1/ It just gets worse and worse - the new Republican Governors are in the middle of an unprecedented campaign to make it more difficult to vote, with new rules and dirty tricks aimed at disenfranchising the poor and minorities....hmmmm.....are they Democratic-leaning voters? Ari Berman in Rolling Stone...... The GOP War on VotingIn a campaign supported by the Koch brothers, Republicans are working to prevent millions of Democrats from voting next yearAs the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. "What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century," says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C. 2/ The tenth anniversary of 9/11 is coming up, and the great Frank Rich reflects on the event and the aftermath....an excellent piece of journalism..... Once the Enron collapse became old news, federal regulatory agencies and law enforcement were encouraged to go fishing as the housing bubble inflated and banks manufactured toxic paper that would send America and the world into a ruinous dive rivaling bin Laden’s cruelest fantasies. It is that America—the country where rampaging greed usurped the common good in wartime, the country that crashed just as Bush fled the White House—that we live in today. It has little or no resemblance to the generous and heroic America we glimpsed on 9/11 and the days that followed. Our economy and our politics are broken. We remain in hock to jihadist oil producers as well as to China. Our longest war stretches into an infinite horizon. After watching huge expenditures of American blood and treasure install an Iran-allied “democracy” in a still-fratricidal Iraq, Americans have understandably resumed their holiday from history where it left off, turning their backs on the Arab Spring. Thanks to the killing of the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and the scattering of Al Qaeda, at least no one can say, ten years later, that the terrorists won. But if there’s anything certain about the new decade ahead, it’s that sooner or later we will have to address the question of exactly who did. 3/ Marco Rubio, Florida's pathetic little Tea Party Senator, is using Ed Schultz from MSNBC as part of his fundraising efforts......so Ed responded Thursday night..... I occasionally watch the "Ed Show" and this is Ed at his best - passionate, human, logical and actually quite angry. One of the best TV anchor clips for a while.......excellent and recommended.....about 13 minutes of great TV.... Bonus - he has a few minutes with Alan Grayson at the end, who is succinct and quotable as always....... 4/ A DDD favourite - BT with "The Emergency".........love this one......crank it up and watch it in 1080.....4 minutes..... 5/ This is interesting - I don't follow college football so this commentary by Matt Taibbi on the University of Miami scandal was news to me....and the corruption and moral hazard of the college game is just another sign of our disintegrating society..... The reason they spend so much time at practice instead of in the library is because the amounts of money now involved have skewed the priorities of the universities. College sports has become such a huge business that coaches have to drive their kids hard to be competitive. The same corporate ruthlessness that drives management in any other big industry drives coaching staffs in college sports. If your second-string linebacker is spending his weeknights studying botany instead of his blitz package, that doesn’t mean he’s a good kid who does what his parents tell him. It means he’s an unreliable worker. Coaches with multi-million-dollar salaries won’t hesitate to cut or discipline a player whose iffy priorities imperil his chance at a contract extension. So playing college sports is not a unique “student-athlete experience.” It’s a job like any other job. Just like in any other corporate job, you go to work every day for a stress-sick executive who needs you to bust ass 24 hours a day to save his neck and stave off his aneurysm. Unlike any other job, though, you don’t get paid, because the company you work for, the NCAA, has cleverly designed a series of pompous rules making it “illegal” for you to be compensated. In order to preserve this bottomless well of unpaid labor (poor kids, both black and white, coming from the ghettoes and from busted country towns in West Texas or the Ozarks, etc.), the league has created and carefully nurtured the myth of “amateur status,” essentially arguing that the 200-300 players they deliver to the NFL draft every spring must be economic virgins at the moment they sign their first NFL contracts, or else all moral hell will break loose. 6/ Incredible video from the Cirque de Soleil - the "Wheel of Death" - not sure which show it's from but I would like to see it - so talented.... And don't worry, noone dies in it.....4 minutes..... 7/ So - if you were within 100 miles of the path did you board up your home for Hurricane Irene? Were you hypnotised by the relentless non-stop "killer storm" coverage? Did you call relatives who were going to be hit to make sure they were OK? They got you! The media machine made you crazy with fear.....again...... It was raining in Manhattan on Sunday morning, and the dogged correspondents in their brightly colored windbreakers were getting wet. But the apocalypse that cable television had been trumpeting had failed to materialize. And at 9 a.m., you could almost hear the air come out of the media’s hot-air balloon of constant coverage when Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm.  