If you live in Florida and still like Rick Scott, read #8.....
1/ Another great column from Gail Collins about all of the angry new Governors in
America, including of course our own, beloved Rick Scott.......I am copying the whole
column so you don't get penalised by the Times's quota......
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Wanna Buy a Turnpike?
By GAIL COLLINS
Right now you’re probably asking yourself: How are all the angry new governors doing?
Great! Fear and loathing may abound, but it’s business-friendly fear and loathing. In Ohio and Wisconsin, angry new governors John Kasich and Scott Walker are taking economic development out of the hands of state bureaucrats and giving the job to new quasi-private entities that will be much more effective and efficient.
In Florida, where the Legislature did all that in the 1990s, the angry new governor Rick Scott has a bold plan to improve economic development by creating a State Department of Commerce that will be much more effective and efficient.
Really, just so there’s change and it doesn’t sound socialistic. “We don’t want to leave any money on the table,” said Kasich, who is planning to sell five prisons, the lottery and maybe do something with the turnpike. I’m from Ohio, and while I never did like the turnpike, I’ve always been a fan of history. I wonder if I could get a good deal on the Warren Harding homestead.
In Maine, Gov. Paul LePage has won his fight to remove a huge Department of Labor mural that LePage regarded as too pro-labor. Now his administration is marching ahead with its effort to rename the building’s conference rooms. Among the names targeted for elimination are Frances Perkins, F.D.R.’s secretary of labor, and William Looney, a 19th-century Republican who sponsored legislation to limit the number of hours women and children could work in factories.
The department has asked its employees to come up with new names that, according to its memo, “should not reflect a bias toward either business or workers.” Definitely do not want to give the impression that government is on the side of the workers. Perhaps attending meetings in the William Looney room made employers worry that the LePage administration leaned too far to the left when it came to child labor laws.
Gov. Butch Otter of Idaho is so on the side of private enterprise ranchers that he just signed a law naming the gray wolf a “disaster emergency.” I would love to go into this, but he’s actually not new in office. I just brought it up because I like being able to say “Butch Otter.”
Meanwhile, in news from South Carolina, Gov. Nikki Haley, a Tea Party favorite, tossed out Darla Moore, a longtime member of the University of South Carolina Board of Trustees who had given money to one of the Democratic candidates for governor. Haley said she wanted “a fresh set of eyes.” This would not be all that big a deal except that Moore is the biggest donor in the university’s history. She has given at least $70 million to the school, which would seem to be worth one heck of a lot of sets of eyes.
Moore is being replaced by Thomas “Tommy” Cofield, a lawyer and Haley supporter who formerly served as a judge on the Fee Dispute Resolution Board. According to his biography, he is also active in community and civic affairs.
In Wisconsin, Governor Walker is moving people around like crazy. He tapped Brian Deschane, a director at the Department of Regulation and Licensing, to oversee regulatory and environmental issues when the Commerce Department turns into the new public-private thingie.
This was a meteoric rise for Deschane, a 27-year-old college dropout who had been at his job for only a couple of months. The promotion carried a 26 percent raise in salary to $81,500 a year, along with the opportunity to manage dozens of other state employees. It offered an exciting change of pace for the Wisconsin wunderkind, whose previous experience had mainly involved short-term political campaign jobs and working for the Wisconsin Builders Association, where his father, Jerry, is a lobbyist and executive vice president. Did we mention that the W.B.A. and its members gave Walker $121,652 in campaign contributions?
“He got the position himself,” the elder Deschane assured The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “I didn’t get it for him.” He did acknowledge that he might have mentioned to Walker’s campaign manager that the kid was “out there and available.”
People, does this sound like good planning to you? If you were governor and one of your top priorities was getting jobs taken out from under civil service protection, wouldn’t you put up a Post-it reminding yourself not to put the unqualified offspring of major campaign contributors in important positions?
After the story broke, the governor was deeply embarrassed, and Deschane — did we mention he had two D.W.I. convictions? — was demoted back to his original job, which he then quit. He is history, although Stephen Fitzgerald, the father of the speaker of the Assembly and also the father of the speaker’s brother, the Senate majority leader, still has his new job as head of the Wisconsin State Patrol.
There is, you know, a reason we created civil service in the first place.
2/ We are in the process of creating a new and permanent underclass in
Plutocracy America, as corporations squeeze their staff mercilessly for more
productivity - more work, same pay......
