1/ You may have heard of a new political movement called "No Labels"........the idea is to try to get away from the hyperpartisanship in Washington.....
Frank Rich looks at this and finds it irrelevant to the real problems with our broken system....very good analysis as always from the master or politics.....
Beltway conventional wisdom is equally responsible for another myth promoted by No Labels: that the Move On left and the Tea Party right are equal contributors to America’s “hyperpartisanship.” In the real world, no one could seriously believe that activists on the left have the sway over Democratic leaders, starting with President Obama, that the Tea Party has over the G.O.P. Nor, with all due respect to MSNBC, does the left have a media megaphone to match the Tea Party’s alliance with the Murdoch empire, as led by Fox News, and the megastars of talk radio.
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Yet what’s most disturbing about No Labels is that its centrist, no doubt well-intentioned leaders seem utterly clueless about why Americans of all labels are angry: the realization that both parties are bought off by special interests who game the system and stack it against the rest of us.
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The country will not rest easy until there are brave leaders in both parties willing to reform the system that let perpetrators of the Great Recession escape while the rest of us got stuck with the wreckage. As Jesse Eisinger of the investigative journalistic organization ProPublica summed up in The Times this month: “Nobody from Lehman, Merrill Lynch or Citigroup has been charged criminally with anything. No top executives at Bear Stearns have been indicted. All former American International Group executives are running free.”
2/ The 9/11 First Responders Health Bill
Interesting how things really happen.....Jon Stewart's show on Thursday was devoted to the failure of this bill to get through the Senate, blocked by Republicans, and he also took Fox News to task for ignoring it.
So if you didn't open this link on Saturdays DDD, do so - one of his best and most powerful shows ever.
Excellent excellent Jon Stewart - he devoted his last show of the year Thursday to the 9/11 responders and the failure of the Senate to get the Bill passed for the medical bills of these brave people.
Then one of the anchors at Fox with a conscience [maybe the only one], Shepherd Smith, got angry at the Republicans and called them out on air...."how do they sleep at night".....
Now this story is in Sunday's Times, saying there has been a reversal of the Senate Republicans stance on this bill so it might pass.
Which makes you think about the power of one Fox News anchor and Jon Stewart to influence the Senate Republican leadership who are beyond scum, worthless whores. Even slime like Mitch McConnell and John Kyl can be shamed into doing what is right by righteous outrage and humiliation.
Or maybe they took a poll.....
3/ Interesting story about the US Navy saving fuel and energy by
becoming "green".....title of the piece is USS Prius!
Good and hopeful column from Thomas Friedman......
As I was saying, the thing I love most about America is that there’s always somebody here who doesn’t get the word — and they go out and do the right thing or invent the new thing, no matter what’s going on politically or economically. And what could save America’s energy future — at a time when a fraudulent, anti-science campaign funded largely by Big Oil and Big Coal has blocked Congress from passing any clean energy/climate bill — is the fact that the Navy and Marine Corps just didn’t get the word.
4/ Two minute video about some hotshots messing with two older golfers....with predictable results.....they'd better not try this in Lake County where many golfers have "extra" equipment in their golf carts.......weapons!....
5/ A fun article about the new words that we used in 2010, like vuvuzela, refudiate, top kill and shellacking......amusing......
Good stuff.....
6/ OMG....it's.......Bicycle Repairman!.....classic Monty Python skit.....don't miss the John Cleese meltdown at the end....
7/ Good article about the delights of Venice in the winter......we've been to Venice twice, not in July and August when the crowding is impossible but in June and September when it's still busy and it's a magical place, but in this story Venice has a totally different character in the winter.....
In summer, Venice is torrid, stuffed to the gills with the 18 million tourists who overwhelm it each year, clogging its bridges, swelling its vaporetti, vastly outnumbering the famously grouchy residents and making the city seem like one big floating Disneyland — a perverse metaphor for the future of Italy, if not all of Europe, a place that has staked its future on selling an image of its past and may yet be destroying itself in the process.
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Distorted by light and water, time thickens in Venice. So does sound. What I love best about the city is its glorious quiet, and its strange pace, as if you were living in slow motion. In Venice, hurrying will get you nowhere fast — or perhaps lost faster. Then again, it’s best to walk briskly in winter, since the city is so damp, the air off the canals so bone-chillingly cold that you have to keep moving to stay warm.
8/ The year's 10 best TV shows......and honorable mentions.....
Mary and I were riveted by "Rubicon", a different character driven thriller which has now been cancelled, probably because it got a little too close to the reality of the oligarchy.....I definitely recommend you Netflix it.....
Also "The Good Wife" is wonderful.......
FRINGE (Fox) The performances have never been more than serviceable, but “Fringe,” the show in which universes are at war and almost every actor plays two characters, has kept its plates spinning entertainingly well into its third season. It’s the best major-network show that no one is watching, which is why Fox recently banished it to Friday nights.
GAVIN AND STACEY (BBC America) The final season of James Corden and Ruth Jones’s unassuming, bittersweet sitcom ended perfectly with the four young friends and lovers laughing on the beach. Let’s fervently hope that plans for an American remake never pan out.
