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Citigroup wishes to thank all of the suckers who allowed us to hoodwink them in 2009. You can be reassured that the Citi executive team will have a relaxing holiday now that our huge bonuses have been restored. We’re also grateful to the IRS for the $38 billion tax break. We’re committed to finding new frontiers in the reckless exotic investment arena. So enjoy a glass of bubbly on New Year’s Eve, then let’s make some new bubbles!

For those who don’t follow sports news, here is a brief recap. Roger Clemens has been accused of having taken performance enhancing drugs during part of the time he was a star Major League Baseball pitcher. The initial accusations came in a report issued by former Senator George Mitchell whose special commission investigated all claims of steroid use by Major League Baseball players. Additionally, Clemens’ trainer, Brian McNamee has testified that he injected Clemens with steroids. McNamee even kept the hypodermic syringes and turned them over to investigators who found Clemens’ DNA on the needles. Nevertheless, Clemens denies ever taking performance enhancing drugs (most of which are now banned by Major League Baseball, but were not during most of Clemens active career). Clemens is now under investigation by a Federal grand jury for perjury allegedly committed when he testified before Congress in February 2008.

Earlier this week, after more than a year of  silence, Clemens went on ESPN Radio and again insisted that he has never taken performance enhancing drugs. Interestingly, he said, “Brian McNamee never injected me with steroids or HGH.” The interviewers, Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic of the “Mike & Mike” show completely blew it by not following up that statement with questions like, “Did Brian McNamee ever inject you with any substance?” It’s possible that someone else gave Clemens his steroids, but McNamee gave him the female fertility drug (the one for which Manny Ramirez tested positive) that players use to try to mask the steroids. Another follow-up might have been, “Did anyone ever inject you with steroids or HGH?” But it seems ESPN is sympathetic to Clemens,  getting down on bended knee for his new Public Relations firm. Greenberg later said he thought he did a fair interview, “straight down the middle”, in his words. I agree it was right down the middle, like a softball pitch. Still Clemens whiffed because the entire setup was bogus. He tried to make it sound like the timing of the interview was based on the fact that he was about to go on vacation and not really directly related to the book American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime that was released the same day. Clemens only wanted to chat with his buddies “Greeny” and “Golie” (as he called them during the interview). “Book? What book? Oh yeah, I heard something about it but it’s all garbage.”  I wonder if Greeny and Golie vote for MLB Hall of Fame candidates. I hope not.

The doozy of the interview was Clemens claim that he has a family history of heart disease and it would be “suicidal” for him to take dangerous steroids (as if steroid and other drug users think about long-term consequences when they’re shooting up). Part of his claim to having a family history of heart disease was, he said, “My stepfather had a heart attack.” Now THOSE are some powerful genes.

The family history revelations prompted me to do my own exhaustive investigations into Clemens’ family history of heart disease. Here’s what I found:

• Clemens’ golf caddy’s cousin lives next door to a guy who had a heart attack
• Clemens’ friend Dick Cheney has had 97 heart attacks and has 12 pace makers and 8 diesel-powered backup pacemakers and a Clemens’ autographed defibrilator that he keeps in Rush Limbaugh’s broadcast booth
• When he drives to a local high school to pitch batting practice, Clemens drives by the Baylor Heart Clinic and they have loads of people in there with heart disease
• 28% of Texans who die each year die of heart disease and .0000000001 % of Texans become seven-time Cy Young award winners; do the math
• Clemens’ vacation house, which has no contact whatsoever with the outside world, especially information about new books written by veteran investigative journalists from the New York Daily News, was built by a guy who later had a heart attack; and now the place has plumbing problems–scary stuff, so you know there’s NO WAY Clemens would be taking any dangerous steroids or HGH out there
• Jose Canseco has not had a heart attack, but he got his brains beat in by  5’9″ sportscaster Vai Sikahema in the first round of a celebrity boxing match; When Clemens reaches his desperate years he wants to be able to at least go at least two rounds against Sikahema, so you know there’s NO WAY he would ever touch any dangerous drugs!

