1/ Leading with another video today - a five minute clip from the Ed Show where Ed talks to former Congressman Alan Grayson, who is clear, articulate and passionate as always. This man makes a lot of sense......
He also announces he will be running in 2012.
2/ Matt Taibbi with an excellent analysis of the debt ceiling crisis, and he notes the rightward push of the Obama White House, quoting some of the same editorials you may have read here.
One expects the debt-ceiling mess to involve a lot of ostentatious chest-pounding on both sides, for despite the fact that this is a deadly serious issue – the fact that we're even considering incurring an intentional catastrophe via a default is incredible, a testament to the bottomless stupidity inherent in our political climate – this whole debate is primarily an exercise in political posturing.
That Republicans are holding up what should be a routine, if unpleasant, decision to raise the debt ceiling in order to portray themselves as the uncompromising defenders of the budget-balancing faith (a howling idiocy in itself, given what went on during the Bush years) is obvious to most rational observers. It's the obvious play for the lame-duck party entering an election year, and they're playing it, with the requisite hysteria.
But what is becoming equally obvious, to both sides, is that the Obama White House is using this same artificial calamity to pitch its own increasingly rightward tilt to voters in advance of the 2012 elections.
..............................
But if nothing else, read his last two paragraphs.......
The blindness of the DLC-era "Third Way" Democratic Party continues to be an astounding thing. For more than a decade now they have been clinging to the idea that the path to electoral success is social liberalism plus laissez-faire economics – in other words, get Wall Street and corporate America to fund your campaigns, and get minorities, pro-choice and gay marriage activists (who will always frightened into loyalty by the Tea Party/Christian loonies on the other side) to march at your rallies and vote every November. They've abandoned the unions-and-jobs platform that was the party's anchor since Roosevelt, and the latest innovations all involve peeling back their own policy legacies from the 20th century. Obama's new plan, for instance, might involve slashing Medicare and Social Security under "pressure" from the Republicans.
I simply don't believe the Democrats would really be worse off with voters if they committed themselves to putting people back to work, policing Wall Street, throwing their weight behind a real public option in health care, making hedge fund managers pay the same tax rates as ordinary people, ending the pointless wars abroad, etc. That they won't do these things because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie. This "Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me into dat dere briar patch" deal isn't going to work for much longer. Just about everybody knows now that theywant to go into that briar patch.
3/ Long but fascinating story on why not one banker has gone to jail or been held personally liable for the crimes they committed which led to the crash of 08. As you read the article you realise the Justice Department has been corrupted, and is now a wholly owned creature of the Wall Street oligarchs.....
Eric Holder [Attorney General] needs to go......
Why No One on Wall Street Is Going to Jail
By Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story, The New York Times
10 July 11
s the financial storm brewed in the summer of 2008 and institutions feared for their survival, a bit of good news bubbled through large banks and the law firms that defend them.Federal prosecutors officially adopted new guidelines about charging corporations with crimes - a softer approach that, longtime white-collar lawyers and former federal prosecutors say, helps explain the dearth of criminal cases despite a raft of inquiries into the financial crisis.
Though little noticed outside legal circles, the guidelines were welcomed by firms representing banks. The Justice Department's directive, involving a process known as deferred prosecutions, signaled "an important step away from the more aggressive prosecutorial practices seen in some cases under their predecessors," Sullivan & Cromwell, a prominent Wall Street law firm, told clients in a memo that September.
The guidelines left open a possibility other than guilty or not guilty, giving leniency often if companies investigated and reported their own wrongdoing. In return, the government could enter into agreements to delay or cancel the prosecution if the companies promised to change their behavior.
But this approach, critics maintain, runs the risk of letting companies off too easily
4/ Coming Friday the 15th of July, two days from now - the final Harry Potter, "HP and the Deathly Hallows Part 2" - in 3D. Got your tickets yet?
5/ Here's a challenging article from Robyn Blumner, who notes some of the most moral and ethical countries in the world are also the most irreligious [low attendance or membership of churches].
Great article......makes you think......
One of the reasons The Book of Mormonis the hottest ticket on Broadway is that it's a blasphemer's laugh riot. In the show's star turn I Believe, an earnest Mormon missionary sings a paean to some of the religion's more, err, interesting claims, such as that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Mo., and that God lives on a planet called Kolob. Americans don't often get the opportunity to laugh at the way religious credos sound to modern ears, and with such pent-up demand, New York audiences are lapping it up. I know I did.
