to cheer me up and put me in a good mood.

Tbogg does the math to contrast the pathetic ticket sales of the Palin fan biopic The Undefeated with the spin by Fox News that the “Palin Film Opens Strong, Theaters Packed.” (One wag noted about the film’s title, it is easy to be undefeated if you keep quitting halfway through everything.)

Meanwhile Stephen Colbert gives his take on the film.

Daniel Radcliffe appeared on The Daily Show. I realized that I had never seen him except in the Harry Potter films. Given his massive success at a young age, he could easily have turned into a brat, but he comes across as quite an unassuming, self-deprecating young man.

Over at National Review Online, Dennis Prager has come up with an exciting new ritual to liven up that dull holiday known as the fourth of July that he hopes will instill in young people a better understanding of the true meaning of the event. He says he based it on the Passover seder and we know that there is nothing that children like to do on a holiday more than engage in solemn quasi-religious rituals instead of running around outside eating hot dogs and watching parades and fireworks. Here’s a sample of Prager’s ritual (I am not making this up):

Host holds up each symbolic item as he explains its symbolic meaning.

• We drink iced tea to remember the Boston Tea Party. “No taxation without representation” was the patriots’ chant as they dumped British tea into the Boston Harbor.
• We eat a salty pretzel to remember the tears shed by the families who lost loved ones in the struggle for freedom in the Revolutionary War and all the wars of freedom that followed.
• We ring a bell to recall the Liberty Bell, which was rung to announce the surrender of the king’s army. On the Bell are inscribed these words from the Book of Leviticus: “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”
• We eat strawberries and blueberries dipped in whipped cream to celebrate the red, white, and blue of our flag.

Once this gem hit the internet, there was much merriment in the land, courtesy of Tbogg and James Wolcott.