Troubled Assets

Toxic Assets

Caustic Assets

Corrosive Assets

Poisoned Assets

Explosive Assets

Flammable Assets

Polluted Assets

Dangerous Assets

Hazardous Assets

Dumb Assets

Dumb Ass Assets

Stupid Assets

Foolish Assets

Worthless Assets

Invisible Assets

Tasteless, Odorless Assets

Impotent Assets

Depressed Assets

Hopeless Assets

Phantom Assets

The Assets Formerly Known as “Assets”

Other People’s Assets

Sucker Assets

Chump Assets

Pain in the Assets

Deeply Troubled Assets

Disturbed Assets

Deranged Assets

Neurotic Assets

Psychotic Assets

Catatonic Assets

Borderline Assets

Oppositional-Defiant-Narcissistic Assets

Existential Assets

Diseased Assets

Malignant Assets

Disfigured Assets

Terminal Assets

Tortured Assets

“Alternative” Assets

“Enhanced” Assets

Daredevil Assets

“Loose Cannon” Assets

Spontaneously Combustible Assets

Radioactive Assets

Withering Assets

Irrational Assets

Erratic Assets

Unpredictable Assets

Chaotic Assets

Inconsistent Assets

Arbitrary Assets

Impoverished Assets

Bullshit Assets

Depleted Assets

Anemic Assets

Unknown Assets

Unfamiliar Assets

Creepy Assets

Scary Assets

Dead Assets

Petrified Assets

Dirty Assets

Filthy Assets

Soiled Assets

Assets You Wouldn’t Take Home to your Mother

Distorted Assets

Elusive Assets

Hollow Assets

Holographic Assets

Simulated Assets

Pseudo-Assets

Pre-shrunk Assets

Faded Assets

Stoned Assets

Drunk Assets

Hallucinogenic Assets

Idiopathic Assets

Cryptogenic Assets

Whacked Assets

Lost Assets

Wandering Assets

Starving Assets

Lifeless Assets

Lethargic Assets

Phlegmatic Assets

Deceptive Assets

Lying Assets

Dishonest Assets

Bad Faith Assets

Strangled Assets

Charred Assets

Feeble Assets

Tragic Assets

Theoretical Assets

Hypothetical Assets

Bilious Assets

Jaundiced Assets

Village Idiot Assets

Stinky Assets

Yucky Assets

Poopy Assets

FUBAR Assets

SNAFU Assets

WTF? Assets

I would like to see a journalist stand up and throw a sneaker at Andy Reid, just like that Iraqi journalist did last week to show he was fed up with Bush. Who is going to step up? Mark Eckel? Howard Eskin must wear $2000 Bruno Magli’s–they would make for some nice chin music(though I know he’s too much of an Eagles lap-dog to go negative on them–what a nitwit). Print journalists, your newspapers are going down in flames anyway–you have nothing to lose.  Sam Donellon, take off  your Nikes and throw them at the coach. Better yet, hand them off to him. THAT would be the ultimate insult!

I usually don’t rant about the Eagles, but the loss last night pushed me over the edge. Fire Reid. Release McNabb. Start fresh. How about bringing in the coach from Navy? His team passed 86 times this season and ran 667 times. I keep hearing Steve Fredericks’ voice in my head saying, “run the stinkin’ football”.

Last night the Eagles threw 46 times and ran 12 (I don’t count McNabb’s two scrambles–they were pass plays where nobody could get open). I know there were a lot of drops. DeSean Jackson dropped two very catchable balls (one right into his hands in the end zone).  Still McNabb was unsatisfactory. He threw low. He threw behind receivers.

Westbrook is hurt, so why can’t Reid run Buckhalter and Eckel? Look at the Giants. Brandon Jacobs is hurt, so they hand it to Derrick Ward and what does he do? Just rack up 181 rushing yards in the Giants’ overtime victory over Carolina.