Frightened people don't fight, so hanging over most workers in America is the
implied threat of downsizing, firing anyone who complains and shipping jobs
overseas.
And the much ballyhooed jobs being "created" are paid less, with fewer
benefits.......but the executive bonuses get fatter....
Consider a bleak snapshot of our ailing economy: Real corporate profits are now near an all-time high, yet one out of six working people are either out of a job or have no choice but to work part-time.
We just saw a huge two-year gain in productivity – the amount of goods and services produced per worker. In 2009, it rose by 3.5 percent, and last year we saw a 3.6 percent increase, the largest in eight years.
At the same time, labor costs – the value of wages and benefits – have seen their steepest decline since 1962-'63.
This is the result of companies putting the big squeeze on their workers – threatening to cast them into a sea of unemployed Americans if they don't produce more for the same wages. These numbers tell us that an economy that now employs seven million fewer workersthan it did in 2008 can produce the same amount of stuff, albeit at a great social cost.
Lower Wages, Fewer Jobs
According to an analysis of Census data by USA Today, just 45 percent of the population now holds a job, the lowest share since 1983. Over the past decade, the number of non-working adults in the U.S. has increased by 27 million.
Those who have been laid off and were then lucky enough to get rehired aren't faring well. In an employers' market, over half of all full-time workers laid off after at least three years at the same job return to the workforce with lower wages. According to the Wall Street Journal, more than a third of them lose 20 percent or more of their previous income.
The average length of joblessness among the unemployed is now 39 weeks,
3/ Music video - a DDD favourite - Paramore with "The Only Exception". Love they
way they create a story line in perfect tune with the words......great song....
4/ One of the Tea Party agenda items I didn't really understand was why they are so
fiercely against any planning and zoning, and this article explains why the true
believers in the Tea party believe the UN is trying to sabotage America....if you ever
hear "Amendment 21" this is what's behind it.
I wonder where they are getting this stuff, because even Fox News wouldn't put out
such crazy BS, unless of course it was on Glenn Beck....
First, they took on the political establishment in Congress. Now, tea partiers have trained their sights on a new and insidious target: local planning and zoning commissions, which activists believe are carrying out a global conspiracy to trample American liberties and force citizens into Orwellian "human habitation zones."
At the root of this plot is the admittedly sinister-sounding Agenda 21, an 18-year-old UN plan to encourage countries to consider the environmental impacts of human development. Tea partiers see Agenda 21 behind everything from a septic tank inspection law in Florida to a plan in Maine to reduce traffic on Route 1. The issue even flared up briefly during the midterms, when Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes accused his Democratic opponent of using a bike-sharing program to convert Denver into a "United Nations Community."
In the tea partiers’ dystopian vision, the increased density favored by planners to allow for better mass transit becomes compulsory "human habitation zones."
Agenda 21 paranoia has swept the tea party scene, driving activists around the country to delve into the minutiae of local governance. And now that the midterm elections are over, they're descending on planning meetings and transit debates, wielding PowerPoints about Agenda 21, and generally freaking out low-level bureaucrats with accusations about their roles in a supposed international conspiracy.
5/ Fascinating article about conservatives trying to restrict womens reproductive
choices, and what they are really after.....power and control over women.....
So ladies, before you vote Republican next time do you really want some religious
whacko redneck telling you what your contraceptive choices are?
Last week, the Missouri General Assembly debated House Bill 28. Among other things, this cynical piece of legislation allows pharmacy employees to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control, confuses RU-486 with emergency contraception, forces women seeking medical abortions to make – count them — four visits to the clinic, and creates a slew of other absurd requirements for physicians. The bill is an absolute horror show of degrading assumptions and scientifically incorrect statements. Though the bill passed with the legislature’s famous anti-woman gusto, there were many shining moments during floor debate. One of those was when Representative Genise Montecillo (D – 66) said about the bill, “This is just as much about control as rape is about control.” She’s right, and it’s time we start recognizing these attacks on choice for what they really are: violence against women.
