Wednesday, March 02, 2005

That's how we feel about Dubya all the time

White House website, 10.30 AM eastern time:

March 2, 2005
                                                                                              March 2, 2005

It's meant to be the title to a release called "Fact Sheet: Better Training for Better Jobs" and the release itself seems to be apostrophe-challenged (e.g. "in our Nations job training programs," "President Bushs WIA Plus proposal"). The Internets is hard!

UPDATE: So the White House eventually got their text character problems sorted out. If only their personal character problems could be mended as easily. Anyway, as we noted above, the botched release was part of a job training emphasis by Dubya today, manifested in one of his Social Security style "discussions" in Maryland, and there are some interesting things in that transcript:

So I look forward to continuing to work with friends and allies to advance freedom -- not America's freedom, but universal freedom, freedom granted by a Higher Being.

Note -- it's the White House transcribers that capitalised those last two words. So God is sneaking back in to Dubya's freedom line, having been given the boot not so long ago.

Later comes mention of Dubya's new energy plan: the land!

I like the idea of using corn and soybeans to help produce energy. I mean, after all, it would be neat, someday, Governor [Ehrlich, of Maryland], if somebody walked in and said, we're growing more crop, and therefore, we're less dependent on foreign sources of energy.

Someone really needs to explain to Dubya the very basic physical laws of energy creation and destruction before he pursues this idea much further. And while Dubya is taking Energy 101, the aforementioned governor of Maryland might want to check in for Econ 101:

[Governor] We're at 3.8, 3.9 percent [unemployment]. We want to go to 0.0 [unemployment], Mr. President. I want to report to you 0.0. How about that for a goal? (Applause.) I told you we set high benchmarks around here.

We know that we do a lot of Spinal Tap references on this blog, but 0.0 unemployment is exactly the same mentality as Nigel's "This one goes up to eleven."

But Dubya is getting some economics training:

There's a -- the term of art these days is productivity and how does the worker become more productive.

This usage likely provides insights into the way Dubya's advisers are explaining stuff to him: "Mr President, the term of art is deficit/exchange rate/interest rate etc." Perhaps an Alan Greenspan clause?

FURTHER UPDATE 7 March: The same glitch is back at 3.22 eastern time today -- the sequence of  characters and an apostrophe-less news release following. This time it's "Making a Difference for America s Youth"

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