The receivers are to blame as well. Why is L.J. Smith running a two-yard route on 3rd and 4? Why is Reggie Brown running a route that ends on the one-yard line in the middle of the field instead of the end zone with 8 seconds left in the game and no timeouts.

Most of all the coaching staff is to blame. A credible run threat gave them three victories in a row. Then they went back to pass, fumble, pass, pass, pass.

As Reid mentioned after the game, they still have a chance to make the playoffs. Maybe they do, but they have no chance off winning a playoff game with an offense that can only put up three points against the non-playoff-bound Redskins defense.

Time to clean house. This team and their coaching philosophy is out of date.  Teams that are running the ball are winning.

Time’s yours.

Topic  #1: Fox Broadcasting Weasels

Joe Buck and Tim McCarver were unbelievably biased in their commentary while the game was proceeding in the middle of an East Coast cold-weather monsoon. McCarver at one point said something like, “The pitcher has a dry ball and the batter has a wet bat” and went on about how the pitcher had a huge advantage. How does McCarver explain how the ball stays dry when the catcher has to throw it 60 feet back to the pitcher. Ruiz is accurate, but I don’t think he can throw balls that dodge raindrops in a dogs-and-cats downpour. After the game, Cole Hamels said he could not grip the ball and had no choice but to throw fastballs. McCarver then suggested that it would be impossible for B.J. Upton to steal second base with all the mud and puddles in the basepaths. One of them asked, “How do you slide into that?” About two seconds later, Upton stole second and executed a perfect slide. A few seconds after that, the “disadvantaged” Carlos Pena hit a single into left center with his wet bat (Impossible! How can a batter possibly get a hit with a wet bat? The batter is at such a huge disadvantage!) that scored Upton to tie the game. If those broadcasters had any objectivity and credibility, they would have been talking about how the game should have been stopped in the 4th inning at the latest (the truth is that the game should have never been started). Of course, the MLB has made them rich and fat and they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them. McCarver of all people, as a former catcher (and a Phillies catcher at that) should know better.

Topic #2: Pitching

I suppose it’s decided. Both managers have already said that they’re going with their bullpens for the continuation of the game. Mitch Williams also said this morning on 610 WIP Sports Radio that the teams should treat this game exactly like a regular game that is in the 6th inning. I beg to differ. It cannot be just like any other game in the middle of the sixth. The players will be in clean uniforms. This is a new 3-inning game. The Phillies have the advantage because they get to bat first and last (this is probably why McCarver said that the entire game should be replayed–that’s a pro-Tampa position). If it were me, I would hand the ball to Brett Myers and ask for three good innings at home, in front of a frenzied, wild Philly crowd. He eats that stuff up. Three innings and you get the glory, Brett. Who is the first player you think of when you think of the 1980 Phillies? Tug McGraw, of course. That final pitch is always memorable. I think Brett would take that over the insult of not being able to start in a possible Game 6. It would be beautiful symmetry. Myers was the opening day pitcher. He had to go back to the minors for a stretch go get his head together. He did it. Why not let it come full circle and have the guy who threw the first pitch of the season prove that he’s all the way back by pitching for the final out in the clinching World Series game.

If it goes back to Tampa, I don’t want to pitch Myers there. He already lost once. He stinks on the road. By then Moyer is rested. Moyer starts game 6 if necessary and Hamels goes in game 7.

But like I said, it’s not happening. We’ll see Chad Durbin, Ryan Madsen and Brad Lidge. As I’ve said before, I don’t care how they do it, as long as the Phillies win, I’ll be happy.

Topic #3: John Bolaris is also a Weasel

During the initial delay of the original game 5, the local Fox affiliate cuts to FOX-29 Meteorology Guru John Bolaris and he hems and haws his way through a phony explanation that the rain came about a half hour later than everyone expected. Well, everyone except a real weather guru like Joe Bastardi of Accu-Weather who demanded at 6:30pm (two hours  before the game), “Cancel the game.” Bolaris says he was not approached by Fox or the MLB.   More proof that Bed Selig is as dumb as a bag of diamond dust. How can you not check with the local weather experts at the affiliate of the network that is broadcasting the game? MLB says it uses WeatherBug. I note that WeatherBug’s copyright statement says “2007.” I think their forecasts are also off by more than a year.

