Your Urgent Assistance is Required!

Dear American:

I cordially correspond today to request you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.



I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for urgently large transfer of funds of 800 billion USD. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.



I am working with Mr. Phil Gramm, lobbyist for UBS, who (God willing) will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a former U.S. congressional leader and the architect of the PALIN / McCain Financial Doctrine, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. As such, you can be assured that this transaction is 100% safe.



This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred. For this inconvenience you will be rewarded with grand fees of 1/1,000,000th of 1% of possible profits due to off shore laundering of skim funds due to reprinting of said funds.



Please reply with mother's maiden name, routing and account numbers of all of your bank account, IRA and college fund accounts and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.



Yours Faithfully,

Minister of Treasury Paulson


Folks, seriously, contact your representatives about the insane bailout plan: Skippy has the info and pertinent links here.

h/t Richard Blair

Saturday Night Live Does Hillary V. Palin, and Palin is Apparently Sorta Kinda my Look-alike.

I was out at a wedding and so missed the beginning of SNL this week... at which wedding a woman came up to me and...looking at me sideways...maybe she was drunk...(and yes I get Amy Yasbek and a young Diane Keaton sometimes)... told me... that... I... look... like...

Sarah Palin!!!! EEEEKKKK!!!

Which sent me to the bathroom to not only look at myself because I often forget what I look like... but also to take a picture of myself in the bathroom mirror with my cell phone cam, and then email Jill Brill to be sure that this couldn't possibly be true. Ah its true, I was wearing my fashionable glasses in the interest of seeing; something I don't often do because I prefer a little soft blur these days. but this was my friend's daughter and I wanted to be able to report on the ice sculpture and the Chinese tea ceremony and the 6 (yes 6!) courses of food that just kept coming (Will and I slipped out before the Viennese Dolce Table, which was after the wedding cake...which consisted of around 7 layers from straight cheese cake to chocolate cake to some sorta Italiano rum section and maybe a meringue!)
Anyhow, my quick answer was that no I don't get that (perhaps a new problem, but if it continues I may have to color my hair or something drastic like that) but it must be the glasses...and that the real difference is that my IQ is around double hers... (heaven knows, my knowledge of foreign affairs trumps hers, and I'm no Rachel Poli-sci Maddow.) I actually used the silly comparison to make some pretty sober points which made the woman quickly drift towards the raw bar while Will laughed and I doubled over in disgust!

Will found it hysterical that one exchange with a woman who probably only watches Faux News bothered me so much, or maybe it was that she approached with such a fun and peppy attitude and was quite shocked at my reaction... but I guess that the whole Palin thing is in my craw...stuck...and I have trouble making light of how little this county has learned after 8 years of a Bush government begun by the feeling that he was a good old boy who was some sort of renegade that we should have a beer with. Isn't it time to just maybe try out someone who has some ideas and ...um...ideas of diplomacy?...at least maybe someone who isn't a rapture ready snake handler...? Just for a while?

The Palin woman, as my grandpa calls her, has charisma and spunk which sort of distracts from the fact that every other sentence out of her mouth is a lie. I cant even fathom how it is OK for all of them in lockstep, from the lowest coffee boy to the biggest policy maker, to throw it all at the wall and just see what sticks. Its too late in the game for so many to have such wrong information in the face of science and...um...real political science experts. How can they fucking lie so much? How can it be?

So you can see why I havent been writing much the past weeks....I think that others might have somethign more to say than "why, why, why?"...its all so tragic for the people of America who really, really need a little turnaround to start happening soon. Its a crying shame.

So, I guess I'll leave the funny up to the SNL folks...and of course, its the comedians (artists) in any society who mirror back our most glaring faults. I think that's why the Republicans have been so keen on cutting funding to the arts in this country. It is artists who are often the loudest speakers of the truth. It is certainly the artists who have the most guts to make the uncomfortable statements that the rest of us are unable to. And this is why the Republicans are complaining about this skit...to which I say: Boo-fucking-Hoo!


h/t to Sam Seder Be sure to catch the warm-up shows of Seder V. Maron daily here at 3PM eastern. Even in it's rough state, its fantastic!