Jefe's House

That’s it. I am literally never going to listen to the radio, watch TV or read news stories on the Internet ever again. Literally. I am literally going to gouge out my eyeballs with a ballpoint pen.  Literally.

NBC Dateline segment Follow the Money, 5/2/10 (rerun, originally aired Nov. 2009):

SGT. JAMES PEREZ OF FAIRFIELD, CT:  She’s so close. She could almost see the money. She can smell it, she can taste it in her bank account.

CHRIS HANSEN: The scammers managed to get Shireen to be emotionally invested here.

SGT. PEREZ: Right. They’re literally pulling the puppet strings.

No, Sergeant, the Nigerian email scammers are figuratively pulling the puppet strings, that’s your point. They did not literally have strings tied around Shireen’s joints controlling her arm, leg and head movements.

Next up, NPR’s All Things Considered segment on the government’s Minerals Management Agency (5/11/10), which sells leases for oil and gas production. 

For the exploding Gulf rig the agency gave BP a Categorical Exclusion, “which means there is no public review, no scientific analysis, no discussion of alternatives…it’s literally a rubber stamp process,” said Bill Snapes, Chief Counsel for Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group.

No, Bill, it’s figuratively a rubber stamp process, that’s your point. I don’t think the MMA literally inked CATEGORICAL EXCLUSION – APPROVED onto a series of BP’s mimeographed  lease documents with a big rubber stamp.

And lastly, this AP story about “Crude” documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger being ordered to hand over footage regarding a long-running legal case against Chevron in Equador (5/7/10):

Chevron lawyer Randy Mastro…said it was not a case about the First Amendment. “It’s a case about a lawyer who decided he wanted to star in a movie,” he said. “It is literally candid camera.”

No, Randy, it’s figuratively Candid Camera, that’s your point.  Was the lawyer in the documentary shown shooting a TV show hosted by a Funt and featuring actors pulling good-natured practical jokes on unsuspecting dupes?  No, Randy, he wasn’t.

[pictures via amazon.com, sentinelprint.com and seattleweekly.com]

[The story below is a parody (just barely) of today's AP story here.]

How can you tell a real Teabagger from a fake Teabagger?  The Teabaggers are having trouble with this one themselves but it all comes down to spelling, grammar and race.

Organizers of tax-day tea parties are preparing for their biggest day of the year today, as thousands of Teabaggers participate in local rallies against high taxes, big government spending, and the fact that they were never taught English.  They are particularly infuriated that poor immigrants are also following the predominantly rich, white Teabaggers’ lead and not bothering to learn English.

Teabag leaders are striving to keep the rallies from presenting an image of themselves as fringe extremists obsessed with hateful, misspelled messages. Sensitive that poor public perception could sink their movement, some rally planners have uninvited beloved speakers, beefed up security and urged participants to find a Democrat to spell-check their signs before they head out to rallies.

Organizers want to project a peaceful, literate image, so many of them are moving their Teabag events to exclusive country clubs to keep out their own party members. “We are screening every entrant in order to separate the mainstream racists who are part of our group from the fringe racists who are not part of our group,” said one Teabagger activist.

“What’s at stake is showing various government officials of both parties that rich, white conservative, married men are concerned,” said Tom Hegel, an adjunct political science professor at the University of Idaho. “That’s why it’s important that we doesn’t have distractions caused by our core membership of functionally illiterate bigots.”

The tea party took a recent publicity hit when three black Democratic congressmen said they heard racial slurs as they walked through thousands of health care protesters — many of them Teabaggers — outside the U.S. Capitol on March 20. Some Teabaggers insist it never happened.

But it’s not the only racially charged incident. A photo posted on Flickr, which has attracted Internet chatter, shows a white man carrying a sign that says: “Obama’s Plan White Slavery.” The photo claims to have been shot at a tea party rally last year in Madison, Wisconsin. Hegel dismisses this photo. ‘There’s no way it was one of us. You can tell because it was spelt properlike,” he said.

Cindy Goebbels, who put together a tea party rally at a park in Rochester, Minn., said organizers have brought in more security and put local police on alert. “We just want to make sure the press isn’t getting access to the people who actually support us and attend our events,” she said.

[Photos swiped from NYDailyNews and Flickr.]