1/ I have to confess when I read about how Texas was somehow immune to the troubles all other states were in I feel a little irritated, because Texas is actually run by the Tea Party loonies or the extreme right wing equivalent.
So it's "chickens coming home" for me to read Paul Krugman's column which says the Texas miracle was smoke and mirrors, and they will be $25 biliion in the hole.....and that the cut taxes, cut spending philosophy doesn't work....
Wait — Texas? Wasn’t Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn’t its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that “we have billions in surplus”? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years.
And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting — the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending — has been implemented most completely. If the theory can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere.
..............................
The only thing that let Gov. Rick Perry get away, temporarily, with claims of a surplus was the fact that Texas enacts budgets only once every two years, and the last budget was put in place before the depth of the economic downturn was clear. Now the next budget must be passed — and Texas may have a $25 billion hole to fill. Now what?
Given the complete dominance of conservative ideology in Texas politics, tax increases are out of the question. So it has to be spending cuts.
Yet Mr. Perry wasn’t lying about those “tough conservative decisions”: Texas has indeed taken a hard, you might say brutal, line toward its most vulnerable citizens. Among the states, Texas ranks near the bottom in education spending per pupil, while leading the nation in the percentage of residents without health insurance. It’s hard to imagine what will happen if the state tries to eliminate its huge deficit purely through further cuts.
I don’t know how the mess in Texas will end up being resolved. But the signs don’t look good, either for the state or for the nation.
2/ The honey in your cupboard is Chinese...
I'm sure a lot of our readers' eyes glaze over when you read about the nasty Chinese taking over everything etc etc, but this story should make you a little disturbed. Most of the honey sold in the US is from China, and it's loaded with chemicals illegal here. And even if you look at the labels closely it doesn't have any mention of China so you have no idea about the origin.....the story below is from the Toronto Globe and Mail so it's almost certainly true.....
It's on two levels - the factual part about where the honey we eat comes from, and the second more interesting level about how the world really works - we pass a law protecting our domestic honey producers by adding tariffs to Chinese honey, and immediately the Chinese find a way around it. The US government is slow and ineffectual to react, so the trade is blatant, driven by the greed of the corporations who import the honey who buy itknowing it's Chinese.....
Just a tale of a tiny sliver of our economy, with incompetence, greed and corruption all around....sad really - nothing is as it seems and who can you trust any more.....
Honey has become a staple in the North American diet. Those that do not consume it straight from bear-shaped squeeze bottles eat it regularly whether they know it or not – honey is baked into everything from breakfast cereals to cookies and mixed into sauces and cough drops. Produced by bees from the nectar of flowers and then strained for clarity, honey’s all-natural origin has garnered lofty status among health-conscious consumers who prefer products without refined sweeteners (think white sugar and processed corn syrup). About 1.2 million metric tons of honey is produced worldwide each year.
What consumers don’t know is that honey doesn’t usually come straight – or pure – from the hive. Giant steel drums of honey bound for grocery store shelves and the food processors that crank out your cereal are in constant flow through the global market. Most honey comes from China, where beekeepers are notorious for keeping their bees healthy with antibiotics banned in North America because they seep into honey and contaminate it; packers there learn to mask the acrid notes of poor quality product by mixing in sugar or corn-based syrups to fake good taste.
None of this is on the label. Rarely will a jar of honey say “Made in China.” Instead, Chinese honey sold in North America is more likely to be stamped as Indonesian, Malaysian or Taiwanese, due to a growing multimillion dollar laundering system designed to keep the endless supply of cheap and often contaminated Chinese honey moving into the U.S., where tariffs have been implemented to staunch the flow and protect its own struggling industry.
So how do you protect yourself? We have a bottle of Publix Organic honey in our pantry, and I am in process of finding out from Publix and the manufacturer where it's from......so watch this space, I'll follow up on this. In the meantime I think the local honey's are OK, if it specifically says "from Florida" or similar. But any of the big brand names like "SueBee" and the cheaper honeys are almost certainly Chinese......
3/ Another great Jon Stewart this week - this time his eagle eye is on John McCain, who is definitely past his sell by date......I can't even imagine this cranky old bastard as President......
4/ Politics - I have quoted a few articles by Robert Reich, an economist who worked in the Clinton administration and a champion of the middle class, and this is an interview with the Times which Democrats at least should read.....a good, intelligent piece.....
“If you widen the lens, the public is being sold a big lie — that our problems owe to unions and the size of government and not to fraud and deregulation and vast concentration of wealth. Obama’s failure is that he won’t challenge this Republican narrative, and give people a story that helps them connect the dots and understand where we’re going.”
Mr. Reich, 64, is one of several prominent liberal economists who despair of what they say is this president’s political caution, and his unwillingness to duel with an emboldened Republican Party.
Faced with a Republican majority in the House, Mr. Obama this week appointed Gene Sperling, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, as director of his National Economic Council, and William M. Daley, a centrist politician turned banking executive, as his chief of staff. Mr. Daley was a member of the Third Way, a group that counsels deficit reduction, more tax cuts and perhaps trimming Social Security.
Mr. Reich is not pleased by the president’s message of late.
