Two links from two weeks ago that you may or may not have seen, but I had saved to share and not gotten around to it yet.

The Yes Men sent out a hoax press release from the US Chamber of Commerce saying they had changed their position on climate change. Obviously the media was interested in this so the Yes Men rented a room at the DC Press Club and gave a fake press conference. Then it gets really awesome when a representative of the Chamber shows up and shuts down the presser. And now, they’re getting sued for it

Via TPM.

If you saw the profits made by the big banks last quarter and wondered how they were doing it, Philip Greenspun has an answer:

Because of the Collapse of 2008 financial reforms, the big investment banks are able to borrow money from the U.S. government at 0 percent interest. Then they can turn around and buy short-term bonds that pay 2 or 3 percent annual interest. Now they’re making 2 percent on whatever they borrowed. They can use leverage to increase this number, by pledging some of the bonds that they’ve already bought as collateral on additional bonds.

It’s all so awesome, isn’t it?

Via Talking Points Memo, a poll from Public Policy Polling drilling down into the nonsense regarding whether President Obama is a naturalized citizen of the US.

According to the poll, 24% of the population do not believe Obama was born in the US. That’s not a huge surprise, because that’s about the % of the country that supported Bush until the end of his presidency (though, it’s obviously not certain these are the same people). More of these people (10% to 7%) believe he was born in Indonesia, rather than Kenya, which is weird because as TPM notes, everyone knows that Obama was born in Kenya, or at least that’s what they say.

Most telling, tough is the 10% of people who acknowledge Obama WAS born in Hawaii. 6% of them don’t think Hawaii is part of the US and 4% aren’t sure.

Reasonable people can disagree, sure, but these people aren’t reasonable.

Talking Poings Memo rounds up the 10 most viral Sarah Palin videos of the last year. Lots to giggle about here.

Via Talking Points Memo, click to read what Roger Ebert had to say about Billo while shaking your head at the horrible joke in the title of this post.

Still living the good life.