THE END OF THE GREAT CNBC SUCKS, a.k.a. It is perfectly OK to be an investor, a CNBC viewer, a pervert, a sexist, a breast lover, a racist, a white supremacist, a nationalist, a liberal hater, a hater of homosexuals, a Southerner, any other type of redneck or hick, a NASCAR fan, a country music fan, a gun owner, a pro-lifer, a Christian, a conservative, a Libertarian, a Republican, and / or even a wealthy individual and VOTE ONLY FOR DEMOCRATS over the next thirty years

For all my talk of huge breasteses on this post and throughout my blog, I picked this photo of Jessica Biel because of those amazing, silkenly smooth thighs. Imagine motorboating with a bikini-clad, large-breasted Democrat such as Jessica Biel. If you are a Democrat, you might not even need a boat.

This post was formerly entitled “Unity” and it originally featured this photo of now President Barack Obama and now Secretary of State Hilary Clinton at their first post-primary public appearance together in Unity, NH, on June 27, 2008.  I still have my perfectly even 200 posts, as I repurposed the post with the fewest page views on this blog, so that it will be on the front page of this blog in posterity.  The last shall be first.  It is my own little version of income redistribution, only in this case, we are talking about page views.

I was going to write a long, final post as The Great CNBC Sucks, but I am so utterly sick of Republicans and CNBC (except Trish Regan) that I am also tired of writing about them, at least for free.  I need to focus on making money.  Instead of writing a long goodbye post, I recommend that you read Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?  You can buy it here, you can read huge portions of it for free on Google, you can go to your local bookstore and read a chapter at a time, or you can borrow it from your local public library.  If you read that book - and if you have the sense to consider that my Republican Party has for thirty years been using the non-progressive tax code, huge deficit spending, reflationary monetary policies, lax regulatory regimes, and corrupt government subsidies for GOP favored industries such as Wall Street, oil, nuclear power, and defense to steal from the poor, middle class, and future generations and concentrate America’s wealth among only the rich – then you will understand the title of my post.  Unless you personally are a multimillionaire, the Republicans have been burglarizing all of us and our children for thirty years, and we need thirty years of Democratic dominance to get our money back.  Be careful, though, What’s the Matter with Kansas? makes me want to punch someone everytime I read it.

Thank you for visiting CNBC Sucks and to George for moderating this blog over the last two months.  I am moderating again, so please feel free to leave comments, but I will not comment in reply.  I have also created a contact page that provides instructions on how to reach me.

I wish you all the best.  With the help of Jessica Biel, Shannon Whirry, Eva Amurri, Halle Berry, Heidi Klum, and Scarlett Johansson, I leave with some “food for thought”, for old times’ sake.  Goodbye.

It is not known if huge-breasted CNBC Sucks all-time favorite Shannon Whirry is a Democrat, but since Wisconsin is a blue state with historically strong progressive traditions and she is very fittingly from THE DAIRY STATE, you just might have a one-in-a-billion chance of having highly pleasurable "big-breast sex" with Shannon Whirry if you are a Democrat.

As the daughter of longtime liberal activist Susan Sarandon, Eva Amurri is likely a Democrat. Assuming that Eva Amurri is a Democrat, a glance (or a stare) at those seductive Susan Sarandon-type eyes and those massive Shannon Whirry-type breasts will cause you to join the Democratic Party just to increase your chances of having pleasurably convulsive "big-breast sex" with Eva Amurri from non-existent to negligibly infinitesimal.

As a multimillionaire actress, Halle Berry really should not have to smuggle melons underneath her dress, but YOU might have to steal food in your old age if you continue to allow Republicans to destroy Social Security and Medicare. Join the Democratic Party to save yourself, and you just might hook up with a slim but stacked black woman.

Buxom German supermodel Heidi Klum is so liberal that she married a black bloke whose face probably scares his own small children. Sure, he had to be an ultra-talented and accomplished international pop star to hook up with Heidi Klum, but he did not need to have had a major hit in decades, did he? The world is so very liberal outside America.

Scarlett Johansson has a name that is hard to spell but breasts that are easy to love. Scarlett Johansson loves our Great President Obama so much that she had to deny having a crush on him. Imagine a week's "indoor vacation" with a young, busty blond Democrat like this one as your girlfriend and you will be a Democrat too.