“By freezing federal salaries, by talking about deficits, by extending the Bush tax cuts, he’s legitimizing a Republican narrative,” Mr. Reich says.
“Why won’t he tell the alternative story? For three decades we’ve cut taxes on the wealthy while real wages stood still.”
5/ Cool....24 hours of air traffic condensed into one minute.....fascinating to see the flow across the Atlantic and the US.....
6/ Excellent video - "Presidential Reunion" from Funny or Die......imagine President Obama in his bedroom getting advice from all of the recent ex-Presidents.....very funny and very clever.....spot the stars, including Chevy Chase, Jim Carrey, Dan Ackroyd among others.......
7/ Europe, the Euro and the banks
A "wonder whats going to happen" article about the European banking system, with real worries about the Spanish economy which has had the worst housing bubble in the world....and they are still in denial. A default by Spain will make Greece and ireland's troubles look small, and could bring down the world financial system...big, bad stuff folks......
Europe’s sovereign debt crisis is back — if it ever went away.
Less than a month after bailing out Ireland, and after a holiday lull in the markets that may have looked mistakenly like calming, the European Union is again struggling to persuade investors that it has the cash and the will to address the root cause of its travails: a growing debt burden that is strangling governments and their banks.
On Friday, the yield on Portuguese 10-year bonds hit a recent high of 7.1 percent, the cost of insuring the debt of banks in Italy and Spain rose sharply, and the euro hit a three-month low against the dollar.
Driving the recent market weakness was a report by the European Commissionthat proposed that holders of senior bank debt be required to take a loss when a bank fails.
8/ Ladies - work in an office? You'll relate to the beginning of this video from Natasha Bedingfield "Pocketful of Sunshine".....nice.....
9/ TV reviews
The Britishification of our TV - three shows from the UK, two adaptations on Showtime and an import......
"Shameless"
“Shameless” and “Episodes,” two new Showtime series that also start on Sunday, represent the other stages of the Britishification of American television.“Shameless” is an adaptation of a British series about a family of have-nots in a Manchester housing project who steal, cheat and abuse the welfare system, abetted but not supervised or supported by their narcissistic alcoholic father, Frank Gallagher. The American Gallaghers live in a dilapidated house in Chicago, and William H. Macy plays the useless, drunken patriarch.
"Episodes"
Perhaps accordingly, “Episodes” serves as payback for all the creative pilfering over the years. It’s a British and American co-production that mostly makes fun of American television: a satirical and quite funny comedy about two British television writers, a husband- and wife team, Sean and Beverly Lincoln (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) who are lured to Hollywood to adapt their hit sitcom for an American network. They are seduced by lavish praise for their comedy about a witty, erudite British headmaster of a boy’s school, but their dream job quickly turns into a nightmare when the studio casts Matt LeBlanc, playing an exaggeration of himself, as the headmaster.
Downton Abbey
Watching “Downton Abbey,” a thoroughly enjoyable British series on PBS about masters and servants in a stately home on the eve of World War I, is a bit like buying a trunk at Restoration Hardware. Both are copies, of course, but so shrewdly and exactingly recreated that they are almost as gratifying as the original.
“Downton Abbey,” which begins this Sunday on PBS and has a four-episode arc, isn’t the only import flooding the domestic market so early in 2011.
More TV [not British!]
"The Cape", on NBC this Sunday......
.....one meant to suggest that terrible things still happen in prosperous environs, is one of the more distinctive elements of a series (beginning Sunday on NBC) that operates energetically within the conventions of the superhero story. The Cape is a guy named Vince Faraday (David Lyons) who is as morally unbending a cop as they come. Although framed for a spate of murders and thought dead, he is alive and costumed and trying to extinguish the malevolent forces bringing the city to further ruin.
The chief enemy in town is both a personified villain — Peter Fleming, whose alter ego is the even more pernicious Chess — and an idea: privatization. Fleming (portrayed by the wonderfully squirrely looking British actor James Frain) runs a dubious conglomerate known as the Ark Corporation, which has meted out private security in Iraq and Afghanistan to very unsettling results and now aspires to take over Palm City’s Police Department and penal system.
10/ It's God time - three religion-related stories.....
Bill O'Reilly is not someone I watch very often, but this story from Huffpost was most interesting - he had on a guest from the American Atheist Group....the emphasis is the ludicrous statement O'Reilly made about the tides being divine, but watch the whole 5 minute clip - the interview you could reasonably say was a draw. Normally opposing viewpoints are shouted down on this and all of the other Fox shows, but not this time.....good TV!
David Silverman, president of the American Atheist Group, went on Tuesday's "O'Reilly Factor" to defend the billboard ads his group has put up around the country calling religion a scam.
O'Reilly began by telling Silverman that his organization is insulting religious people, an accusation Silverman denied, insisting that his message was simply the truth so how could it be offensive. The conversation then took a strange turn as the host played what he believed to be his trump card of the why God exists debate.
O'REILLY: I'll tell you why [religion's] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that.SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?O'REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain that.