But if you can't make it to Broadway anytime soon, another enjoyable diversion for nonbelievers like myself is the book Society Without God by Phil Zuckerman, a sociology professor at Pitzer College in California. Zuckerman's book is a response to those who say that the godless cannot be moral and that irreligious societies are inherently depraved.
In fact, the evidence points to quite the opposite conclusion, according to Zuckerman, whose analysis includes extensive sociological data as well as in-depth interviews with people from all social and economic strata in Denmark and Sweden — among the most irreligious places on Earth.
Americans are so used to right-wing preachers and talk show personalities disparaging atheists and agnostics that it goes unchallenged when they claim godlessness is a social menace.
If you read these final two paragraphs from her article you also have to wonder how any committed Christian who truly believes in the tenets of Jesus could possibly be a modern day 2011 Republican......
Zuckerman calls it a great "socio-religious irony" that the moral imperatives of the world's great religions, such as caring for the sick, elderly poor and infirm; practicing mercy, charity and goodwill toward others; and fostering generosity, honesty and communal concern, are best put into practice in the most irreligious nations in the world today.
Certainly compared with the United States, where a fifth of children are raised in poverty, tens of millions of people are without health insurance, and the mentally ill are often condemned to homelessness, countries like Sweden and Denmark are models of compassion.
6/ OMG another missing teenager - two of her BFF's go on Onion News' "Today Now" to ask her to come back - if you have anything to do with teenage girls, you should find this hysterically funny......
7/ Memo to DDD - time to dial down the rhetoric about Rick Scott - we know he's unpopular, but a lot of that has to do with his arrogance, bad manners and imperial style.
What we REALLY should be hating him for is what he's done to Florida, and this article from the Miami New Times spells out how he has crippled the state, and enriched his buddies at or expense......
"I've seen the mountaintop!" shouted a woman blowing a whistle and marching in combat-style boots down Okeechobee Boulevard in West Palm Beach.
"We shall overcome Rick Scott's tyranny!" added a man who followed closely behind, limping a little.
At least 50 members of the disgruntled masses gathered outside the Palm Beach County Convention Center on this brutally warm March morning, when Gov. Rick Scott was about to give a speech. Scott had just introduced some of the budget proposals that would earn him the wrath of citizens across the state. Teachers, police officers, advocates for the disabled, retirees — people from all walks of life would soon be unified in their hatred of Florida's most powerful politician.
By May, a Quinnipiac University poll put Scott's approval rating at a dismal 29 percent. This week, the Broward Police union is hosting a "Party to Leave the Party" protest against Scott in which cops who are Republicans plan to switch their voter registration and abandon the GOP en masse.
In response to this widespread discontent, Scott has urged supporters to send prewritten letters to the editors of local newspapers."Rick Scott deserves our unwavering and enthusiastic support," the letters say. He also uses recorded phone messages to tout his policy decisions, irritating voters with robocalls about pill mills and government spending cuts.
Born in Illinois, Scott , 58, was raised by a truck-driver dad and a mom who worked odd jobs. For about three years beginning when he was a toddler, his family lived in public housing — a humble beginning Scott emphasized in his campaign. By the time Scott was 10, his family had moved to a three-bedroom suburban house in Kansas City, Missouri, where he attended high school and college.
He earned a law degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and worked for a big firm in town before starting a health-care company called Columbia. He built his fortune at Columbia, eventually merging with Hospital Corporation of America and growing the enterprise to one of the world's largest health-care companies, with more than 340 hospitals and 550 health-care offices in 38 states. But the flush times ended abruptly.
8/ Music video - the hot new British sensation Adele with "Rolling in the Deep". What a set of pipes......
9/ Lake County news - Lauren Ritchie wrote a column last week about how the Republican Party of Lake Co. has been highjacked by a cadre of rich lawyers and developers......hmmm....the column is interesting for sure, but also for what Ms. Ritchie knows but can't put in the story.
A brave article.....
If Argenziano had been living in Lake County, she would have been racing to the supervisor of elections' office long ago.
For once, Lake County was leading Florida in a trend. Too bad it was such a troubling trend, one that declared its supremacy in the recent freewheeling legislative session that likely will be remembered as the most destructive in state history. Just wait till the new laws start taking effect.
There were signs several years ago that the Republican Party in Lake was being hijacked by rich guys who wanted to be even more wealthy. Take, for example, lifelong Republican Property Appraiser Ed Havill. Like Argenziano, Havill is old-fashioned — and emotional. When less-fiery Republicans looked the other way, Havill stared straight at the lawyers and developers who grabbed control and then he, too, changed his registration to no party affiliation. He has since switched back to the Republican Party to run for re-election next year.
