1/ An excellent Paul Krugman column dissecting the Republican candidates for President, and filing them into two categories......the cynical and the clueless.....
Clever, and amusing [if you aren't a Republican]........
There are two crucial things you need to understand about the current state of American politics. First, given the still dire economic situation, 2012 should be a year of Republican triumph. Second, the G.O.P. may nonetheless snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — because Herman Cain was not an accident.
Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year — and who, even as they declare their hatred of government, will balk at any hint of cuts to Social Security and Medicare (death panels!).
And you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security.
So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or totally clueless.
Mitt Romney embodies the first option. He’s not a stupid man; he knows perfectly well, to take a not incidental example, that the Obama health reform is identical in all important respects to the reform he himself introduced in Massachusetts
2/ One of the best Rachael Maddow clips I have yet seen is this one, where she looks at the influence of Fox News on politics and how they are using that power in the 2012 Presidential race. She is joined by Frank Rich towards the end of the segment.....
Well worth the time [15 mins], and very interesting......
3/ OMG - an amazing five minute video of the tsumami in Japan, taken from a hillside looking down over a town.....you see the wave literally smashing the city, people running for their lives.....
Wow......
4/ We seem to be having a spate of JFK-related books and bios, so Frank Rich looks back at the Kennedy years and sees some ominous signs of similarity with what is happening today to Obama.....
Excellent essay.....if you are at all interested in history this is for you........
Thanksgiving week is a milestone for Barack Obama, but not one that many are likely to commemorate. The president who seemed poised to inherit John F. Kennedy’s mantle—in the eyes of Kennedy’s last surviving child and brother as well as many optimistic onlookers (me included) in 2008—will now have served longer than his historical antecedent. Obama, surely, does not want to be judged against any JFK yardstick, longevity included. It’s his rotten luck that he incited such comparisons at the start by being a young and undistinguished legislator before seeking the presidency; by giving great speeches; by breaking a once-insurmountable barrier for African-Americans, as Kennedy did for Roman Catholics; and by arriving in the White House with his own glamorous wife and two adorable young children in tow. He has usually shrugged off these parallels gracefully. These days, with his honeymoon long over, it’s particularly in his interest to do so. But Obama can’t escape JFK’s long shadow, and neither can we. Another wave of Kennedyiana has arrived just in time for the holidays: three major new books, all three already best sellers. But in the second decade of the 21st century, what, exactly, are the customers buying?
5/ The ample Brit with the big voice, Adele, with "Set Fire to the Rain" live on the Graham Norton show......an excellent live performance......
6/ Did you know there is a world corruption index? There is, and the US is #24 on the list......hmmm....if Rick Scott's Florida was a country I wonder where it would be in this ranking.....
New Zealand is the least corrupt country in the world according to this table, which I can believe having just been there, and it's also the cleanest place I have ever been - there wasn't any rubbish or trash anywhere......
(CNN) -- New Zealand is perceived as the least corrupt nation on earth, and Somalia and North Korea are seen as the most corrupt, a German watchdog organization said in a report released this week.
The United States ranked 24th least corrupt on a "corruption perceptions index," the fifth-best in the Western Hemisphere. Canada ranked 10th, Barbados is 16th, the Bahamas is 21st and Chile is 22nd.
Overall, the top spots are occupied mostly by European countries, with the exception of New Zealand, Singapore at No. 5 and Australia, which is tied for eighth with Switzerland. Other nations with top rankings are Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands.
In addition to Somalia and North Korea, which are tied for last at No. 182, the bottom of the list includes Myanmar, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Sudan, Iraq, Haiti and Venezuela.
The report was prepared by the independent, nonpartisan Transparency International organization, which says it drew its conclusions based "on different assessments and business opinion surveys carried out by independent and reputable institutions."
The information used to compile the index includes "questions relating to the bribery of public officials, kickbacks in public procurement, embezzlement of public funds and questions that probe the strength and effectiveness of public-sector and anti-corruption efforts," Transparency International said.
7/ Wikileaks is still around, and has just released files on cyberspying by governments and corporations. It's pretty chilling- there are companies out there that are monitoring everything, everything on the web. Facebook, emails, cellphones, GPS's, everything......
Just in case the government needs it.......
We live digital lives now, flitting from Facebook to YouTube, checking our iPhones and BlackBerries, and chatting with our loved ones on Skype. Very few of us worry too much about tweeting our personal opinions on politics or chatting with a new social network "friend" on the other side of the world, whom we barely know and often forget in a matter of a few hours or days.
Yet all these interactions have become fodder for a new industry that secretly vacuums up the data and preserves it forever on high-end servers that hold many petabytes (a million gigabytes) of information. This industry offers new tools to search that data and reconstruct our past, and even our real-time movements via our mobile phones, in a way that could well come back to haunt us.
WikiLeaks has just released the Spy Files – a trove of almost 300 documents from these companies that shine a light into this industry. At the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, where I work, we trawled through these documents, and tracked down yet more material which our research team – Matthew Wrigley, David Pegg, Christian Jensen and Jamie Thunder – used to create an online database that will soon cover over 160 companies in some 25 countries.
It's worth spending some time browsing through this material because what this new industry offers to do is nothing short of Orwellian.
8/ Herman Cain tells Seth Meyers on SNL why he suspended his campaign....funny......
Kenan Thompson nails his impression of the pizza man.......4 minutes.......
