Borowitz Report: Greek Solution

March 25 - Greece Independence Day (Photo credit: Aster-oid)

ATHENS (The Borowitz Report) – After struggling for months with an intractable financial crisis, Greece announced today that it would cease to exist as a sovereign nation and would instead reboot itself as a social network.

The new entity, FetaBook, is expected to raise much-needed billions in an upcoming IPO.

The social network formerly known as Greece announced that it would cancel its upcoming elections and instead install a CEO, a 24-year-old hacker from suburban Athens named Ciro Mavromatidis.

Speaking from the newly opened offices of FetaBook, Mr. Mavromatidis explained how the social network would be attractive to the investment community in ways that Greece was not.

“We’re keeping all the aspects of Greece that made it a cool brand – the ruins, the Olympics, the olives,” he said.  “We’re just losing the things that were a drag on the Greek economy: namely, the Greeks.”

Borowitz Report: Zuckerberg Letter

Image via CrunchBase

MENLO PARK, CA (The Borowitz Report) – On the eve of Facebook’s IPO, Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg published the following letter to potential investors:

Dear Potential Investor:

For years, you've wasted your time on Facebook.  Now here’s your chance to waste your money on it, too.

Tomorrow is Facebook’s IPO, and I know what some of you are thinking.  How will Facebook be any different from the dot-com bubble of the early 2000’s?

For one thing, those bad dot-com stocks were all speculation and hype, and weren’t based on real businesses.  Facebook, on the other hand, is based on a solid foundation of angry birds and imaginary sheep.

Second, Facebook is the most successful social network in the world, enabling millions to share information of no interest with people they barely know.

Third, every time someone clicks on a Facebook ad, Facebook makes money.  And while no one has ever done this on purpose, millions have done it by mistake while drunk.  We totally stole this idea from iTunes.

Finally, if you invest in Facebook, you’ll be far from alone.  As a result of using Facebook for the past few years, over 900 million people in the world have suffered mild to moderate brain damage, impairing their ability to make reasoned judgments.  These will be your fellow Facebook investors.

With your help, if all goes as planned tomorrow, Facebook’s IPO will net $100 billion.  To put that number in context, it would take JP Morgan four or five trades to lose that much money.

One last thing: what will, I, Mark Zuckerberg, do with the $18 billion I’m expected to earn from Facebook’s IPO?  Well, I’m considering buying Greece, but that would still leave me with $18 billion.  LOL.

Friend me,

Mark

Good 'Top Ten': Walmart

Top Ten Signs You're Shopping At A Bad Walmart

10. The store is on fire
9. There's a guy living in your cart
8. Hard to navigate around all the crime-scene tape
7. Aisle three is a meth lab
6. Prices are falling, but so are the load-bearing steel girders
5. Palpable sense of despair and ennui (Sorry, that's a sign you're at a regular Walmart)
4. Only thing half off is the store manager's pants
3. Store policy: "You break it, you eat it"
2. "Salon" is just Mitt Romney forcibly cutting some guy's hair
1. The greeter gives you the finger

Good 'Late Night' Jokes: Obama's Handicap

Jay Leno

• You know who the real J.P. Morgan is, right? He's Captain Morgan's drunk brother who's bad with money.

David Letterman

• Over the weekend Betty White endorsed Barack Obama. I think I'm going to wait and hear what Angela Lansbury has to say.
• JPMorgan lost $2 billion in bad trades. They made bad investments — for example, those gay wedding chapels in North Carolina. What were they thinking?
• Mitt Romney once lost $2 billion. Then he found it in another pair of pants.
• Now they are starting to dig up stuff on Mitt Romney. One time he was arrested for disorderly conduct and being a public nuisance. It was when he was a kid. He had one of his hairs out of place.

Jimmy Fallon

• On Saturday President Obama and Joe Biden spent more than four hours playing golf together. Joe Biden’s handicap is 20, while Obama’s handicap . . . is Joe Biden.

