“The Barbie Dreamhouse is the expression of a conventional role model that isn’t OK.”
Barbie is a fashion doll manufactured by the American toy-company Mattel, Inc. and launched in March 1959. American businesswoman Ruth Handler is credited with the creation of the doll using a German doll called Bild Lilli as her inspiration.
Take a quick look at one while you still can.
This is “liquid democrazy” in action, I guess.
“We’re too cowardly.”
You couldn’t make this stuff up if you had to, people. Not that anybody cares about Germany’s Pirate Party anymore, but I do have to admit that these guys still keep coming up with real zingers.
The latest coup: The party’s general manager in Berlin, Johannes Ponader, up until now a proud and long-term welfare recipient, is now celebrating his closing with this stage of his life (for now, anyway) by openly calling for public donations to help him finance his hard-pressed, well, livelihood (or lack of it).
Strangely, this actually seems to have upset some of the other pirates out there (they seem a bit touchy these days for some reason) who think that maybe this might cause some kind of a Glaubwürdigkeitsdilemma (credibility dilemma) or something. As if.
Like I said, not that anybody cares anymore or anything.
“Hier entsteht der Eindruck, dass jemand politische Ideen mit persönlichen Vorteilen verknüpft.”
That tired old SPD.
With three tired old SPD guys trying to decide which one of them will have to be the one tired old SPD guy who will have to be the contender in next year’s election against the ridiculously popular Angela Merkel.
So like one of them, former Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück, threw his hat into the ring yesterday, sort of.
His angle? Eat the banks. Split their investment and retail units and have them create their own rescue fund and make them be good and nice again like they used to be in the past (I guess) als die Welt noch in Ordnung war (when the world was still in order).
Been there, done that. Yawn already. Bring out the next stooge and let’s get him over with, too.
“Banks are service providers and not betting shops.”
Who says that in-fighting and a complete absence of credibility, character, policy, tactics or strategy can’t get you anywhere? It got Germany’s Pirate Party to nowhere fast. So you better take one quick look at them while you still can.
They’re down to five percent in the polls at the moment, and sinking fast. But let’s move on now and just try to remember them for all the good things they accomplished while they were still here among the living (hell if I know, I thought you might have).
Die Piraten liegen einer neuen Umfrage zufolge nur noch bei fünf Prozent und müssen damit um den Einzug in den Bundestag bangen.
Or Berlin Teflon, if you prefer. Whatever you want to call it, it’s way more teflony or teflonodelic than other kinds of Teflon out there.
Just ask Berlin’s mayor Klaus Wowereit (SPD) after the opening of the city’s new airport has been postponed yet again (no joke) and now won’t be ready nearly two full years later than planned. It’s his baby, you see.
“Not to mince words, Klaus Wowereit can pack his bags as Berlin mayor. Anyone who recklessly gambles with the future of a whole region, wasting hundreds of millions of euros (…) and covers up instead of looking into mistakes is not qualified to be managing a metropolis. Wowereit is not the only one who has failed in relation to the BER project, but he is the main culprit. People are not going to forget that. No matter what he does, his time is up.”
But what do you think will happen, meine Damen und Herren? Not a damned thing. This is Germany. And worse still, some politicians are just never held accountable for what they do, no matter what what they do, or don’t. But not just here. I know of this one guy from another country, for instance (the president of the something or the other) who could get caught robbing a 7-Eleven at gunpoint and nobody would care. It just ain’t right, I tell ya. But it’s da way of da woild.
German commentators are outraged over the postponement, with one (the key word here is one) calling on Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit to resign.
Pirates!
This is what happens when you fail to deliver (even when nobody ever really knew what you were supposed to deliver in the first place). Hey, what goes around comes around. Or was it what comes around goes away? I, for one, thought they’d never be von gestern (yesterday’s news).
“Since the Pirates have been around, the optical decorum has lapsed, and it’s undignified.”
Is this any way for a marauding mob of pilfering plunderers and freeloading freebooters to behave?
Worried about financial bottlenecks during upcoming election campaigns, Pirate party boss Bernd Schlömer has threatened to admonish dilinquent party members. Many (42 percent) have failed to pay their annual membership fee of 48 euros.
Nach Angaben von Schlömer haben rund 42 Prozent der mehr als 33.000 Mitglieder ihren Jahresbeitrag von 48 Euro noch nicht bezahlt.
No horror here. Or terror, if you prefer. How does that German proverb go? Lieber ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende?
That is, better an end with horror than a horror without end. And that’s where we’re at with Greece now, finally.
German Vice Chancellor Philipp Roesler said he’s “very skeptical” that European leaders will be able to rescue Greece and the prospect of the country’s exit from the euro had “lost its terror.”
Get it over with already, people, and move on.
In a brilliant and risky move never yet attempted by a left-wing politician ever before, SPD boss Sigmar Gabriel has boldly proposed to improve his parties chances at next year’s federal election by “blaming the banks” for everything that has gone wrong in the financial sector and elsewhere.
“Mind-blowing,” one German political commentator said. “No one has been able to put these complex puzzle pieces together like this up until now. But by calling the banks extortionists, accomplices to tax evasion, hustlers and manipulators, Gabriel develops a subtle analysis of a highly complicated theme, thus making it easily accessible to the man on the street.”
“Die versammelte Linke in Deutschland betrügt sich selbst und betrügt die Bürger, wenn sie einerseits die Krise mit immer neuen Schulden bekämpfen will – und dadurch die Abhängigkeit von den Banken und Finanzinstituten erhöht, die man andererseits blindwütig an den Pranger stellt.”
“The entire left tricks itself and the citizens when, on the one hand, it calls to fight the crisis with ever more debt – thus making us even more dependent upon the banks and financial institutions – and then, on the other, mindlessly blaming them for everything.”
Observing Hermann 