THE GOOD WIFE (CBS) The story lines in this legal drama have been less exciting in the second season, but the show is still smart enough to make just about everything else in prime time feel like airport reading.
RUBICON (AMC) Jason Horwitch and Henry Bromell’s moody, slow-moving conspiracy thriller may have asked too much of its viewers’ patience, but it was gratifyingly intelligent and not quite like anything else on TV.
9/ The Killers - "Mr. Brightside".....delightfully decadent music video set [a la Moulin Rouge] in what appears to be a brothel in Beirut....costars Eric Roberts [who you should recognize].......
10/ Ever heard of the TOR Project? You're not supposed to, because it's software you can download that completely masks the origin of anything on the internet......this sounds a little too advanced for your scribe so if any of you geeks out there figure it out let me know if it's safe.....and how it works in practice....
A deliberately byzantine system of virtual tunnels that conceal the origins and destinations of data, and thus the identity of clients, Tor has been around since 2001, when programmers from M.I.T. and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory introduced it at a California security conference. In the past year, supported by grants from the U.S. government and other funders, the Tor Project has prolifically expanded its networks. The software has been downloaded more than 36 million times this year, and thousands of nameless volunteers — many of them Tor clients — now help to relay mind-bogglingly diverse Tor data in nearly every country on earth.
Peaceniks and human rights groups use Tor, as do journalists, private citizens and the military, and the heterogeneity and farflungness of its users — together with its elegant source code — keep it unbreachable. When a communication arrives from Tor, you can never know where or whom it’s from.
11/ Good grief! More snow in Europe....... London Heathrow closed for two days......this will be coldest December on record.....
Blizzards and freezing temperatures shut down runways, train tracks and highways across Europe on Saturday, disrupting flights and leaving shivering drivers stranded on roadsides.
Airports in Britain, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark reported cancelations or delays to flights.
London's Gatwick airport reopened late afternoon after 150 employees using dozens of plows worked to clear the runway of 10 centimeters (four inches) of snow, though officials warned flights would be limited and cancelations likely.
Heathrow Airport will remain shut until Sunday after snow and ice forced the closure of runways, according to a statement on its website.
Todays video - at the hairdressers
Todays clever jokes
Once again, The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.
The winners are:
1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.
6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulance (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief that when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.
The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
Here are this year's winners:
1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
2. Foreploy (v): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
3. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
5. Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
7. Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.
8. Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
9. Karmageddon (n): its like, when everybody is sending off all these
really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like,
a serious bummer.
10. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day
consuming only things that are good for you.
11. Glibido (v): All talk and no action.
12. Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
13. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've
accidentally walked through a spider web.
14. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
15. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.
And the pick of the literature:
16. Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
__.
Todays redneck joke
A redneck family from the hills was visiting the city and they were in a mall for the first time in their life. The father and son were strolling around while the wife shopped. They were amazed by almost everything they saw, but especially by two shiny, silver wallsthat could move apart and then slide back together again.
The boy asked, "Paw, What's 'at?"
The father (never having seen an elevator) responded, "Son, I dunno. I ain't never seen anything like that in my entire life, I ain't got no idea'r what it is."
While the boy and his father were watching with amazement, a fat old lady in a wheel chair rolled up to the moving walls and pressed a button. The walls opened and the lady rolled between them into a small room. The walls closed and the boy and his father watched the small circular numbers above the walls light up sequentially. They continued to watch until it reached the last number and then the numbers began to light in the reverse order. Then the wallsopened up again and a gorgeous, voluptuous 24-year-old blonde woman stepped out.
The father, not taking his eyes off the young woman, said quietly to his Son, "Boy, go git yo Momma..."
The boy asked, "Paw, What's 'at?"
The father (never having seen an elevator) responded, "Son, I dunno. I ain't never seen anything like that in my entire life, I ain't got no idea'r what it is."
While the boy and his father were watching with amazement, a fat old lady in a wheel chair rolled up to the moving walls and pressed a button. The walls opened and the lady rolled between them into a small room. The walls closed and the boy and his father watched the small circular numbers above the walls light up sequentially. They continued to watch until it reached the last number and then the numbers began to light in the reverse order. Then the wallsopened up again and a gorgeous, voluptuous 24-year-old blonde woman stepped out.
The father, not taking his eyes off the young woman, said quietly to his Son, "Boy, go git yo Momma..."
Todays blond joke
As a Delta Air Lines jet was flying over Arizona on a clear day, the copilot was providing his passengers with a running commentary about landmarks over the PA system.
"Coming up on the right, you can see the Meteor Crater, which is a major tourist attraction in northern Arizona. It was formed when a lump of nickel and iron, roughly 150 feet in diameter and weighing 300,000 tons struck the earth at about 40,000 miles an hour, scattering white-hot debris for miles in every direction. The hole measures nearly a mile across and is 570 feet deep."
From the cabin, a blonde passenger was heard to exclaim, "Wow! It just missed the highway!"
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