1/ The debt ceiling issue has been the personification of the madness of the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, and the dipshit Eric Cantor is the poster boy for this lunacy. Rude, low class and arrogant.....
Anyway Paul Krugman comments on the situation......
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Getting to Crazy
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 14, 2011
There aren’t many positive aspects to the looming possibility of a U.S. debt default. But there has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief — of the black-humor variety — in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
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A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. “Has the G.O.P. gone insane?” they ask.
Why, yes, it has. But this isn’t something that just happened, it’s the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades. Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye.
And may I say to those suddenly agonizing over the mental health of one of our two major parties: People like you bear some responsibility for that party’s current state.
Let’s talk for a minute about what Republican leaders are rejecting.
President Obama has made it clear that he’s willing to sign on to a deficit-reduction deal that consists overwhelmingly of spending cuts, and includes draconian cuts in key social programs, up to and including a rise in the age of Medicare eligibility. These are extraordinary concessions. As The Times’s Nate Silver points out, the president has offered deals that are far to the right of what the average American voter prefers — in fact, if anything, they’re a bit to the right of what the average Republican voter prefers!
Yet Republicans are saying no. Indeed, they’re threatening to force a U.S. default, and create an economic crisis, unless they get a completely one-sided deal. And this was entirely predictable.
First of all, the modern G.O.P. fundamentally does not accept the legitimacy of a Democratic presidency — any Democratic presidency. We saw that under Bill Clinton, and we saw it again as soon as Mr. Obama took office.
As a result, Republicans are automatically against anything the president wants, even if they have supported similar proposals in the past. Mitt Romney’s health care plan became a tyrannical assault on American freedom when put in place by that man in the White House. And the same logic applies to the proposed debt deals.
Put it this way: If a Republican president had managed to extract the kind of concessions on Medicare and Social Security that Mr. Obama is offering, it would have been considered a conservative triumph. But when those concessions come attached to minor increases in revenue, and more important, when they come from a Democratic president, the proposals become unacceptable plans to tax the life out of the U.S. economy.
Beyond that, voodoo economics has taken over the G.O.P.
Supply-side voodoo — which claims that tax cuts pay for themselves and/or that any rise in taxes would lead to economic collapse — has been a powerful force within the G.O.P. ever since Ronald Reagan embraced the concept of the Laffer curve. But the voodoo used to be contained. Reagan himself enacted significant tax increases, offsetting to a considerable extent his initial cuts.
And even the administration of former President George W. Bush refrained from making extravagant claims about tax-cut magic, at least in part for fear that making such claims would raise questions about the administration’s seriousness.
Recently, however, all restraint has vanished — indeed, it has been driven out of the party. Last year Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, asserted that the Bush tax cutsactually increased revenue — a claim completely at odds with the evidence — and also declared that this was “the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.” And it’s true: even Mr. Romney, widely regarded as the most sensible of the contenders for the 2012 presidential nomination, has endorsed the view that tax cuts can actually reduce the deficit.
Which brings me to the culpability of those who are only now facing up to the G.O.P.’s craziness.
Here’s the point: those within the G.O.P. who had misgivings about the embrace of tax-cut fanaticism might have made a stronger stand if there had been any indication that such fanaticism came with a price, if outsiders had been willing to condemn those who took irresponsible positions.
But there has been no such price. Mr. Bush squandered the surplus of the late Clinton years, yet prominent pundits pretend that the two parties share equal blame for our debt problems. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, proposed a supposed deficit-reduction plan that included huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, thenreceived an award for fiscal responsibility.
So there has been no pressure on the G.O.P. to show any kind of responsibility, or even rationality — and sure enough, it has gone off the deep end. If you’re surprised, that means that you were part of the problem.
2/ And Tom Tomorrow has the debt ceiling summed up.......wonderful cartoon from the Planet Glox.....
3/ SCOTUS is shorthand for the Supreme Court, and this article takes a look at the Court and some of their recent decisions and finds some strange anomalies.....
At least two of these bastards should be impeached......