The Microsoft TV commercials featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld trying to connect to “real people” are being pulled. In episode 2 of the ads, Bill Gates asks, “Tell me again why we’re doing this?” Seinfeld replies, “you and I are a little out of it. You’re living in some kind of moon house hovering over Seattle like the mother ship. I got so many cars I get stuck in my own traffic.”

The fact is that Gates is not “out of it” at all. He recently retired from Microsoft to devote more time to his foundation. He is passionate about solving a problem that kills three million real people every year: malaria. In a 2005 New Yorker article by Michael Specter, Gates says, “It just blows my mind how little money has been spent on malaria research.” The Gates foundation has spent somewhere in the area of US $10 billion on global health issues. So why does Gates go along with an ad campaign that paints him as a detached hedonist when he so clearly is nothing of the sort?

The other pieces of this confused ad campaign are coming to light. There are the celebrities claiming “I’m a PC.” Getting Deepak Chopra to soberly look into the camera and claim, “I’m a PC” has the momentary effect of making the Mac ads look juvenile. I say momentary because when I clicked through to the site I encountered two glaring problems.

1. The pop-up window where (I presume) a video testimonial is supposed to play was blank–just a black box. This was on Firefox 2.0. I tried the site on Internet Explorer 6 (the only version of IE I’m allowed to use on my work computer) and I got the same result, a black box.
2. My CPU usage shot up to 100% and I couldn’t do anything on my PC until I closed the window with the broken PC ad. I guess that’s the high quality Silverlight software leaking memory like a Xenical clinical trial patient.

Then there’s the “Windows vs. Walls” portion of the campaign with some of the worst copywriting I’ve ever seen. I felt like I was reading The Bridges of Madison County. For instance:

But, most importantly, to connect all of us to the four corners of our own digital lives and to each other.

What the hell does that even mean? The four corners of our own digital lives?

To go on doing the little stuff, the big stuff, the crazy stuff and that ridiculously necessary stuff.

Ridiculously necessary? So things that are necessary are worthy of ridicule?

An approach dedicated to engineering the absence of anything that might stand in the way…of life

Say what? Engineering the absence? I feel a Danny DeVito (auditioning for the role of Louie De Palma) rant coming on–”Who wrote this shit?”

Today, more than one billion people worldwide have Windows®. Which is just another way of saying we have each other.

Oh, I get it now, Windows® is human. I guess that’s why it is so deeply flawed.

A note to the model who is looking through the “window” he just chopped out of the wall on the ad site: Dude, next time you take your reciprocating saw to a wall filled with fiberglass insulation, you might want to put on some gloves, a dust mask and goggles. I predict OSHA will be the next regulatory agency to knock on Microsoft’s door.

(Disclosure: My everyday computer is an IBM Thinkpad running Microsoft Windows XP. I’m not a Mac snob. However, I do need to replace my laptop soon and I will probably get a Mac. I don’t like the idea of having to shell out a lot of extra cash for new licenses for things like Adobe Creative Suite, which I use daily, but I probably will anyway.)

If you’re going to make a list of heresies, you don’t put 10 items on it. You have to put 13 items on it. 13 is a heretical number. I don’t even want to spend much time on how naive and phony WIRED‘s list is. They present a set of false choices, such as picking a hybrid versus buying an old used car (how about not having a car at all or at least cutting your driving by 80% or more–that would reduce carbon output more than anything WIRED recommends). Another bogus point is that air-conditioning emits less carbon than heating. Duh, WIRED, consider that most people in the USA have to both heat AND cool their homes. A better idea is to conserve as much as possible; insulate better, keep your house a little cooler in the winter and a little warmer in the summer. Why quibble over whether “organic” cows produce less beef and fart more than their “conventional” bovine brethren. The better suggestion is to STOP EATING BEEF or at least cut down a whole lot. Those aren’t provocative topics that can divert a person’s attention to a magazine on a newsstand (with content that is so weak that it requires a neon orange background), so WIRED dismisses the more commonsense and ultimately even less convenient truths about climate change. If we want to reduce carbon emissions, we’re going to have to give up our gigantic SUV’s, our bacon-double-cheeseburgers and our sprawling McMansions.

