1/ An exercise in naked power politics came this week when the head of the American Petroleum Institute threatened President Obama with "serious political consequences" if he denies the permits for the Keystone XL pipeline next month.....
Hmmmm.........wonder if he'll cave? He should think about the fact that one of the main beneficiaries of constructing the pipeline would be Koch Industries....
Good story from the Guardian UK.......
The head of the US's biggest oil and gas lobbying group said on Wednesday that the Obama administration will face serious political consequences if it rejects a Canada-to-Texas oil sands pipeline that has been opposed by environmental groups.
Jack Gerard, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, said TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline would definitely play a role in this year's national elections.
"This issue is very simple and straightforward, it's about jobs and national security," Gerard told reporters after giving a speech on the state of US energy.
"Anything less than approval or acquiescence in allowing the pipeline to go forward would be inconsistent with the vast majority of Americans," Gerard said.
The oil and gas industry says the country needs the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport 700,000 barrels per day or more of Canadian oil sands crude to US Gulf coast refineries.
But the decision on the pipeline is a difficult one for President Barack Obama. Approval would upset environmentalists – an important part of his voter base – while axing the project would upset some workers' unions, another part of his base.
With environmental groups concerned about carbon emissions from oil sands production, the administration had delayed a decision on a presidential permit for the project until 2013.
2/ A very good gail Collins column......"The March of the Non-Mitts", with her take on the Republican weeding out process.....amusing as usual......
“This is the New Hampshire primary! This is a big deal! I can’t even believe I’m standing here!” cried Jon Huntsman, who yearns to be the Rick Santorum of New Hampshire.
That’s what it’s come to. Do you think this is what Huntsman told himself when he quit his distinguished post as ambassador to China? (“Diplomacy is all well and good, but I believe I was meant for greater things. Like being the Rick Santorum of New Hampshire.”)
Santorum, of course, was the man of the hour when he sort-of-almost-nearly came in first in the Iowa caucuses on Tuesday. Actually, Mitt Romney won. (Eight Republicans can’t be wrong!) But Santorum has the momentum. His strategy of spending his entire life going from one Iowa Pizza Ranch to another paid off.
After campaigning only in New Hampshire, with 150 events in the bag, Huntsman hopes for a similar triumph. It’s the famous one-state strategy that worked so well in 2008 for Rudy Giuliani.
3/ A classic Chris Rock clip - "How not to get your ass kicked by the Police".......very funny.....4 minutes......
4/ "Forgive them Lord they know not what they do", a well known phrase, should apply to Congress for passing the recent Defense Act with the proviso that the military can declare anyone including American citizens and detain them indefinitely without trial.
Didn't hear about this? It passed over the holidays, nice and quietly, but Naomi Wolf argues it's Congress that should be fearful because this act is highly likely to be used against them......
never thought I would have to write this: but - incredibly - Congress has now passed the National Defense Appropriations Act, with Amendment 1031, which allows for the military detention of American citizens. The amendment is so loosely worded that any American citizen could be held without due process. The language of this bill can be read to assure Americans that they can challenge their detention - but most people do not realize what this means: at Guantanamo and in other military prisons, one's lawyer's calls are monitored, witnesses for one's defense are not allowed to testify, and one can be forced into nudity and isolation. Incredibly, ninety-three Senators voted to support this bill and now most of Congress: a roster of names that will live in infamy in the history of our nation, and never be expunged from the dark column of the history books.They may have supported this bill because - although it's hard to believe - they think the military will only arrest active members of Al Qaida; or maybe, less naively, they believe that 'at most', low-level dissenting figures, activists, or troublesome protesters might be subjected to military arrest. But they are forgetting something critical: history shows that those who signed this bill will soon be subject to arrest themselves.
5/ Katherine Heigel hates balls......yes, those ones......funny 3 minute clip......
6/ Fascinating essay on how the superrich have seceded from the US - they have withdrawn into enclaves and gaze down at the rest of us with contempt.....
Read this and then tell yourself he's wrong....dare you.....
But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.