I deleted my CNBCSucks Twitter account

[UPDATE, February 26, 2009: I deleted my CNBCSucks Twitter account.  Over 18 days, I had 125 Tweets and 18 followers.  This post is also my second-to-last post on my CNBCSucks WordPress account.  Before I close, as a registered Republican, I want to help make sure that the 2012 Republican primaries will be clean, unlike in 2000, and so I hereby preempt any salacious rumors that Mike Huckabee is a homosexual or Tim Pawlenty is a pedophile.  I have not researched those rumors, since their Republican opponents have yet to spread them, but I tend to doubt such allegations would be true.  I also have no reason to be believe that Mike Huckabee is a pedophile or Tim Pawlenty is a homosexual.  I will not similarly protect Mitt Romney and Rudy Guiliani because neither can ever win the GOP nomination.  After Tuesday night, Piyush "Bobby" "Kenneth the Intern" "Mr. Rogers" "Gomer or Goober Pyle" "Apu" Jindal can forget about it.]

[UPDATE, February 23, 2009: I have managed to keep my promise to myself and not add any more to my 200 posts on this blog.  I just wanted to add a few random search engine indexable terms related to three advertising banners that I added last night to the right sidebar: Kwik-E-Mart, cross-eyed black Republican idiot, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, large-breasted women tend to be Democrats, Bobby Jindal, Ron Christie, The Simpsons, Indian IT outsourcing tech support.  Also, I understand that NBC is working with CNBC this week to explain the economic meltdown to a general audience, so I thought I should write: If you have never been exposed to CNBC before, take anything you hear from anyone from CNBC with a grain of salt.  Better yet, ignore it.  The morons at CNBC have been calling - hell, openly wishing - for a bottom in stock prices since before I started this blog on D-Day 2008, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average (a.k.a. The Dow Jones False Prophet Index) closed at 12,209.81.  On that day, I called Dow 5,000 sometime in the 2010s.  (I also predicted $300 oil, and it will come; we're not even in the 2010s.)  As I write this, the Dow today is at 7213.31.  If you had acted on what the cretins on CNBC were saying when I started this blog and you invested in equities (bought stock), you would have lost a lot of money.  If you genuinely want to learn about what has happened to our economy, take Chris Martenson's Crash Course.  I do not agree with everything Martenson writes on his blog, and I have taken only a small portion of his course, but the parts I have seen did impress me.  If you want to learn about the economy by following a blog regularly, don't look at me, but I would recommend my friend Barry Ritholtz's The Big Picture.  If you want a one-run-on-sentence synopsys of what went wrong, I will give it a shot now, but first please note that I am a proud registered Republican: taxes were way, way, way too low on the rich; there were too much war and defense spending and general military overreach that made a lot of Republican cronies rich, but made our national debt skyrocket; nevertheless, we were (and still are, for now) able to dictate low interest rates to our creditors; those low interest rates fostered asset bubbles in both housing and equities, the first of which popped and the second of which has been on a slow but sure decline; Wall Street banks engaged in housing-related derivatives whose risks they ultimately could not price; when housing went down, those banks got into major trouble, causing a huge credit crunch that exacerbated the situation; more fundamentally, we Americans do not manufacture enough in this country, we do not export enough, but we borrow and consume too much; innovation has always been the key to American prosperity, and innovation could both pave the way to recovery and better secure our critical energy supply, but the Republicans will not support innovation because that would be against the interests of their oil, nuclear, and military lobbyists; our woeful underinvestment in much needed infrastructure will limit our growth, but the Republicans will continue to fight any legislation that does not subsidize or otherwise protect the richest Americans, Wall Street, oil, nuclear, and the defense industry, collectively a.k.a. The Tax Cut Wing or The CNBC Wing of the Republican Party.  (There is another wing called The Pentecostal NASCAR Wing or The Fox News Wing of the Republican Party, and the two sides never really get together unless there is an election or an important bill before Congress.)  If you want one scapegoat, blame Larry Kudlow.  If you want one solution, support your Great President Barack Obama, assault (at least verbally) anyone who says anything bad about him, vote in every election, and make sure you vote for only Democratic candidates for the rest of your life.  And don't watch CNBC.  The bridge is yours again, George.]