Actually, abusers and anti-choice policies (and the politicians who advocate for them) use many of the same oppressive tactics. Just like rape, sexual assault, harassment, and intimate partner violence, laws that limit women’s access to abortion care are all about power and control. They are designed so that state power over a woman’s body supersedes a woman’s own power over her body. It is assumed without question that the ultra-conservative politicians who champion these laws have the right to control women’s bodies – that making laws about women’s reproduction is completely within their professional purview. Violence is used by abusers in much the same way: to take and maintain power and show the victim that the abuser canand will exercise that power. Just as anti-choice politicians believe they have the right to govern women’s bodies, abusers believe they have the right to punish women physically – to keep them in line through bodily force and coercion. In both scenarios, women are deemed stupid children who do not deserve autonomy or control over their own destinies. Why else would they make laws telling us we have to go meet with Jesus-pushing CPC volunteer “counselors” 72 hours before an abortion so that we can really “think about it”?
And here is Tom Tomorrow's take on the Republican War against Women.....
6/ Excellent Robyn Blumner column from the St. Pete Times about the current
state of our State under the "leadership" of Governor Rick and the Republican scum
in Tallahassee....needless to say it isn't pretty....
I'm not surprised that Wonderland, the musical which originated in Tampa, received withering reviews when it opened on Broadway April 17. I walked out before the second act when it premiered here in 2009, anxious to escape this lame and incoherent rendering of a grown-up Alice and her tea party crowd. Little did I know that there soon would be no escape from a real-life tea party onslaught that would overtake the state. These days, Florida is trapped in its own version of Wonderland. Call it: "Crazyland." But rather than a dream-like romp through the imagination, this is a prodigious and horrifying nightmare from which there is no waking up.
Republican Gov. Rick Scott's election was the first evidence that the state had fallen down a rabbit hole. A political neophyte with vast wealth accumulated by building a hospital chain that paid record fines for fraud against Medicare, Scott has been running the state as if he took Queen-of-Hearts lessons from the Lewis Carroll character herself.
Just as the Queen declared that in matters of judgment, "first the sentence, and then the evidence," Scott's distaste for state regulation led him to instantly upon taking office halt every new rule that hadn't yet gone into effect, regardless of the merits.
His "off with their heads" moment came when Scott unilaterally canceled a high-speed rail project that would have brought billions of federal dollars, thousands of jobs and badly needed transportation infrastructure to Florida.
And he flexed his monarchial arbitrariness to great effect by holding up emergency funding for the court system, and forcing the state's chief judges to gear up for possible courtroom closures before deigning to release the crumbs.
Rounding out Florida's tea party menagerie is the Legislature, which enjoys veto-proof Republican majorities in both houses, and is chockablock with lawmakers whose bizarre way of thinking would give the Mad Hatter a run for it.
7/ In their quest to destroy the Democratic party in Florida the Republican
Legislature has passed a bill making it more difficult to vote, and that includes the
military. Here are details on the latest assault on your voting rights....
As part of their push to restrict voting rights in the state to older white Republicans, Florida’s Republican legislators have resisted even attempts to preserve the ability of members of the military to change their address on election day.
Tucked into this Sun-Sentinel post on the speed with which voting rights are being restricted in Florida by the right wingers in Tallahassee is a nugget on the failed amendments that superminority Democrats tried to insert into bad legislation:
Lawmakers debated for several hours and considered more than 40 amendments to change the bill. Proposals by Democrats, which were all shot down by the Republican majority, included a requirement that the Secretary of State investigate all instances of attempts to disenfranchise voters, bans members of the Legislature or Cabinet from soliciting or accepting campaign contributions for federal office during a legislative session and allow college students and military families to change registration at the polls regardless of county.
8/ So Rick Scott won't allow Florida to join the lawsuit against BP? Has to be a
reason.....
Florida Governor Rick "Run The Government Like A Business" Scott chose the eve of the one year anniversary of the BP oil spill to give Transocean, the business, a break by announcing that Florida won't join the other Gulf states in a lawsuit against the company, just as he had hinted last week:
Scott told reporters at the event that he saw no need for a lawsuit."I'm very comfortable that my discussion so far with BP is that they're going to continue to do the right thing," he said.
“It doesn’t make sense that the state join that lawsuit. We have a plan to make sure our state is treated fairly with regards getting reimbursed by British Petroleum for the damages done to our state,” Scott told reporters on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the oil rig blast that spewed 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.And the reason is......the Rickster owns $20 million of stock in a company that supplies Transocean and other oil companies.....so if he doesn't sue, his company will get rewarded....You elected a crooked Governor, a lying thieving scum-sucking pigdog.... so live with it.....