I do not mean secession in terms of physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens occasionally. It means a withdrawal into enclaves, a sort of internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well-being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension – and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call, who cares about Medicare?
7/ One of the "Best Of 2011" clips from SNL - the Kardashian divorce.......3 minutes.....
Seriously- who watches the real show? Idiots of America? Iowans?
8/ Media coverage of Rick Santorum has been fairly uniform, mentioning social issues and family values along with his strong conservatism and we will be hearing a lot more in the run up to the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.
But none of them mention he is a world class dick......
Great article.......
BRENTWOOD, N.H. — Rick Santorum, papist nutter and GOP It Boy of the moment, is well and truly energized by his recently demonstrated ability to get 25,000-odd Iowans to show up and write his name on a piece of paper. The way you know this is because his stump answers are no longer stumps. They are fully blossomed trees, ripe with pious arrogance, vicious social policies camouflaged with luxurious rhetorical foliage within which the bullshit birds sing their sweet songs of "dependency" and "freedom," and low-hanging hypocrisy just so ever-ripe for the picking. No kidding. The crazy is in full flower in this one.
Begin simply with the place last night's even took place. It was an assisted-care facility/nursing home run by Rockingham County here in the southern part of New Hampshire. It has disabled residents on Medicaid and it has 200 people in its nursing-home section, almost all of whom are on Medicare. It is a government-run facility, and a very well-regarded one, which is impossible because, as we all know, the government has no business interfering with the health-care "market." The facts about this facility will become important later on. Stay with us.
You can also tell he's energized because he's back to being the legendary dick he's always been reputed to be by those who knew him best in Washington. A kid from Haverhill, Mass., got up to ask a question, and Santorum hung him out to dry for the benefit of his assembled fans from New Hampshire. While discussing President Obama's recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, which the president made because the congressional Republicans refused to give his nominees a hearing, because the congressional Republicans don't want the NLRB — a fully legitimate agency of the federal government — to work, the grandson of a coal miner sneered, "I'm suurrrre they'll be soooo friendly and hospitable to American business." His entire pitch now is an extended nyah-nyah in the general direction of whatever White House exists at the moment in his imagination.
9/ The Swedish dance music star Robyn with "Call Your Girlfriend".....unusual video in that she dances alone in a warehouse with strangely different dance moves.....quite hypnotic ......
10/ One of the enduring myths of the US culture is the"American Dream", where a poor or working class kid through hard work and perseverance can be successful.....but some recent studies have show most European countries and Canada have more social and economic mobility than us.....
Maybe the Occupy movement has it right......
But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage.
Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a Republican candidate for president, warned this fall that movement “up into the middle income is actually greater, the mobility in Europe, than it is in America.” National Review, a conservative thought leader, wrote that “most Western European and English-speaking nations have higher rates of mobility.” Even Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who argues that overall mobility remains high, recently wrote that “mobility from the very bottom up” is “where the United States lags behind.”
Liberal commentators have long emphasized class, but the attention on the right is largely new.
“It’s becoming conventional wisdom that the U.S. does not have as much mobility as most other advanced countries,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think you’ll find too many people who will argue with that.”
One reason for the mobility gap may be the depth of American poverty, which leaves poor children starting especially far behind. Another may be the unusually large premiums that American employers pay for college degrees. Since children generally follow their parents’ educational trajectory, that premium increases the importance of family background and stymies people with less schooling.
At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.
11/ I-Phone users - David Pogue tells us which of the new apps for your phone are the coolest......
For iPhone owners, 2011 brought a flood of new apps, but in many cases they struggled to outshine last year’s best. So rather than present a top 10 list that includes names from 2010, I’m including only apps that had their debuts this year. If you really want to turbocharge your device, combine these with last year’s picks. (Note that this list doesn’t include games, which will be the subject of a separate post on the Gadgetwise blog.) Like last year’s list, this one includes many free picks.
12/ Now that the farce that was the Iowa Republican caucus is over, Jon Stewart looks back at the contest and the OTT media coverage......5 amusing minutes....
By the way for this whole hoopla that obsessed the media for weeks, 5.4% of eligible Iowa voters actually took part......the 5.4% of the citizens of Iowa who were crazy or religious loonies.....
