1/ Wow. A "what if McCain had won" article that certainly gets you thinking, especially the opening two paragraphs.....
Excellent article......
Democrats were united on one issue in the 2008 presidential election: the absolute disaster that a John McCain victory would have produced. And they were right. McCain as president would clearly have produced a long string of catastrophes: He would probably have approved a failedtroop surge in Afghanistan, engaged in worldwide extrajudicial assassination,destabilized
Nothing reveals the true state of American politics today more, however, than the fact that Democratic President Barack Obama has undertaken all of these actions and, even more significantly, left the Democratic Party far weaker than it would have been had McCain been elected. Few issues are more important than seeing behind the screen of a myth-making mass media, and understanding what this demonstrates about how power in America really works—and what needs to be done to change it.
2/ Excellent story on the real cause of the economic problems this country is struggling with......it's us boomers - you and I, and the greedy lifestyles we had from the 80's that came screeching to a halt in 2008......and now comes the reckoning.....
NEWS ANALYSIS
We’re Spent
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: July 16, 2011
THERE is no shortage of explanations for the economy’s maddening inability to leave behind the Great Recession and start adding large numbers of jobs: The deficit is too big. The stimulus was flawed. China is overtaking us. Businesses are overregulated. Wall Street is underregulated.
Mark Pernice and Ashly Nodar
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Times Topic: United States Economy
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But the real culprit — or at least the main one — has been hiding in plain sight. We are living through a tremendous bust. It isn’t simply a housing bust. It’s a fizzling of the great consumer bubble that was decades in the making.
The auto industry is on pace to sell 28 percent fewer new vehicles this year than it did 10 years ago — and 10 years ago was 2001, when the country was in recession. Sales of ovens and stoves are on pace to be at their lowest level since 1992. Home sales over the past year have fallen back to their lowest point since the crisis began. And big-ticket items are hardly the only problem.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently published a jarring report on what it calls discretionary service spending, a category that excludes housing, food and health care and includes restaurant meals, entertainment, education and even insurance. Going back decades, such spending had never fallen more than 3 percent per capita in a recession. In this slump, it is down almost 7 percent, and still has not really begun to recover.
The past week brought more bad news. Retail sales in June were weaker than expected, and consumer confidence fell, causing economists to downgrade their estimates for economic growth yet again. It’s a familiar routine by now. Forecasters in Washington and on Wall Street keep saying the recovery’s problems are temporary — and then they redefine temporary.
If you’re looking for one overarching explanation for the still-terrible job market, it is this great consumer bust. Business executives are only rational to hold back on hiring if they do not know when their customers will fully return. Consumers, for their part, are coping with a sharp loss of wealth and an uncertain future (and many have discovered that they don’t need to buy a new car or stove every few years). Both consumers and executives are easily frightened by the latest economic problem, be it rising gas prices or the debt-ceiling impasse.
3/ Sorry to keep piling on the boomer generation, but Thomas Friedman nails it......we boomers have mortgaged our kid's future, and some of the younger generation are waking up to this....not in the US, of course......
I REALIZE that I should be in Washington watching the debt drama there, but I’ve opted instead to be in Greece to observe the off-Broadway version. There are a lot of things about this global debt tragedy that you can see better from here, in miniature, starting with the raw plot, which no one has described better than the Carnegie Endowment scholar David Rothkopf: “When the cold war ended, we thought we were going to have a clash of civilizations. It turns out we’re having a clash of generations.”
Indeed, if there is one sentiment that unites the crises in Europe and America it is a powerful sense of “baby boomers behaving badly” — a powerful sense that the generation that came of age in the last 50 years, my generation, will be remembered most for the incredible bounty and freedom it received from its parents and the incredible debt burden and constraints it left on its kids.
It is no wonder that young Greeks reacted so harshly when their deputy prime minister, Theodoros Pangalos, referring to all the European Union loans and subsidies that propelled the Greek credit binge after 1981, said, “We ate it together” — meaning the people and the politicians. That was true of the baby boomer generation of Greeks, now in their 50s and 60s, and the baby boomer politicians. But those just coming of age today will never get a bite. They will just get a bill. And they know it.