For once, Lake County was leading Florida in a trend. Too bad it was such a troubling trend, one that declared its supremacy in the recent freewheeling legislative session that likely will be remembered as the most destructive in state history. Just wait till the new laws start taking effect.
There were signs several years ago that the Republican Party in Lake was being hijacked by rich guys who wanted to be even more wealthy. Take, for example, lifelong Republican Property Appraiser Ed Havill. Like Argenziano, Havill is old-fashioned — and emotional. When less-fiery Republicans looked the other way, Havill stared straight at the lawyers and developers who grabbed control and then he, too, changed his registration to no party affiliation. He has since switched back to the Republican Party to run for re-election next year.
10/ Michael Putney of the Miami Herald and a TV commentator, arguably one of the senior and most respected journalists in Florida, had his interview with our putrescent slimeball of a Governor cancelled because the Rickster didn't like some of the questions....
Here he writes about it.....
Questions for Gov. Rick Scott
BY MICHAEL PUTNEY
MPUTNEY@LOCAL10.COM
Gov. Rick Scott, a regular on Fox News and lately a chatterbox on friendly AM radio stations in Florida, finally agreed to sit down with me for an interview, for which I was grateful, what with my suspect “lamestream” media credentials. To kick start the conversation I even broke with journalistic tradition and sent the governor the questions in writing. Ordinarily, this is a no-no, but he’s still relatively new to doing interviews. I had hoped he wouldn’t get into that 700,000-jobs-in-seven-years riff. As Politifact noted the other day, he’s done OK with job creation though his claims are a bit exaggerated.
Maybe I was a bit too direct in my questions. On Tuesday, the governor’s communications director Steve McNamara cancelled the interview, calling some of my questions “insulting.” Too bad, there was no insult intended, just tough questions during tough times. In the interest of transparency, here they are, edited to fit this space:
11/ The "Law of Unintended Consequences" has just hit Georgia - they passed a draconian immigration law this year, and now at harvest time a lot of their produce is rotting in the fields because they can't get labour......
Your pecan pie will be expensive this year.....
By FRANK CERABINO
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Updated: 12:37 a.m. Wednesday, July 13,
Posted: 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 12,
In Georgia, crops are rotting in the fields because migrant workers aren't there to pick them.
"We don't have a workforce," said Bryan Tolar, the president of the Georgia Agribusiness Council, a group that represents about 700 farmers and agricultural businesses in that state. "Where are we supposed to get it?"
Wait a second. Isn't unemployment in Georgia as high as 14 percent in some farming communities?
"I think there are people here who can do it," Tolar said. "But we can't find people who will do it."
Georgia is what Florida could have been if immigration hysteria here had actually turned into immigration law.
Lucky for us, it was all just useful nonsense. Gov. Rick Scott, who campaigned on a pledge to bring a let's-see-yer-papers-amigo law to Florida, didn't push very hard for it once he got across the finish line. And elements of the tea-addled Florida Legislature ran into the state's agriculture lobby, which put an end to this political puffery with some last-minute adult supervision.
Migrant labor migrated
12/ We saw "Bridesmaids" with Kristen Wiig yesterday, and I have to say it was one of the funniest movies I've seen for a while. It's not a chick flick, nor is it a kids movie as it's really raunchy, but there are scenes it it that will make you fall on the floor laughing. The trailer below doesn't do it justice......so Netflix it......
13/ Speaking of Netflix - look what I got this morning. Netflix has just put my plan rates up 50%. This is corporate America for you - come up with a great idea and have it catch on, which then drives your competitors out of business so after a few years you can then screw your customers.
Not this one....I'm cancelling......
This is their actual email.....
Dear david,
We are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into two separate plans to better reflect the costs of each. Now our members have a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan, or both.
Your current $11.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs (including Blu-ray access) will be split into 2 distinct plans:
Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month
Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs (including Blu-ray), 1 out at-a-time (no streaming)
for $9.99 a month
Your price for getting both of these plans will be $17.98 a month ($7.99 + $9.99). You don't need to do anything to continue your memberships for both unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs.
These prices will start for charges on or after September 1, 2011.
You can easily change or cancel your unlimited streaming plan, unlimited DVD plan.
We realize you have many choices for home entertainment, and we thank you for your business. As always, if you have questions, please feel free to call us at 1-888-357-1516.
–The Netflix Team
We are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into two separate plans to better reflect the costs of each. Now our members have a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan, or both.
