1/ A fascinating, frightening story about how one oligarch in North Carolina has changed the state's political map from light blue [Obama won the state in 08] to red in four years. With lots of money and ruthless focus Art Pope, owner of a chain of retail stores, has broken the Democratic Party's hold on North Carolina and is using the Republican majorities to suppress voting and all of the other quasi-legal measures to keep the state bright red.
This is the future - how tens and hundreds of millions of dollars and one individual with buckets of money will change our lives....thanks to the Supreme Court. This article is how it can be done, with help from the Koch Brothers funded think tanks, to smash once and for all the middle class in America.
In the spring of 2010, the conservative political strategist Ed Gillespie flew from Washington, D.C., to Raleigh, North Carolina, to spend a day laying the groundwork for REDMAP, a new project aimed at engineering a Republican takeover of state legislatures. Gillespie hoped to help his party get control of statehouses where congressional redistricting was pending, thereby leveraging victories in cheap local races into a means of shifting the balance of power in Washington. It was an ingenious plan, and Gillespie is a skilled tactician—he once ran the Republican National Committee—but REDMAP seemed like a long shot in North Carolina. Barack Obama carried the state in 2008 and remained popular. The Republicans hadn’t controlled both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly for more than a century. (“Not since General Sherman,” a state politico joked to me.) That day in Raleigh, though, Gillespie had lunch with an ideal ally: James Arthur (Art) Pope, the chairman and C.E.O. of Variety Wholesalers, a discount-store conglomerate. The Raleigh News and Observer had called Pope, a conservative multimillionaire, the Knight of the Right. The REDMAP project offered Pope a new way to spend his money.
That fall, in the remote western corner of the state, John Snow, a retired Democratic judge who had represented the district in the State Senate for three terms, found himself subjected to one political attack after another. Snow, who often voted with the Republicans, was considered one of the most conservative Democrats in the General Assembly, and his record reflected the views of his constituents. His Republican opponent, Jim Davis—an orthodontist loosely allied with the Tea Party—had minimal political experience, and Snow, a former college football star, was expected to be reëlected easily. Yet somehow Davis seemed to have almost unlimited money with which to assail Snow.
2/ A wonderful clip of a Fox News producer for the Greta van Susteren show looking for a "stupid" sound bite from one of the demonstrators in the New York Wall Street protests, and getting more than he bargained for from a very articulate young man.....needless to say this interview has not aired.....3 great minutes.....
With smart young people like this, there's hope.....
3/ One of the best titles to a column ever....."How did the robot end up with my job?"
Thomas Friedman makes an excellent point - corporations are using technology more and more to cut their costs, save money and use fewer people.....and those jobs aren't coming back.....
I’VE done a lot of television book interviews lately, and I continue to be struck at what a difference there is in the technology in just a few years’ time.
Here is a typical evening at a major cable TV network: arrive at Washington studio and be asked to sign in by a contract security guard. Be met by either a young employee who appears to still be in college or an older person who seems to have hung on with tenure. Have your nose powdered by that person. Have your microphone attached by that person. Be positioned in the studio chair by that person, and then look directly into a robotic camera being manipulated by someone in a control room in New York and speak to whoever the host is wherever he or she is. That’s it: one employee, a robot and you.
Think of how many jobs — makeup artist, receptionist, camera person, producer-director — have been collapsed into one. I raise this point because there is no doubt that the main reason for our 9.1 percent unemployment rate is the steep drop in aggregate demand in the Great Recession. But it is not the only reason. “The Great Recession” is also coinciding with — and driving — “The Great Inflection.”
4/ A clip from a movie from the 70's or 80's I don't know the title of [help, alert readers!], but it's a violent reminder of why you shouldn't tailgate....
Bad language and ultraviolence......3 minutes.....
5/ Sometimes the only way we ever find our about what evil corporations like Koch Industries are up to is when they get sued.....here are a number of cases involving Koch Industries and their foreign subsidiaries.....
This is from Bloomberg News - the last 2/3 of the article is all backup and detail, so you will get the sense of the story from the first few paragraphs.