Not everyone was willing to accept this turn of events. When the Weather Channel’s Brian Norcross told MSNBC that forecasters had been expecting the first hurricane to make landfall in New York City since 1893—“and it didn’t happen”—anchor Alex Witt was openly skeptical. “Really, Brian?” she asked. Hadn’t Irene technically still been a hurricane when it came ashore in New York an hour earlier? “Can’t we still go with that?” No, Norcross said. 8/ The wonderful Tom Tomorrow on the Republican Presidential race...... 9/ One for the ladies....and if there are any abortion loonies still on the DDD list, for you too.... One of the quiet choices for women with insurance taking fertility drugs is to abort multiple foetuses to end up with one baby....i.e. if a woman takes a fertility drug and conceives twins, many are choosing to remove one of the twins. Since this was a new one for me, I found this article fascinating.... It's also interesting that in all the controversy over abortion I have never heard this mentioned. But a cynical view of why this issue is so under the radar is that the abortion wars are over procedures for poor women, not middle class Republican ladies with some available funds for fertility drugs..... Smell hypocrisy yet? As Jenny lay on the obstetrician’s examination table, she was grateful that the ultrasound tech had turned off the overhead screen. She didn’t want to see the two shadows floating inside her. Since making her decision, she had tried hard not to think about them, though she could often think of little else. She was 45 and pregnant after six years of fertility bills, ovulation injections, donor eggs and disappointment — and yet here she was, 14 weeks into her pregnancy, choosing to extinguish one of two healthy fetuses, almost as if having half an abortion. As the doctor inserted the needle into Jenny’s abdomen, aiming at one of the fetuses, Jenny tried not to flinch, caught between intense relief and intense guilt. 10/ Interesting video about alien spaceship sightings in Norway......although the clip shows earnest Norwegian scientists and footage from their cameras of alleged ships,, basically lights moving in the sky sometimes extremely fast, I'm not fully convinced. Why would aliens advanced enough to travel intergalactically be interested in a remote, obscure, backward planet like this one? If they landed in Florida and said "take me to your leader" they would be meeting Rick Scott......just boggles the mind, doesn't it..... 11/ Just when you think the insanity of our Florida Legislature can't get any worse, they surprise us all again. The city of Groveland, Florida [Lake County!!] had to rescind it's law about firing weapons in the air because the NRA lobbied, the Legislature passed, and the Governor signed a bill disallowing cities restricting anything to do with guns.... Insane.....Fred Grimm from the Miami Herald...... In My OpinionWhatever NRA wants, it getsBY FRED GRIMMFGRIMM@MIAMIHERALD.COMYou might not have figured sleepy little Groveland, Fla., to be a hotbed of pointy-headed-liberal anti-gun predilections, with local laws restricting patriotic Americans’ God-given right to pack heat anywhere and anyhow they the damn well see fit. The city, with about 7,000 residents, just kind of pops out of the citrus groves up in Lake County, fairly oozing with small-town conservative American values. But back in January 2010, the Groveland city council trampled all over the Second Amendment, passing a city ordinance that outlawed celebratory gunshots into the heavens. The council wanted to make city law compatible with the law of gravity. "What goes up, comes down," police Capt. Eddie McConnell told the council, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Capt. McConnell reminded the city fathers that a bullet shot into the heavens descends at 700 feet per second, with enough velocity to put a fair size hole in the skull of some hapless innocent caught outside without his Kevlar helmet. Besides, McConnell added, Groveland’s supposed to be a bird sanctuary, a designation not so compatible with trigger happy gunmen letting loose with random bursts of flying lead. The new ordinance carried penalties of up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. Three weeks ago, Groveland rescinded the ordinance. No choice. Under Florida’s latest bizarre anything-the-NRA-wants-the- Today's video - a really, really funny clip from the Carol Burnett show with Harvey Korman....."No Frills Airline". Waaaaaaay ahead of it's time.....about 8 minutes..... Washing Dishes with Coldwater: Can Cold Water Clean Dishes? This is for all the germ conscious folks that worry about using cold water to do your washing up. John went to visit his 90 year old grandfather in a very secluded, rural area of Florida. After spending a great evening chatting the night away, the next morning John's grandfather prepared breakfast of bacon, eggs and toast. However, John noticed a film like substance on his plate and questioned his grandfather asking, ' Are these plates clean?' His grandfather replied, 'They're as clean as cold water can get em. Just you go ahead and finish your meal, Sonny!' For lunch the old man made hamburgers. Again, John was concerned about the plates, as his appeared to have tiny specks around the edge that looked like dried egg and asked, ' Are you sure these plates are clean?' Without looking up the old man said, 'I told you before, Sonny, those dishes are as clean as cold water can get them. Now don't you fret, I don't want to hear another word about it!' Later that afternoon, John was on his way to a nearby town and as he was leaving, his grandfather's dog started to growl, and wouldn't let him pass. John yelled and said, 'Grandfather, your dog won't let me get to my car'. Without diverting his attention from the football game he was watching on TV,the old man shouted! 'Coldwater, go lay down now, you hear me!' |
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Davids Daily Dose - Sunday September 4th
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