Good New Yorker Cartoons

Paul Krugman: Dimond et al. Need Another Spanking

NEW YORK, NY - MAY 03: JPMorgan Chase & Co. chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon looks on while speaking at Simon Graduate School of Business at the University of Rochester's New York City Conference on May 3, 2012 in New York City. Dimon spoke about the state of the economy and regulations in the banking industry. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

It’s clear, then, that we need to restore the sorts of safeguards that gave us a couple of generations without major banking panics. It’s clear, that is, to everyone except bankers and the politicians they bankroll — for now that they have been bailed out, the bankers would of course like to go back to business as usual. Did I mention that Wall Street is giving vast sums to Mitt Romney, who has promised to repeal recent financial reforms?

Enter Mr. Dimon. JPMorgan, to its — and his — credit, managed to avoid many of the bad investments that brought other banks to their knees. This apparent demonstration of prudence has made Mr. Dimon the point man in Wall Street’s fight to delay, water down and/or repeal financial reform. He has been particularly vocal in his opposition to the so-called Volcker Rule, which would prevent banks with government-guaranteed deposits from engaging in “proprietary trading,” basically speculating with depositors’ money. Just trust us, the JPMorgan chief has in effect been saying; everything’s under control.

Apparently not.

What did JPMorgan actually do? As far as we can tell, it used the market for derivatives — complex financial instruments — to make a huge bet on the safety of corporate debt, something like the bets that the insurer A.I.G. made on housing debt a few years ago. The key point is not that the bet went bad; it is that institutions playing a key role in the financial system have no business making such bets, least of all when those institutions are backed by taxpayer guarantees.

For the moment Mr. Dimon seems chastened, even admitting that maybe the proponents of stronger regulation have a point. It probably won’t last; I expect Wall Street to be back to its usual arrogance within weeks if not days.

But the truth is that we’ve just seen an object demonstration of why Wall Street does, in fact, need to be regulated. 

Thank you, Mr. Dimon.

Related articles

• Paul Krugman: Why We Regulate (economistsview.typepad.com)

Good 'Late Night' Jokes: Jogging

Jay Leno

• Today Newt Gingrich didn't agree or disagree on the gay marriage thing. However, he did say there should be a term limit on all marriages.



Joe Biden (Photo credit: xomiele)

• According to Danish researchers, people who jog live six years longer than non-joggers. Aren't you OK with dying early and missing that six years of jogging?

Conan

• The White House admitted that Vice President Biden's endorsement of gay marriage forced him to come out in favor of it. So in a related story millions of Americans are trying to get Biden hooked on pot.
• Mitt Romney has issued an apology for some of his high school pranks that went a little too far. Probably the meanest prank was the time he bought his high school and fired everyone in it.
• The best-selling novel "Fifty Shades of Grey" has been banned from many libraries in Florida. Isn't it shocking? They have libraries in Florida.

Borowitz Report: Mitt's School Daze

Mitt Romney - Caricature (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)

NEW YORK - (The Borowitz Report) - Today, presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney released the following open letter to the American people:

Dear Friends:

This week, The Washington Post reported an incident from my high school days in which I bullied a gay classmate by pinning him to the ground and cutting his hair off.  This story revealed a side of Mitt Romney that may have been surprising to many of you: the Mitt Romney with an irrepressible and hilarious sense of humor.

Some of you may say, “Hold on, Mitt – isn’t holding a kid down and cutting off his hair going a little far?”  Well, the merry prankster in me tells me you can never go too far when it comes to giving the greatest gift of all: the gift of laughter.  And I certainly remember many of us laughing long and hard about what I did to that Nancy-boy.  Was it cruel?  Perhaps, but it’s not like I tied him to the roof of a car or anything.

The Democrats have already tried to seize on this incident as evidence that I don’t like gays.  That is a lie.  I have nothing against gays.  Except for the poor ones, of course.  And as any of my high school chums can tell you, I did not go out of my way to pick on gay kids.  I was also a total douche to many heterosexuals.