Has the Supreme Court lost faith in the American court system? That is a strange question to ask about the justices who sit at the top of the country's judicial hierarchy. But in case after case in the just-completed term, the court, usually in 5-4 decisions with the conservatives in the majority, denied access to the courts.
Consider just a few of the examples:
Consider just a few of the examples:
• The court ruled that patients who suffer devastating injuries from generic prescription drugs cannot sue the manufacturers for failing to provide adequate warnings even when drug companies making the non-generic versions of the same drugs can be sued on the same basis.
• The court held that standard clauses in consumer contracts calling for arbitration preclude consumers from joining class-action suits even when the effect almost surely would be that no individual lawsuits would be filed because the amount involved was too small.
• The court decided that employees who claim to be victims of sex discrimination cannot sue in class actions when the employer has a policy that prohibits discrimination.
• The court concluded that a man who spent 18 years in prison for a murder that he did not commit could not sue the prosecutors who hid key evidence.
• The court said that taxpayers cannot bring an action in federal court arguing that a state impermissibly established religion by giving tax credits that go almost entirely to religious schools.
• The court held that prisoners convicted in state court cannot obtain a hearing in federal court even when they have new evidence that calls into question their convictions — because of matters such as ineffective defense counsel or failure of prosecutors to turn over evidence — notwithstanding a federal statute that expressly authorizes such hearings.
One way of interpreting these decisions, and others like them, is that the conservative justices are simply pro-business and pro-prosecutor and are denying access to the courts to consumers, employees and criminal defendants. That certainly explains the rulings. But something else that is even more disturbing seems to underlie these rulings: distrust of the courts.
• The court held that standard clauses in consumer contracts calling for arbitration preclude consumers from joining class-action suits even when the effect almost surely would be that no individual lawsuits would be filed because the amount involved was too small.
• The court decided that employees who claim to be victims of sex discrimination cannot sue in class actions when the employer has a policy that prohibits discrimination.
• The court concluded that a man who spent 18 years in prison for a murder that he did not commit could not sue the prosecutors who hid key evidence.
• The court said that taxpayers cannot bring an action in federal court arguing that a state impermissibly established religion by giving tax credits that go almost entirely to religious schools.
• The court held that prisoners convicted in state court cannot obtain a hearing in federal court even when they have new evidence that calls into question their convictions — because of matters such as ineffective defense counsel or failure of prosecutors to turn over evidence — notwithstanding a federal statute that expressly authorizes such hearings.
One way of interpreting these decisions, and others like them, is that the conservative justices are simply pro-business and pro-prosecutor and are denying access to the courts to consumers, employees and criminal defendants. That certainly explains the rulings. But something else that is even more disturbing seems to underlie these rulings: distrust of the courts.
4/ The President recently proposed the tax break for executive jets be eliminated, and the right wing media screamed "class warfare"! The truth is there is class warfare, the superrich against the rest of us......
Here we go again. Democrats single out glaring examples of tax preferences or spending priorities that favor the wealthy and Republicans cry “class warfare!”
The latest round came in the wake of President Barack Obama’s calls to eliminate tax breaks for corporate jet owners. Ending special deductions for the depreciation of corporate aircraft would save roughly $3 billion over the next decade. Republicans argue — correctly — that amounts to less than half of 1 percent of the current national debt. So it was striking how quickly, and passionately, conservative pols and commentators rose to defend the subsidy.
“Dangerous!” “Full-fledged demagoguery!” cried Rush Limbaugh. The president’s “aim is for one group of Americans to hate and despise another!”
“Unprecedented class warfare!” claimed Glenn Beck. The president again showed “his sheer, unadulterated disgust for the wealthy, the successful and anyone who’s ever tried to do anything with their life here in America.”
Really? Closing a single loophole worth less than one-half of 1 percent of the national debt is all that?
The knee-jerk conservative response confirms two things. First, they know the president landed a punch. Second, they’re utterly unwilling to acknowledge how much the playing field in American life has now tilted in favor of the haves.
5/ OK Go - "This Too Shall Pass", a newer version of this amazing video.....Rube Goldberg indeed......
