US President Barack Obama put aside policy pronouncements for a night and took a stab at stand-up comedy on Saturday at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
The dinner, one of the top yearly social events in Washington, attracted leading Hollywood celebrities and politicians.
Obama competed for laughs with late-night TV comedian Jay Leno, who told jokes at the dinner. Other celebrities at the event included film director Steven Spielberg, actors Morgan Freeman and Alec Baldwin and singer Jessica Simpson.
Obama ribbed among others Vice President Joe Biden, unsuccessful 2008 Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain and Goldman Sachs Group, the Wall Street giant accused by securities regulators of misleading investors.
Obama said he had not been sure he should attend the dinner, but Biden talked him into it.
“He leaned over and he said, ‘Mr President, this is no ordinary dinner. This is a big ... meal.’”
As Obama delivered the line, he was interrupted by an extended electronic bleep of the type used to block profanity on television.
The zinger recalled Biden being caught on microphone congratulating Obama in March for a “big [expletive] deal” on his victory in the fight to overhaul US healthcare.
Obama noted that McCain, now up for re-election as a Republican senator from Arizona, recently had said he had never identified himself as a maverick.
“And we all know what happens in Arizona when you don’t have ID,” the president said. “Adios Amigos.”
It was a jibe reflecting concerns among many Hispanics that they may be unfairly singled out under a new state law in Arizona cracking down on illegal immigrants.
Obama said all of his jokes at the black-tie dinner were “brought to you by” Goldman Sachs, the investment bank charged two weeks ago with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Don’t worry, he told the nearly 3,000 people in attendance: “They make money whether you laugh or not.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS