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Late Night Humor
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
It’s reported that
Barack Obama’s new attorney general is going to be Eric Holder.
Here is what we know about him: His name is Eric Holder.
It’s being reported
that Hillary Clinton will accept the position of secretary of
state. Actually this works out great for the Clintons. While
Hillary is concentrating on foreign affairs, Bill can get back
to concentrating on domestic affairs.
Barack Obama says one
of his top priorities once he becomes president is closing down
Guantanamo Bay. And to make sure it closes, he’s going to turn
it into a bank.
According to the New
York Post, Sarah Palin may appear on the season finale of
“Desperate Housewives.” In a related story, John McCain just got
a big Flomax commercial.
Late Show Top Ten
Top Ten Things Overheard During Obama’a Meeting With McCain
10. “Oh, just
preparing to be president. What have you been up to?”
9. “I know a guy who would be a perfect secretary of plumbing”
8. “What is the deal with that Alaskan babe?”
7. “Let’s wrap this up; Wheel of Fortune’s on”
6. “Seriously, what was the deal with that Alaskan babe?”
5. “Actually, it’s now the ‘Straight Talk Express and Girls Gone
Wild’ bus”
4. “Uh John, this isn’t another debate”
3. “Where’s the soup? Someone said there’d be soup!”
2. “I know I’m trailing by 192 electoral votes two weeks after
the election, but I’ve got you right where I want you!”
1. “Maybe you’d be president-elect if you hadn’t crossed
Letterman”
Late Show with David Letterman
Cold in New York City.
So cold, today Sarah Palin spent $150,000 on mittens.
Sarah Palin has landed
a $7 million book deal. She got it through a guy named Joe the
publisher.
When she was asked
about writing a book, she said, “You bethcha! As long as I don’t
have to read it.”
Wow — $7 million.
Maybe now she can buy her own clothing.
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
Yesterday in Chicago,
President-elect Obama met with former political rival John
McCain. Both men said it was a relief to put their differences
aside, sit down, and really
make fun of Sarah Palin.
Yesterday, President
Bush awarded a National Medal of the Arts to Stan Lee, the comic
book artist who created “Spider-Man.” Afterwards, Bush said it
was the first thing he’s done as president that “felt right.”
Political experts say
Hillary Clinton may not be given the position secretary of state
because of Bill Clinton’s activities. When he heard this, Bill
said, “It’s only fair — she denies me positions all the time.”
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
Happy birthday to the
Alaska senator, and convicted felon, Ted Stevens. Today he turns
85 to life.
Michael Jackson is in
trouble again. He is supposed to testify in a lawsuit, but his
lawyer says he’s too sick to travel. He can only travel in an
emergency — like a Jonas Brothers concert.
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Raging fires in
California. So far, 32,000 acres have burned. It seems ironic
that the flamingest state in the Union voted against gay
marriage.
It looks like Hillary
Clinton might be Barack Obama’s secretary of state. She went
from almost being president to a secretary.
Sounds like somebody
needs to watch “Working Girl” — that’s not how it’s supposed to
work.
The secretary of
state travels all over the world meeting with foreign
leaders sometimes spending months away from his or her
husband. But that’s just the sacrifice Bill is willing to
make.
Lost and Found
• ”Clash Over $700bn Bank Bail-Out’–headline,
BBC Web site, Nov. 18
• ”Opec ‘Lost $700bn on Cheaper Oil”–headline,
BBC Web site, Nov. 19
‘This Is Now Bone of My Bones and Flesh of My Flesh’
“First Person in World Gets Organ Entirely Made in
Lab”–headline, KARE-TV Web site (Minneapolis), Nov. 19
And You Thought They Were Just Happy to See You
“Scientists Rediscover Pocket-Sized Primate”–headline, Globe
and Mail (Toronto), Nov. 19
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Today’s Papers
Panic Grips Wall Street
The
New York Times,
Washington Post,
USA Today, and
Wall Street Journal
lead with yet another terrible, horrible, no good, very
bad day at the
stock market. The Dow Jones industrial average plunged
5.1 percent and closed below the 8,000 mark for the first
time since March 2003. The market is now down 43.5 percent
from a high point hit a little
over a year ago. USAT
notes that the market has “wiped out nearly $10 trillion
in wealth since the October 2007 peak” and the
WSJ
highlights that the recent plunges have nearly wiped out
“all the gains from the last bull market, which lasted from
October 2002 to October 2007.” Optimists who had hoped the
market had nowhere to go but up after the lows of last month
were hit with a cold dose of reality by a string of grim
economic news made it clear that the pain is far from over.
