Just in time for the New Year, Andy Borowitz has a few New Year’s predictions:
January: After paying five billion dollars for The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch will reduce the size of the paper by removing the facts.
June: Population experts will warn that the world’s population will soar in 2008, largely due to the Spears sisters.
August: Sen. Edward Kennedy will abandon plans to write his memoirs, explaining, “I can’t even remember what I did last night.”
More here. Leave your own in the comments.
TheFountainHead
Mmmmm, Delicious Cupcakes, I can has them??
myiq2xu
You can take the girl outta the trailer park, but ya can’t take the trailer park outta the girl
cleek
March: a leak to the NY Times will reveal that the administration has been recording the conversations of Democratic campaigns and giving the transcripts to Republican campagins. Hewitt and Malkin will demand the NYT be sanctioned for revealing this.
Michael D.
I am 10 minutes into Jesus Camp and I’m fucking creeped out by it all.
Prediction: The rest ain’t gonna get any better
4tehlulz
April: NYT will hire Hewitt and Malkin for their Op-Ed pages.
myiq2xu
It don’t.
I was raised in a fundie church that thought Baptists were too liberal and Jeebus Camp creeped me out too.
The one scene that really got me is about 15 mintes in and it shows a maroon and her son at the kitchen table. She’s home schooling him, and explaining how there really isn’t no such thang as globull warmin’
Since when was global warming a “religious issue?”
That scene is evidence as to why home schooling should be outlawed.
Jake
Prediction: It’ll get better if you make it into a drinking game. Just don’t make “Jesus” one of the words or you’ll wake up January 8th in a seedy New Jersey hotel.
Next to Britney Spears.
(Aaaaaiiieeeeeeeeeeeeee!!)
myiq2xu
That sounds like a plan. I’d hit that.
The udder one is still jailbait. 16 will get you 20.
myiq2xu
My daddy said that the perfect “10” was two 5’s or a 7 that owned a liquor store.
But he never heard of hot, rich and slutty.
Scotty
You should at least get a laugh at the part with Ted Haggard. But the rest… not so much.
TheFountainHead
I applaud your sentiment, but I think simply fostering the common practice of only hiring those educated in more formal settings will do the trick well enough and avoid the legal ramifications of attempting to outlaw a form of education.
p.a.
March: A new university-level physics textbook is published in Tehran. Bush admin. announces Iran has re-started nuclear weapons program. Bombs Tehran University and various libraries throughout Middle East. U.S. libraries come under suspicion for ‘harboring information potentially useful to terrorists’.
myiq2xu
Didn’t the Nazis burn books?
Oh shit, I just invoked Godwin’s Law. Dammit!
Dug Jay
April: The New York Times fires oped columnist Paul Krugman and four million heads explode across the lunatic left-wing blogosphere.
May: The average IQ of the population in the US is found to have increased two fold in just one month.
Punchy
Fixed, apparently.
4tehlulz
November: President-Elect Ron Paul, true to his “Dr. No” nickname, announces that he will not take the oath of office. Millions of Paultards celebrate his consistency in his refusing to govern.
AkaDad
This one time, at Jesus camp, I stuck a flute in my…
myiq2xu
Now fixt
rachel
If they’d been fixed, she wouldn’t be in this situation.
myiq2xu
That’s what TZ would call a 4-footer
cleek
so, you’re saying the father is a quadruped ?
The Other Steve
December: President-Elect Ron Paul, announces that he will not be living in the White House. Instead he will be staying at the Motel 6 on his own dime.
Ron Paul announces the Southern Baptist Convention has agreed to buy the White House and turn it into a shrine to GW Bush.
Jay
Sometime in the coming year, maybe sooner, TheFountainHead will applaud the building of a campfire before pissing it out.
libarbarian
savior?
myiq2xu
Neigh! But he’s hung like one.
TheFountainHead
As a general rule I don’t expose myself to open flame.
Punchy
Speakin of instruments, I think “playing the organ” means something different at Jesus camp….
Ed Drone
May 2008: With military rotations being up and few new recruits to send into Iraq’s meat-grinder, George W. Bush announces ‘victory’ and claims to be pulling troops out of the war. With no sense of irony, he announces he has brought the US ‘Peace in Out Time.”
June 2008: As US troops leave, internecine warfare erupts in earnest, causing George W. Bush to reinstate the draft and send in 150,000 more US troops, vowing to stay in Iraq until ‘true’ victory is won. He insists that the withdrawal announced the month before was an unfortunate decision brought on by “his predecessor’s flawed plan for the war on terror.”
August 2008: The White House announces the postponement of the US presidential and Congressional elections, citing the turmoil caused by reinstatement of the draft. In order to meet the Constitutional requirement for scheduling elections, the madministration announces a new calendar, to be inserted between September 2008 and September 2009. Some of the new months are “Jenna,” “Not-Jenna,” “Barney,” and “Turd-Blossom,” each of which has 60 days. To show his devotion to bipartisanship, there are months with names like, “Democrat Party” and “Hanoi Jane Fonda,” each of which has 5 days.
November 2008 (AKA Saint Reagan 2008a): Alarmed by the rioting, factional warfare and breakdown of civil order resulting from the August coup, the September counter-coup, and the October ‘surprise’ coup, Canada and Mexico jointly occupy the former United States. Their troops are welcomed with flowers and singing in the streets.
Not all of these predictions are tongue-in-cheek, alas.
Ed
Robert Johnston
February: Tom Friedman announces his intent to retire from the Times in August.
August: Tom Friedman announces his intent to retire from the Times in February ’09.
libarbarian
“I want to get down on my knees
and start pleasin Jesus,
I wanna feel his salvation
all over my face…”
-Faith+1
Jay
You just did.
TheFountainHead
You caught my double entendre, took out a gun, and shot it in the face.
myiq2xu
What’s the chant from Full Metal Jacket?
“This is my weapon, this is my gun
This one’s for killing, this one’s for fun”
The Grandest Panjandrum
June: Middle class neighborhoods are overrun by millions of trailer park residents attempting to claim the homes left vacant after the devastating Krugularity of April 2008.
Jay
Also a double entendre – they were interchangeable in Kubrick’s film.
Tara the anti-social social worker
January: Tom Friedman says we need to give Iraq 6 more months.
July: Tom Friedman says we need to give Iraq 6 more months.
January 2009: etc.
myiq2xu
GP: Please don’t feed the trolls. Ignore them and maybe they will go away.
Doug H.
January: The Indianapolis Colts beat the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship game. The resulting head explosions across the Northeast singlehandedly end Mitt Romney’s campaign for President.
February: John McCain rises in the polls following his naming of Kirk Douglas, Joe Paterno, and Keith Richards as potential running mates.
March: Desperate for filler while the writers remain on strike, NBC gives Doctor Phil a two-hour primetime special with the Spears family. The show ends with Britney announcing her allegiance to the Symbosian National Front.
April: President Bush is shocked and surprised at the uptick of Iraqi violence following the post-surge drawdown of troops, and announces another surge that will last until the first Tuesday of November.
May: The Ron Paul blimp collides with an aerial tower in New Jersey and explodes into flames.
June: Michael Vick leads a scrappy group of prison inmates to an uplifting victory against the prison guards, only to be foiled at the last minute when Benji gnaws his ankle off.
July: Hilary Clinton has the Democratic nomination all but sealed up, when suddenly Hannah Montana rips off her rubber mask to reveal that the former First Lady is, in fact, Old Man Withers.
August: Mike Huckabee precedes his acceptance of the Republican nomination by having Adrian Peterson help him carry a cross through downtown Minneapolis.
September: Baseball’s pennant races come to an exciting finish when the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox buy out the other twelve American League teams.
October: George Bush spends most of the month in the Oval Office twiddling thumbs while waiting for a phone call from Republican nominee Huckabee.
November: In a contested four-way election, John Edwards is elected the 44th President of the United States. Mike Huckabee’s concession speech consists of a teary-eyed “Why hast thou forsaken me?” Ron Paul supporters converge at Lake Jackson with packets of cyanide and grape Kool-Aid. Dean Broder proclaims that the Bloomberg / Nunn ticket’s fourth-place finish means that the centrist voter has forsaken the center and that America needs a new centrist voter. He’s later taken to Bellevue for ‘observation’.
December: George Bush mails the keys to the Oval Office to President-elect Edwards and spends the month hanging in bars with Tony Romo. “I ain’t playing President anymore, so the hell with staying sober.” The Vice-President’s office goes up in a pillar of flame, with Dick Cheney last seen yelling to the heavens from the rooftop.
TheFountainHead
Gonna be a good year.
myiq2xu
That’s gratitude for ya, Huckleberry pardons the Rolling Stoner and he still backs McCain.