My true goal here, however, is to help WIRED fulfill its act of heresy against the green movement(actually, my goal is to poke fun at the numbskulls at WIRED who wrote the article, but play along) Hence, here are my three additional WIRED-style “green heresies” that will bring their number up to the very sinister total of 13.

11) Buy Lots of Cigarettes – Think about it. Tobacco is a plant. Plants absorb CO2. If thousands and thousands of additional acres of tobacco were planted, think of all the carbon that would be kept out of the atmosphere. What’s that you’re thinking? When you smoke the cigarette, it just puts the carbon right back in the atmosphere? Well, you wouldn’t actually smoke them, silly (I suppose you could and still be “carbon neutral”, and, hey, since curbing carbon is our number one goal, we’ll have to make a few sacrifices to our health to get there). Carbon-cutting citizens could put all those packs of cigarettes into crawl spaces and attics for insulation. Americans are accustomed to buying lots of stuff we don’t need (and that we’ll never use) and then letting it all sit around and clutter up our homes, so this won’t require any change in behavior and it would be great for the economy!

12) Be Even More of a Couch Potato – When you boil it all down, it’s human activity that is causing global warming. Want to cut carbon emissions? Then just stop doing so much. Every time you come up with something to do, you’re suddenly spewing out carbon like nobody’s business. You jump in your car and you buy stuff that had to be shipped halfway across the earth and it was made with oil and other natural resources that burned up tons of hydrocarbons to get to the store in your local strip mall. Here’s a better idea: sit on the floor in the dark. If you’re worried about obesity from lack of exercise, try a seaweed diet. Homegrown seaweed. There you have it, WIRED’s recipe for reversing carbon emissions: sit in the dark and eat seaweed that you grow in your swimming pool.

13) Cancel your subscription to WIRED.

Imagine a basketball league. Let’s give this hypothetical league a name. How about the Democratic Un-united Mudslinging Basketball Association, or DUMBASS for short. Now let’s consider two of the teams in this league. We’ll give our first hypothetical team the name “Clinton” and we’ll call our second team “Obama”.

So far so good. Imagine that DUMBASS scheduled these two teams to play each other in Michigan in April. Suppose that the owner of the arena in Michigan demanded that the two teams play in January, not April. When the demand is made, DUMBASS (the league to which both teams belong) makes it very clear that if the game in Michigan is played in January, the game will not count. So the Obama team thinks, “well if our league says that the game is not going to count, then why should we even show up? We could spend our time and energy getting ready for our other games.” Team Clinton, however, shows up at the game, puts five players on the court against zero players for Obama. Clinton wins the game 300-0.

What do you know, here we are in June and Team Clinton is just one victory short of qualifying for the championship. They’re in second place behind Obama. They don’t want to be in second place, so they appeal to DUMBASS to allow the Michigan game to count. So DUMBASS wimps out and decides to give each team half a victory in the Michigan game. The Clinton team realizes that half a victory won’t get them to the championship because they’re a whole game behind Obama in the standings.

What’s a team to do? Team Clinton then asks DUMBASS to come up with a new way to decide which team it will send to the championship. Instead of counting wins and losses, let’s add up all the points that both teams have scored during the season and whichever team scored more total points, regardless of wins and losses, will go to the championship. “Count every point!”, is their motto.

Even with their 300-point fake victory, they still don’t have enough points to win. I guess they’ll have to appeal to the DUMBASS “credentials committee.”

It’s hard to imagine a political party screwing things up worse than the Republicans have done for the last eight years, but I’m beginning to think the Democrats are up the challenge.

I suppose now that the first baby boomer has begun collecting retirement benefits, there are no funds left over to run the Social Security Administration web site.