NFPOTY 2008

There was some serious competition for this year's No Fear Player. And unlike last year, where OJ conquered the hill of douchebags in September with his audacious kidnapping and grand larceny, this one has come down to the wire.

Here then, are the nominees:

Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) -
- Helped the Republican establishment sink John McCain's Presidential bid;
- Spent upwards of $150,000 in public funds on clothes for herself and her family in less than a month;
- Repeatedly offended the letter "g" by excluding it from its rightful place at the end of words;
- Caused Tina Fey to have a serious identity crisis;
- Brazenly talked up abstenance-only sex education while her daughter was getting nailed by Levi Johnston;
- Used her developmentally disabled baby as a political prop.

CEOs Rick Wagoner of GM, Alan Mulally of Ford, and Robert Nardelli of Chrysler -
- killed the electric car;
- made really crappy, unreliable, inefficient, gigantic cars and trucks, allowing generations of small-penised men to feel good about themselves. Well, maybe that's not the worst thing;
- demanded a bailout from the federal government without any sort of plan to make their companies better;
- Flew in separate private jets to their first senate hearing to request money because they "don't have any;"
- made Michiganders look to their 3-9 Wolverines and their 0-14 Lions for comfort.
- turned Detroit from a decrepit, depressing city with no future into a decrepit, depressing city with no future.

AIG CEO Edward Liddy -
- took $150 billion in taxpayer money, used it to wipe his ass;
- after receiving all that money for financial assistance, then took his executives for spa junkets and massages. Of course, he shelled out extra for the happy endings;
- after getting caught on camera on one of said junkets, went back to the U.S. senate and requested more bailout money. Which he received;
- Got so much money so easily from the federal government that Wagoner, Mulally and Nardelli thought they for sure deserved some of that cheese.

And finally, Mr. Bernard Madoff -
- killed Jewish philanthropy;
- dug it up, raped it, and killed Jewish philanthropy again;
- stole $50 billion from individuals, corporations, and charities;
- turned the Palm Beach Country Club into a den of greed and hubris, instead of the den of elitism and snobbery it had once been;
- Together with Jack Abramoff, made Jewish non-profits long for the days of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky (look them up, and reminisce about a time when financial malfeasance was nice and comprehensible);
- defrauded the nice little old ladies of Hadassah out of $90 million;
- caused 2 family charitable foundations to shut their doors, and renege on millions in committed grants.

Personally, as a Jewish Communal Professional, I say Madoff. But, as an American Taxpayer, I could easily see Liddy or the Detroit Three winning. I could also include Bob Babich, who has turned a once-mighty Chicago Bears defense into a toothless, blitzing-addicted paper tig- um, bear, but that might be a little too petty for this year.

The winner will be announced as soon as I blog again, because I trust very few of my 4 readers to vote, and also because I'm tempting you with an unusually quick follow-up post. So look out for that.

Don't tell me I don't love America.

Thanksgiving, according to a wise man, is a special night.



It is my favorite holiday. Better than Passover, better than Kwanzaa, better even than Hobo week. And don't tell me that's not a real week, because Google says it is. And if you've never gotten down in August during Hobo week, then you have not lived. But despite all that frivolity and bindle-weaving, Thanksgiving is the best.

Is it the history of brutal oppression of an indigenous people? Maybe. Is it the awful football games? Doubtful. Is it the airing of grievances over heaping piles of white and dark meat, fueled by liquor and stuffing? Bet your ass. Mostly, though, it's the quintessential America-ness of the day.

You can have your 4th of July, your Memorial Day, your Arbor Day. Thanksgiving is the only one that combines gluttony, sloth, greed, wrath, lust, pride and envy. I don't know what it means that I associate America with the seven mortal sins. Could be that I just love Brad Pitt. Or maybe it's that I celebrated this holiest of days by participating in all 7 capital vices.

Gluttony - this is almost too obvious, but to wit: I ate an obscene amount of turkey, fought viciously against Brother A for the stuffing, and inhaled an entire chocolate pie. "Good pie, Ma." Damn skippy it was. And that was before Friday night, where the family dined on raw beef and leftover turkey.

Sloth - so much turkey, so much napping. And as for those terrible football games: did I watch them? Hells yeah. What am I going to do, get off the couch to find the clicker to change the channel? That sounds an awful lot like work, buddy.

Greed - this is the one I'm most embarrassed about. So you know how some malls opened Thursday night at midnight to bring in Black Friday early? And you sat at home wondering how unbelievably avaricious some whackos could be, how addicted they could be to good deals? Yeah, that was me and my family. Ostensibly the idea was to go at night, so we could have fun on Friday. That didn't actually work out, and we ended up going at night and during the day. This led to...