[UPDATE, February 11, 2009: This post was originally titled, "OK, I've had it".  George still has "custody" of this blog, but we have made some major improvements as you can see.  Now, you can enjoy CNBC Sucks @ Twitter right in the comfort of CNBC Sucks' own WordPress.com blog.  Just look to your left sidebar and you can enjoy CNBC Sucks' spontaneous contemplations on everything from Jane Wells' fun personality and bags (funbags, get it?) to whether we elected Richard Pryor to the White House when we had hoped to get Richard Roundtree.  Or rather, whether we elected Malcolm-Jamal Warner to the White House when we needed Malcolm X.  (OK, Barry Obama, I still believe in you, you beautiful thinking and communicating President you, but for Pete's sake, IT'S TIME TO JACK UP TAXES ON THE RICH.  We need your "angry black man" to come out.  No more bipartisanship - that means threats, slander, "Presidential privileges", and any other means necessary...you know, the Republican way.)  Yours always, The Great CNBC Sucks, Registered Republican.]

That’s not completely true.  In the absence of imagination, I often resort to symmetry.  Or YouTube videos.

In two days, I am off to Melbourne, Australia for my vacation.  I leave on Sunday night and arrive there on Tuesday afternoon, Oz time.  It is my second time to the Land Down Under, the first time to Sydney a few years ago.  This time, I am off to the south coast, mostly for beach time, chill-out time, and some fishing.

It has been an interesting year, a trying year, a pivotal year.  I sincerely believe that we barely missed the certain end of civilization and human life on Earth if John McCain and Sarah Palin had been elected.  You just do not let the bottom of the intellectual and ethical barrel run the greatest nation on Earth, the guiding light of Western civilized order and rule of law, during one of its most challenging periods in history.  Thank goodness, Barack Obama won, and we have a chance to turn everything around.  If I have pissed you off on this blog, or elsewhere in the blogosphere - or in life, for that matter - I will not apologize, but I will say “peace out”.  I know that I can be at one time temperamental and at another time irritating.  I felt compelled to deploy any means necessary to balance out CNBC and its propaganda for my Republican Party and the risky and dangerous status quo, and to help Barack Obama beat John McCain.

This is my 200th and most likely final post on this blog.  Before I leave, I ask you to do something in how you think about the world and conduct your life: DO THE FUCKING MATH AND DO NOT LET CONVENTIONAL THINKING SHACKLE YOUR BRAIN.  There is a math to everything.  Whether you think “we cannot increase taxes on the wealthy”, “less government spending is possible”, ”the oil will not run out in my lifetime”, “this recession will be short”, ”the stock market will rally”, or even “this relationship could never work”, think of the mathematics governing the foolish belief in your brain and ask “Why have I convinced myself of this?”  I know Americans are stupid at math, but my math will always trump your conventional thinking in the heart of God.  In math, there is truth and the opportunity for survival and even happiness.  On Earth, however, I know your conventional thinking will likely prevail - at least in the short run – which is why this planet is too often a miserable place and could be a really awful one in your lifetime.  But I am past killing myself with worry about your inability with math.

George now has custody of CNBC Sucks.  YOU should consider blogging about CNBC on CNBC Sucks.

It has been a privilege to save the world.

YEEEAAAH!

Why don’t YOU blog about CNBC on CNBC Sucks?

I have decided to hand over ”custody” of CNBC Sucks to George indefinitely.  I am not selling him CNBC Sucks.  The deal is that he can post, but not change any content that I have already created.  George’s plan is to sporadically write the lamest possible posts about the CNBC hotties to keep page views up, tend to comments, analyze site traffic to determine if any “business model” is possible, and make less of an ass of himself than I have.  If he figures out a way to make money, we split things 50-50.

This blog is about to enter a new era of lameness, even if I am not.  Therefore, if you want to vent your annoyance with CNBC on this blog, we welcome you.  Register as a user on WordPress.com, leave a comment with your username and email address stating a desire to write, and George will grant you “Contributor” privilege.  You can write and manage posts, but not publish, which will be George’s role.  George will compensate you with a smirk.  We want to maintain it at least at a crazy drunk’s level of coherence and a cheap motel’s level of taste, so we will have to reserve the right to reject any material.  And please, no nude photos of Erin Burnett, even if faked.

