In Your Face, Unwarranted Influence, Whether Sought or Unsought, From The Military-Industrial Complex!

I was incensed a while back by a particularly lame SNL cold open where Fred Armisen's Obama rattles off the lack of accomplishments so far. (It hasn't even been a year.) GITMO may still be open, but less flashy positive developments are under way:

White House officials say Mr. Obama took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said Wednesday that the plan was to threaten a veto over a prominent program — in this case, the F-22 fighter jet — “to show we were willing to expend political capital and could win on something that people thought we could not.”

Once the Senate voted in July to stop buying F-22s, Mr. Emanuel said in an interview, that success “reverberated down” to help sustain billions of dollars of cuts in Army modernization, missile defense and other programs.

[Via the NYFT,B's!]

[UPDATE] Horror Stories From SNL in 1995

A choice excerpt, because I don't feel like I have sold this piece well yet. Skip to the end, if you don't like Roseanne, but do like stories about Norm MacDonald punching people:

Lately, the extracurricular action in the writers’ room has been more colorful than a lot of the writing.

The show hosted by Sarah Jessica Parker, in November, included a song contrasting love’s higher and lower impulses. Michael McKean sang chastely to Parker, plunking an acoustic guitar; then Sandler cranked up his electric guitar to underscore sophomoric lines like “I’m gonna give ya the wood!”

During rewrites of the piece, Kightlinger jokingly suggested to the group that the song be made even more explicit—and found herself the target of a crude barrage. “A couple of them turned on her,” says a close friend of Kightlinger’s, “with these really vicious, mean sexual things. . . . She’s one of the strongest people I know. Very tough to faze. And it made her cry.”

Kightlinger, who wrote for Roseanne last year, has been reciprocally shocked by the thin skin of her new colleagues. “I’ve had to pare down my sarcasm big-time,” she says, adding that she now feels “really positive” about SNL. “In the writers’ room at Roseanne, you could shit on each other and everybody would laugh. But here, it’s like, ‘Wait a second—that’s a piece I’ve worked on, dah, dah, dah.’ It gets personal in a hurry.”

In December, Ian Maxtone-Graham, a self-described anti-smoking zealot, complained about Norm MacDonald’s lighting up in the writers’ room. MacDonald shrugged it off. So Maxtone-Graham extinguished the cigarette by squirting MacDonald in the face with a water pistol. MacDonald punched Maxtone-Graham in the head, knocking him to the floor.

Can I Has This Michael Jackson Portrait?

[Via NYT]

Ellis vs. Predator

Tom Scharpling Live Karaoke "Born To Run"

God I love this man and his radio show.

Weirdly Accurate And Topical

Chanel Guitar Bag

I am often appalled and delighted by deftly executed opulence: for instance this (very cool-looking) Chanel guitar bag wherein form follows function only to pants function and run off laughing, "All art is quite useless!"

Image: Matteo Volta for Style.com

Marcy Kaptur! Why Aren't You Obama's VP!

She's took some serious names last week on the financial bailout absurdity. [Thanks, Chris!]