6/ And more on the class divide - the always excellent Matt Taibbi with an essay on the divisions in our society.....
All of this is a testament to the amazing (and rapidly expanding) cultural divide that exists in this country, where the poor and the rich seldom cross paths at all, and the rich, in particular, simply have no concept what being broke and poor really means. It is true that if you make $300,000 in America, you won't feel like you're so very rich once you get finished paying your taxes, your mortgage, your medical bills and so on.
For this reason, a lot of people who make that kind of money believe they are the modern middle class: house in the burbs, a car, a kid in college, a trip to Europe once a year, what's the big deal? They'd be right, were it not for the relative comparison -- for the fact that out there, in that thin little ithsmus between the Upper East Side and Beverly Hills, things are so fucked that public school teachers and garbagemen making $60k with benefits are being targeted with pitchfork-bearing mobs as paragons of greed and excess. Wealth, in places outside Manhattan, southern California, northern Virginia and a few other locales, is rapidly becoming defined as belonging to anyone who has any form of job security at all. Any kind of retirement plan, or better-than-minimum health coverage, is also increasingly looked at as an upper-class affectation.
That the Tea Party and their Republican allies in congress have so successfully made government workers with their New Deal benefits out to be the kulak class of modern America says a lot about the unique brand of two-way class blindness we have in this country. It's not just that the rich don't know the poor exist, and genuinely think a half a million a year is "not a lot of money," as one "compensation consultant" told the New York Times after the crash.
7/ Todays animal video - Two Dogs Eating in a Restaurant.....2 minutes of terminal cuteness......
8/ Even if you don't believe in Global Warming, Global Warming believes in you......
Farmers all over the country are under severe pressure because of the drought.....get ready for even higher food prices......
COLQUITT, Ga. — The heat and the drought are so bad in this southwest corner of Georgia that hogs can barely eat. Corn, a lucrative crop with a notorious thirst, is burning up in fields. Cotton plants are too weak to punch through soil so dry it might as well be pavement.
Multimedia
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J Pat Carter/Associated Press
FLORIDA Bruce Hooks took in the scene at Lake Mangonia in West Palm Beach last month. He said it was the worst the lake, in drought-stricken South Florida, had been in more than a decade. More Photos »
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Farmers with the money and equipment to irrigate are running wells dry in the unseasonably early and particularly brutal national drought that some say could rival the Dust Bowl days.
“It’s horrible so far,” said Mike Newberry, a Georgia farmer who is trying grow cotton, corn and peanuts on a thousand acres. “There is no description for what we’ve been through since we started planting corn in March.”
The pain has spread across 14 states, from Florida, where severe water restrictions are in place, to Arizona, where ranchers could be forced to sell off entire herds of cattle because they simply cannot feed them.
In Texas, where the drought is the worst, virtually no part of the state has been untouched. City dwellers and ranchers have been tormented by excessive heat and high winds. In the Southwest, wildfires are chewing through millions of acres.
Last month, the United States Department of Agriculture designated all 254 counties in Texas natural disaster areas, qualifying them for varying levels of federal relief. More than 30 percent of the state’s wheat fields might be lost, adding pressure to a crop in short supply globally.
Even if weather patterns shift and relief-giving rain comes, losses will surely head past $3 billion in Texas alone, state agricultural officials said.
Most troubling is that the drought, which could go down as one of the nation’s worst, has come on extra hot and extra early. It has its roots in 2010 and continued through the winter. The five months from this February to June, for example, were so dry that they shattered a Texas record set in 1917, said Don Conlee, the acting state climatologist.
Oklahoma has had only 28 percent of its normal summer rainfall, and the heat has blasted past 90 degrees for a month.
“We’ve had a two- or three-week start on what is likely to be a disastrous summer,” said Kevin Kloesel, director of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey.
The question, of course, becomes why. In a spring and summer in which weather news has been dominated by epic floods and tornadoes, it is hard to imagine that more than a quarter of the country is facing an equally daunting but very different kind of natural disaster.