In past years, I would have taken Elvis over Sinatra on this song, but lately in anything, I seem to be picking Blue State over Red State.

“Taxation is the lifeblood of civilization, and only the rich can pay” PLUS photos of and search engine optimized sexual comments about Erin Burnett, Margaret Brennan, Trish Regan, Becky Quick, and Michelle Caruso-Cabrera

Over the last 28 years, the great myth successfully perpetuated in this nation by my Republican Party is the ideal of small government.  The concept is that if you make the government small enough, you will foster greater self-reliance, stoke entrepreneurialism, and unleash the creativity and energy of the American people, thereby achieving every societal goal and solving every problem imaginable.  The reality is that no modern Western civilized nation has operated or can operate with a truly small government, and the world’s only superpower is certainly no exception.  (You would know this if you have ever played SimCity, or have the brain capacity to make the intellectual connection when seeing news clips of Somalia.)  In fact, government in America has only grown larger and larger over time even as the political climate has shifted right.  However, instead of government putting poor people in housing projects or handing them Welfare checks, the Republicans (who have controlled the White House for 20 of those 28 years) expanded subsidies – direct and implicit – for defense contractors; oil, coal, natural gas, and uranium companies; certain health care and insurance companies; and most noticeably in the last year, Wall Street and the financial services industry.  This was the thrust of supply-side Keynesian economics: feed certain favored corporate and corporatist constituents – aka CNBC guests – and wealth will trickle down to the masses.  (The Democrats also practice Keynes, but favor intervention on the demand side, meaning people who buy things, meaning you.)  But the government never became smaller; it got bigger.  Much bigger.  The truth was, government had to get bigger, because as it intervened on behalf of certain GOP favored industries, it corrupted the free enterprise system, established structural but unnatural advantages for those favored industries, and stifled innovation and Schumpeter’s necessary creative destruction.  As our Republican leaders favored certain elements of the economy such as oil companies and defense contractors, the economy itself became more dependent on more government.  But most Americans never connected big government with my Republican Party, because clever as ever, the Republicans outsourced a lot of government, often to their cronies, often in the name of the free enterprise system.  And that is the way my Grand Old Party got away with extolling the virtues of small government while creating the exact opposite.

{…continued after a couple of annotated CNBC hottie photos from Dr. Pavlov for you, you horny beast…}

If showered, I would not throw Erin Burnett out of bed

Margaret Brennan is one of the hottest non-flat-chested CNBC chicks of all time, but I really like Trish Regan

Because the Republicans have been able to sustain the Great Small Government Myth in the minds of the American people, they have also been able to rationalize low taxes on the wealthy.  If you can create the illusion that small government is not only desirable but possible, then it follows that taxes should be lower for all Americans.  (This was John McCain’s argument, and if he had won, my children would be eating your children someday.)  Americans love the concept of fair play, even if that concept is unfair to them.  Much more wily and much better organized than the Democrats – whom I consider the Keystone Cops of politics - my GOP has married the Twin Mythological Economic Ideals of Small Government and Low Taxes with cultural canon core to the populist conservative movement: family values, right to life, Christianity, uninformed patriotism (of which Ronnie Reagan warned against), guns, NASCAR.  When poor, uneducated, increasingly disenfranchised Americans in the South and Great Plains – the trusty Red States - vote Republican in Jesus’ name, they lower Larry Kudlow and Bob Doll’s taxes, while allowing the Republican Party to run the US government as if it were a leveraged buyout.  The dumb poor white trash of America have made it damned good to be wealthy in America, certainly better than in France or Germany or even Canada.  Marginal income tax rates on the rich got sliced, snipped, and shrunk even further - to about 1/3 to 1/2 of what they were under the Republican Administrations of Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford.  It has been a fine, sweet ride for the wealthy; the rich have not had to pay as much in taxes, even as government got bigger, largely to the benefit of the rich.  How is that possible that we ordered a bigger meal, but the people who ate the most and are best able to pay the tab were not stuck with the incremental burden?  That question is answered in the gigantic federal deficits – on pace to reach $1 trillion in 2008, more than double any prior deficit - and national debt – approaching $11 trillion – that Republicans have accumulated while in control over the last 28 years.  But the party’s over.  The central bankers in China (Long Duck Dong?) and Japan (Lick You Long?) will eventually stop buying our debt, even if the US has remained the safest place in the world to invest.  Why?  Because we are doing everything in our power to make the US no longer the safest place in the world to invest.  Even as America must wean itself from a crackwhore-like addiction to debt, our Federal Reserve yesterday elected to pursue a Japan-style zero interest-rate policy (ZIRP) – unprecedented in America – in the hopes of continuing to reflate – or was it to re-fellate? – the Dow Jones False Prophet Index.  Even as every single economic indicator under the sun warns of more trouble ahead, ass-clown after ass-clown parade through the CNBC studio to offer their myopic market bottom calls, pump up their book, and entice you to invest your hard-earned money with their sorry-ass, dime-store investment philosophies.  Even as the energy sector itself warns of disastrous supply troubles ahead and the urgent need for investment, capitalism’s sycophants applaud cuts in energy capital spending.  Even as it becomes clearer that more Americans will need help from their government, and that huge public-sector investment is necessary to rebuild the economy, capitalism’s parasites have the audacity to clamor for tax cuts for themselves.  Their thinking is: Let us put it all on the tab with Long Duck Dong and Lick You Long, and maybe the children and grandchildren of the middle class and poor can shoulder the burden.