I guess he wants a candidate who looks deader than he is.
Dug Jay
August: Republican Presidential nominee accepts Democratic nominee’s proposal that those citizens with IQ’s measured at less than 50 should be deported to India for remedial education; Obama said that the first deportee should be the notorious thirteen year-old blog commenter known as “myiq2xu.”
Robert Johnston
I can’t quite figure out whether there’s any tongue-in-cheek going on here. There’s a sort of odd plausibility to the ends for candidates two through four that keeps the speculation from quite being over-the-top.
Dreggas
The Option ARM resets come due further plunging the housing and credit markets into decline triggering a recession and possible depression that makes 1929 look like a time of prosperity in comparisson.
Dug Jay
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
atrios
Downpuppy
Exit polls show Edwards defeating McCain 65-35. Final vote count 50-50. Supreme Court appoints McCain, awarding him California’s electoral votes even though he wasn’t on the ballot there due to an oversight.
McCain is unable to take office due to Viagra overdose. VP nominee Jeb Bush announces intent to issue blanket pardon of all previous appointess.
Punchy
This might actually be funny, if there wasn’t a undefined pronoun, and simultaneous references to multiple celebrities that only grandchildren and grandparents could possibly know who the hell they are..:)
.
Dreggas
I worked in the industry, mock it if you wish but it’s coming and it’s not going to be pretty. The fed and euro banks keep throwing money into the markets left and right but that’s like pissing on a california wild fire.
Richard Bottoms
Dumbass Republican Bush election & re-elections supporters will continue to tell Democrats how they should vote.
Dug Jay
Sorry, Dreggas. I wasn’t mocking the potential adverse consequences of further mortgage resets, but rather the way in which blogger, atrios, often reports on bad economic news followed with that silly “WHEEEEE.”
I personally share some of your concern, although I currently believe the problem is likely more manageable than you do.
myiq2xu
I’m startin’ to be glad I built that bomb shelter in the back yard back in 99. Y2K is still a coming, it’s just late.
DougJ
Numerous pundits will write that “we will know how Iraq will turn out in four to six months.”
Many Republican lawmakers will be indicted and/or convicted. The media will continue to portray Republicans as the “values party”.
There will be at least one new “Girls Gone Wild” video.
John will continue to make no effort to spell check or otherwise edit his posts.
Dreggas
I wish I could be that optimistic, after watching how the Option ARM’s HELOC’s and Subprime/Alt-A manure were spread around, this “big shit pile” to use another of Atrios’ lines (one that is spot on in this case) is in just about everything.
Already there are cities having to stop payment on pensions because they bought a lot of this paper through funds on wall street. The company’s that have been going down are just the firewall, they made these loans but once they were done they sold this stuff to wall st and from there it was slice and dice time. None of the lenders serviced these loans, or at least many didn’t, that way they wouldn’t be caught holding them when the shit came down. It wasn’t uncommon to have people showing up and bitching because they didn’t know who the hell to make their payment to because within 3 months their loan was sold off to someone else, no seasoning whatsoever.
This led to some issues with delinquency but was easier to fix. You could pretty much tell when the jig was up because more security was being hired at mortgage places (gee wonder why…irate homeowners?).
This didn’t start just with subprime and Alt-A lending though. Once the refi boom was done (with over-inflated home values) then came the HELOC’s, which are Home Equity Lines of Credit. These were great for people that wanted to upgrade their home and since it somehow went from being worth 100k to 300k (or more) they were getting a great credit line backed by the equity in their home.
Well they max that out paying off all their bills and getting repairs and renovations done but suddenly the market starts taking a downturn and they’re losing equity, as a result where they once had the house to borrow against they don’t anymore, now they owe money and at a higher rate.
Of course following this, as rates go up and people start slowing on the buying side out come the ARM’s but more insidiously the Option-ARMS which allow low low payments for about 2 years. Well these started in late 05 and early 06, we hit 08 and it’s going to be a major major shock to the system as defaults go up even more and cause even more of a flood of available housing onto an already saturated market.
This is only, really, the beginning. It’s not just here either, Europe and the UK are in the same boat.
Dreggas
You already have your zombie plan. I just have the quickest offroad routes to the nearest ammo-dumps.
Dreggas
And where was the gov’t?
myiq2xu
I have all the beer and liquor distributors marked on my map. Let the ijits loot the liquor stores, I’m going for the gold!