The
Los Angeles Times gives big play to the stock
market woes but leads with news that the California Supreme
Court has agreed to review
legal challenges to Proposition 8, the voter initiative
that banned same-sex couples from getting married in the
state. The court’s move suggests that it wants to resolve
all issues relating to marriage between two people of the
same sex in one ruling. The court refused to allow the
marriages to continue until a decision has been made, but
legal experts warn this shouldn’t be read as a sign that the
court is ready to uphold the ban.
Investors looking for reasons to be anxious about the
economy’s future didn’t have to look far. The leaders of
Detroit’s Big Three were grilled for a second day by
skeptical lawmakers who made it pretty clear the U.S. auto
industry shouldn’t be expecting a bailout; the Federal
Reserve’s leaders warned that they expect the economy to be
in a recession through the middle of next year,
if not longer; new data showed that builders started
fewer homes last month, marking the fourth straight month of
declines to reach the lowest level in at least 49 years
since the government has kept track. And that wasn’t the
only data to reach a record. Perhaps most worrying of all,
the Consumer Price Index fell 1 percent in October, its
biggest one-month drop in the index’s 61-year history.
While the average consumer is likely to welcome a decrease
in prices, it can be disastrous for an economy and brought
back the much-talked about fears of deflation, a prolonged
period of falling prices. The
NYT focuses on
deflation—”an economists’ nightmare”—in its lead story,
while the WSJ
devotes a
separate front-page story to the issue. Deflation was “a
hallmark of the Depression and Japan’s so-called lost
decade,” notes the NYT.
Everyone still thinks the chances of deflation are extremely
slim but the fact that it’s even a concern ramps up the
pressure on President-elect Barack Obama and lawmakers to
pass a new fiscal stimulus package. “Whatever I thought that
risk was four or five months ago, I think it’s bigger now,
even if it is still small,” Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn
said. Even talking about deflation now marks an amazing turn
of events considering that this summer the big concern was
inflation and many economists openly worried about the
prospects of stagflation, the simultaneous increase of
inflation and unemployment.
The only reason people aren’t more freaked out at the
record-breaking prices decline is that it was mainly due to
falling energy prices, which is good for consumers and is
generally seen as a bad indicator of long-term trends.
Excluding energy and food, prices fell 0.1 percent in
October, which is far more modest but hardly insignificant
since, as the WSJ
notes, it marked the first decline since 1982. The
WP points out
that broadly speaking,
economists worry that “businesses are losing any ability
to set prices because demand for their goods has dried up.”
Due to all the depressing economic news, more consumers are
choosing to play it safe and save what they have. Or as one
economist succinctly
puts it: “People are scared to death.” The
LAT points out
that this decline in spending suggests that the only way the
economy will get a boost is through increased
government spending. Indeed, the
NYT points to a
number of statistics that make it seem “clear that the
nation is entering a more frugal era after several years of
conspicuous consumption.”
The nervousness over the economy’s future could clearly be
seen in the markets, where, as the
WSJ points out,
investors seem once again to be willing to accept nearly no
returns in order to sink their money into the safe haven of
short-term Treasury bills. The pain wasn’t isolated in
stocks. The WSJ
highlights that by some measures, “bonds were hit harder
than stocks.” The WP
points out that this anxiety in the bond markets
makes it difficult for companies to
raise money.
