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.
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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.

Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere

(Thanks to reader Fu DaYi)

Yesterday they did a piece on the story I wrote about a couple of months ago about the way that the IKEA company in the US abuses its workers here.

Stephen Colbert has found him.

It is the same old dreary story that we are unfortunately so familiar with, with the same financial chicanery buried in the same jargon. It should be no surprise that Goldman Sachs is once again involved in the collapse.