In fact, science has a very good explanation for the tides occur on such a regular basis:
On the same theme the 16% of Americans who call themselves "unaffiliated" when it comes to religion are woefully underrepresented in Congress. Not one Congressman will admit to being an atheist or agnostic.....
That’s why a report this week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life about the religious composition of the 112th Congress caught my eye. According to the report, the unaffiliated (atheists, agnostics, the unchurched, uncommitted, etc.), at 16.1 percent of the population, is the largest religious group in America without representation in Congress. (Six members, about 1 percent, did not specify a religious category.)
The title of this column is "God Save the Debate", Gail Collins on how the new House is using God in all kinds of mysterious ways.....funny as usual....
I am thinking about you, Representative Steve King of Iowa. On Friday, King gave a 58-minute-and-20-second speech on the floor of the House in which he made it abundantly clear that God did not want more federal regulation of health insurance companies. “We will carry on this struggle until in God’s good time, with all his power and might, he steps forth to the rescue and liberation of our God-given American liberty,” King declared.
The Republicans have set aside seven hours for debating the repeal, but once one side has announced that God is their co-signer, there’s really not a whole lot more to say.
11/ Mount Dorans - disappointing news....
On Monday Jan. 3rd I wrote this.......
"I just hope the new owner of the Lakeside Inn opens a good upscale restaurant which might jumpstart some other decent eateries. We need a good steak house in town, a coffee house like Starbucks or anything with a new looking interior like Casa Mia in Tavares."......
DDD has subsequently learned that the new management of the Lakeside Inn has no plans for renovation any time soon, and if any work is to be done it will be financed out of profit. In other words, the desperately needed facelift to Mount Dora's icon isn't going to happen......
Jim Gunderson the new owner of the Lakeside and hotel industry veteran has allegedly told employees the work to be done in the immediate future will be "cleaning the carpets".....
Bummer.....
Todays videos
Run on Flat - 3 commercials you won't see on TV [a little too violent]
Bonus video - Pelosi handing off the gavel to Boehner .....funny.....
Todays Marines joke
As soon as he left, one of the Arabs picked up the Marine's shoe and spat in it. When the Marine returned with the coke, the other Arab said, 'That looks good, I'd really like one, too.' Again, the Marine obligingly went to fetch it. While he was gone the other Arab picked up the Marines other shoe and spat in it. When the Marine returned, they all sat back and enjoyed the flight.
As the plane was landing, the Marine slipped his feet into his shoes and knew immediately what had happened. He leaned over and asked his Arab neighbors...'Why does it have to be this way?' 'How long must this go on? This fighting between our nations? This hatred? This animosity? This spitting in shoes and pissing in cokes?'
Todays borderline racist but quite funny joke
At the end of a tiny deserted bar in downtown Detroit sat a huge black man.
He was having a few beers when a short well dressed and obviously
gay man walked in and sat beside him. After three or four beers the gay man got the courage to say a few words to the big black man.
Leaning over towards him he whispered "Do you want a blow job?"
At this the massive black man leaped up with fire in his eyes and smacked the crap out of the gay man knocking him swiftly off his stool. He proceeded to beat him all the way out of the bar before leaving him bruised and battered in the parking lot and returning to his seat.
Amazed the bartender quickly brought over another beer to the black man and said "I've never seen you react like that. "What did he say to you?"
"I don't know" the black man replied. "Something about a job."
He was having a few beers when a short well dressed and obviously
gay man walked in and sat beside him. After three or four beers the gay man got the courage to say a few words to the big black man.
Leaning over towards him he whispered "Do you want a blow job?"
At this the massive black man leaped up with fire in his eyes and smacked the crap out of the gay man knocking him swiftly off his stool. He proceeded to beat him all the way out of the bar before leaving him bruised and battered in the parking lot and returning to his seat.
Amazed the bartender quickly brought over another beer to the black man and said "I've never seen you react like that. "What did he say to you?"
"I don't know" the black man replied. "Something about a job."
Todays blonde joke [DDD favourite]
On a plane flight from Seattle to Chicago, a blonde was sitting in economy class. About half way through the flight, she got up and moved to an empty seat in first class. A flight attendant who observed this, went over to her and politely explained that she had to move back to economy class because that was what her ticket was for. The blonde replied, "I'm blonde, I'm beautiful, I'm going to Chicago and I'm staying right here."
After several attempts to explain to the blonde why she had to return to economy class, the flight attendant gave up. She went to the cockpit and explained the situation to the pilot and co-pilot. The co-pilot said, "Let me try." He went up to the blonde and politely tried to explain to her why she needed to return to her seat in economy class.
But the blonde only replied, "I'm blonde, I'm beautiful, I'm going to Chicago and I'm staying right here." Frustrated, the co-pilot returned to the cockpit. He suggested that perhaps they should have the airline call the police and have her arrested when they land.
"Wait a minute," said the pilot. "Did you say she's blonde? I can handle this. My wife is a blonde. I speak Blonde." So he went up to the woman sitting in first class and whispered something in her ear.
"I'm sorry," said the blonde, and she promptly got up and returned to her seat in economy class.
"What did you say to her?" ask the astonished flight attendant and co-pilot.
To which the pilot replied, "I just told her that first class isn't going to Chicago."
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