In the WSJ’s
op-ed page,
Andy Kessler says that while investors are taught that
they should listen to the stock market, right now you should
“stick wax in your ears and don’t listen to the market until
February.” When it’s working properly, the market can be a
good indicator of the economy as a whole but due to the
credit crisis Kessler is “convinced the stock market is at
its least efficient today” and investors shouldn’t read too
much into the declines that are sure to come in the next two
months.
While investors have lost trillions in the stock market over
the past year, many top officials at companies that are at
the heart of the current crisis managed to make a pretty
penny over the past five years,
reveals a WSJ
analysis. Fifteen leaders of large home-building and
financial firms made more than $100 million in that time
period, for example. Among the 15 are the heads of Lehman
Brothers and Bear Stearns. This is hardly a new phenomenon
as periods of economic booms usually translate into
astronomical paychecks for those who participated in the
bubble. During the technology bubble of the late 1990s, more
than 50 people made more than $100 million right before the
crash.
The LAT and
NYT front, and
everyone mentions, the latest news from the presidential
transition. President-elect Obama has decided to nominate
Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader, as
secretary of health and human services. Everyone sees the
nomination as a sign that Obama plans to aggressively tackle
the issue of healthcare since Daschle is an experienced
legislator who wrote a book about health care. Apparently,
Daschle made it clear he would only accept the cabinet
position if Obama also named him the administration’s point
man to develop a health care plan. “Being a Cabinet
secretary is a car and driver and you get to go to the head
of the line at the airport, unless you’re Defense or State,”
a Daschle associate
tells the WP.
“This was key for Tom to have that White House connection.”
In other transition news, everyone says Gov. Janet
Napolitano of Arizona appears to be Obama’s choice to become
homeland security secretary.
Daschle’s selection not only provides another example of how
Obama is filling his administration with Washington
veterans, but also promises to test his strict ethics rules.
Daschle’s wife is a registered lobbyist whose list of
clients might provide conflicts of interest for her husband
but her focus is in the aerospace and military industries.
And, as the NYT
details in a piece inside, Daschle himself is also
open to examination. Since leaving the Senate, Daschle
has been a board member of the Mayo Clinic as well as an
adviser to a law and lobbying firm. Although this might not
prevent his appointment, Daschle might have to recuse
himself from issues that relate to his former employers, “a
potentially broad swatch of the health secretary’s
portfolio,” says the NYT
that notes the lobbying firm has dozens of health care
industry clients, including pharmaceutical companies and
health care providers. And, of course, the Mayo Clinic is
also a health care provider as well as a research
institution that receives grants from the National
Institutes of Health.
The LAT fronts
an interesting interview with a senior officer “Zimbabwe’s
version of the KGB: the Central Intelligence Organization.”
The meeting
between journalist and spy, which is carried out in the
utmost secrecy, reveals how a group of people who could once
counted on to be the most loyal to the president have become
disenchanted. The senior officer estimates that 60 to 70
percent of CIO officers no longer back President Robert
Mugabe. “That the dark heart of Mugabe’s web of fear is
abandoning him underscores how tenuous his grip on power has
become,” writes the LAT’s
Robyn Dixon.
In the WP’s
op-ed page,
Michael Kinsley writes that Americans may have just
elected a president who is part of the one group that
suffers from socially-sanctioned discrimination in the
United States. Although Obama claims to have quit smoking,
“the evidence is ambiguous.” Regardless, if he hasn’t quit
“we should forgive him” because his “good habits outweigh
his single bad one.” And perhaps his failure to quit is part
of the reason why he’s been able to maintain his now-famous
calm demeanor. “If he needs an occasional cigarette to
preserve it,” writes Kinsley, “let’s hand him an ashtray,
offer him a light and look the other way.”
They Like Nothing Better, Except Messing Up Messerschmidts
“Gremlins Still Jinx LAUSD Payroll”–headline, Daily Breeze
(Torrance, Calif.), Nov. 18
But Poor Old Goebbels . . .
