__
Felix Salmon has a nifty little post on meme generation, OWS, and what he calls “The Abacus Sign“, Abacus being the bankster grift Thot Expermint referenced in the quote. It’s a good pic, which deserved to go viral, but it also gave Salmon an opportunity to brag on his contribution to Probably The Greatest Work of Art Created in 2011 If Not In This Entire Century.
ETA: If you’re not clicking the second link (William Powhida), you’re missing out. Seriously.
OzoneR
well if that isn’t a clear precise message working class Americans can understand, I don’t know what is!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I would like that on a bumper sticker, except I would probably get hit by the guy trying to read it.
Mark S.
Probably couldn’t fit on a bumper sticker.
Yay! A thread that’s not about Obots and Jane Hamsher. We should discuss this comment by Rick Santorum:
There might be a reason why other presidents didn’t talk about it: They weren’t as fucking insane as you are, Rick. God he’s a creepy fuck.
Mark S.
@Mark S.:
Oh, here’s a link to that quote.
OzoneR
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
the bumper of what? An A380?
THE
Secular Coalition has an item that Gingrich said that atheists can’t be trusted.
Why don’t the R party like us? :<
amk
Burn, bill o’racist, burn
Suffern ACE
@Mark S.: President for three plus terms, no one now remembers Roosevelt’s cancelled Fireside chat in December 1941 demonstrating how to put on a condom properly so it wouldn’t malfunction when it was most needed. It probably wouldn’t have been his finer speech, but he was called away for more important business.
Litlebritdifrnt2
Reposting from below, a human being in need bleg
OT – my good friend Foggy (aka Bill) of the birfer busting forum Fogbow has been struck by a seriously nasty illness. He is in the hospital and is undergoing treatment that is costing serious bucks. He has no health insurance. We are currently running a fundraiser to gather the funds to pay for his treatment. If any of you feel the need please go over to The Fogbow and hit the contribute button. All of the donations that normally pay for transcripts of trials and other paperwork are currently being diverted to Foggy’s medical bills. I have contributed what I can, as have the other FB posters, we are at $5K+ right now but it is going to take a lot more than that. Please if you feel the need go over to The Fogbow and contribute. Foggy and the others do absolutely stellar work tracking down and debunking the birfers, as well as securing transcripts and pleadings, enabling right minded people to examine them and debunk. Thanks for your help
BruceFromOhio
Gaia help me, this is *so* six weeks ago.
When is the new Green Day release?
Martin
@THE:
They can’t trust us to vote for whoever declares themselves Jesus’s tight end.
Mike G
Try to imagine seeing something that literate at a Teatard rally, amongst all the OBAMUNIST IS A MUSLIN TERIST signs writen in crayon.
noodler
So much clarity is in that sign. I get it now.
http://www.borowitzreport.com/2011/10/17/a-letter-from-goldman-sachs/
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)– The following is a letter
released today by Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of banking giant Goldman Sachs:
Dear Investor:
Up until now, Goldman Sachs has been silent on the subject of the protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street. That does not mean, however, that it has not been very much on our minds. As thousands have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests. And we have asked ourselves this question:
How can we make money off them?
The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund, whose investment objective is to monetize the Occupy Wall Street protests as they spread around the world. At Goldman, we recognize that the capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain – but there’s plenty of money to be made on the way down.
The Rage Fund will seek out opportunities to invest in products that are poised to benefit from the spreading protests, from police batons and barricades to stun guns and forehead bandages. Furthermore, as clashes between police and protesters turn ever more violent, we are making significant bets on companies that manufacture replacements for broken windows and overturned cars, as well as the raw materials necessary for the construction and incineration of effigies.
It would be tempting, at a time like this, to say “Let them eat cake.” But at Goldman, we are actively seeking to corner the market in cake futures. We project that through our aggressive market manipulation, the price of a piece of cake will quadruple by the end of 2011.
Please contact your Goldman representative for a full prospectus. As the world descends into a Darwinian free-for-all, the Goldman Sachs Rage Fund is a great way to tell the protesters, “Occupy this.” We haven’t felt so good about something we’ve sold since our souls.
Sincerely,
Lloyd Blankfein
Chairman, Goldman Sachs
Martin
@Mike G:
Awesome.
Mark S.