BTW – Headshots! Ya can’t kill zombies by aiming center mass.
Dreggas
Well as we all know the first rule of all post-apocalyptic thrillers and video games is that he with the biggest guns gets the chicks. But since I am a generous person, you bring the booze and I’ll bring the bombs.
We’ll teach that chick in Tank Girl a thing or 10.
myiq2xu
Q: What’s the difference between a zombie and a blond?
A: When zombies eat you, they swallow.
Dreggas
See now my answer would have been that zombies have more brains seeing how that’s their diet but *shrugs* that works.
myiq2xu
I’ve known a few blondes who had genius DNA in them.
borehole
October: Producers at NPR and editors at the New Yorker finally realize what an unfunny hack Borowitz is and start giving his space over to actual humorists.
This isn’t so much a prediction as it is a beautiful, beautiful dream.
wasabi gasp
In 2008 the President initiates a massive Crockpots-for-IEDs program in Iraq as a last ditch effort to salvage his legacy.
Dreggas
Well, until they digested it right?
myiq2xu
Or until it leaked out.
Dreggas
BWAHAHAHAHA
Jake
October 2008: Washington, DC – Unable to afford meat, citizens turn to members of the Bush administration to meet their RDA of protein. Dick Cthcheney is spared a turn on the spit because there are some things too disgusting to eat.
myiq2xu
December 2008: The incoming Vice President’s transition team discovers that the “man-sized safe” in Cheney’s office is actually a meat locker. Several missing person cases are solved, but Bush immediately issues his boss a pardon.
myiq2xu
August 2008: After all the GOP primaries are completed and no candidate wins the nomination, the GOP convention begins its convention. After 23 ballots, there still is no winner and each candidate receives progressively fewer votes. Newt Gingich volunteers to serve in a moment that provides enormous comic relief to the delegates. Finally, a “Draft Goldwater” movement succeeds in having Barry Goldwater named as the GOP Presidential nominee. The fact that he is dead is seen by Republicans as a feature rather than a bug. Jack Bauer is selected as his running mate.
myiq2xu
Oopsie! My bad. Fixt
myiq2xu
From C&L:
NY Times Hires Vladimir Putin as Weekly Columnist:
Critics say The Times’ decision underscores the paper’s increasing willingness to showcase views of those who are less concerned with the constraining nature of reality and truth. But Rosenthal scoffed at such assertions.
“I’m not sure if I understand this weird fear of opposing views,” said Rosenthal. “We have views on our op-ed page that are as thuggish or more so than Vladimir’s.” He added, “The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected and brutal leader – and somehow that’s a bad thing. How intolerant is that? The whole point of the op-ed page is to air a variety of opinions.”
In further defending the hire, Rosenthal explained, “Look, Hitler and Stalin are dead. Pol Pot, too. Osama bin Laden tends toward the run-on sentence. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has trouble meeting deadlines. Musharraf told us he has too much on his plate right now to commit. Charles Manson’s parole board has repeatedly declined our requests for Chuck to pen a column for us while serving out his life sentence. Dick Cheney can’t write a sentence without dropping an F-bomb. And, well, let’s just say all options were off the table concerning President Bush.”
Bwwwaaahhahahahahah!
Props to Nicole for teh funny
Johnny Pez
November 4, 2008: Democratic candidate wins presidential election by 15-point landslide.
November 5, 2008: President Bush announces that he is exercising his inherent power as Commander-in-Chief to nullify results of presidential election. Awards election to Republican candidate.
November 6, 2008: Democratic candidate concedes election.
myiq2xu
October 2008: Jonah Goldberg releases a new book titled “The Conservative Jesus” in which he reveals that after eating some “magic Cheetos,” Jesus appeared to him in a vision and told him that the entire New Testament was distorted and rewritten by Librulfascists during the Dark Ages.
The book tells how Jesus really favors a neocon foreign policy, hates minorities and social spending, and that paying taxes is a mortal sin.
However, no publisher is willing take a chance on the book after the failure of Goldberg’s previous effort, so Jonah signs a contract with Charmin, which prints the book in roll form. The “book” is approximately 200 sheets in length (double ply.)
Nancy Irving
Har har har. You have the chutzpah to label this “humor”? You must have a pretty bad hangover.
myiq2xu
Nope – still drunk
s/The Notorious myiq2xu