My brother, who will be 50 on his next birthday, still complains about the tremendous financial reversal he suffered when Mom threw out his baseball cards.
Well, I can top him on that: I returned from vacation, and the new cleaning people who started here last week had thrown out my Barack Obama water bottle! So much for my best opportunity to get rich on E-Bay.
You may or may not be aware that all things Obama are hot. You would definitely know this if you
worked here and saw the people lined up in our lobby to buy copies of the Nov. 5 front page pictured at right. And that was just a reproduction of a page ABOUT Obama.
So just imagine how much I could have gotten for a water bottle with actual Obama DNA on it. I had picked it up when I was gathering up my stuff from the table after our editorial board interview on Jan. 21 of last year. Actually, I wasn't entirely clear on whether it was HIS water bottle or MINE. But then, the photographic evidence indicates I was drinking coffee, while he was drinking water (from my special Initech cup from "Office Space"), not water, so it was most likely his (of course, I also have a photo below in which he had no water bottle before him, but what are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?). The photo above, by the way, is a blown up detail from the wider shot back on this post.
Anyway, I had left it on a credenza on the other side of my office, and it had sat there unmolested for 11 months. Every once in a while I'd look at it and wonder what I should do with it, then promptly forgot about it.
When I went on vacation Dec. 26, I cleaned up my office. My desk was spotless. There was no debris apparent anywhere — except for that old water bottle, which I no longer noticed. But obviously our new cleaning people did. They were getting paid to clean the office, and that was the only thing that looked out of place to them. Just my luck. (I only realized it was gone when I used a water bottle to water a dying plant — which I see the cleaning people or somebody had also trimmed back from where it had been trailing on the floor, and started to leave the bottle next to the plant, but thought that wouldn't be tidy, and happened to think of the Obama bottle…)
Weirdly, they left an empty water bottle on my window sill that says "Galivants Ferry Stump, May 1, 2006" on it. I guess it was more obviously a souvenir.
Of course, it might not have been the cleaning people. But I don't think my Mom has a key to my office, so they're at the top of the list. And there's nothing I can do about it, because they have a perfect comeback — it looked like trash. In this sort of dispute, the authorities never side with the pack rat…
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I see that Ann Coulterguist has written a new book. The reviews suggest mostly a recycled version of her same discredited right-wing rants. But that’s America. Anyone can make a fortune even if they have no talent, nothing new to say or any integrity. The sad thing is there is a ready cadre of about 20 million people who eat this stuff up no matter how little merit it has. America in the 21st century has become a melting pot of both brilliant, dynamic and talented folks such as President-elect, Obama and crackpots like Coulter. What a great country.
Don’t worry, Brad; there will be lots of other ways to get rich off Obamanism. None of them entail honest work, either, because the government has only a tiny role in that.
Just buy more home than you can afford, and let Obama bail you out. Drop your medical insurance, because Obama is promising Medicaid for everyone. Isn’t that something to look forward to?
Or set up a construction company with some Eskimo women as the front people, the titular owners, you know, so you can score more points in the Affirmative Racism grading system for contracts to be handed out with $350 BILLION of Infrastructure Lard.
It will help if you fill out the forms as being non-white. That was Obama’s only “qualification” to run for President. Don’t worry about lying. Obama lied about his past and his citizenship. Almost everyone getting a government check lies. You have to lie if you are going to steal.
My wife threw out my Lee Muller bobblehead just last week. A tragedy.
Doug! There’s your Lee Muller fix — I think it’s a triple today. Some of us only come here for the LeeMullerSpeak. It hath wisdom to calm the savage beasts.
I found a Lee Muller bobblehead on EBay!
My social studies students are mostly black and very supportive of our incoming president. On Jan. 20, we will watch part of the inauguration in class, and then we will post a picture of our new president in a prominent place.
If there is one message that Obama’s election has for our young people regardless of their ethnic or cultural background, it is that, yes, you can achieve your dreams. Yes, you can make this a better world!!
Let’s all wish our new president godspeed. He is certainly going to need it. One can argue about how much the Republicans are to blame for our current problems, but the time for blaming people is over. We need to get behind our new government in an effort to head off the possibility of falling into Great Depression II in 2009.
