Your favorite foreign correspondent has taken time out of her busy wine-drinking schedule to report on a bunch of fuckery happening presently:

Italy

Berlusconi, class clown, made fun of the lefty governor of the Piemonte region: Read more »

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We wouldn’t normally take the trouble to note a CNBC shouting match, but we particularly enjoyed this exchange:

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It has come to our attention that our thesis about the relationship of feral pigs to South Carolina douchebags was incomplete in its implication. Let’s study a fresh example and expostulate:

South Carolina will no longer recognize U.S. currency as legal tender, if State Rep. Mike Pitts has his way.

Pitts, a fourth-term Republican from Laurens, introduced legislation earlier this month that would ban what he calls “the unconstitutional substitution of Federal Reserve Notes for silver and gold coin” in South Carolina.

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We’re not trying to cop the Daily News in every post this week — we’re just having a hard time avoiding it:

The Riverside Press-Enterprise quoted Fiorina saying, “Whether that is the right approach now, I don’t know. I think bankruptcy, as a possibility, at the very least focuses the mind on what has to be done to salvage a situation.”

When asked by The Bee on Wednesday whether she knew states couldn’t declare bankruptcy, Fiorina answered, “Sure, I knew, but what cold comfort is that to all these California voters who may not know that technicality but who are sitting here knowing that by any common-sense definition, this state can’t pay its bills.”

Actually, the proper move for the disgraced ex-CEO of HP would be to overpay for Arizona and then declare bankruptcy.

Fiorina: California’s inability to declare bankruptcy a ‘technicality’ [SacBee, via TPM]

The monstrous horror that Bank of America, and its noxious acquisition, Countrywide Financial, have cast upon this land extends far beyond lunatic abandonment of underwriting quality, knowing sale of worthless mortgages to securities firms and wanton, savage disregard for the financial health of its customers.

This criminal enterprise is so completely mad in the babbling, demented fury of its death throes that it is seizing buildings with which it has no foreclosure standing. Arrive at home and find that the  locks have been torn out and replaced? The electrical power’s been cut? Surprise, Bank of America’s come for a visit!

Ha! Hahaha! Hahahahahahahahahahahaha! Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s BofA!

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What a waste of money (that they don’t have):

Dubai (AsiaNews/Agencies) – The tallest skyscraper in the world was inaugurated today. With the Mideast glass-and-steel Burj Dubai standing at over 800 metres, four of the five tallest buildings in the word are located in Asia. Only Taiwan’s Taipei 101 (508 metres) and Hong Kong’s Two IFC (420 metres) towers come closest.

Owned by Emaar Properties, a giant property firm part-owned by the government, Burj Dubai can be seen from as far as 95 kilometres away and has about 28,000 glass panels on the exterior of the tower.

Dubai Inaugurates the Tallest Skyscraper in the World [AsiaNews.it]

For those of you poor assholes with a job, congratulations, you may have made more money last year, especially once we account for inflation and all that boring-ass shit. For those of you without, keep enjoying staycationing in your foreclosures, suckers.

The New York Times has this article about how employed people are motherfucking rolling in it these days, like Richard Pryor in that one movie, and then has some sad metaphor about the unemployed:
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