1/ Last week we had a blog by Robert Reich that put forward the idea of an Obama/Clinton ticket for the 2012 election - this Sunday we had a column in the New York Times by Bill Keller, the ex-editor of the paper, with the details of how this might work and details of the personalities and why it might not happen.......
An idea floated in a blog is one thing - a piece in the Sunday Times is heavy.......
My personal opinion - Go Hillary!!! Take it......
THE beginning of a new year is a time for resolutions, and Hillary Clinton’s admirers are already busily, lovingly resolving on her behalf. On one sideline, her friends tell me that after a few years of hyperactive globetrotting what she really needs is to put her feet up and dictate another volume of her memoirs while nagging Chelsea to deliver grandchildren. (“She’s tired; she needs some time off,” her husband told ABC.) At the other extreme, a couple of Democratic consultants, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, propose to draft her right now as the 2012 Democratic presidential candidate, whether she likes it or not. (“Not only is Mrs. Clinton better positioned to win in 2012 than Mr. Obama, but she is better positioned to govern if she does,” they wrote in The Wall Street Journal.) Other helpful devotees have noticed that Brown University is looking for a new president, or have imagined her creating a clone of the Clinton Global Initiative focused on empowering women. Or maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg will decide to put her feet up, opening a seat on the Supreme Court.
The right choice is none of the above.
Hillary Clinton is 64 years old, with a Calvinist work ethic, the stamina of an Olympian, an E.Q. to match her I.Q., and the political instincts of a Clinton. She has an impressive empathic ability — invaluable in politics or statecraft — to imagine how the world looks to an ally or adversary. She listens, and she learns from her mistakes. She was a perfectly plausible president four years ago, and that was before she demonstrated her gifts as a diplomatic snake-charmer. (Never mind Pakistan and Libya, I’m talking about the Obama White House.) She is,says Gallup, the most admired woman in America for the 10th year in a row, laps ahead of, in order, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin and Condoleezza Rice; her approval rating of 64 percentis the highest of any political figure in the country.
2/ A funny Jon Stewart, nailing the political races for using class warfare and blaming Obama, then attacking Romney using class warfare.....go figure......4 minutes......
3/ We in the Western world believe Japan was a basket case economically in the 90's, and hasn't fully recovered from their 'lost decade"......but it's a myth. Most interesting story with the truth of how the Japanese economy is really doing.....and it's quite nicely thank you......
Another example of the failure of our media to truly inform us, and this time it's the business pages.....
DESPITE some small signs of optimism about the United States economy, unemployment is still high, and the country seems stalled.
Time and again, Americans are told to look to Japan as a warning of what the country might become if the right path is not followed, although there is intense disagreement about what that path might be. Here, for instance, is how the CNN analyst David Gergen has described Japan: “It’s now a very demoralized country and it has really been set back.”
But that presentation of Japan is a myth. By many measures, the Japanese economy has done very well during the so-called lost decades, which started with a stock market crash in January 1990. By some of the most important measures, it has done a lot better than the United States.
Japan has succeeded in delivering an increasingly affluent lifestyle to its people despite the financial crash. In the fullness of time, it is likely that this era will be viewed as an outstanding success story.
How can the reality and the image be so different? And can the United States learn from Japan’s experience?
It is true that Japanese housing prices have never returned to the ludicrous highs they briefly touched in the wild final stage of the boom. Neither has the Tokyo stock market.
But the strength of Japan’s economy and its people is evident in many ways. There are a number of facts and figures that don’t quite square with Japan’s image as the laughingstock of the business pages.
4/ Occasionally DDD likes to give our readers a little moisteye video, so here is the original clip from Britains Got Talent where a nervous but cheeky Susan Boyle stunned the judges and the audience with her incredible "I Dreamed a Dream"......
Get your kleenex now.......6 minutes.....and when you watch this you'll agree Simon Cowell is truly a piece of work........
5/ Elliot Spitzer with a very interesting essay on how Obama can seize two issues that will serve him well in November.......student loan debt, and the 15% tax rate for capital gains....
Good common sense stuff......come back Elliot - all is forgiven!!!
With Mitt Romney’s almost certain win in New Hampshire next week, the race for the White House has now resolved to what was predicted almost a year ago: Mitt vs. Barack. The more extreme and entirely irrational voices of the Republican Party have nearly burned out, and the Republicans will be offering up a rather bland and opportunistic middle-of-the-roader who nonetheless has a credible record in the big leagues of private equity and as a one-term governor of Massachusetts.* Romney has successfully navigated a minefield of debates and attacks from the right without marginalizing himself so that he lost his capacity to appeal to the undecided voters who will determine the election in November. So let’s be clear: Democrats cannot easily dismiss Mitt Romney. This will be a tight race, and the economic data of the late spring and summer will help determine the emotional state of the electorate.