From a meteorological standpoint, the answer is fairly simple. “A strong La Niña shut off the southern pipeline of moisture,” said David Miskus, who monitors drought for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The weather pattern called La Niña is an abnormal cooling of Pacific waters. It usually follows El Niño, which is an abnormal warming of those same waters.
9/ This is from Tuesday's Daily Show, but it's still relevant today because nothing of substance has changed with the debt ceiling "debate"......a very good clip from Jon Stewart.....
10/ Now THIS is biking, Harley style. How on earth does the cop do this with the huge hog......
11/ It's sometimes valuable to look from the outside how the rest of the world sees the US, and this article quotes from both a British [conservative] newspaper and an Irish one.....most interesting from the LA Times....
Op-Ed
Rutten: The end of American optimism
Two newspapers, one British and the other Irish, provide a sobering picture of the U.S.
- Share1274
- 84
By Tim Rutten
July 6, 2011
It's sometimes useful to see ourselves as others do, and reports this Independence Day weekend in a couple of English-speaking newspapers usually sympathetic to the United States are sobering.
Britain's Daily Telegraph — a conservative paper and that country's bestselling broadsheet — diagnoses us as a nation depressed, and cites polling data describing alarming percentages of Americans who expect their own economic situation to deteriorate further and that of their children to be worse still. As Toby Harnden, the paper's U.S. editor, wrote: "A country whose hallmark has always been a sense of irrepressible optimism is in the grip of unprecedented uncertainty and self-doubt. With the United States mired in three foreign wars, beaten down by an economy that shows few signs of emerging from deep recession and deeply disillusioned with President Barack Obama, his Republican challengers and Congress, the mood is dark."
Britain's Daily Telegraph — a conservative paper and that country's bestselling broadsheet — diagnoses us as a nation depressed, and cites polling data describing alarming percentages of Americans who expect their own economic situation to deteriorate further and that of their children to be worse still. As Toby Harnden, the paper's U.S. editor, wrote: "A country whose hallmark has always been a sense of irrepressible optimism is in the grip of unprecedented uncertainty and self-doubt. With the United States mired in three foreign wars, beaten down by an economy that shows few signs of emerging from deep recession and deeply disillusioned with President Barack Obama, his Republican challengers and Congress, the mood is dark."
12/ Mount Dora had a hate crime last week, as vandals defiled our synagogue being built and close to completion - here Lauren Ritchie chronicles the way the community rallied around to clean and repaint the temple. We live in a town of good people.....
And MDPD have caught the perps......
Anyone who thinks the written word has lost its power in this visual age should have been inMount Dora on Saturday morning, watching tears stream down the faces of members of a Jewish synagogue whose new building was defiled by vandals.
What a jolt to realize that someone unaccountably hates you — maybe just for using air.
What a jolt to realize that someone unaccountably hates you — maybe just for using air.
13/ It's here - Harry Potter opened yesterday, and great news - it's a really good movie according to the Times......
Childhood ends, this time forever, with tears and howls, swirls of smoke, the shock of mortality and bittersweet smiles in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” the grave, deeply satisfying final movie in the series. A pop cultural happening extraordinaire, the Potter movies took uncertain flight in 2001 with Harry, then an orphan of 11, home alone with his grotesquely unloving relatives. Times were grim, at least off screen — the first opened in November of that year — but Chris Columbus’s directorial touch was insistently light as Harry was initiated into a world alive with odd doings, strange creatures and the evil that would almost consume it.
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Here it’s Ralph Fiennes and Alan Rickman who give the master class in acting.
As Lord Voldemort, the evil wizard who could not be named for ages but has been for a while, Mr. Fiennes has been part of the mix since the fourth film (“The Goblet of Fire”). Over the course of the series, as Voldemort gathered in power and corporeality, his wrenched, Medusa-like face eventually growing a body (though oddly losing itsnose), the actor started to fill out the character with sharp, indelible gestures, a flick of the wrist, a twist of the mouth. In “Part 2” his whispering hiss of a voice slithers into ears like a snake, seducing and terrorizing. But watch Mr. Fiennes’s hands, look as they flutter, their white, spidery fingers idling with exquisite delicacy as the long nails, sharpened into perfect arrows, threaten the worst.