Steve Yerrid, a Tampa attorney who served as special counsel on the oil spill to Scott’s predecessor, Gov. Charlie Crist, said the state has a solid claim against Transocean and the governor is obligated to get all the money it can for Florida taxpayers.Scott recently came under scrutiny for conflict of interest over his shares in his family's health care chain, Solantic, which he had transferred to his wife. He subsequently sold those shares to an investment firm, Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe last week.A nearly $20.4 million investment in Drives Acquisition LLC. He created the company to purchase Drives LLC, a manufacturer of mechanical chains, in 2008. The company’s markets include North America and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.Drives, LLC, is a company that makes chains and drills for oil exploration. But he said he doesn't sit on the company's board and has pledged to put his investments in a blind trust if elected.Oil exploration.A "blind trust." Where have we heard that one before?
9/ Movie Review
"Water for Elephants", out this weekend. Both my wife and I read this book and
loved it, so we were waiting for this movie and hoping it was going to be as good as
the book.
But alas, it isn't - here are exerpts from 2 reviews, one from Entrtainment Weekly
and the other from the NYTimes....the summary is the film is OK, but the spark is
missing.....
From EW
It's odd, the anemia of this production, directed by Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend) from a squared-off script by screenwriter Richard LaGravanese (The Horse Whisperer). Inevitably, the movie veers from the novel in various small to medium ways, but not so much that a bookworm would complain. The heart of the story is there: how Jacob's life changes after his parents die in a car accident, how he finds his way to the Benzini Brothers, how August is even crueler to his circus animals than he is to his wife, and how the tense triangle of Jacob, Marlena, and August leads to a dramatic climax.
Instead, what's missing is the soul. From scene to scene, and plot point to plot point, nothing connects. Pattinson, Witherspoon, and Waltz perform in separate rings of their three-ring circus. Pattinson, his sleepy-eyed handsomeness styled in the manner of a '30s matinee idol, looks very manly and elegant even when he's glistening with grimy sweat and shoveling animal droppings. He gives Jacob an interesting air of watchfulness and reserve. Meanwhile, over in her own corner, dolled up in platinum curls, big eyelashes, and sparkly body-hugging showgirl leotards, Witherspoon interprets Marlena as part bored trophy-wife, part hard showbiz pro, and part lost little girl. None of which allows for much romantic chemistry between the two actors.
From the Times
But the timid screen adaptation, directed by Francis Lawrence (“I Am Legend”) from a screenplay byRichard LaGravenese, short-circuits the novel’s quirky charms and period atmosphere by its squeamish attitude toward gritty circus life and smothers the drama under James Newton Howard’s insufferable wall-to-wall musical soup.
In Ms. Gruen’s novel, the beaten and mistreated Rosie is a heroine for all seasons. As you pore through “Water for Elephants,” a book with a special appeal to readers who get teary about animal stories, you develop a deepening sense that she is a noble creature, the elephant in the room who never forgets, who knows all and harbors a primal sense of justice.
With her caring trainer, Jacob Jankowski (Robert Pattinson), a veterinary student who drops out of Cornell after his parents’ sudden deaths, Rosie shares a quasi-mystical understanding of good and evil. That intuitive rapport — the soul of the novel — is barely felt in this cool, placid film, which so studiously tries to cram all of the book’s incidents and characters into two hours that it forgets it is telling a story. I’m no big fan of animal movies, but “Water for Elephants” could have used some spritzes of “National Velvet” or “Lassie Come Home” sentimentality.
10/ Great trailer for a lousy movie - "Scream 4"......oh well, watch this 2 minute
trailer and you don't have to see it.....
Todays video - Spanish for your Nanny.....very funny.....a DDD favourite....
Todays golf joke
Thomas, a 70 year old very wealthy widower shows up at the country club with an
absolutely gorgeous, breathtakingly beautiful and very sexy 25 year old brunette .
She hangs on his arm and listens intently to every word.
His usual golf partners and other members of the club are baffled and shocked.
At the very first chance they corner him and ask "Thomas, how did you get the
amazing trophy girlfriend?"
To which he replies "Hell no, she's not my girlfriend! She's my wife".
Disbelieving Thomas they ask "So how did you persuade her to marry you?"
"I lied about my age" he replies.
"What, did you tell her you were only 50?"
Thomas smiles and says "Nope, I told her I was 90."
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