So how will Obama approach the contest? His good news: We are out of Iraq; Bin Laden is dead; DADT is gone; we avoided an economic cataclysm (often by doing the wrong thing) and kept the auto industry alive; the economy is beginning to create jobs (note the 200,000 private-sector jobs reported today and an unemployment rate that has dropped to 8.5 percent); and health care reform was enacted.
Yet the crisis of the middle class continues unabated; the wages in new manufacturing jobs are far below what is needed to support middle-class living; the mortgage crisis continues, depressing the middle class; poverty is increasing; social mobility is down; and there are enough storm clouds on the horizon—a European recession in particular—that Americans are extremely anxious.
6/ An SNL video about a surrogate mother for hire - "I Wanna have Your Baby".......amusing........2 minutes......
7/ The evil monster WalMart is being targeted by organised labour to make yet another attempt to try to unionise parts of the company.....and when you read this article you can see how WalMart divides and conquers it's employees so that they can resist unions and punish any staffer who dares to think about it.....
They have unlimited resourses......and they spend freely to kill unionisation.......
In October two shabby buses filled with Walmart employees stopped unannounced outside the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. As the employees filed into the building’s expansive parking lot, plainclothes private security personnel sporting sleek sunglasses and Walmart emergency response badges rushed in and swiftly corralled the employees onto a public sidewalk. Members of a new union-backed campaign to organize Walmart, the workers had come from around the country to ask Walmart’s CEO, Mike Duke, for better wages and better treatment.
The hoped-for meeting was not granted. Within minutes, a dozen Bentonville police officers rushed in to reinforce the security guards in forming a barricade between the employees and their headquarters’ front door. A labor relations representative emerged from the mostly windowless building. She announced that she would meet only with workers who carried Walmart employee discount cards in addition to their company badges and state IDs. Without discount cards, the protesting employees would be arrested.
“I didn’t come here today to go shopping, so why do I need my discount card?” said Girshriela Green, a young mother who until recently worked at Walmart in Southern California. “I feel totally disrespected. Shame on them for not having the common decency to sit down and talk to their own associates.”
This recent unrest in Arkansas—the second Bentonville action by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)–supported OUR Walmart group in a span of four months—is part of the widest effort yet to organize Walmart, the world’s largest private sector employer and the labor movement’s most intractable foe in the era of declining unionism. Over the past year, a loose coalition of labor groups has redoubled engagement with the retail giant in a series of campaigns using nontraditional organizing strategies—namely, the formation of informal groups of workers that are not union certified but attempt to assert themselves to management all the same. OUR Walmart, the largest initiative, focuses on the company’s retail stores. Another new campaign, Warehouse Workers United (WWU), focuses on logistics workers in Walmart-contracted warehouses in Southern California and is launching a lean effort to coordinate workers internationally along Walmart’s supply chain.
8/ DJ Earworm[?] has put together a very clever compilation of the top 25 hits of 2011, complete with video clips.....see how many songs you recognise.....5 minutes.......
Really good........
9/ "America's Unlevel [Playing] Field" is the title of Paul Krugman's latest column, and he examines the myth of upward mobility in this country. What determines a child's success or failure in economic terms is who his parents are and which class he were born into......
Last month President Obama gave a speech invoking the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt on behalf of progressive ideals — and Republicans were not happy. Mitt Romney, in particular, insisted that where Roosevelt believed that “government should level the playing field to create equal opportunities,” Mr. Obama believes that “government should create equal outcomes,” that we should have a society where “everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk.”
As many people were quick to point out, this portrait of the president as radical redistributionist was pure fiction. What hasn’t been as widely noted, however, is that Mr. Romney’s picture of himself as a believer in a level playing field is just as fictional. Where is the evidence that he or his party cares at all about equality of opportunity?
Let’s talk for a minute about the actual state of the playing field.
Americans are much more likely than citizens of other nations to believe that they live in a meritocracy. But this self-image is a fantasy: as areport in The Times last week pointed out, America actually stands out as the advanced country in which it matters most who your parents were, the country in which those born on one of society’s lower rungs have the least chance of climbing to the top or even to the middle.
And if you ask why America is more class-bound in practice than the rest of the Western world, a large part of the reason is that our government falls down on the job of creating equal opportunity.
The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care. It continues once children reach school age, where they encounter a system in which the affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools or, if they choose, to private schools, while less-advantaged children get a far worse education.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/ And on the same theme Nicolas Kristof writes the class problem may be caused by economic stress on children, and an unstable family under pressure produces damaged kids, doomed to failure.....