No doubt at all this is the tip of the iceberg....the Kochs, being major oligarchs in the US, can suppress any bad news here....
In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.
“I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova- Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.”
She immediately notified her supervisors in the U.S. A week later, Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries dispatched an investigative team to look into her findings, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue.
By September of that year, the researchers had found evidence of improper payments to secure contracts in six countries dating back to 2002, authorized by the business director of the company’s Koch-Glitsch affiliate in France.
“Those activities constitute violations of criminal law,” Koch Industries wrote in a Dec. 8, 2008, letter giving details of its findings. The letter was made public in a civil court ruling in France in September 2010; the document has never before been reported by the media.
Egorova-Farines wasn’t rewarded for bringing the illicit payments to the company’s attention. Her superiors removed her from the inquiry in August 2008 and fired her in June 2009, calling her incompetent, even after Koch’s investigators substantiated her findings. She sued Koch-Glitsch in France for wrongful termination.
6/ A good Jon Stewart, and he and Wyatt Cenac take on the Rick Perry scandal about his hunting lodge with it's unfortunate name.....3 minutes and 4 minutes....
Jon Stewart and senior correspondent Wyatt Cenac spent a good chunk of Monday night's "Daily Show" mocking Rick Perry, but not for the usual reasons. Aside from his execution record and scattered debate performances, Stewart found new material in a recent story about the Texas Governor on the front page of The Washington Post.
It turns out that Perry's family hunting camp had a racially insensitive name written on a rock at its entrance for years, despite Perry's claims that it was painted over immediately after it came into his family's possession.
It turns out that Perry's family hunting camp had a racially insensitive name written on a rock at its entrance for years, despite Perry's claims that it was painted over immediately after it came into his family's possession.
7/ This is one of my favourite websites, Awkward Family Photos, and here is a sample gallery of amusing wedding pictures with great captions....
Some of the best (read: most awkward) family photos are captured at weddings. We had the chance to scour the archives of AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com to bring you the most uncomfortable, the most bizarre, the most eyebrow-raising wedding photos we could find, which we have collected here, along with the original AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com captions. Click through the slideshow below to see our picks!
8/ Fascinating story from Will Bunch that argues the Tea Party has largely disappeared, but it's philosophy and tenets have been folded into the Republican mainstream, driving the once reasonable alternative party way off to the fringe of craziness.
Interesting stuff.....
You could make the argument that the Tea Party movement is the most potent force in American politics today. After all, the evidence is everywhere -- especially in Washington, where Republican lawmakers pushed the previously-unheard-of, tea-flavored notion that disaster aid for hurricane victims can only be paid for by cutting social programs. That was advocated by the same Tea Party faction, swept into office last fall, that has scuttled any talk that higher taxes -- even on millionaires and billionaires who thrived in an era of working-class decimation -- could ever be part of the Beltway's obsession with debt reduction. From making support for generally accepted global warming science melt faster than an Arctic glacier, to folks cheering the death penalty and then booing a gay solider serving in Iraq at GOP presidential debates, the anti-government, anti-science, anti-knowledge 26 Percenters of the Tea Party Movement have been the angry tail wagging the confused dog of American politics for the last 30 months. Right?
Yes, you could make that argument.
But here's the weird thing -- if the Tea Party is really such a powerhouse of political influence... where has it been recently?
9/ The wonderful Adele with 'Rolling in the Deep".....she is not only one of the hottest performers on the charts, she has the voice and presence to become one of the best singers in the world....if she's lucky......
A spine tingling moment when she let's loose about the one minute mark.....
10/ Nobody has a pension any more, right?
Well some do - the senior management at major corporations who have plundered rank and file pensions for decades to their own benefit.....it's all cleverly and legally done, and so complex noone even knows the full extent of the theft.
Here is an excerpt from a new book......
If I was paranoid I'd say this was part of the master plan to impoverish the middle class........