“German Medic’s Account Confirms Hitler Had Only One
Testicle”–headline, FoxNews.com, Nov. 19
‘Why Are Those FA Bans Driving on the Left?’
“Drogba and Ferguson Hit by English FA Bans”–headline, CNN.com,
Nov. 19
But We’ve Been Taking It, and We’re Not . . . What Were You
Saying Again?
“Gingko Biloba Doesn’t Prevent Dementia, Study Finds”–headline,
Los Angeles Times, Nov. 19
‘Come to Think of It, 900,000 Pounds Was Pretty Heavy’
“Nestle Recalls 900,000 Pounds of Lean Cuisine”–headline,
ABCNews.com, Nov. 18
Isn’t There
Any Mandatory
Retirement Age?
• ”Fired 44-Year-Old Stripper Sues Club for
Age Discrimination”–headline,
FoxNews.com, Nov. 18
• ”70+ Strippers Sue Club”–headline,
Clear Channel, Nov. 18
News of the Tautological
“Dead Body Found in Cemetery”–headline, News Virginian
(Waynesboro, Va.), Nov. 14
News of the Oxymoronic
“Scientists Find New Penguin, Extinct for 500 Years”–headline,
Associated Press, Nov. 19
News You Can Use
• ”Getting a Job With Obama Easier Than You
Think”–headline,
Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, Nov. 16
• ”Brothel Offers Free Entry to Men Who Have Its Name Tattooed
on Their Arm”–headline,
Daily Telegraph (London), Nov. 18
• ”Facial Scars Can Help Win a Woman’s Heart”–headline,
Daily Telegraph (London), Nov. 17
Bottom Stories of the Day
• ”3 Residents Attend City Council Hearing”–headline,
El Paso Times, Nov. 19
• ”Texas Legislature Set to Consider Some Odd, Trivial
Bills”–headline,
Dallas Morning News, Nov. 16
• ”Obama Doodle Not for Sale, Owner Says”–headline,
Chicago Tribune, Nov. 16
• ”Hollywood and Climate Change Experts Ponder Global
Warming”–headline,
Associated Press, Nov. 19
• ”Vice President Cheney Indicted by Willacy County Grand
Jury”–headline,
Brownsville (Texas) Herald, Nov. 1
Today’s Business Press :
Deflation Fears Suck Air out of Markets
Sound the alarms! Consumer prices are in a
freefall, stoking fears the economy is on the precipice of
deflation. The Labor Department on Wednesday reported the
prices of consumer goods fell by 1 percent in October, the
biggest one-month drop in 61 years. As the
New York Times points out, no, falling prices are not
a good thing for an already shrinking global economy. “While
most consumers might welcome the idea that things are getting
cheaper,
deflation is an economists’ nightmare,” the
NYT writes. For
starters, declining prices would greatly minimize the impact of
the Federal Reserve’s previous rate cuts. Unresponsive monetary
policy is what sunk Japan in the 1990s, the so-called “lost
decade,” pundits are quick to point out.
What is the Fed to do? Cut again. According to the
Financial Times, “the US central bank may cut
interest rates again by as much as 50 basis points from the
current level of 1 percent in December.” Analysts at
JPMorganChase predict
the Fed will go even lower—down to zero by early next year.
It’s not just the United States that is seeing a rapid decline
in prices. Prices are also falling across Europe and in Japan,
the NYT reports.
Deflation fears sank U.S. markets on Wednesday
to their lowest levels since the current financial crisis began.
According to the Wall Street
Journal, investors ditched equities and bonds. “The
stock market’s fall to a 5½-year low was led by the credit
markets, where prices of corporate and real-estate bonds
fell to their lowest levels in more than 20 years,” the
newspaper writes.
Things look equally bleak overseas this
morning.
Asian stock markets fell on average by 6 percent Thursday to
plumb five-year lows, Reuters reports, adding that oil fell
below $53 a barrel.
