There’s just something creepy about state-compelled cheerleading.

Hopefully, they’ll at least have a momma put out a hit on her daughter’s competition. Meantime, give me the pick of the litter:*

Via Tom McMahon, who always has cool stuff…

* Anyone remember that?

Jesus H. Christ on a pogo-stick:*

Free enterprise has been good to Bill Gates. But today, the Microsoft Corp. chairman will call for a revision of capitalism.

In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the software tycoon plans to call for a “creative capitalism” that uses market forces to address poor-country needs that he feels are being ignored.

Clearly, there is a mental illness that grips you when you have that many significant digits to the left of the decimal point in your bank account. “Oh, all the natural laws that allowed to me amass a fortune undreamed of by even Scrooge McDuck in the funny papers can be repealed on the say-so of…me.”

Or maybe it’s his esposa, browbeating him about the umpteenth 6 ft.-wide plasma flat screen. Who knows? Fucking lunatics, all running the world, sitting around Davos, spending gajillions to talk about revising capitalism with their lunatic gajillionaire friends. Talk about pulling the ladder up behind you.

Throw me a million, bub…I’ll give you a revision. Sure I will. Just as soon as I knock out this change to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

NB: Alan Sullivan demolishes this dipshit way of thinking:

The Third World does not need technocratic paternalists. It needs home-grown leaders who value the common good above personal pelf, and who build polities where private property is secure. Then and only then, people will lift themselves from poverty; they need no help from Bill Gates.

When and why did the dopehead Heath Ledger acquire the Mantle of Unmockability?

On his radio show yesterday, Fox News host John Gibson responded to ThinkProgress’ criticism of his comments mocking the death of Heath Ledger, saying that it was just “a little Brokeback Mountain joke” and there is “no point in passing up a good joke.”

Without offering any sort of apology, Gibson defended his callous comments by claiming that “for months and months and months,” his show has consistently made fun of the line, “I wish I knew how to quit you” from Brokeback Mountain. “I’m not giving that up,” exclaimed Gibson:

I’ve been driving back and forth to Laredo for the last few days, and for most of that, the radio is on, and I have to hear, on the hour and half-hour, news reports about the latest details of this jackass’ self-imolation. For two freaking days, for 10 hours of driving — that’s 20 GDMFSOBing news reports about the pill-popping dumbass.

That right there is what’s wrong with America — the idea that such a thing is news. How many other dopeheads, all across America, died on Tuesday of an overdose? Or in a wreck caused by their drunkenness? I don’t know, because I didn’t hear about any others…just this schmuck. Like all decent people, I mourn every untimely death, but just because the dude could recite lines, had some good looks, and made enough money to indulge his habit out of sight of the rest of the world doesn’t shield him from mockery. C’mon now, people.

Wonder what the reaction from the Grief Machine would have been if he’d died in a gun accident?