Wrath - wherein I cursed the gods, my own brothers, my wife, my child, capitalism, and the other whackjobs shopping at 3 in the morning, and almost stabbed a poor checkout girl with a cufflink. Plus the sleep deprivation gave me a nice short fuse right up until the holy Sabbath.

Lust - I'm just saying, Thanksgiving does some weird things to your brain. One minute you're staring at the perfectly cooked turkey, all gold and stuffed with stuffing, and then next your shirt is across the kitchen, you've got gravy all over your naked belly, and all the stuffing is gone.
(Note: that came out a lot more disturbing than I thought it would be when I started writing it. And yet...I'm not deleting it. So I guess the lesson is that I have no shame.)

Pride - Carving the turkey is a grand tradition in my family, passed down from my grandfather to me and Brother S. And I have to say, I carved the shit out of that turkey. It was magnificent. There was nothing left but gristle and bone, because I have the hands of a surgeon.

Envy - I'm pretty certain that, in the end, Brother A got more stuffing than I did. And I had to leave all that extra beef in Florida to be consumed by the rest of my family. And Brothers S and Z got some sweet-ass clothes. Should I care? Shouldn't I, who has talked up socialism and disparaged the free market all these months, let it go?

I should. And maybe if I'd been able to eat some more turkey I'd be ok. But you know what? While the rest of the country is gorging on leftovers this week - turkey sandwiches, turkey loaf, turkey burgers, turkey soup, turkey salad, turkey jerky, turkey stew, turkey chips - I've had to subsist on non-turkey roughage. And that's not cool.

My resolution for next year? Ether for the brothers, turkey for me. And lord help Child if he ends up liking dark meat instead of white...

What'd I miss? And G-d Bless Eleska

I've was out of town, and then celebrating the new year, which is the Year of the Kreplach. Meanwhile, I stop blogging, and the whole world goes to hell. Financial markets crash, Sarah Palin puts together a coherent sentence, the Brewers make the playoffs, Child develops a crazy multicolor rash from putting everything within reach into his mouth...a simple e-mail would have sufficed, Planet Earth.

But first things first: last night's vice presidential debate blew. Boooorrrring. Biden didn't call Palin "little lady," and Palin didn't freeze at the first mention of Afghanistan. Sure, she was tight, but this is just the fourth time she's appeared before a camera, right? I mean, she wasn't a news anchor or anything. She hasn't held any sort of executive position before, you know?

She used the word "maverick" almost as often as she talked about "how we do tings up dere, in Eleska." She was like a Bears Superfan, except without the gigantic swinging belly.



Biden, for his part, did not snort in derision, at least into the microphone. And he also didn't screw up too many facts, which is a nice switch for him. But all he had to do was not get in the way of the McCain snowball, now gaining force as it rumbles further down the mountain.

If I could sum up the past few weeks of polling, it would go thusly: "Huh, Palin is a chick! And she's hot! That's cool, I like hot chicks. Whoa, when she opens her mouth, she sounds like George Bush. I may be drunk, and about to have the bank foreclose on my house, and watching my nest egg disappear by the second, but I don't think I like George Bush. Let me get out my 401- wait, where did that go? Well let me check my medical insur- no, can't afford that either. Wow, Bush is a DICK! Palin must be a dick too!"

So that's settled.

I went to business school as an undergrad, majored in finance. So everyone in my major classes wanted to be an investment banker, because that's where the money was. Lots and lots of money, for lots of crazy hours, but hey, it's a buttload of money, right?

And now the investment banks are gone. Sure, Goldman is still there, and JP Morgan, but they're not i-banks anymore. Now they're... something else, I guess. Either way, I just feel bad for the guys coming out of my program this year. Where will they go if they want to be gigantic douches? Not everyone can be a hedge fund manager, and accounting is not nearly so flashy. And law school, while rife with douche, takes more work, and Daddy only said he'd pay for college, so that cuts out grad school.

I guess the thing we should be concerned about is all that douche overflowing into other sectors of the economy. So if you're parking valet gets all snooty about parking your Civic, just take a few breaths before stiffing him on his tip. Remember, just a month ago he was making 500K and snorting coke off silicon tits in a Soho martini bar.

I'm not going to even bother going into the whole collapse, mostly because I have no idea whether it was because of deregulation or encouragement by the government of banks to increase their subprime mortgage business so poorer people could own their own homes. All I know is that the market lost $1.2 trillion dollars of imaginary value last week, and that's not a good thing.