European markets opened down as well on Thursday, the BBC
reports. Part of the fears in Asia came from a surprise report
out of Tokyo this morning. “Japan
unexpectedly posted a 63.9 billion yen [$671 million] trade
deficit in October, reinforcing concerns that falling
exports will push the country deeper into recession,” the
FT writes. Economists
had been banking on a trade surplus. The outlook is looking only
marginally better for struggling Iceland. Overnight it announced
its Nordic neighbors
Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway will pitch in and lend
Iceland $2.5 billion.
Viewing the struggles of the world’s largest
economies, a new theory is emerging from global business
leaders: It will be
the emerging economies that get us out of this mess. These
emergent powers, including China, India, and Brazil, make up 30
percent of the world’s GDP. Josep Piqué, chairman of European
airline Vueling, told the NYT
that “the emerging countries are the solution to the overall
global slump.”
“Like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen
in high-hat and tuxedo.” That’s how one lawmaker described the
chief executives of the Big Three automakers’ “tone deaf”
decision to fly by corporate jets to D.C. in search of a
bailout, the Washington Post
writes. By the time a deeply skeptical
House financial services committee had finished grilling
GM’s Richard Wagoner,
Ford’s Alan Mulally, and Chrysler’s Robert Nardelli, it was
clear the Big Three could go home empty-handed, writes the
Los Angeles Times.
Coupled with the Senate’s decision to cancel a vote on providing
auto loans, it is clear that “[m]any members of Congress worry
that Detroit has not changed its big-spending, gas-guzzling
habits, and that company executives will be back in a few months
asking for billions of dollars more to stay afloat,” writes the
LAT. If
Detroit falls, the South could rise writes the
WSJ, noting, “Foreign
makers have been lured to South Carolina, Alabama and other
Southern states over the past decade by generous tax benefits
and laws that make it easier to build a largely nonunion work
force.” That labor “flexibility” has allowed the likes of BMW
and Toyota to quickly downsize when necessary in a way the Big
Three could only dream of doing.
While retailers on both sides of the Atlantic
grapple with the
prospect of dire Christmas sales (even the
vaunted online retail sector is cut-throat this year), at
least one set of consumer companies already is looking to the
New Year. The Seattle
Post-Intelligencer reports that a “group
of companies including
Starbucks,
Nike and
Sun Microsystems has banded together to urge Congress to
regulate greenhouse gas emissions and promote investment in
renewable energy.” The coalition,
Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy, advocates
“stimulating renewable energy, promoting energy efficiency and
green jobs, requiring 100 percent auction of carbon allowances,
and limiting new coal-fired power plants to those that capture
and store carbon emissions,” MarketWatch reports.
And
finally, rewind to a previous financial crisis: the technology
and dot-com collapse of 2000. That’s when fund manager
Alberto W. Vilar allegedly starting swindling a total of $20
million from his clients—including $5 million from Lily
Cates, the mother of actress Phoebe Cates—to keep his operation
at Amerindo Investment Advisors afloat. Vilar and his partner
Gary A. Tanaka were convicted on a series of fraud charges
yesterday in federal court in Manhattan, the
NYT writes. For
Vilar, the verdict marks a staggering fall. “The investor and
music lover accustomed to opulent living, front-row opera seats
and the gratitude of arts impresarios, now faces a more humble
prospect: prison,” the newspaper writes.
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The Ethicist
Say No to the Gas Companies
By
RANDY COHEN
Natural-gas companies in our area can drill in one spot and
extract gas more than a mile away by using “horizontal”
drilling. These companies offered to lease homeowners’ mineral
rights — about $4,000 for my partner and me. For environmental
reasons, we strongly oppose this drilling, but most of our
neighbors are enthusiastic about the profits, so drilling will
likely be done under our house whether or not we agree to the
lease. What should we do? JESSICA MAY, FORT WORTH
It
is understandable that you feel powerless in the face of
community-wide sentiment — gold rush! — but you should not sign
the lease. To fail to resist what you see as injustice simply
because you fear that you cannot win the fight assures the very
defeat you dread. If nothing else, this is a short-term view.