4/ Michele Bachmann has based her Presidential campaign on her religious convictions which strongly resonate with the conservative base, and one of her platforms is to vehemently oppose gay marriage. However, sniffing hypocrisy is the alternative media's job, and the news that Marcus Bachmann [the husband] runs a "Pray The Gay Away" clinic was red meat to some......so Mr. Marcus came under scrutiny. And as is often the case with virulent anti-gay men, there are demons lurking......
Hear that snickering? That’s the sound of the 2012 mudslinging starting in earnest.
If you aren’t yet familiar with the growing whispers about Michele Bachmann’s campaign—the uncorroborated speculation that the candidate’s profoundly antigay hubby, Marcus, is a closeted gay man—you will be. The chatter has already made its way from the blogs and Twitter (Cher tweeted that Marcus has tripped her exquisitely tuned gaydar) to the alternative press to The Daily Show, where Jon Stewart and Jerry Seinfeld left each other in stitches this week taking shots at Marcus Bachmann’s effeminate manner and “center-square gay” voice. (Anyone out there old enough to remember Paul Lynde?) As Stewart joked, the guy is “an Izod shirt away from being the gay character on Modern Family.” Clips of the comedians’ faux “comedy repression” session promptly popped up on the websites of such stodgy outlets as The Washington Post and The Atlantic.
5/ A wonderful Bill Maher, skewering both La Palin and Michele.....4 minutes of really funny stuff - when you watch it, his joke "God commands" is a classic......
One thing is abundantly clear: Bill Maher is not afraid of offending you.
Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin are an interesting force in American politics. They are the Republicans progressives love to not take seriously at all. They are also the ones that "people who know" say you shouldn't underestimate. But more importantly, perhaps, they afford conservatives the unique opportunity to call liberals sexist.
6/ Rachael Maddow comments [with the supersmart Melissa Harris-Perry] on the Republican vote in the House to repeal the Federal Clean Water Act, and leave any regulation of our rivers and water supply to the states and Governors like Rick Scott.....wonder how that would work out.......6 minutes........
7/ On the same theme Robyn Blumner comments on the attempts by conservatives to gut the EPA, leaving anything environmental up to the good consciences of the corporations doing the polluting....."voluntary standards", just like Koch Industries wanted.....
The best way to appreciate the benefits of environmental regulation is to travel internationally. I don't mean to First World cities like Toronto or Paris but to places where government is unable or unwilling to rein in polluters.
When I was in Beijing about 10 years ago, travelers could expect days of thick smog and see locals wearing face masks. What I saw in Lagos, Nigeria, were waterways piled high with garbage while children played nearby. The tap water? Don't even brush your teeth with it.
In my experience, anywhere pollution was allowed to exist, it did, ruining the outdoors and the health of human beings. But in America we have the Environmental Protection Agency.
Yes, the EPA, the great "job-killing organization of America" as Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann dubbed it. She'd repeal it if she could. So would former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another GOP presidential hopeful, who would replace it with the "Environmental Solutions Agency" that would work cooperatively with industry. Because that worked so well in the past.
The EPA is under assault right now by Republicans on the campaign trail as well as in Congress. Last week, House Republicans outlined new cuts they will seek, representing an 18 percent reduction from current spending. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has been called before a congressional energy subcommittee to be pilloried by its chairman, Rep. Edward Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican. She's a Republican punching bag.
8/ This Lady Gaga video has a number of firsts.......
- she has the same costume on for the full five minutes....
- features a long saxophone solo from Clarence Clemons.....
- she cornered the market in smoke machines.....
- she's dancing on her own....
Song is pretty good too......
9/ Interesting article on how the wives of politicians in disgrace are no longer expected to stand by their man - written by the co-authors of the best series currently on TV, "The Good Wife"..........
When "The Good Wife" returns in the fall give it a shot - guys, it's not a chick show, and ladies - the heroine is a strong, determined woman you will like. The closest series I can compare it to is "LA Law", but with "realer" characters......
Anyway - interesting essay.......
