Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Davids Daily Dose - Tuesday February 1st

1/  Politics and the State of the Union speech - Frank Rich with a masterful analysis of what really happened last Tuesday, and how the Republicans are tying themselves in knots.....most interesting, and if you're on the fence about our present state of corrosive politics, a must read.....

There was no drama to Obama’s address — just a unifying theme, at long last, as he reasserted the role of government in rebooting and rebuilding the country for a new century and putting Americans back to work. The president wisely left any theatrics to his adversaries, and, as always, they were happy to oblige.
This time we were spared a “You lie!” But once Obama segued into a rambling laundry list and the “prom night” bipartisan photo ops lost their comic novelty, the night’s storyline inevitably shifted to the reliable diva antics of Michele Bachmann, the founder of the House’s Tea Party Caucus. For all the Republican male establishment’s harrumphing, it couldn’t derail her plan to hijack the party’s designated State of the Union response with one of her own. More Katherine Harris than Sarah Palin, Bachmann is far more riveting television bait than Paul Ryan, the bland congressman officially assigned the Bobby Jindal memorial slot after the New Jersey governor Chris Christie was savvy enough to take a pass.
The G.O.P. grandees’ consternation was palpable. Earlier in the day Bachmann had dispatched an e-mail announcing that her speech would be carried live by Fox News. But when the time came, Fox relegated the live feed to its Web site, forcing viewers to scurry to CNN, of all places, and delaying its own television recap until after prime time in the East. Rupert Murdoch’s other major organ, The Wall Street Journal, toed the same line, burying Bachmann’s speech in a half-sentence in its print edition the next morning. By then, John Boehner, seconding the disdain of Eric Cantor, was telling reporters that he hadn’t watched Bachmann because of “other obligations.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/opinion/30rich.html?_r=1
















2/  Thomas Friedman, back from vacation with a reality check for us .....he must have been in Singapore because he's very impressed with them and contrasts their education system with ours.....

The [Singapore] class is learning about DNA through the use of fingerprints, and their science teacher has turned the students into little C.S.I. detectives. They have to collect fingerprints from the scene and then break them down.
I missed that DNA lesson when I was in fifth grade. When I asked the principal whether this was part of the national curriculum, she said no. She just had a great science teacher, she said, and was aware that Singapore was making a big push to expand its biotech industries and thought it would be good to push her students in the same direction early. A couple of them checked my fingerprints. I was innocent — but impressed.
This was just an average public school, but the principal had made her own connections between “what world am I living in,” “where is my country trying to go in that world” and, therefore, “what should I teach in fifth-grade science.”
I was struck because that kind of linkage is so often missing in U.S. politics today. Republicans favor deep cuts in government spending, while so far exempting Medicare, Social Security and the defense budget. Not only is that not realistic, but it basically says that our nation’s priorities should be to fund retirement homes for older people rather than better schools for younger people and that we should build new schools in Afghanistan before Alabama.
President Obama just laid out a smart and compelling vision of where our priorities should be. But he did not spell out how and where we will have to both cut and invest — really intelligently and at a large scale — to deliver on his vision.
Singapore is tiny and by no means a U.S.-style democracy. Yet, like America, it has a multiethnic population — Chinese, Indian and Malay — with a big working class. It has no natural resources and even has to import sand for building. But today its per capita income is just below U.S. levels, built with high-end manufacturing, services and exports. The country’s economy grew last year at 14.7 percent, led by biomedical exports. How?















3/  You may have seen "Davos" in the news last week and immediately switched off as it was a meeting of the World Economic Forum, muy boring to most people. But Simon Johnson was there and as he writes what the meeting really was was a gathering of the world oligarchy, and from the tone of the discussions "the boys" are happy - profits are up, corporate recovery is under way and all is well. 
As for you and I, the "little people", with eroding incomes, massive un and under-employment and a safety net under attack, not a mention in Davos.....
The world of the oligarchs.....

There is, of course, variation in views across CEOs and the people work intellectual agendas on their behalf, but still the mood among this group was uniformly positive – it was hard to detect any note of serious concern.
Many of the people who control the world’s largest corporations are quite comfortable with the status quo post-financial crisis.  This makes sense for them – and poses a major problem for the rest of us.The thinking here is fairly obvious.  The CEOs who provide the bedrock of financial support for Davos have mostly done well in the past few years.  For the nonfinancial sector, there was a major scare in 2008-09; the disruption of credit was a big shock and dire consequences were feared.  And for leaders of the financial sector this was more than an awkward moment – they stood accused, including by fellow CEOs at Davos in previous years, of incompetence, greed, and excessively capturing the state.
But all of this, from a CEO perspective, is now behind them.  Profits are good – this is the best bounce back on average in the post-war period; given that so many small companies are struggling, it is reasonable to infer that the big companies have done disproportionately well (perhaps because their smaller would-be competitors are still having more trouble accessing credit).  Executive compensation at the largest firms will no doubt reflect this in the months and years ahead.