{…more after CNBC babe photos with my patented commentary, now actually read what I wrote in this post…}

I really like Trish Regan and her breasts

I want to sleep with Becky Quick and her nice hair

Fuck all that, we’ve gotta get on with these jam-it-up-the-ass tax recommendations from CNBC Sucks.  It is time to pay the piper, or rather, time to make America’s rich pay the piper.  The wealthy have been waiting so long for you stupid people to wake up, and salvation lies within Larry Kudlow’s pockets.  The Constitution of the United States of America states that you, the American people, have all the rights and power to take what is theirs and make it yours.  You want clean energy?  Make Kudlow pay for it.  You want free healthcare?  Doll would be more than happy to pay.  Do not let Republican propagandists and obstructionists cloud your vista: whatever your heart desires is there for the taking.  And do not feel guilty.  Think of severe tax hikes on the wealthy now as a way of saving the rich later if the masses begin to starve in America, the way the French did in the late Eighteenth Century.  I fear, if you do not tax them now, you crazy fuckers are liable to march them to the guillotine later.  Chaos is the last thing that I want to see, or my children to see, in America.  It is time to crack open the tidy little piggy bank - our common nest egg – that my hero Ronnie Reagan started for you when he cut taxes on the wealthy.  Do not let flawed notions of fairness (it is unfair that I am not wealthier than Larry Kudlow) and the anti-Marxist bias of American history confuse you: property rights only exist to the extent that the property owner can defend those rights, or that the state can protect those rights for the property owner.  This has been true on Planet Earth since the first dinosaur laid territorial claim to that patch of land Pat Buchanan now calls “his” property.  Where there is no state, there are no property rights.  The state must prevail, order must be maintained, civilization must endure.  Taxation is the lifeblood of civilization; taxes on others is good for you.  I know I do not want to fight hungry mobs in my old age, and I doubt you do, and quite honestly, it would do Kudlow and Doll no good to push around wheelbarrows of gold in the Apocalypse.  The rich must be taxed, and taxed vigorously.  So, get your head out of your ass, America, and tax them.  The rich ache for your touch.

CNBC resident idiot Dennis Kneale steals a glance at Michelle Caruso-Cabrera's funbags

The Saturday of George

Alcohol tends to wake me up instead of the expected depressant effect.  I only had 90 minutes of sleep before waking up.  Thankfully, AMC is showing one of my favorite movies – “The Usual Suspects” – to the insomniac demographic (obligatory embedded YouTube video below).  I might as well write this now and sleep later, because it might have implications for the future of CNBC Sucks.  At the hockey game, my old b-school buddy George offered me $1,000 to take over my blog.