In December 2010, General Electric held its Annual Outlook Investor Meeting at Rockefeller Center in New York City. At the meeting, chief executive Jeffrey Immelt stood on the Saturday Night Live stage and gave the gathered analysts and shareholders a rundown on the global conglomerate’s health. But in contrast to the iconic comedy show that is filmed at Rock Center each week, Immelt’s tone was solemn. Like many other CEOs at large companies, Immelt pointed out that his firm’s pension plan was an ongoing problem. The “pension has been a drag for a decade,” he said, and it would cause the company to lose 13 cents per share the next year. Regretfully, to rein in costs, GE was going to close the pension plan to new employees.
The audience had every reason to believe him. An escalating chorus of bloggers, pundits, talk show hosts, and media stories bemoan the burgeoning pension-and-retirement crisis in America, and GE was just the latest of hundreds of companies, from IBM to Verizon, that have slashed pensions and medical benefits for millions of American retirees. To justify these cuts, companies complain they’re victims of a “perfect storm” of uncontrollable economic forces—an aging workforce, entitled retirees, a stock market debacle, and an outmoded pension system that cripples their chances of competing against pensionless competitors and companies overseas.
What Immelt didn’t mention was that, far from being a burden, GE’s pension and retiree plans had contributed billions of dollars to the company’s bottom line over the past decade and a half, and were responsible for a chunk of the earnings that the executives had taken credit for. Nor were these retirement programs—even with GE’s 230,000 retirees—bleeding the company of cash. In fact, GE hadn’t contributed a cent to the workers’ pension plans since 1987 but still had enough money to cover all the current and future retirees.
And yet, despite all this, Immelt’s assessment wasn’t entirely inaccurate. The company did indeed have another pension plan that really was a burden: the one for GE executives. And unlike the pension plans for a quarter of a million workers and retirees, the executive pensions, with a $4.4 billion obligation, have always been a drag on earnings and have always drained cash from company coffers: more than $573 million over the past three years alone.
11/ Here's a video of our times - a visual representation of the effectiveness of our education system and the dumbing down of America, in all 50 states.
If this doesn't fill you with despair about the future of this country, nothing will.
All 51 candidates for the Miss USA contest were asked "Should evolution be taught in schools?"
Their answers are frightening, because these are all young women who presumably went through our school systems and most [not all, but most] of whom know nothing about science. The majority believe whether or not to believe in science is a "choice" or an "option"......
Mind you if you are as beautiful as these ladies you cruise through school on your looks.....but even so.....eeeeek.......14 minutes......
12/ Following on to that story, all of the Miss USA candidates should definitely watch the History Channel tonight - "The History Of The World In Two Hours".....
Ladies, the world was created billions of years ago, not 8000........
Dream and reality meet on Thursday night on History in “History of the World in Two Hours,” a spunky recap of what’s been going on since the Big Bang that really does, by the end, feel like everything you need to know about history. No analysis of troop movements in century-old battles here. No who cut off which wife’s head in what European monarchy. Just the very-big-picture stuff: creation of complex elements; continental drift; fire; human migration; industrialization. And — here’s the important part — how they all fit together.
“More than 12 billion years ago stars are already forming the elements that will spur the Iron Age,” the narration says about the young universe. The history here may be compact, but it doesn’t feel dumbed-down; this little program — first seen on Sunday on History’s sister channel, H2 — might also qualify as almost everything you need to know about physics, geology, paleontology and a few other subjects.
“Within a fraction of a second the Big Bang creates all the energy that will ever exist,” we’re told. Everything that has come after that formative explosion has been a variation on the theme of finding and using that energy, whether the entity doing the finding is a coal-mining company or a primitive plant. Bringing matter and energy together is what has spawned bursts of innovation, whether we’re talking about matter slamming together to form complex atoms or humans taking up residence near a water source and trading ideas.
13/ Much has been made of the audience applause at the Republican debates for Rick Perry's execution record, and the young man dying for lack of health insurance, but as this article points out we all have a limited capability for compassion and some people have reached the burnout stage and cannot cope with other people's problems. We've definitely reached that point with Haiti, Somalia and the other disaster areas around the world that never seem to get better.....
ABOUT the only thing tanking faster than consumer confidence and the Greek economy would be the global compassion index, if such a measure existed.