4/  Mothers - is this you? Are you stalking your kids through Facebook and Twitter? Onion News has the story......2 minutes......
















5/  Michelle Bachmann and her Tea Party credentials.....is she the new Sarah Palin? Amusing column from Gail Collins.......

And do we really need a new Sarah Palin? Shouldn’t the first one be made to go away before we start considering replacements?
Bachmann, the superconservative member of Congress from Minnesota, made a big splash on Tuesday night with her Tea Party response to the State of the Union address. True, the placement of the cameras made her look as if she was talking to an invisible friend, and her eye makeup had a peculiar zombie aspect to it. But the next day all the attention was on her and not the official Republican response by Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman.
And the Republicans were afraid to complain! One congressman from Utah told Politico that he thought “to try to upend Paul Ryan was just wrong.” Hours later he issued a retraction — through Bachmann’s office.
On one level, Bachmann is just a third-term representative who only gets attention whenever she does something newsworthy, like claiming the Constitution says she doesn’t have to tell a census taker anything but how many people live in her home. 
















6/  A combo of music video and fighter planes in the sky......the band "Thirteen Senses" with "Into the Fire" is the soundtrack to great video of swooshing planes.....very cool......absolutely wonderful marriage of the music and the images.....3 minutes......

















7/  Texas has always seemed to me to be populated by a different breed of American - arrogant, boastful and more than a little stupid. This story just confirms the impression. 
In a year of massive budget deficits in Texas, maybe up to $25 billion, a school in a suburb of Dallas is building a $60 million football stadium for their high school football team....
This project makes perfect sense to them, which I guess proves something.....

This is no ordinary stadium, in no ordinary state, where football ranks near faith and family. Super Bowl XLV will take place a short drive southwest next Sunday at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, but while the “big game” will repeatedly highlight football’s oversize importance in Texas, the folks in Allen need no reminders. Here, every game is big.
Williams — Bubba to his friends — arrived long before the boom, when Allen was more speck than sprawl, and now he cannot fathom all the fuss over this stadium, the calls from England, the Pacific Northwest, New York.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Williams said Friday. “We got a lot more interest than we thought we would.”
To the residents, who voted 63 percent in favor of a $119 million bond in May 2009, this project, which includes the stadium, an auditorium for fine arts and a service center for the district, is designed to scale. Their scale just happens to be larger than most.















8/  Underrated movies - "Mars Attacks", a 1996 movie from director Tim Burton......this was greeted as an alien blockbuster, but it really is a delicious black comedy, flaky, satirical. And look at the cast - Netflix time!!!!

















9/  One of the "must see" things to do when you visit Las Vegas is a trip to the Hoover Dam - I've done the tour of the dam and the electricity generating plant inside the dam, and it's pretty interesting [especially to guys], but the project of building a bridge bypassing the dam is finished....so now we have a new "must see" destination - the new bridge.......... 

The Hoover Dam bypass bridge is not just any bridge, however. Soaring 890 feet above the Colorado River, it’s the second-highest span in the United States (the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado is 65 feet higher). And as much as it was constructed for cars and trucks, the bypass bridge was built for sightseers, too: from its six-foot-wide sidewalk, pedestrians have a grand view of the famous concrete dam, just 1,600 feet upstream.
The dam, which was built in the 1930s for about $50 million, gets about a million visitors a year. But in the few months since it opened in October, the $240 million bridge — officially the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, for Mr. O’Callaghan, a politician and newspaper publisher, and Mr. Tillman, the professional football player turned soldier who was killed in Afghanistan — has become something of an attraction itself.
A steady stream of tourists climbs up to the bridge from a parking lot near the dam to take in the view while strolling along the sidewalk. The sheer face of the dam lies below, its top punctuated by Art Deco turrets. And visitors to the dam can’t avoid seeing the bridge, which stretches out above them, its delicate concrete-and-steel arch spanning the sandstone walls of Black Canyon. It’s a toss-up as to which view is more spectacular.















10/  Ah Florida.....