George and I had met up on the Upper West Side for a late breakfast.  I thought it would be two old friends catching up on a wide and fairly random variety of subjects, but he was laser-focused on blogging, CNBC Sucks, financial blogs, CNBC, search engine optimization, and Web 2.0 including how RSS and mash-ups work.  I had given George admin privileges to CNBC Sucks only a couple of days ago, but he presented me a surprisingly detailed written summary of his analysis at the diner, which he later summed up with his coup de grace offer in the evening at the Pru.  George had to break away briefly for a mid-afternoon party, but he gave me homework to determine the click-through rates of the animated banner ad that I made for the right sidebar.  At 5:30 PM, we reconvened to grab some Chinese food, but did not have enough time, so we ate at the Devils game.  We closed the evening with nightclub hopping.  Tonight, it seemed as though every woman looked like a supermodel, which apparently prompted George to pick my brain for thoughts regarding Internet dating, an interesting coincidence considering that I had a discussion on the same topic recently with Moe.  In the last week or so, I have been amusing myself with this blog.

George encouraged me to blog openly about his thoughts on CNBC Sucks, so that we both might be able to get some outside perspectives from commenters while I am on holiday vacation in Australia:

• Six months after I launched CNBC Sucks by launching into CNBC, CNBC Sucks has reached a plateau of 30,000 page views per month.  George noticed that I have been a reluctant blogger lately because I refuse to watch CNBC, even with the audio muted.  Because four of the five all-time most popular search terms that visitors use to find CNBC Sucks are “becky quick”, “margaret brennan”, “amanda drury”, and “trish regan” (all without the quotation marks in the actual search; the fifth term is “jeri ryan”), George thought that I could boost my page views by providing more regular “CNBC babe commentary”.  I told him that I created CNBC Sucks to fight CNBC’s oppressive campaign of spin and misinformation about the economy and financial markets, which I was convinced supported a political agenda that would favor certain established corporate and corporatist constituents.  Being more liberal than I, George was surprised by but agreed completely with my world view, but said that I need to act less like an online Che Guevara and more like an MBA.  I defended myself by saying that I never considered CNBC Sucks as a means to make money, and he frowned.  George said that at least, I should give myself a chance, especially since I seem to have done a great job on SEO.
• George asked why I was so angry in some of my postings and I responded that I was often using emotional projection the way actors do.  I told him that I have the ability to make myself angry or sad or happy at will, like Kevin Spacey.  He responded with a hearty chuckle, relating a recent story where he himself yelled partially artificial furious expletives at a cable television customer service representative when she would not reset his CableCARD after four verbal requests.  George said that cable companies program their help desks to avoid doing anything a customer asks until that customer relents to a highly inconvenient and time-wasting cable technician visit or starts using swear words, so he was ready with a manufactured but vicious sounding tirade.  George gave me some spiel about how he saw blogging as art not unlike a film or television sitcom or novel.  He said that he wanted to be a “blog character”, kind of like a movie character.  Although I saw CNBC Sucks itself as somewhat of a blog character, I objected by pointing out that he just told me I should act more like an MBA.  That is when George busted my chops by reminding me of Jim Collins’ “Tyranny of the OR”.  George then asked why I chose the Andreas09 theme - with its full-page width and tiny fonts – which he thought drove me to be very wordy (this post being Exhibit A), and why there are only two categories but 27 static pages.  I said CNBC Sucks was just an initial, experimental, organic effort, and George agreed that CNBC Sucks certainly looks and navigates like one.  He also said that I seem to have used every possible sidebar widget ever invented and then some, and marveled at how I seem obliged to embed a YouTube video on as many posts as I could.  George closed by asking why there were so many time-consuming hyperlinks.
• After softening me up with his qualitative critique, George went into the numbers.  According to eMarketer (actually Bain and IAB), the average total CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) value per page for blogs is $15, based on exposure (as opposed to behavior such as click-throughs).  He pointed out a 24/7 Wall St. analysis in March 2008 that demonstrates how different blogs commanded different CPM rates: Gawker, $20; PerezHilton, $5; TechCrunch, $30; Ars Technica, $40; Seeking Alpha, $40; GigaOm, $40; BoingBoing, $15; Silicon Alley Insider, $30; Talking Points Memo, $15.  George said that due to my ”rant blog” style, content, and layout, CNBC Sucks was more of a $5 PerezHilton than a $40 Seeking Alpha.  I countered by saying that CNBC should have a very affluent audience, and that CNBC Sucks draws from that audience, and that is when George pulled out a CNBC.com audience profile that he had printed.  He said that certainly, there were attractive aspects about the audience profile: 73.2% are in the 18 – 54 age range, 8.4% have a household income of $150,000+, 12% have a portfolio size of $500,000+.  However, George pointed out that only 50.3% of the audience are employed full-time.  He said, “CNBC’s main programming takes place when normal people are working, for Pete’s sake!”  George added that because WordPress.com did not offer users the ability to embed Google AdSense into their blogs, any revenue for CNBC Sucks would have to come from direct sponsors.  George said that to make any real money in advertising on such a tiny niche blog, an advertiser on CNBC Sucks would have to convert very high-value sales with the extreme most affluent ”long tail” of the CNBC audience, such as multi-millionaires who would qualify to be featured in the “I am American business” campaign.  He did concede that ”you never know who might be searching for ‘michell caruso cabrera big tits’”.  [UPDATE: Added hyperlinks.]
• At the hockey game, I reported that the 150×127 right sidebar animated banner ad has a 1.1% click-through rate in its four iterations (this, this, this, and now this).  This was double the long-held industry standard for banner advertising, and a 3X to 10X multiple on the CTRs reported in September by MarketingSherpa that varied by banner size.  George said that these figures were in my favor, considering that the IAB estimated in 2006 that slightly over half of Internet advertising was wasted.  He said that I knew my audience and I was getting them to click-through, even with zero banner rotation.  However, when George asked how much in actual political contributions my ad hoc advertising campaign had generated, I sadly had to say none or unknown.  With that, as the Sabres sealed the Devils’ defeat with their second goal of the third period, George sealed my own by making a rough napkin calculation.  At 30,000 page views per month (360,000 page views per year), a $5 CPM, and a 1x implied revenue valuation, CNBC Sucks was worth $1,800.  Given that he thought the blog needed a significant overhaul and that he expected there would be no other interested parties, George offered me $1,000 to take over my blog.  We agreed to spend as much time as I had left before leaving for Melbourne next weekend to do some “knowledge transfer” and also explore if we might want to partner on his “side venture”.

