Maybe Obama should’ve gotten Gordon Brown one of these

Just go look.  The pictures alone are worth it, even if you can’t read the Japanese (I certainly can’t).

I wonder if this company has done any other figures like this.  Maybe George Bush with flight suit and “Mission Accomplished” banner?  Bill Clinton with a Mickey D’s takeout sack and lipstick on his collar?  Dick Cheney…oh, wait, there’s already a Dick Cheney figure in one of those shots, never mind.

To help or punish?

I found this interesting blog post by Megan McArdle over at The Atlantic:  To help or punish?

Some very thoughtful stuff in there regarding both homelessness and the current credit crisis on Wall Street (and impending government bailouts, if any), and good stuff in the comments as well.  I don’t agree with all of it, but it made me stop and think, which is always a good thing, right?

Hat tip:  Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.

Hanna-tized

Well.  That was a whole lot of nothing.  (Much, in fact, like the real Sean Hannity.)

We got a bit over 5″ of rain here in Durham, and RDU airport recorded a 26 mph wind gust.  That, despite the center of Tropical Storm Hanna passing maybe 55 miles east of here.  The higher winds were all on the east side of the storm–there was minor damage along the NC coast from 50-60 mph winds here and there, but nothing hugely serious.  It’s been so dry around here that after the rain stopped, the minor street and creek flooding that occurred dried up amazingly fast as the ground soaked it all up.

Maybe now the Water Nazis around here will let people wash their cars again.

argh IV

Got paid this morning.

Checked the Bank of America website and realized that because our sitter deposited our checks yesterday, and the way B of A does withdrawals to maximize overdrafts, and the way the ATM does fees, that $10 I pulled out of the ATM at the local Sheetz yesterday morning is probably gonna end up costing us $119.

Checked the wife’s car on the way out to my truck…there’s steel belts showing through the sidewall on her left rear tire.  So two new tires this weekend for Stubby.  $100+ that we don’t have down the drain.

And the Durham Arts Council still hasn’t refunded the $160 they owe us for the booth fee of a show we didn’t get accepted to, and they’re late on it.  But we don’t get to charge them late fees.

It just never ends.  It just does not ever fucking end.  Forget getting ahead…we can’t even get less behind.  I am totally out of altitude, airspeed, and ideas.  I feel like I’m just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic watching the Atlantic get closer to the rail as the ship tilts.  And I don’t know how to fix it.

More argh

The wife’s three-month-old hard drive just shit itself.  Dead as a post.  Neither of our systems will see it, and it’s been working perfectly fine up until now.  And we don’t have the money to replace it.

YOU CAN STOP TEABAGGING US ANYTIME NOW GOD.

Obama takes his ball and goes home

“I’ll be honest with you, we’ve now had 21,” he said. “It’s not as if we don’t know how to do these things. I could deliver Sen. Clinton’s lines; she could, I’m sure, deliver mine.”

Shockingly, I agree with Obama to a point. Most of the debates so far have been, of themselves, useless. The only new things we learn from them are more about the candidates’ moods and emotional states than any actual policy planks or opinions.

But Obama is, let’s face it, the best debater of the three left standing. He’s usually acquitted himself fairly well in debates up until this last one. But when he has one bad night (and make no mistake, he had a real bad night), and then decides that it’s time to stop debating? That shows a complete lack of spine to me. I’d give him a lot of credit if he said something like, “OK, let’s have another one, and I’ll be ready for it. Name the time, name the place. Bring it, sister.” But instead, he’s running.

And that’s not the kind of guy I want leading my country in a world full of Islamic terrorist nutburgers and shrimpy North Korean megalomaniacs.

(entire article is here)