Category: Best Line of the Day

Clever turns of phrase, special splashes of wit, provocative insight — all in a sentence or two.

Best line of the day, so far

“We should take a page out of her playbook and take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country,” [Pawlenty] urged.

The overall strangeness of this thought aside, consider the timing. An angry man had just smashed his airplane into an I.R.S. office in Austin, Tex., killing one federal employee, injuring others and breaking quite a few windows. Does this seem like the very best time to be encouraging people to assault government property? Pawlenty’s defenders will undoubtedly say that he did not want his listeners to literally grab a golf club and hit something. But it is my experience that many Americans do not totally understand the concept of a metaphor.

Gail Collins – NYTimes.com

Best telling-it-like-it-is line of the day

The only reason such apathy exists, however, is because there’s still a widespread misunderstanding of how exactly Wall Street “earns” its money, with emphasis on the quotation marks around “earns.” The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits — Goldman reported $13.4 billion in profits last year, after paying out that $16.2 billion in bonuses and compensation — is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street’s eye-popping profits come from, exactly? Did Goldman go from bailout city to $13.4 billion in the black because, as Blankfein suggests, its “performance” was just that awesome? A year and a half after they were minutes away from bankruptcy, how are these assholes not only back on their feet again, but hauling in bonuses at the same rate they were during the bubble?

The answer to that question is basically twofold: They raped the taxpayer, and they raped their clients.

Matt Taibbi in “Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle”.

This article is important in understanding what happened and how we taxpayers bailed out Wall Street.

Seriously.

Borrowing at zero percent interest, banks like Goldman now had virtually infinite ways to make money. In one of the most common maneuvers, they simply took the money they borrowed from the government at zero percent and lent it back to the government by buying Treasury bills that paid interest of three or four percent.

To sum up, this is what Lloyd Blankfein meant by “performance”: Take massive sums of money from the government, sit on it until the government starts printing trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to restart the economy, buy even more toxic assets to sell back to the government at inflated prices — and then, when all else fails, start driving us all toward the cliff again with a frank and open endorsement of bubble economics. I mean, shit — who wouldn’t deserve billions in bonuses for doing all that?

Thanks to Avelino for the pointer.

Best line of the day

“The people NBC needs to woo aren’t sports fans. They broadcast the Olympics for people who like stories about polar bears and gymnasts with rare diseases and speed skaters whose sisters have cancer. Yes, these people are out there and to justify the insane investment dollars they have to watch too. It’s a mini-series that happens to have some sports in it.”

Deadspin

Best sometimes-even-satire-makes-a-key-point line of the day

Also worth considering: We charge $99 per year for a MobileMe subscription. Google gives you the same stuff and all they ask for is, um, permission to totally invade your privacy and to “monetize” (God I hate that word) your personal information. You think your personal information is worth less than $99 a year? Then you’re getting a hell of a deal with Google. The rest of us would rather spent $99 and keep the contents of our email to ourselves.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

Best NBC (Nothing But Commercials) commentary of the day, so far

The other problem I had was the ski jump. People speeding down an incline and then launching farther than a football field through the air has to be about the coolest thing, right? Not if you watch on NBC! The shot of every competitor was a close up that fit just them in the screen. You know in how in The Aviator, Howard Hughes puts his movie on hold because there are no clouds in the sky and planes flying without clouds around provides no frame of reference and you can’t tell they are moving? That’s what this was like, basically you have a stationary guy first crouching, then pointed awkwardly, then suddenly landing. What is the point of this close up? Does the average person have enough knowledge of this sport to look at these people’s technical performance? “Oh, I don’t like how his ankle is cocked there. He’s making a big pocket in the middle!” No, just show people flying through the air already!

Commenter at Deadspin

Best question of the day

“Have we all paid for our sins for the wardrobe malfunction in 2004?”

Toni Monkovic, The Fifth Down Blog.

McCartney (62), The Rolling Stones (Jagger and Richards were 62), Prince, Tom Petty (48), Bruce Springsteen (59), Half of The Who (64 and 65). Can’t we have someone younger? How about a marching band just for a change of pace?

But not Carrie Underwood who sang the single worst rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” ever.

Best redux line of the day

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. “In English,” he said, “A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”

A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”

First posted three years ago today.

Best line for a cold day

“I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that, I gave Jesus a chance. . . .”

Annie Savoy

Pitchers and catchers begin reporting in two weeks.