@Suffern ACE:
Was he going to put it on a banana as it was shown in one of my sex ed classes?
Cat
Its going to drive me crazy until I can figure out where I heard that before today. Maybe its a “You smell like steak to us” or “You smell like meat to him”…
argh…
TooManyJens
@Mark S.: In a radio address, no less. He was just that good!
Mark S.
What the hell was Bachmann wearing last night?
(I obviously didn’t watch the debate last night. I didn’t bother getting cable when I moved several months ago, and I haven’t missed it at all. Yay Hulu and Netflix!)
hhex65
@Martin:
________________
@Mike G:
amongst all the OBAMUNIST IS A MUSLIN TERIST signs writen in crayon.
Awesome.
_____________
Lol, “Awesome” isn’t a complete sentAnce.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@Cat: “Piggies,” by The Beatles, The White Album? Not exactly the same, but pretty damn similar.
handy
@THE:
Isn’t Gingrich a Catholic? An institution that, among other things, actively cover up boy-buggering. But it’s the atheists we can’t trust.
BigGovernmentFTW
How the f#@k does that make any sense at all?
Cat Lady
I lost my last job closing commercial loans for Merrill Lynch Mortgage Lending to put into their securitization pools to sell to investors in tranches rated AAA by compromised rating agencies paid to lie about their rating even though they all knew they had subprime mortgages mixed into it which were subsequently sold to pension funds and other institutional investors that were prohibited from investing in anything other than AAA rated investments so that a few scum sucking shitbags could buy gold plated handles for their fur lined sock drawers.
lamh34
I guess I must be the only person who thinks it wasn’t some great manly thing that Mitt Romney did when he patted Perry on the shoulder.
I think it was obviously a sign that Perry had gotten under his skin. Plus can anyone remember how big a deal it was when Al Gore walked up to GWB in a debate, and the meme of the day was that Al Gore was trying to “intimidate” GWB. It was soooo “unpresidential” supposedly.
But so far, all I’ve seen in both liberal and supposed mainstream press is some kind of “wow romney sure manned up” on Perry narrative.
Of course, IOKIYAR, but still??? Anyway I don’t really care ’bout Perry et al, but still it bothered me..
Meh.
Warren Terra
Really? I kinda hated that poster. Didn’t work for me at all.
MikeJ
@hhex65: Interjections (Hey!) show excitement (Yow!) or emotion (Ouch!).
They’re generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point,
Or by a comma when the feeling’s not as strong.
slag
Perfect. (As in, a perfectly complete sentAnce.)
amk
Last marines team leave from Iraq.
danimal
I just wish I had the chops and the time to create the next viral website:
We are the 27%!
Don’t tell me that doesn’t have loads of potential.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Mark S.:
if this meant i could take comfort in knowing that santorum has never received even a quarter stroke’s worth of pleasure outside the friendly confines of mrs. santorum’s wrigley, it would almost be a fair trade-off.
as it stands, i only hope that someone, larry flynt or someone, is efforting to expose the hypocrisy in santorum’s stance. i would love to see someone come forward with evidence of a handie, a hummer, anything.
hhex65
@MikeJ: Ouch! and that’s one of my favorite songs– performed by Essra Mohawk (former Zappa crony) I later learned.
smintheus
Also wouldn’t fit on a bumper sticker:
TaMara (BHF)
One of my clients and her Maine Coon had a ‘friendly’ run-in with a couple of mountain lions. Thought I’d point you in the direction of the photos as a distraction from all the crazies.
Maine Coon and Mountain Lion Face-Off
TaMara (BHF)
Now I’ll go back to lurking. Been so busy, but at least try to read a few BJ posts everyday. Couldn’t get through my day without you guys.
David Koch
The sign is too technical.
It’s great if you’re well read and/or a Krugman reader, but for the casual person who doesn’t have an economic background nor a lot of time to follow 28 blogs and the NYT op-ed page you need something simple and sharp.
I mean, that’s why “We are the 99%” works so well, it’s simple and sharp.
slag
@David Koch: In our most recent march, I kept trying to push
But I didn’t get many takers. And the takers I got didn’t have exceptionally loud voices.
Linda Featheringill
@smintheus: #32
It ain’t me.