Your current $11.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs (including Blu-ray access) will be split into 2 distinct plans:
Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month
Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs (including Blu-ray), 1 out at-a-time (no streaming)
for $9.99 a month
Your price for getting both of these plans will be $17.98 a month ($7.99 + $9.99). You don't need to do anything to continue your memberships for both unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs.
These prices will start for charges on or after September 1, 2011.
You can easily change or cancel your unlimited streaming plan, unlimited DVD plan.
We realize you have many choices for home entertainment, and we thank you for your business. As always, if you have questions, please feel free to call us at 1-888-357-1516.
–The Netflix Team
Todays video - Robin Williams and his classic rant on the Scots inventing golf......careful - lot's of bad language.....
Todays guy jokes
Fall Classes for Women at
THE CITY ADULT LEARNING CENTER
REGISTRATION MUST BE COMPLETED
By Monday July 30, 2011
NOTE: DUE TO THE COMPLEXITY AND DIFFICULTY LEVEL
OF THEIR CONTENTS, CLASS SIZES WILL BE LIMITED TO 8 PARTICIPANTS MAXIMUM.
Class 1
Up in Winter, Down in Summer - How to Adjust a Thermostat
Step by Step, with Slide Presentation.
Meets 4 wks, Monday and Wednesday for 2 hrs beginning at 7:00 PM..
THE CITY ADULT LEARNING CENTER
REGISTRATION MUST BE COMPLETED
By Monday July 30, 2011
NOTE: DUE TO THE COMPLEXITY AND DIFFICULTY LEVEL
OF THEIR CONTENTS, CLASS SIZES WILL BE LIMITED TO 8 PARTICIPANTS MAXIMUM.
Class 1
Up in Winter, Down in Summer - How to Adjust a Thermostat
Step by Step, with Slide Presentation.
Meets 4 wks, Monday and Wednesday for 2 hrs beginning at 7:00 PM..
Class 2
Which Takes More Energy - Putting the Toilet Seat Down, or Bitching About It for 3 Hours?
Round Table Discussion.
Meets 2 weeks, Saturday 12:00 for 2 hours.
Class 3
Is It Possible To Drive Past a Wal-Mart Without Stopping?--Group Debate..
Meets 4 weeks, Saturday 10:00 PM for 2 hours.
Class 4
Fundamental Differences Between a Purse and a Suitcase--Pictures and Explanatory Graphics.
Meets Saturdays at 2:00 PM for 3 weeks.
Class 5
Curling Irons--Can They Levitate and Fly Into The Bathroom Cabinet?
Examples on Video.
Meets 4 weeks, Tuesday and Thursday for 2 hours beginning at 7:00 PM
Curling Irons--Can They Levitate and Fly Into The Bathroom Cabinet?
Examples on Video.
Meets 4 weeks, Tuesday and Thursday for 2 hours beginning at 7:00 PM
Class 6
How to Ask Questions During Commercials and Be Quiet During the Program
Help Line Support and Support Groups.
Meets 4 Weeks, Friday and Sunday 7:00 PM
Help Line Support and Support Groups.
Meets 4 Weeks, Friday and Sunday 7:00 PM
Class 7
Can a Bath Be Taken Without 14 Different Kinds of Soaps and Shampoos?
Open Forum.
Monday at 8:00 PM, 2 hours.
Class 8
Health Watch--They Make Medicine for PMS - USE IT!
Three nights; Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 7:00 PM for 2 hours.
Class 9
I Was Wrong and He Was Right!--Real Life Testimonials.
Tuesdays at 6:00 PM Location to be determined.
I Was Wrong and He Was Right!--Real Life Testimonials.
Tuesdays at 6:00 PM Location to be determined.
Class 10
How to Parallel Park In Less Than 20 Minutes Without an Insurance Claim.
Driving Simulations.
4 weeks, Saturday's noon, 2 hours.
How to Parallel Park In Less Than 20 Minutes Without an Insurance Claim.
Driving Simulations.
4 weeks, Saturday's noon, 2 hours.
Class 11
Learning to Live--How to Apply Brakes Without Throwing Passengers Through the Windshield.
Tuesdays at 7:00 PM, location to be determined
Class 12
How to Shop by Yourself.
Meets 4 wks, Tuesday and Thursday for 2 hours beginning at 7:00 PM.
Upon completion of any of the above courses, diplomas will be issued to the survivors.
Send this to all your guy friends for the best chuckle of their day ....
And to all your lady pals who have a sense of humour .
No comments:
Post a Comment