As Dr. Krugman points out, deficit spending on worthwhile infrastructural projects that are spade-ready would at the very least put people back to work. It may have taken a world war to pull out out of Depression I on a definitive basis, but people were starving under Hoover while he cut taxes and balanced the budget.
We cannot, we must not try to solve this immense fiscal problem by throwing 25% of the population out of work and re-introducing hunger in America in order to create conditions of optimal investor confidence.
I hope Republicans will join with the president in pushing through a strong economic stimulus package. If they don’t, then they should be mercilessly thrust aside.
“Spade-ready infrastructure projects”…for Obama… LOL!!
Seriously, Obamanites, wake up!
The same Demicrats who were damning President Bush for deficit spending were the same ones damning him for stopping them from running deficits twice as large.
Then, in 2006, Demicrats got control, deficits tripled to over a TRILLION DOLLARS a year, as they tried to paper over their failed housing programs for unqualified blacks and illegal aliens.
Now Mr. Obama says he may have to run up TRILLIONS MORE in debt. It will further wreck the economy.
Any money spent by government is taken out of the real economy, away from honest, intelligent people.
Every dollar spent by government is a tax on real workers, because it has to be covered by a corresponding tax, or by devaluing the currency and robbing the wage earners, savers and investors of purchasing power.
Change!
Let’s elect an inexperienced, lying, crackhead Marxist for a change.
Done.
I don’t want to be difficult by staying on topic when bud’s trying to divert us to his unrelenting rehash of nothing much at all, but, alas, I will.
Brad, if you wanted to keep your Obama bottle, all you had to do is buy another one and keep your mouth shut. 🙂
And this just in: bud, how can you say Ann Coulter has no talent when she can actually spell?
Teacher, do you or did you have a picture of Bush in a prominent place in your classroom? Were there any white students in your social studies class that supported Bush and would have appreciated the same gesture of having his picture displayed in a prominent place? If not, why then are you discriminating against white students?
It is a great moment in our history when a black person can be elected to the highest and most powerful office in the free world and his election should be a source of pride for the black community, of that there is no disagreement.
It was with great sadness for you that, I read about your loss. I feel sure that if you communicated such a devastating loss to Obama he would be happy to send you not only another bottle anointed by him but you might even get a cabinet post. You could be assistant to the new CIA appointment. Obama could get all the incriminating information that the CIA would have against our country and our president and you could be sure that nothing is leaked out to the press that would hurt Obama in any way.
Even better, you could head up the FBI and Leon can head up the CIA. What a team that would be. It would make you forget about the water bottle. With both the CIA and the FBI in Obama’s pocket you can be sure that the newspaper industry would only get information favorable to Obama and his decision making.
Just send in the UPC codes from 5 Obama Kool-Aid packets and get a new Obama bottle, complete with Welfare Nipple.
Your loss is a Richland County landfill’s gain.
To think, someone probably paid a dollar or so for that plastic bottle so it could be used for 20 min or so as a drinking vessel and then disposed. Talk about an inefficient use of oil and resources — and then it gets tossed in the ground to sit for how many years? And you Brad went along for the ride.
This sounds like an Energy Party scandal. Quick, someone alert the press!
Sounds like an inside job to me. When we get our new FBI director and our CIA director sworn in maybe that could be their first assignment. Find the Obama bottle.
I have it from a reliable source that there is a new Kool Aid coming out with a picture of Obama on the bottle. Lee is right once again.
Kemo Sabe said that it was a smart man that surrounds himself with heap smart Indians. Tonto saved the Lone Ranger’s hide many a day.
So you say. What has that got to do with Obama. He might have rode in on a White Charger but his backsides in now sitting on the John and hoping that nobody flushes. Don’t forget. He has the Certificate of Birth locked away (not the Birth Certificate).
Obama does not shoot silver bullets.
forget the bottle; howz about those coins with obama’s visage added for collector value.
isn’t it a crime to deface US currency?
Phony coins, phony seal, phony Oval Office, phony birth certificate, phony President-Select…
Just think how much money you could get for a real birth certificate of Barack Obama!
I have the half drunk bottle of water Obama drank from that I grabbed from the podium after a Barack town meeting. I blogged about it today and dumda dum da…when I looked to see if the searched picked it up, they did….when I went back again a looked…the referances were gone. Wait! Is that a black helicopter landing in my front yard! Run!