The fact is, boys will be boys.  Who among us hasn’t shoved a crippled kid down a flight of stairs?  That’s something else I did in those mischievous days, but the mainstream media isn’t reporting it because they want to turn this into an anti-gay thing.  The fact is, when I was in high school I played pranks on everyone – blind kids, deaf kids, dwarves and Jews.  Although come to think of it, I don’t think our school accepted Jews.

Now that I’ve put my actions into better context, I hope you’ll see this incident with the gay kid for what it was: innocent good fun.  And I hope when you vote in November, you won’t judge me as the teenager who bullied one gay boy, but rather as the adult who fired thousands of people.

Vote for me,

Mitt Romney

Pat Oliphant Cartoon: The Pope and Nuns

Good New Yorker Cartoons: Innovation

Pat Oliphant Cartoon: The Euro

Good 'Late Night' Jokes: Facebook and eHarmony

Jay Leno

• Rick Santorum is here tonight, making his first appearance on our show. I haven't seen Rick this excited since he endorsed Mitt Romney.



Cover of Woody Allen

• Facebook has revealed their estimated net worth — $96 billion. That's almost as much money as businesses lose every year from their employees wasting time looking at Facebook.

David Letterman

• Lindsay Lohan was in New York having dinner with Woody Allen. Nice going, eHarmony.com.
• I hate to dampen everybody's spirit but they busted up another one of these exploding underpants plots. All I can say is thanks a lot, underpants bombers, because now at airport security we have to put our underpants in a tray.

Related articles

• Top 7 jokes about Mitt Romney's dog - MJ Lee - POLITICO.com (mittismean.org)

Good 'Late Show Top Ten': Avengers

Top Ten Superheroes Left Out Of "The Avengers"

10. Captain Paramus
9. Orthodonto
8. The Crossword Puzzler
7. Iron Manilow
6. The Fight Doctor, Ferdie Pacheco
5. The Human Couch
4. Genehackman
3. The Somewhat Credible Hulk
2. The Clap
1. She-Tan

Good 'Late Night' Jokes

David Letterman

• President Obama visited Afghanistan — unplanned, unannounced, just went right to Afghanistan. Not to be outdone, Mitt Romney got in his car and drove through the rough part of Beverly Hills.
• Mitt's wife Ann Romney, Mrs. Mitt, said there's another Mitt Romney that is wild and crazy. She says that one time he changed his name to Mitta World Peace.
• Newt Gingrich has dropped out of the presidential race. Next stop: "Dancing with the Stars."
• Now Newt will not be able to fulfill his lifelong dream of losing by a landslide. 
• Anybody watch the Kentucky Derby? Once again it was won by a guy from Kenya.
• The horse that I bet on was so slow that instead of a victory party we had to form a search party.
• Lindsay Lohan was seen having lunch with Woody Allen. That's a parole violation, right?
• After lunch, Woody reported that his glasses were missing.

Pat Oliphant Cartoon: Agreement

A Less Sophisticated View of the World

Pat Oliphant Cartoon: The New Sheriff

Borowitz Report: Romney Visits His Money in the Caymans

International Money Pile in Cash and Coins (Photo credit: epSos.de)

CAYMAN ISLANDS (The Borowitz Report) - In an uncharacteristically emotional scene for the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney today paid a surprise visit to his money in the Cayman Islands.

Speaking in a bank vault surrounded by stacks of cash, Mr. Romney praised his money for "the brave work you have done in the never-ending fight for freedom from Federal income tax."

"Thanks to your hard work, losers around the world are envious of me," he added.  "For that I salute you."

Stressing that his money's mission in the Caymans was "far from over," he refused to set any timetable for withdrawal.

In a reference to his bid for the Presidency, Mr. Romney told his money, "It would be an honor and a privilege to have my face on you someday."

After plunging into the stacks of cash to touch many of the dollar bills individually, Mr. Romney boarded his private jet to pay a surprise visit to Switzerland.  Get a free subscription to the Borowitz Report here.