Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the future of the GOP (audio NSFW):

I post, you decide:

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If a grad student needs a thesis project, might we suggest a comparative analysis of Firesign Theatre/Monty Python/SNL/Mel Brooks references we’ve deployed Above the Timestamp? We’re reliably informed that comedy did indeed exist outside the 1970s, but our mind is like Classic Rock for Geeks, an infinite loop of “And He Knew Not His Ass From a Hole In the Ground.”

And with that, let’s play Oddball Blogfill!

• That was your cigar smoldering in the ashtray! Iran’s secret nuke plant revealed; low-angle Times photo artfully disguises how much shorter Sarkozy is than Obama and Gordon Brown.
• Exit Left to Funway. Have we mentioned that Demrat fundraiser’s $292 million Ponzi scheme yet? No? Well, nobody else has, either.
• Land Shark! Banks oppose a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, have yet to come up with a pithy line about how regulations will strangle your grandma.
• Crunchy Frog! “Fanged frog that eats birds” discovered in Southeast Asia. Guess we could have gone with a Dead Parrot there, but that would have been obvious.

A year ago today, we switched cars in the parking lot. 2008 had been a long, strange trip, and we were due for a final turn before finally reaching the Interstate. 1,500 posts and almost 50,000 comments later, the ride has been so smooth you could trim a baby’s dick.

We’re sticking with January 19 as the official anniversary of Our Collective Adventure, so no need to buy gifts. Although if you insist on running up a tab using our Amazon Kickback Link, we won’t stop you.

Dead Guy Video

The era of complete and total disregulation of the financial violence industry has created a new class of predator, the debt collector, often a third party speculator who buys blocks of debt at a discount and sends bounty hunters out to collect on it, using tactics that would make Ghenghis Khan vomit blood.

The collectors are soulless , cackling jackals who will say and do anything short of pistol whipping a debtor to get them to disgorge payment.  Got more than one vowel in your name and an accent?  They’ll ask if you papers are in order and if you’ve ever been kicked to death by ICE agents.  Got a wife?   They’ll ask if you’ve ever imagined what she would look like without arms.  Got a debilitating disease?  They’ll taunt, threaten and jeer at you until it fucking kills you.

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Cornyn – what a schmuck:

I had to add this teabagger photo:

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Kent Conrad:

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), the Senate Budget Committee chairman and a member of the unsuccessful Gang of Six effort, raised a few eyebrows this week with a message for his “progressive friends.”

Conrad, a consistent opponent of the public option, wanted liberals to know “government-run programs” aren’t necessary to lower costs and expand access. He explained that he’d finished reading T.R. Reid’s “The Healing of America” over the weekend, and learned Germany, Japan, Switzerland, France, and Belgium are doing just fine. “[A]ll of them contain costs, have universal coverage, have very high quality care and yet are not government-run systems,” Conrad said.

Wrong.

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