13/ One more review of the years events, this time from Tom Tomorrow.....see how many of the years stories you remember....or want to remember!
Two parts......
14/ Fascinating story about Stephen Colbert, his history and his persona on TV. And a look at how his SuperPAC is exposing how dangerous a world we are living in with unlimited money available for political races......but it's mostly the interesting story of Stephen......
Very good, quite long but an excellent read.....
There used to be just two Stephen Colberts, and they were hard enough to distinguish. The main difference was that one thought the other was an idiot. The idiot Colbert was the one who made a nice paycheck by appearing four times a week on “The Colbert Report” (pronounced in the French fashion, with both t’s silent), the extremely popular fake news show on Comedy Central. The other Colbert, the non-idiot, was the 47-year-old South Carolinian, a practicing Catholic, who lives with his wife and three children in suburban Montclair, N.J., where, according to one of his neighbors, he is “extremely normal.” One of the pleasures of attending a live taping of “The Colbert Report” is watching this Colbert transform himself into a Republican superhero.
Suburban Colbert comes out dressed in the other Colbert’s guise — dark two-button suit, tasteful Brooks Brothersy tie, rimless Rumsfeldian glasses — and answers questions from the audience for a few minutes. (The questions are usually about things like Colbert’s favorite sport or favorite character from “The Lord of the Rings,” but on one memorable occasion a young black boy asked him, “Are you my father?” Colbert hesitated a moment and then said, “Kareem?”) Then he steps onstage, gets a last dab of makeup while someone sprays his hair into an unmussable Romney-like helmet, and turns himself into his alter ego. His body straightens, as if jolted by a shock. A self-satisfied smile creeps across his mouth, and a manically fatuous gleam steals into his eyes.
Lately, though, there has emerged a third Colbert. This one is a version of the TV-show Colbert, except he doesn’t exist just on screen anymore. He exists in the real world and has begun to meddle in it. In 2008, the old Colbert briefly ran for president, entering the Democratic primary in his native state of South Carolina. (He hadn’t really switched parties, but the filing fee for the Republican primary was too expensive.) In 2010, invited by Representative Zoe Lofgren, he testified before Congress about the problem of illegal-immigrant farmworkers and remarked that “the obvious answer is for all of us to stop eating fruits and vegetables.”
But those forays into public life were spoofs, more or less. The new Colbert has crossed the line that separates a TV stunt from reality and a parody from what is being parodied. In June, after petitioning the Federal Election Commission, he started his own super PAC — a real one, with real money.
15/ Nothing too exciting in the movies this week, but TV is coming alive......here is the review of "Downton Abbey".
Season 1 was one of the best series ever......and season 2 is beginning tomorrow night [Sunday the 8th] on PBS......
Although the comments in the Times are, shall we say, lukewarm, I'm going to give Season 2 a try.....
That second, irresistible slice of chocolate cake is almost always too much. It tastes good, of course, but the pleasurable surprise has dissipated. A sated palate turns discerning — the frosting seems a little too sweet, the base too rich.
And yet somehow, there is an appetite for thirds.
The same can be said for the second season of “Downton Abbey,” which returns on Sunday to PBS with a flush of excitement and heightened expectations usually associated with “Mad Men” or even, back in the day, “Dallas.”
This elegant soap opera about masters and their servants in the twilight of the British Empire was a shameless throwback to “Upstairs Downstairs” and “The Forsyte Saga.” Season 2 is in many ways as captivating and addictive as the first, but this time around, the series comes off as a shameless throwback to itself.
The creator, Julian Fellowes, conceived “Downton Abbey” as a mini-series, but the viewer response was so enthusiastic that he and the producers decided to add more seasons. Accordingly, it’s a sequel that feels like a prolongation: plot twists are repeated, and the same devices are used in too many scenes. (Nosy servants overhear every private conversation, and nobody ever learns to close the door or talk outside.)
Todays video - Man in Sauna.....
Todays jokes for skiiers......
Prepare yourself for your ski trip......