John Travolta and Uma Thurman just finished their dance on “Pulp Fiction” and it is time for me to catch a few more Zs.

Just because a man wears a bow tie doesn’t mean he’s an idiot

If you ever get to thinking that men who wear bow ties are idiots - as I have - think again.  (And I wasn’t thinking of your dad, Tkatcy.)  Jim Rogers was on Old Man Kudlow’s Show (here, here, and here- I am so nice to provide you links), and he was wearing a pink bow tie.  I mean a big, floppy one.  I only caught thirty seconds of Jimbo talking, and even though he was criticizing Obama, I love the sounds of Jimmy Rogers’ brains functioning.  I just wonder if during the panel with the official Biggest Tool on CNBC (The People’s Choice!), the Little Ewok, Curly Neal (sorry, I feel compelled to immaturely make fun of Democrats just to balance out my guilt), and the writer from the Wasp Street Journal, the Jimster was thinking, “I have achieved more and am worth ten times more than all four of you combined, and you have the nerve to be on a panel with me?”  Whatever Jiminy said, I am sure I agree with it.

It feels good to be a Republican again.  Now vote Democratic for the rest of your lives.

The Palin 15

I caught a muted whiff of Bob Doll on CNBC this afternoon.  I swear it looks as if Bob has gained the middle-aged male equivalent of the freshman fifteen.  Since I gain weight due to stress (as a girl would), I myself have gained what I call the Palin 15, against which I have now started to work again.  I shall return to my supreme fitness (relatively speaking) and six-pack.  Surely, Bob Doll did not gain 15 pounds due to the fear of Sarah Palin getting into the White House.

What’s the matter, Bob, are you worried about your precious, little stock market?  Stop worrying, you could drop a neutron bomb on Wall Street and the Dow would be up 65.  And oh, by the way, how the hell could anyone call the neutron bomb “moral” (see obligatory YouTube video below)?  I was always scared of those ghastly things when I was a kid.