This is such great screen villainy it makes you regret there wasn’t more of Voldemort all along and more too of his incarnations as another gifted boy wizard, Tom Riddle. The books, fat with detail and detours into the past, gave Ms. Rowling loads of room to play. With only two or so hours of story time, the movies have been forced to sacrifice swaths of her material, and while the scripts have been largely models of adaptation — most, this one included, are by Steve Kloves — the emphasis on action (and interminable games of quidditch) was also a concession to the action-imperative of the modern blockbuster. (A deadly dull game that served as a rehearsal for war, quidditch is one Hogwarts tradition I was happy to see burn.)
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This bigness is no small thing. There are times, particularly during the enervating summer season, when it can seem as if Hollywood has forgotten how to put on a really big — and great — show. (Perhaps the studios should just hand over more blockbusters to the British: Christopher Nolan, after all, is London born.) It isn’t often in the summer that you enjoy the intense pleasure of a certain kind of old-fashioned cinema experience, the sort that sweeps you up in sheer spectacle with bigger-than-life images and yet holds you close with intimately observed characters and the details that keep your eyes and mind busy. Too often it can be hard to see the human touch amid the industrial machinery, which hasn’t been true here.
One reason the movies work is that their scale never overwhelmed the extraordinary characters, especially the wizards whose very ordinary habits, prejudices, quirks and fears made this fantastical world recognizable. Over time the special effects have grown more special, but at their finest these are so seamlessly integrated that they no longer pop off the screen (even in 3-D) and instead serve the story’s emotional realism. When you see the albino dragon in “Part 2,” you may marvel at the technical virtuosity of its creation and how the muscles on its flanks clench with palpable effort as it looks down at a cityscape much as King Kong once did. Yet what lingers is how quickly this computer-made creature becomes a character.
That dragon and Mr. Fiennes make this final Harry Potter movie soar, as do Mr. Gambon’s brief turn and Ms. Smith’s furious and then visibly delighted marshaling of an army of stone soldiers. Finally too there is Mr. Rickman, who as Snape, Harry’s longtime nemesis, lifts the movie to its expressive high point. First seen standing in a window shaped like a coffin, Snape enters gravely, a picture of death. Pale and unsmiling, his black hair framing his white face like mourning crepe, he has always suggested Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, an ominous thought with children in the vicinity. That Snape has proven worthy of that comparison is partly a tribute to Ms. Rowling, but that he has become such a brilliant screen character is due to Mr. Rickman, who helped elevate a child’s tale of good and evil into a story of human struggle.
Todays video - The dangers of changing your tires......
Todays politically incorrect jokes
In a local sports bar trivia quiz the other night, I lost by one point.
In a local sports bar trivia quiz the other night, I lost by one point.
The question was, where do women mostly have curly hair?
Apparently, it's Africa.....
One of the other questions was to name two things commonly found in cells.
It appears that Mexicans and African Americans is not the correct answer
I've heard that Apple has scrapped their plans for the new children's-oriented iPod after realizing that iTouch Kids is not a good product name.
A new Muslim clothing shop opened here, but I've been banned from it after asking to look at some bomber jackets...
You can say lots of bad things about pedophiles but at least they drive slowly past schools.....
A friend of mine has just told me he's shagging his girlfriend and her twin.
I asked, "How can you tell them apart?"
He said, "Her brother has a moustache"
Just put a deposit down on a brand new Porsche and mentioned it on FaceBook.
I said "I can't wait for the new 911 to arrive!"
Next thing I know 4000 Muslims have added me as a friend!!
Being a modest man, when I checked into my hotel on a recent trip, I said to the lady at the registration desk "I hope the porn channel in my room is disabled."
To which she replied, "No, it's regular porn, you sick bastard.”
The Red Cross knocked at my door asking if I could help towards the floods in Pakistan . I said I would love to, but my hose only reaches the bottom of the driveway.
Todays bonus Osama joke
Osama Bin Laden was living with 3 wives in one compound and never left the house for 5 years.
It is now believed that Bin Laden called the US Navy Seals himself.
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