16. Visit your local butcher and pay $80 to sit in the walk- in freezerfor a half an hour. Afterwards, burn two $100 dollar bills to warm up.
15. Soak your gloves and store them in the freezer after every use.
14. Fasten a small, wide rubber band around the top half of your headbefore you go to bed each night.
13. If you wear glasses, begin wearing them with glue smeared on the lenses.
12. Throw away five hundred dollar bills-now.
11. Find the nearest ice rink and walk across the ice 20 times in yourski boots carrying two pairs of skis, accessory bag and poles. Pretendyou are looking for your car. Sporadically drop things.
10. Place a small but angular pebble in your shoes, line them withcrushed ice, and then tighten a C-clamp around your toes.
9. Buy a new pair of gloves and immediately throw one away.
8. Secure one of your ankles to a bedpost and ask a friend to run intoyou at high speed.
7. Go to McDonald's and insist on paying $18.50 for a hamburger. Be sureyou are in the longest line.
6. Clip a lift ticket to the zipper of your jacket and ride a motorcyclefast enough to make the ticket lacerate your face.
5. Drive slowly for five hours - anywhere - as long as it's in asnowstorm and you're following an 18-wheeler.
4. Fill a blender with ice, hit the pulse button and let the spray blastyour face. Leave the ice on your face until it melts. Let it drip intoyour clothes.
3. Dress up in as many clothes as you can and then proceed to take themoff because you have to go to the bathroom.
2. Slam your thumb in a car door. Don't go see a doctor.
1. Repeat all of the above every Saturday and Sunday until it's time forthe real thing!
Now that's what I call fun!
Todays joke for people on Welfare
Welfare Check..........
A guy walked into the local welfare office to pick up his check. He
marched straight up to the counter and said,
"Hi. You know...., I just HATE drawing welfare. I'd really rather have a job."
The social worker behind the counter said, "Your timing is excellent.
We just got a job opening from a very wealthy old man who wants a
Chauffeur and bodyguard for his beautiful daughter. You'll drive his
2011 Mercedes-Benz CL and he will supply all of your clothes.
The social worker behind the counter said, "Your timing is excellent.
We just got a job opening from a very wealthy old man who wants a
Chauffeur and bodyguard for his beautiful daughter. You'll drive his
2011 Mercedes-Benz CL and he will supply all of your clothes.
"Because of the long hours, meals will be provided. You'll also be
expected to escort the daughter on her overseas holiday trips. This is
rather awkward to say, but you will also as part of your job
description have to satisfy her sexual urges. The daughter is in her
mid-20's and has a rather strong sex drive."
The guy in wide-eyed amazement said, "You're bullshittin' me!"
The social worker said: "Yeah, well ... You started it."
Todays homeless joke
A man was walking down the street when he was accosted by a particularly dirty and shabby-looking homeless man who asked him for a couple of dollars for dinner.
The man took out his wallet, extracted ten dollars and asked, "If I give you this money, will you buy some beer with it instead of dinner?"
"No, I had to stop drinking years ago," the homeless man replied.
"Will you spend this on green fees at a golf course instead of food?" the man asked.
"Are you NUTS!" replied the homeless man. "I haven't played golf in 20 years!"
"Well," said the man, "I'm not going to give you money. Instead, I'm going to take you home for a shower and a terrific dinner cooked by my wife."
The homeless man was astounded. "Won't your wife be furious with you for doing that?
The man replied, "That's okay. It's important for her to see what a man looks like after he has given up drinking and golf."
The man took out his wallet, extracted ten dollars and asked, "If I give you this money, will you buy some beer with it instead of dinner?"
"No, I had to stop drinking years ago," the homeless man replied.
"Will you spend this on green fees at a golf course instead of food?" the man asked.
"Are you NUTS!" replied the homeless man. "I haven't played golf in 20 years!"
"Well," said the man, "I'm not going to give you money. Instead, I'm going to take you home for a shower and a terrific dinner cooked by my wife."
The homeless man was astounded. "Won't your wife be furious with you for doing that?
The man replied, "That's okay. It's important for her to see what a man looks like after he has given up drinking and golf."
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