9/ And more on the electronic tracking of us all - Android phones have software that monitor everything you do on that device and sends it to the phone company, who then sells your information to ?.....
The article also has ways to disable the software on some phones.....
You might have heard about Carrier IQ, software that comes pre-installed on millions of smartphones that has the capability to record and store your keystrokes, the text messages you send and receive, the Internet websites you visit and more. If you own a smartphone -- a BlackBerry, an iPhone, an Android, a Windows Phone, whatever -- you are probably wondering whether or not Carrier IQ is on your smartphone, and if it is, how you can remove it.
Here is a rundown of everything we know about Carrier IQ, OS by OS. For a full background on Carrier IQ, what it does and why it has so many people nervous, read my colleague Gerry Smith's thorough piece from earlier.
10/ Robyn Blumner in the St. Petersburg Times on how the Newtster is incredibly out of
touch with the American people, but so in tune with the 1%.....an evil, cynical bastard tbe
sure.....
Never mind Newt Gingrich's multiple marital infidelities which he inappositely excuses as a manifestation of his patriotism and working too hard for the country he loves. Never mind Gingrich's willingness to cut his conscience (to borrow from Lillian Hellman) to whatever conservative manifesto is au courant, such as abandoning his onetime support for an individual health mandate now that it's tinged with liberal radioactivity. Gingrich has abdicated any claim to be president for the whole of the American people because he is openly contemptuous of their economic struggles.Gingrich's statement on the Occupy movement, offered with self-satisfied gusto during the "Thanksgiving Family Forum" Republican presidential candidate debate in Des Moines, Iowa, says all you need to know about the man who wants the reins of the economy. Gingrich's prescription for reversing the nation's record-breaking long-term joblessness and the shrinking of the middle class is a little shoe-leather and deodorant soap.
"All of the Occupy movements start with the premise that we all owe them everything," Gingrich said. "They take over a public park they didn't pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn't pay for, to beg for food from places they don't want to pay for, to obstruct those who are going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park, so they can self-righteously explain that they are the paragons of virtue for which we owe everything.
http://license.icopyright.net/11/ Mount Dorans - Lauren Ritchie nails State Senator Alan Hays for his support for the
infamous Lake County hospital tax, reviled by the Tea Party AND Democrats as a blatant example of waste and corruption....hmmm......wonder if Alan Hays gets any campaign
contributions from these hospitals?
Hunt out your scissors. This is one of those columns you will want to clip out, toss into your preferred junk drawer and retrieve right around election time.
That way, you will be reminded that your state senator, Alan Hays of Umatilla, fought against your right to vote on an unnecessary hospital tax and instead proposed a measure to force you to keep paying for at least another decade.
How could any real Republican even contemplate ripping away the people's chance to vote in favor of providing continuing corporate welfare for big, private hospitals? What real Republican would support more taxes?
http://www.orlandosentinel.12/ Secret meetings to divide up the precious water from the Florida aquifer.......but you're OK with that aren't you? You trust these utilities and Water management groups to act in the best interest of the public, don't you?
No? How cynical you are........
Some of those attending the meetings questioned whether they were breaking open-meeting laws by not also inviting business representatives, farmers, environmentalists and the ordinary people who pay monthly water bills.
Others said the discreet nature of the gatherings was necessary if the water-management agencies and the water-pumping utilities were to overcome their historic distrust of each other as they took on an intricate and daunting task.
Experts fear the Floridan Aquifer is being pumped so aggressively that springs, wetlands and lakes are drying up.
The ongoing talks are an effort to develop an orderly move toward new and more-costly sources of water, such as the St. Johns River and even the Atlantic Ocean, while avoiding every-utility-for-itself competition, said Brian Wheeler, executive director of Toho Water Authority, the largest utility in Osceola County and the host of the meetings.
13/ If you saw the Swedish adaptation of the "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" you may think Hollywood couldn't improve on that great movie with Mikael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace.....but watch this eight minute trailer of the new version coming out in two weeks and you might change your mind. The 30 second ad currently on TV is good, but this trailer gives you much more depth.....
Directed by David Fincher, with Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara in the lead roles.....looks excellent! Daniel [007] Craig might not look as homely and rumpled as Nyqvist, but what the hell.....
"The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," the adaptation of the first book in the hit Stieg Larsson mystery franchise, this extended, eight minute look presents a dreary, moody vision of a modern day noir. Two-timing investigations, secret keeping and violent sexual abuse are teased in blue and grey textured snippets, promising fierce action and brutality beyond measure.
Starring Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, "Dragon Tattoo" has mostly teased quick cut sizzle reels, but from the video below, we can see that it's a whole lot more than just some violence and sex.
14/ A sickeningly gooey video for all of you sentimental types....."A Boy and His Dog"......yech.......oh all right it's kind of cute......
Todays video rerun - "So your son wants to be a ballerina"....a rude but funny German beer ad.......
Todays short drunk joke
I pointed to two old drunks sitting across the bar from us and told my friend
"That's us in 10 years".
He said "That's a mirror, dip-shit!
Todays Dear Abby joke
DEAR ABBY:
'I have always wanted to have my family history traced, but I can't afford to spend a lot of money to do it. Any suggestions?'
Sam in California.
DEAR SAM:
'Register as a Republican, and run for public office.'
Sam in California.
DEAR SAM:
'Register as a Republican, and run for public office.'
Abby
Todays "Boss" joke
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