barack obama

Any amusing email / text / social media faux pas you’d care to share?

“How do you wake up the President?” wondered Slate’s twitter feed last month. The tweet linked to an old article I’d read before, concerning the protocol that surrounds when and how the commander-in-chief is roused from his sleep for an emergency briefing.

It was a Friday evening. I was babysitting my niece. On a whim, I retweeted the original question (“How do you wake up the President?”) along with a tongue-in-cheek suggestion of my own. (“SUPER-SOAKERS!!!) For some reason, the image of Obama’s Chief-of-Staff bursting into the presidential bedroom with a florescent pump-action water blaster just amused me.

When I refreshed the page a few minutes later, I had 25 fewer Twitter followers. Read the rest of this entry »

Time there, folks, please! Change in the Middle East, have yiz no homes to go to?

“President Hosni Mubarak dashed the hopes of hundreds of thousands of Egyptians waiting for what they thought would be his resignation speech last night by defiantly announcing that he would not bow to domestic or foreign pressure to quit…” Read the rest of this article.

Breaking: President to drop ‘da bomb’

Jay-Z is in the Whitehouse. In related developments: This is Funny. Also, next week’s pub column is one protracted lead-in to a lame Jay-Z based joke. I haven’t written it yet tho…

“You are poison! You’re dead to us.”

Back in the mid-1990s, Q magazine gave Naomi Campbell’s Babywoman album a devastatingly succinct two word review: Gobsmacking hubris. If the supermodel’s hubris was ‘gobsmacking’, then the delusional folly of former Democratic Vice Presidentialial candidate John Edwards’ during the 2008 presidential race is Shakespearean in scope. Read the rest of this entry »

SO… YOU WANNA COME BACK TO MY PLACE, MAYBE SWAP SOME STATE SECRETS?

This suspiciously hot girl seated behind Obama when he spoke in Shanghai last week is causing a bit of a sensation in China. By the time he appeared at the podium, she had removed the red jacket – hence the Chinese media dubbing her variously the ‘beauty in black beside Obama,’ ‘Obama girl in black’ or ‘woman in black behind Obama.’ (Clearly, the Ministry for Snappy Tabloid Nicknames having something of an off-day there.)

However, if she was the bait to lure the American president into an elaborate honey trap – which absolutely no one other than myself suspects – then, alas, her cover has been blown. Read the rest of this entry »

OH YEAH… OH YEAH… OH REALLY… OH YEAH… BOOOOOOM!

The White House has confirmed that Barack Obama will announce an American exit strategy from Afghanistan (with short term troop increases, no it doesn’t make sense to me either) next Tuesday. I wonder will it be anything like this?

MISCELLANEOUS AMUSING ITEMS I’VE COME ACROSS #14

How weird is Europe’s Obama crush? Uh, this weird. I spotted this in a kids toy store in Rome over the weekend… Read the rest of this entry »

Road to Oslo paved with good intentions, apparently

The decision, announced within the last hour, to award Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize is an utterly baffling one. In fact, I assumed it was a joke when I first heard about it. I like the guy. And I like what he’s trying to do. But he hasn’t accomplished any of it yet. So they’re honouring him for having good intentions. Hey, Nobel prize committee – I got good intentions! Where’s my award? Read the rest of this entry »

PRESIDENTIAL CONFIDENTIAL

Two American presidents caught talking off the record this evening. What George W. Bush really thinks about John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin here. What Barack Obama really thinks of Kanye West here. And how Bill Clinton wanted Al Gore to make Hillary his 2000 running mate here.

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE GROSSLY MISCHARACTERISED THE POLICIES OF THEIR POLITICAL OPPONENTS? YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT, THE NAZIS*

As mentioned here previously, partisan politics in America is an ugly, ugly business. Everyone compares anything they don’t like to the Holocaust. Everyone compares anyone they don’t like the Nazis. But every so often a story comes along that if, well, it can’t warm the cockles, it’ll at least elicits a cackle from the coldest chambers of your heart. Read the rest of this entry »