If you listen to Governor Rick and the loonies in the Florida legislature, we have no alternative but to cut cut cut, every program that gives any benefit to Floridians. 
BS. As this article says if we eliminated even half of the loopholes and special exemptions in our sales tax we would make up the $5 billion with no problem. Think on this as an example, and there are many more - sales of bottled water [Dasani, Zephyr Hills etc.] are exempt from sales tax....their lobbyists did a great job convincing the scum in the Legislature to exempt water from sales tax.....
Here's the thing - would I shock you if I said Florida doesn't have to cut anything this year? Because we don't. We don't have to endanger what little of an economic recovery we have going. We don't have to lay off thousands of teachers, police officers, firefighters, safety inspectors, and park rangers. We don't have to grow our unemployment rolls. We don't have to accept the falsehoods being told to us by politicians who say things like the government's budget is just like a family's budget. State legislators in Tallahassee don't have to cause an immense amount of unnecessary pain for Floridians by hacking up their government's budget.
As my friend Nancy Noonan demonstrated in an op-ed to the Star-Banner close to a year ago, budget cuts are unnecessary to balance Florida's budget:
Fortunately, the Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy has identified several areas where our state can raise the more than $3 billion required to ensure there are no cuts in this year's budget, particularly to our schools. Some of these items include modernizing our state's sales tax by removing unnecessary exemptions and eliminating unnecessary corporate income tax exemptions. And those are only selected recommendations. The reality is that Florida annually gives up $12 billion a year in potential sales tax revenues and another $20.9 billion in potential service tax revenues. At the end of the day, budget cuts are completely unnecessary.





No surprise here - for all the people moving into Florida, an equal number are moving out.....

WASHINGTON — Faced with a dramatic decline in the number of Americans moving to Florida, community boosters are promoting the Sunshine State as a cluster of research and technology, not just a balmy place to live.

The rebranding reflects attempts to attract businesses and college graduates while reviving the stream of retirees and home buyers who once poured into Florida and nurtured economic growth.

A batch of hurricanes, a housing crisis, the Great Recession and the loss of a million jobs in the state have brought the stream of new arrivals to a trickle.



Using the latest available data, census surveys estimate that only 461,088 people moved to Florida from another state in 2009. Nearly as many Floridians — 439,665 — moved to another state. That's roughly one-third fewer new residents compared with 2005, when 632,168 moved to Florida from another state.







So much BS from our Governor Rick and our "leaders" about how we need to make Florida business-friendly so we can attract companies down here.....Florida is already the most open state for corporations, but lacks educated workers and infrastructure....

In case you weren't already convinced that Florida rolls out the welcome mat to businesses just as enthusiastically as it does to tourists, yet another study confirms our state's enticingly low taxes and cheap labor.

Five Florida regions dominate a list of the 20 cheapest areas in the nation to operate a corporate headquarters, according to the BizCosts.com study.

This is important because corporate headquarters provide exactly the kind of high-wage jobs the state needs.

The study adds to the evidence that it's not exorbitant costs that are holding Florida back, despite the calls for lower taxes we hear out of Tallahassee.






Wow - Governor Rick is coming to Eustis to meet the local Tea Party.....anyone want to go? They're serving Liptons.....

TALLAHASSEE — Rick Scott wants to throw himself a tea party over the Florida budget.
The new Republican governor reached out to tea party organizers to host a budget-rollout event Monday in Eustis, a rural heartland town about 190 miles from the state Capitol — where governors traditionally unveil their spending proposals.
The event underscores Scott's likely commitment to propose a budget with large cuts in spending, fees and taxes — a proposal that has been met with skepticism by legislators, who aren't sure how to slash up to $2 billion in taxes and fees while the state faces a shortfall that could top $4 billion next budget year.















11/  This is up for music video of the year - "Bad Romance", with Lady Gaga......you may want to watch it again, as it kind of defies description.....amazingly imaginative is the best I can do.....don't forget to watch the last 10 seconds....















12/  Most interesting - this is a 20 minute video by a female doctor who has invented a new imaging process to detect breast cancer. The problem is the medical system has invested heavily in other equipment that doesn't work as well, but has huge financial benefits to the hospitals and doctors.
Ladies - strongly recommend you watch this so you can inform yourself about mammograms, their effectiveness and how to protect yourself against the medical abuses of breast cancer detection.....it might save you 1/ money, 2/ anxiety and 3/ maybe a boob.....
The doctor isn't a dynamic speaker, but stick with it.....

















13/  "Justified" is a great series about a US Marshal in Kentucky, and Walton Goggins is the most interesting character in this pretty good series.  If you ever watched "The Shield" you will know who he is... very good actor....

TIMOTHY OLYPHANT may embody the steely-eyed, white-hatted hero on “Justified,” the backwoods crime drama on FX based on stories by Elmore Leonard, but Walton Goggins supplies the show’s tortured soul.