Spaghetti Lee
I feel like I’m, um, missing something?
smintheus
@Linda Featheringill: That’s the bumper sticker right there.
Anne Laurie
@TaMara (BHF): That photo series is the definition of WIN. I particularly like #3, where Zeus checks over his shoulder: “You’re backing me up on this, amiright?”
Although I’m surprised nobody at the link commented that if you’re gonna put out decoys, you’ve gotta expect ducks!
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@smintheus:
unless you are planning on having brett favre be the face of the occupation, or plan on offering occupiers a coupon for 25% off all denim, i don’t think that song is going to resonate like some older folks think it must.
piratedan
@BigGovernmentFTW: you can trust Newt… to do what’s in Newt’s best interest, altruistic faithful soul that he is… just ask his ex-wives how trustworthy he is.
Calming Influence
If that’s not the most typical complaint of these whiners, I don’t know what is.
Captain C
@Mark S.:
Why do I have a sneaking feeling that Santorum has a really, really freaky side to him? Probably with lots of squickness involved.
Captain C
@Cat:
“Honey, why do you always smell from lamb chops?”
bjacques
By the way, Occupy Amsterdam is chugging along (there are also smaller camps in the Hague and Nijmegen). The weather was beautiful last weekend, and the protest was on the Beursplein, the square right in front of the Amsterdam Exchange (AEX). Unlike in other financial capitals, the cops let us plaster the front of the exchange building with signs as long as we didn’t break anything (we didn’t) and if it all got cleaned up Monday (it did).
There were about a dozen 2-person tents on Saturday and about 30 on Sunday. The Beursplein is pretty small. By Tuesday, the weather had turned rotten, hailing 3 times in the daytime. Now it’s clearer but very cold. Meanwhile, the number of tents has grown to over 100, so the people there are reorganizing to make better use of the space and accommodate more people.
Morale is high.
[ETA] The website is http://www.occupyamsterdam.nl but their server is struggling.
arguingwithsignposts
@Spaghetti Lee: You and me both. It’s a nice piece of agitprop, but not all that.
Craig Pennington
I can’t believe nobody has mentioned that the text on this sign is from Conor Friedersdorf’s Atlantic piece on the OWS protests.
Frankensteinbeck
@BigGovernmentFTW:
To the fundamentalist evangelical base of the GOP, it makes perfect sense. It means ‘only we are good people.’ This group is crucially important for a GOP candidate to have on their side in a nomination fight.
EDIT – You may say you know this already, but it’s the only important fact. That it makes sense to them on the gut level is all that’s important, it’s the reason it’s said, and it doesn’t have to win any debates by logic. Try, and you get into weird circular logic because to them it’s OBVIOUS.
arguingwithsignposts
@Craig Pennington: Probably because, like 99v9999999 percent of the world, nobody here reads Friedersdorf.
sparky
a. thanks for this post.
b. love the photo.
c. love the Powheda extra much. “You smell like bacon” closely captures it: great herds of serfs, waiting to be shorn, annually.
edit: @arguingwithsignposts: i’m one of the people who doesn’t read him, and if that article is an example of what he writes, i intend to go on not reading him. he has OWS all wrong from start to finish. this piece reads like an inept David Brooks.
Paul in KY
@Anne Laurie: There’s a bronze statue of a mountain lion there, right?
Craig Pennington
@arguingwithsignposts: @sparky:
I don’t usually read anyone at the Atlantic, but this particular sign was the subject of a story on NPR (I forget the show, absent minded totebagger that I am — maybe Marketplace) that mentioned Conor’s essay as the source. I figured that with all the comments regarding how awkwardly worded it was for a protest sign, someone else who heard the story would have noted why it was so. Maybe I’m the only one too lazy to change the channel during pledge week.
different-church-lady
Wait, seriously? All this back-patting over something 98% of the general public stopped reading by line two? Am I just missing the snark here?
Fuckin’ social media bubbles: how do they work?
Sasha
Sully posted video from someone with this sign. It’s apparently taken verbatim from a James Fallows blog entry.
Jason
Is that Kari from mythbusters, without makeup?
wrb
@Mark S.:
Shorter Santorum:
Contraception is a license to neglect lonely anuses.
They can’t trust us to vote for whoever declares themselves Jesus’s tight end.
“I’m an asshole” isn’t working??