Consider just a few recent news items: Americans are balking at extending unemployment benefits, and even disaster relief was in doubt for a time last week in another of Washington’s budget skirmishes; Europeans are cutting payments to pensioners; and “there’s no mood for intervention” to avert famine in Somalia, according to one diplomat.
At a recent Republican presidential debate, the audience erupted into cheersupon hearing Texas’s nation-leading rate of executions.
Behind such sentiments lie genuine concerns, be they for law and order or personal responsibility, not to mention limited resources and a struggling economy. After all, a lowering tide grounds a lot of rescue boats, literally and psychologically.
Yet psychologists and primatologists have been arguing for years that compassion is an evolved instinct, rooted in the brain’s circuitry. In a new book,“The Better Angels of Our Nature,” the psychologist Steven Pinker calls empathy “the latest fashion in human nature.” Chimpanzees show evidence of compassion, as do some monkeys; even mice seem to feel the pain of close peers. But if current trends continue, rats might become a more appropriate subject of study.
Are people today — are societies — really becoming somehow more callous?
14/ Excellent Robyn Blumner column from the St. Pete Times, and she argues the right's vehement opposition to any government involvement in stimulating growth is because they want the economy to fail, for political reasons.....
A thoughtful article....
The Obama administration's debacle with Solyndra was not its brightest moment. The California solar panel maker went belly up after $535 million in government loans were sunk into the venture. The administration allowed aggressive company lobbyists and its desire to push stimulus funds out the door — particularly to jump-start innovations in solar energy — to trump sober judgment about the plant's prospects.
But this idea, currently being jawboned by conservative politicians and commentators, that Solyndra's demise demonstrates that government should not be "picking winners" because the marketplace does a better job, is hokum.
How can anyone suggest that the market is a canny judge of viable businesses after our nation's near financial collapse? Most of Wall Street's titans didn't seem to know or care that their companies' portfolios were crowded with nearly worthless mortgage-backed securities and collateral debt obligations. Or that they were peddling garbage to investors.
Todays videos.....
Two SNL parodies of commercials.......very funny.....1 minute each......
1/ Why have 12 lame periods a year when you can have just one, extremely violent, psychologically damaging menstruation?
2/ When it comes to corn syrup, you can either trust science or stay-at-home-mom Sheila from down the street who's having wine at 10 a.m.
Todays pirate joke
A pirate walked into a bar, and the bartender said, "Hey, I haven't seen you in a while. What happened? You look terrible."
"What do you mean?" said the pirate, "I feel fine."
"What about the wooden leg? You didn't have that before."
"Well," said the pirate, "We were in a battle, and I got hit with a cannon ball, but I'm fine now."
The bartender replied, "Well, OK, but what about that hook? What happened to your hand?"
The pirate explained, "We were in another battle. I boarded a ship and got into a sword fight. My hand was cut off. I got fitted with a hook but I'm fine, really."
"What about that eye patch?"
"Oh," said the pirate, "One day we were at sea, and a flock of birds flew over. I looked up, and one of them shit in my eye."
"You're kidding," said the bartender. "You couldn't lose an eye just from bird shit."
"It was my first day with the hook."
Todays quickies
My neighbor knocked on my door at 2:30 am this morning, can you believe that..... 2:30am?!
Luckily for him I was still up playing my Bagpipes.
Luckily for him I was still up playing my Bagpipes.
I saw a poor old lady slip and fall on the ice!! At least I presume she was poor - she only had $1.20 in her purse.
My girlfriend thinks that I'm a stalker. Well, she's not exactly my girlfriend yet.
Went for my routine check up today and everything seemed to be going fine until he stuck his index finger up my butt!
Do you think I should change dentists?
Do you think I should change dentists?
A wife says to her husband you're always pushing me around and talking behind my back.
He says what do you expect? You're in a wheel chair.
He says what do you expect? You're in a wheel chair.
I was explaining to my wife last night that when you die you get reincarnated but must come back as a different creature. She said she would like to come back as a cow.
I said, "You're obviously not listening. "
I said, "You're obviously not listening. "
The wife has been missing a week now. Police said to prepare for the worst.
So I have been to the thrift shop trying to get all her clothes back.
So I have been to the thrift shop trying to get all her clothes back.
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