Two years ago, “The Good Wife,” a CBS drama, opened with a familiar tableau: a politician apologizing for sexual peccadilloes. By his side, also caught in the glare of cameras, was his pale, stone-faced wife. What was going through her mind? Since then, politicians continue to face the cameras asking forgiveness. But wives have become conspicuous by their absence; the public no longer expects them to stand by their philanderers. What are these wives thinking? The show’s creators, Robert and Michelle King, who write together and have been married since 1987, speculate about the pressures peculiar to the wives of errant politicians as they weigh whether to forgive their husbands.
10/ Every DDD should have a "dog bites shark" story.....so here it is from glorious "Down Under".....1 minute......
11/ The author of this story is very close to dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, and writes about how he is determined not to end up in the "end of life" medical machine.
Very moving, well written and when you read this you have to admire this man's courage.....
I HAVE wonderful friends. In this last year, one took me to Istanbul. One gave me a box of hand-crafted chocolates. Fifteen of them held two rousing, pre-posthumous wakes for me. Several wrote large checks. Two sent me a boxed set of all the Bach sacred cantatas. And one, from Texas, put a hand on my thinning shoulder, and appeared to study the ground where we were standing. He had flown in to see me.
“We need to go buy you a pistol, don’t we?” he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with.
“Yes, Sweet Thing,” I said, with a smile. “We do.”
I loved him for that.
12/ David Brooks, the conservative columnist from the Times, uses the story above to muse on our medical system, and the budget crisis.....
I hope you had the chance to read and reread Dudley Clendinen’s splendid essay, “The Good Short Life,” in The Times’s Sunday Review section. Clendinen is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S. If he uses all the available medical technology, it will leave him, in a few years’ time, “a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self.”
Instead of choosing that long, dehumanizing, expensive course, Clendinen has decided to face death as one of life’s “most absorbing thrills and challenges.” He concludes: “When the music stops — when I can’t tie my bow tie, tell a funny story, walk my dog, talk with Whitney, kiss someone special, or tap out lines like this — I’ll know that Life is over. It’s time to be gone.”
Clendinen’s article is worth reading for the way he defines what life is. Life is not just breathing and existing as a self-enclosed skin bag. It’s doing the activities with others you were put on earth to do.
But it’s also valuable as a backdrop to the current budget mess. This fiscal crisis is about many things, but one of them is our inability to face death — our willingness to spend our nation into bankruptcy to extend life for a few more sickly months.
The fiscal crisis is driven largely by health care costs.
Todays video - Baby Elephant Trunk Penis with Buddy Hackett......rude!!! But funny......
Todays Irish jokes
The Irish have solved their own fuel problems.
They imported 50 million tonnes of sand from the Arabs and they're going to drill for their own oil.
They imported 50 million tonnes of sand from the Arabs and they're going to drill for their own oil.
My mate's missus left him last Thursday. She said she was going out for a pint of milk and never came back!
I asked him how he was coping and he said, "Not bad, I've been using that powdered stuff."
The police came to my front door last night holding a picture of my wife.
They said, "Is this your wife, sir?"
Shocked, I answered, "Yes."
They said, "I'm afraid it looks like she's been hit by a bus."
I said, "I know, but she has a lovely personality."
They said, "Is this your wife, sir?"
Shocked, I answered, "Yes."
They said, "I'm afraid it looks like she's been hit by a bus."
I said, "I know, but she has a lovely personality."
Two Irishmen find a mirror in the road..
The first one picks it up and says, "Blow me, I know this face, but I can't put a name to it."
The second picks it up and says, "You daft bastard ... it's me!"
Paddy's in jail. The Guard looks in his cell and sees him hanging by his feet.
What are you doing?" he asks.
"Hanging myself," Paddy replies.
"It should be round your neck," says the guard.
"I tried that," says Paddy, "but I couldn't breathe.
Two Irishmen are hammering floorboards down in a house.
Paddy picks up a nail, realises it's upside down & throws it away.
He carries on doing this until Murphy says, "Why are you throwing
them away?"
"Because they're upside down," says Paddy.
"You daft prat," replies Murphy, "save 'em for the ceiling!!"
Paddy picks up a nail, realises it's upside down & throws it away.
He carries on doing this until Murphy says, "Why are you throwing
them away?"
"Because they're upside down," says Paddy.
"You daft prat," replies Murphy, "save 'em for the ceiling!!"
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