So if you could all check under your imaginary couches, and in the depths of your pretend purses and dream glove compartments, I'm sure we can find that money. Maybe we can even give some of it back to my old classmates. I don't know about you, but I'd like the guy parking my car not to have a death wish.

I'm more European than an English Muffin

I talk a lot of junk about hippies, and the Commies. But deep down, my heart bleeds for endangered fluffy bunnies and Mother Earth. And for our neighbors to the North, I give you guys some crap, but sometimes I think I wouldn't be better as a Canadian.



You see, I was born without a profit motive. As for money I just...I just don't care. So when it comes to corporations I'm at best ambivalent. Sure, they can do some good, but since they have no reason to exist other than to provide their shareholders with a return, sometimes they're downright evil.

So when I read Naomi Klein's (Canadian Jew!) The Shock Doctrine, it confirmed my paranoia. Klein has a real bone to pick with Milton Friedman, seemingly mild-mannered economist and sworn enemy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal.

Friedman took a psychological experiment using electro-shock therapy and turned it into the dominant economic and political theory of the last 60 years. The idea is to shock a country or region into disorientation, either through natural disaster or war or some other traumatic event. With the public reeling, the government needs a quick fix. So Friedman trained economists from all over the world to step in and offer lessons in privatization, and corporate-friendly labor laws and taxes. He started in Chile with Augusto Pinochet, then moved through South America privatizing Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia following the coups that occurred there. His acolytes promised new wealth, freedom, and democracy.

The only problem is that the coups were often funded and provoked by the CIA. And once the wildly unpopular economic plans were announced, and citizens were a little upset when their healthcare and wage protections were revoked, the governments invariably arrested and killed thousands of dissenters.

The privatizations allowed a few to become wildly rich, and the vast majority to become fantastically poor. Friedman's theory was tested in South America, and then unleashed in Indonesia, Poland, Russia, and Great Britain. The World Bank and the IMF were created to provide funding for underdeveloped countries, and they used that opportunity to make the loans contingent on extensive privatization. Eventually natural disasters were exploited, like the 2004 tsunami and Hurricanes Mitch and Katrina. In most cases either Friedman's students or corporate officers themselves who drafted the new economic regulations.

And then there was that whole Iraq thing. Friedman's followers are responsible for the incredible amount of contracting going on in Iraq, as well as in many other areas of the US government. Guys like Grover Norquist, who said that "I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." This is Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, invaluable adviser to Bush, and co-drafter of Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America. For a guy who hates government so much, he sure has an awful lot to do with it. Although how are we supposed to take a guy named Grover seriously?

So aside from all that, the book was HILARIOUS. You'll laugh until you cry. And if you live in Canada, you'll probably drink yourself silly, comforted in the knowledge that your trip to the hospital for alcohol poisoning and cirrhosis will be paid for by a bunch of snooty Quebecois.

I guess my point is, hoooooooooray for capitalism.

Taxes suck, waa waa waa

I understand people who complain about taxes. I really do. You made the money, you should keep it. Obviously. My only problem is that these people are Communist pinkos, who want nothing more than to freeload. Go back to Russia-town, Stalinists!

You pay for cars, houses, clothes, everything except music and porn on the internet. Why exactly should you get to live in America for free? It's a great gig - we have good movies, decent restaurants, and football, miles and miles away cooler than soccer. We have the greatest, most powerful army in the world that fights wars with only the most technically advanced weaponry, when Congress actually spends that money on the troops, as opposed to contractors (just kidding, Blackwater. Please don't kidnap and torture my family).

Living in America is a privilege, not a right. Don't like it? Move to Iceland or Ireland, the only developed countries with average tax rates lower than ours. And it's never really the people without money who complain, is it? It's the ones with plenty of money, who can afford their own health care, but just don't want to support anyone else. Well you know what? If you agree not to take anything from the government - not Social Security, or Medicaid, or Medicare, take 911 off your speed dial, remove all the smoke alarms because you can fight your own fires, you big burly men you - then hey, don't bother paying the taxes.

The government has a $3 trillion deficit. Eventually, they're going to have to raise taxes because they don't have enough money, and none of us (other than Chinese immigrants, maybe) want the national anthem to be in Mandarin in 30 years. So suck it up, pay your taxes, and find something a little bit more interesting to base your vote on, like, say, sound fiscal policy, or a reasonable solution to the drug problem, or whether a particular candidate has a crazy preacher. Because even that is a more legitimate beef than bitching about how much Uncle Sam is ripping from your liver-spotted arthritic claw.

You know who demands to tear down the market system, and get things for free? Welfare recipients, and Bolsheviks. America gets to charge what the market will bear, that's your whole capitalism thing, right?