Even though I gained the Palin 15 over the past few months, I as a registered Republican blogger have decided to endorse Sarah Palin to be Republican Presidential nominee for 2012 and for as long as she is alive.

Now that the election’s over, it’s safe to be a Republican again

The last five weeks or so since the election have been quite a happy, relieved, but subdued time for me, sort of like Europe in May 1945, or at least the way Europe immediately after World War II was portrayed in one of my favorite television miniseries, War and Remembrance.  I am off war footing.  After staring deep into the darkest abyss that was John McCain and Sarah Palin, I will not have to worry about a Republican running the country for another four years.  Hopefully, Obama gets re-elected in 2012, and then Rahm Emanuel or any other Democrat keeps the White House for yet another eight years.

Why is this registered Republican so hopeful of a Democratic Dynasty for the next two decades?  I do not really have the time or the energy to explain, even though ironically it has partly to do with energy and that we might be running out of time.  A true Republican loves America so much that he will vote Democratic for twenty years if that is what is best for his country, and that is where we are in December 2008.  I do not know if I adequately explained these thoughts to Moe “What Makes You Think I Haven’t Planned Your Life Yet?” Tkacik, or even if the “off the record” button was (literally) toggled “on”.  I will, however, have plenty of time to share these views and more with my old b-school buddy George, with whom I will spend practically all of tomorrow.  George bribed me with Devils-Sabers hockey tickets for tomorrow night (why couldn’t he have gotten tix for the Rangers-Devils game tonight?) in exchange for admin access to analyze CNBC Sucks.  At first, I told him “analyze this“, but then I realized he could tend to comments while I am vacationing in Australia for two weeks (beginning on December 21), so why not?

With three teams in the area, I have stayed fairly neutral (which means I follow hockey as a girl would), but here is the obligatory embedded YouTube video, a 2003 Devils tribute set to one of my most favorite jogging songs ever.  But where’s Jay-Z?

Moe + Australia = Maustralia (Yeah, I suck.)

I am so psyched about my holiday trip to Australia that I decided not to preserve my last few posts so that I have exactly 200 to close out CNBC Sucks.  There were so many political and ideological revelations that I want to write about, but right now, I just want to talk about other things, not to mention that Moe Tkacik seems to have sucked out every last remaining drop of content that I had left in me.  God bless Maureen, she has sex without condoms, she comes with her own alcohol, and she loves CNBC Sucks.  And, somehow, Moe can stand to watch and blog about CNBC, which I cannot.  Since I no longer watch CNBC, sometimes I think of cleaning up some of my worst temper tantrums on this blog, but I do not have time before the end of the year.

Anyway, here is my cheap little Ode to Oz, in the form of yet another YouTube video, a tribute to Elle MacPherson.

Business school hobos

I got out of the drizzle early enough to catch part of a b-school alumni event in Midtown tonight.  It was about how to survive Barry Ritholtz’s Fair Depression.  (That Ritholtz is quite the comedian, har har.)  The place was jam packed, good God!  The economy is totally tanking, and a ton of people are either getting laid off or already laid off or their book of business is otherwise soft.  There were a couple of headhunters talking about the job market.  It was miserable on all fronts.  But then, I ran into one of my old buddies, George.  Well, we were in the same case study team during one course, and we both loved watching Seinfeld and sneaking stares at big boobs on the coeds (not the b-school women, though, who would have stuck a fork in our testicles if they caught us).  Anyway, the guy is in the same industry as me and we traded notes…more bad news.  I guess his business is soft, too.  We then chatted about the election and we were both ecstatic about Obama.  George was totally shocked, because I was a diehard Republican (still registered as one) and George is an Independent.  He always was more liberal than me, until this year, but I think we have traded places.  I suppose I was always a more mercurial, temperamental type and George was always more analytical.  Well, I let it slip that I got into blogging, so now George wants to analyze CNBC Sucks to learn about my business model.  I told him firmly, “There is no business model.  This is a rant blog, fool.”  Oh well.

I am pretty freakin’ psyched about my trip to Australia for the holidays.  I have to get away from winter and enjoy some sun and ocean time.