His character, Boyd Crowder, began the series, which returns for its second season on Feb. 9, as a seemingly psychotic white supremacist. But as the show progressed, an apparent spiritual awakening led the character to break with his father, a crime boss, and, in the season finale, save his on-again, off-again adversary, played by Mr. Olyphant, in a climactic shootout.
Mr. Goggins grounded the pulpy twists with an understated portrayal that mixed the series’ florid dialogue with an unhinged ambiguity. Boyd’s motives were never entirely clear, and a character originally presented as a “stereotypical over-the-top redneck racist,” as Mr. Goggins put it, was revealed to be an intelligent manipulator and a cagey counterpoint to the United States marshal Raylan Givens, the protagonist, played by Mr. Olyphant.















14/  Mount Dorans
Time for a couple of DDD restaurant reviews.....

"Michaels at A Third Place", in downtown Eustis.
Michael, the chef who had a restaurant in Umatilla, has opened  "A Third Place"....the room is the same, with the wonderful bar and high ceilings with the addition of a bandstand in the middle of the room, but the menu is impossibly ambitious. Five pages of way too many choices, and both of our meals were adequate, at best. The only bottled wine was a Robert Mondavi house wine at $26, which is a tad overpriced......
However, a good place to have an adult beverage after work, and maybe lunch......we'll revisit in a couple of months to see if the opening blues have settled down.....




Al's "Top Shelf", in Tavares, on the second floor of Al's Landing at the seaplane dock.

At last - a place in Lake County you can proudly take your visitors from out of town to dinner without apologising, or schlepping 40 minutes to Winter Park to get them top quality food........
 
Al's Top Shelf is a premium steak house with an excellent menu, great ambiance and decent prices that would fit right into the dining scene in Orlando, Miami or other big cities. The restaurant has a sophisticated decor and a cool feel [great music], service is very good indeed and the food quality was exceptional. 
Our huge 14 oz. New York strips were $23, a decent bottle of wine was $22 and I followed our delicious main courses with........OMG.....The...Best...Cheesecake....Ever....In....My....Life.... [their caramel drizzled cheesecake]. Yumsters.
Our bill including wine was under $100, and for this quality experience I thought it pretty reasonable....
They are open Thursday - Sunday from 5pm to 10pm......highly recommended! 




















Todays British joke


SCOTTISH COMPASSION
A man was sitting on a blanket at the beach. He had no arms and no legs.

Three women, from England, Wales, and Scotland, were walking past and felt sorry for the poor man.

The English woman said, 'Have you ever had a hug?' The man said, 'No,' so she gave him a hug and walked on.

The Welsh woman said, 'Have you ever had a kiss?' The man said, 'No,' so she gave him a kiss and walked on.

The Scottish woman came to him and said, 'ave ya ever been fooked laddie?'

The man broke into a big smile and said, ‘no’.

She said, 'Aye - Ya will be when the tide comes in.'















Todays intellectual jokes


The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again 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 the winners:
1.Cashtration (n.):  The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2.
Ignoranus:  A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

3.
Intaxication:  Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
         
4.
Reintarnation:  Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5.
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.

6.
Foreploy:  Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

7.
Giraffiti:  Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

8.
Sarchasm:  The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

9.
Inoculatte:  To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10.
Osteopornosis:  A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11.
Karmageddon:  It's 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.

12.
Decafalon (n.):  The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13.
Glibido:  All talk and no action.

14.
Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15.
Arachnoleptic Fit (n.):  The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

16.
Beelzebug (n.):  Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17.
Caterpallor (n.):  The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:

1.Coffee, (n.): The person upon whom one coughs.

2.
Flabbergasted, (adj.): Appalled by discovering how much weight one has 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.): Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.

7.
Lymph, (v.): To walk with a lisp.

8.
Gargoyle, (n.): Olive-flavored mouthwash.

9.
Flatulence, (n.): Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been 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.): The belief that, after death, the 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.












Todays video - Bud Lite commercial......










Todays blonde jokes



Did you hear about the two blondes
who froze to death in a drive-in movie?

They had gone to see 'Closed for the Winter.'

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

You might have to think twice about this one.

A blonde hurried into the emergency room late one night with the tip
of her index finger shot off. 'How did this happen?' the emergency
room doctor asked her.

'Well, I was trying to commit suicide,' the blonde replied.

'What?' sputtered the doctor. 'You tried to commit suicide by shooting
off your finger?'

'No, silly' the blonde said. 'First I put the gun to my chest, &
then I thought, 'I just paid $6,000 for these implants... 
I'm not shooting myself in the chest.'

'So then?' asked the doctor.

'Then I put the gun in my mouth, & I thought, 'I just paid $3,000
to get my teeth straightened and I'm not shooting myself in the mouth.'

'So then?'

'Then I put the gun to my ear, & I thought: 'This is going to make a
loud noise. So I put my finger in my other ear before I pulled the
trigger. 






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