Political struggle is long. Even if you lose the first battle,
you fight on, and by resisting from the outset, you shape the
conditions of that struggle.
I
reject your premise that drilling is inevitable no matter what
you — and by extension, your neighbors — do. (Local
environmental groups might suggest effective actions that you
have not considered.) If the gas companies believed that, they
wouldn’t continue to offer the money to all and sundry. What’s
more, the example of local resistance to such schemes can affect
the actions of gas companies in their future dealings in other
neighborhoods.
But
the most potent argument for your declining to sign what you
regard as a devil’s bargain is this: It violates your own
principles. Even if all your neighbors are doing it. (Shooting a
guy in an orgy of rioting — same deal. You shouldn’t play along
even if everyone else in the roiling mob is firing furiously.)
In what sense do you oppose drilling if you sell your mineral
rights to the first person who puts cash on the table? Ethics
concern our actions, not just our arguments.
A dear friend was facing some difficult times, including an
increasingly strained marriage. I went to visit him for a few
days to provide some support. One evening, while he was away,
his wife seemed to make sexual advances to me: nothing explicit,
but I felt uneasy. In my opinion they are a bad match, but I
keep that to myself. Do I alert him to her inappropriate
advances or silently file it with my opinion? NAME WITHHELD, NEW
JERSEY
Keep
it to yourself. The wife’s actions are too ambiguous, too
anomalous and too easily denied by her for you to provoke a
confrontation in an already shaky marriage. Furthermore, if you
had responded to her putative pass, who knows whether she would
have followed through or backed off? Even if she explicitly
propositioned you on that one occasion, that, too, would belong
in your file of silence. Everyone does foolish things from time
to time, particularly when under stress. Such things are often
best overlooked. (There’s a phrase for it in German: einmal ist
keinmal. Loosely: once does not count.) If everyone were called
to account for each utterly atypical marital gaffe made when the
moon was full and the wine was flowing, civilization would
collapse into a heap of rubble.
I
would not offer this get-out-of-jail-free card for more serious
offenses; I am not proposing a kill-one-guy rule or even a
one-affair exemption. I am suggesting that there are times when
a friend’s happiness is best served by a tactful silence.
UPDATE: He said nothing. The couple have gone into
counseling and are, he says, “making progress.”
Who Says Conservatism Is Dead?
“Woolly Mammoth Genome Sequence May Bring Beast
Alive”–headline, Bloomberg, Nov. 19
Don’t Know? Vote O.
A new poll from Zogby International shows Obama voters to be
shockingly ignorant of political trivia involving their own
candidate:
83%
failed to correctly answer that Obama had won his first election
by getting all of his opponents removed from the ballot, and 88%
did not correctly associate Obama with his statement that his
energy policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry. Most
(56%) were also not able to correctly answer that Obama started
his political career at the home of two former members of the
Weather Underground.
Nearly three quarters (72%) of Obama voters did not correctly
identify Biden as the candidate who had to quit a previous
campaign for President because he was found to have plagiarized
a speech, and nearly half (47%) did not know that Biden was the
one who predicted Obama would be tested by a generated
international crisis during his first six months as
President. . . .
57%
of Obama voters were unable to correctly answer that Democrats
controlled both the House and the Senate.
Wait, it gets worse. The test was multiple
choice!
Most Obama voters did recognize John McCain
and Sarah Palin, respectively, as the guy who didn’t know how
many houses he owned and the lady with the pricey clothes.
And it’s not as if these questions were really
hard, like asking Obama’s middle name. Even we don’t know the
answer to that one.
Who Says Conservatism Is Dead?
“Woolly Mammoth Genome Sequence May Bring Beast
Alive”–headline, Bloomberg, Nov. 19
We Thought He Was the Smooth One
“Bill Clinton in Talks to Smooth Wife’s Path to
Cabinet”–headline, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 19
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