Saul Williams makes me want to buy some Nikes and curse my evil white heritage

If you haven't seen it already, this is Nike's commercial for its new cross-trainers:



The song is by Saul Williams, called "List of Demands (Reparations)." I don't know about you, but it makes me want to go out and run suicides, or buy some overpriced athletic shoes.

The song is awesome, and obviously Saul Williams authorized its use in the commercial, but don't you think someone who looks and thinks like this, wouldn't he be a little hesitant about allowing a company to use what is effectively a protest song, in such a way? Or is that simply my white guilt, projecting my discomfort onto him?

Either way, badass song, right?

Rollo Horschmeier - the Urbans are coming!

Good fellow citizens in capitalism,

There is a phenomenon that, until now, I have been able to ignore. What happened over the weekend in South Carolina is but the most recent example of a certain kind of individual gaining prominence in our good land. As a staunch supporter of small town squares, neighborhoods in which one may sound out one's children with sparklers and a slingshot and not have to worry whether anyone might put out an eye, and of course cotton candy, these Urbanites threaten everything that is good and right in this country. 

If you have not encountered these gritty, citified masses, then you have not had to deal with their coarse manner, their off-putting commitment to being different, both in appearance and philosophy. Consider some of their more disturbing character traits:

 - Their music is often driven, nay, possessed, by carnal rhythms, and chanted in tribal formulae that hypnotize naive women and cause them to perform garish gyrations. Nowhere may be heard a banjo, or even a ukulele. 

 - Their manner of dress is sloppy, and unoriginal. Our sporting shirts and khaki trousers have been transmogrified into baggy wastes of cloth. Alternatively, they may dress in suits that are too short, too tight, revealing all manner of private sinuosities. Soon no doubt we shall see some Urbanite wearing some horribly mangled priestly vestments, designed only to shock and titillate. 

 - They have an unnatural preference for public transportation. Who doesn't prefer the quiet moments behind the wheel of one's own automobile, free from the smells and pressures of other people's filthy bodies? One might be inclined to suggest the taxicab as a happy compromise between the Urbanites and the rest of us good Americans, but again, there is the stench of foreign breath, and unknown spices and flavors. Disgusting.

Obviously there are the standard aversions to hard work, self-determination, and ponies, but these need not be repeated. Simply put, the Urbanites want to be paid by the government to wear their baggy or tight clothes, play their basso profundo music, and take their trains to smoky clubs where seditious plots and revolutions are fomented. It is incumbent upon us, then, to push back with our pure, snowy might, and vote against the insurgents. As a proper corporate citizen, my vote can only be fore Governor Romney, in all his robotic glory. Programmed for right, with that dreamy grin and perfect hair, Mitt is my man. And he's also the man for our kind of America. A non-Urban America. 

To the booths, ladies and gentlemen, and then on to the malls, and the big box retailers, and to Wal-Mart! Onward, corporate soldiers!

Why aren't arms good enough anymore?

This is my last week before an impossibly loud midget who doesn't speak English will explode through the bottom of Wife and into my existence, preventing me from sleeping past 7 am for the next eighteen years. And even then, I'll be used to getting up so damn early - hell, I'll probably have a regular squash game with Conroy and Fitzpatrick down at the club at 6:30, Monday Wednesday and Thursday. Which is worse than you think, because Conroy cheats, and Fitzpatrick won't shut up about his lawn. So hoooray for that. 

Anyhoo, I've learned many things these past few months. The first thing I learned is that there is no stork - that story is complete crap. Or maybe I'm the stork...I'm not sure anymore. 

The most recent thing I've been taught is that there are dozens, nay, several billion different methods and apparati for carrying a baby. I thought the Swedes, with their Baby Bjorn (it's BJorn, dammit, not BYorn. ENGLISH, people!) were the pacesetters in this industry, but it turns out they're not so great, those gigantic, blond bastards. Aside for the standard B-Giorn there are pouches, and slings, and wheelbarrows that can be wrapped around you, and chairs that can be clamped, via titanium bolts, into your spine. Evidently one is supposed to have a variety to offer your child, because certainly a pygmy who can't see past its nose can determine that a sling is better for its itty bitty spine. And in its place I'm supposed to make a decision about this? I can't even decide if Fetus is a boy or girl. Sure, science tells me that the decision's already made, but it also says that it's natural for babies to pass through vaginas. Does that sound like the sort of thing right-thinking people accept? No, that sounds like some crazy witch-doctor shit. 

So we're copping out, Wife and I. We're getting the pu-pu platter (haha! Chinese food is funny!), and going with the Swedes, and the hippies, and the Japanese. Because nothing is too good for Fetus, except college.