PERHAPS the most widespread peril children face isn’t guns, swimming pools or speeding cars. Rather, scientists are suggesting that it may be “toxic stress” early in life, or even before birth.
This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics is issuing a landmark warning that this toxic stress can harm children for life. I’m as skeptical as anyone of headlines from new medical studies (Coffee is good for you! Coffee is bad for you!), but that’s not what this is.
Rather, this is a “policy statement” from the premier association of pediatricians, based on two decades of scientific research. This has revolutionary implications for medicine and for how we can more effectively chip away at poverty and crime.
Toxic stress might arise from parental abuse of alcohol or drugs. It could occur in a home where children are threatened and beaten. It might derive from chronic neglect — a child cries without being cuddled. Affection seems to defuse toxic stress — keep those hugs and lullabies coming! — suggesting that the stress emerges when a child senses persistent threats but no protector.
Cues of a hostile or indifferent environment flood an infant, or even a fetus, with stress hormones like cortisol in ways that can disrupt the body’s metabolism or the architecture of the brain.
The upshot is that children are sometimes permanently undermined. Even many years later, as adults, they are more likely to suffer heart disease, obesity, diabetes and other physical ailments. They are also more likely to struggle in school, have short tempers and tangle with the law.
The crucial period seems to be from conception through early childhood. After that, the brain is less pliable and has trouble being remolded.
“You can modify behavior later, but you can’t rewire disrupted brain circuits,” notes Jack P. Shonkoff, a Harvard pediatrician who has been a leader in this field. “We’re beginning to get a pretty compelling biological model of why kids who have experienced adversity have trouble learning.”
This new research addresses an uncomfortable truth: Poverty is difficult to overcome partly because of self-destructive behaviors. Children from poor homes often shine, but others may skip school, abuse narcotics, break the law, and have trouble settling down in a marriage and a job. Then their children may replicate this pattern.
Liberals sometimes ignore these self-destructive pathologies. Conservatives sometimes rely on them to blame poverty on the poor.
The research suggests that the roots of impairment and underachievement are biologically embedded, but preventable. “This is the biology of social class disparities,” Dr. Shonkoff said. “Early experiences are literally built into our bodies.”
11/ Tom Tomorrow has the last word on class conflict.........
12/ NASA [before it was defunded by this Congress] put out a video simulation of how the Mars rover would operate......quite interesting.....4 minutes.....
13/ President Obama did a bold thing last week [woop woop] - he appointed Richard Cordray to the Consumer Protection agency in defiance of a sham Republican maneuver of keeping the Senate "in session"......about time!
This article explains the background and the White House strategy ...........
President Obama’s decision to use a recess appointment to seat Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was a no-brainer — such a no-brainer, in fact, that many ofus were racking our brains to figure out why he didn’t do it sooner. It’s an important move that brings together four important battles the Obama administration is waging:
1. Nullification. Fights between Congress and the president over presidential appointments have gone on for decades. But Senate Republicans have taken the fight to a new level by using the power to deny appointments to require changes in the laws. The Dodd–Frank financial reform established the C.F.R.B., but Wall Street hates it, and Republicans openly vowed not to confirm any director unless Obama agreed to weaken the law.
This is an entirely new use of congressional power to block appointments. The normally mild-mannered James Fallows has called this “nullification,” and Republicans have begun using it to paralyze large swaths of the government. The normal presidential recourse against hardened opposition to an executive branch nominee is to make the appointment when Congress is out of session, but Republicans closed off that avenue as well, by holding pro forma sessions year-round. If it held up, this would give Congress enormous power over the president – allowing it to unilaterally halt any agency it likes in return for any demand at all. They have likewise refused to confirm any directors at all to the National Labor Relations Board, denying the agency a quorum and essentially halting the enforcement of federal labor law.
So Obama tried the audacious and legally indeterminate move of simply declaring the pro-forma session a sham, insisting Congress really was on recess, and appointing his man. If it stands up to the likely legal challenge – the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is threatening to sue – Obama will have taken a dangerous new weapon out of Congress’s hands.
14/ Book Review - "Pity The Billionaire" by Thomas Frank, the author of the wonderful "What's the Matter With Kansas".......I listened to Diane Rehm interview him on NPR and he makes all kinds of sense in his analysis of the crash of 08 and the politics behind it......the review in both the Guardian UK [attached} and the NYTimes was excellent.......
If you are interested in politics this is a good book to get.......
Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right by Thomas Frank – review
Its organisers, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, exhorted their followers at the "Rally to Restore Sanity" to wear "I'm With Reasonable" T-shirts – ironically, of course – and set aside political differences in the interests of getting on with their neighbours. Despite the subsequent Occupy Wall Street movement, the pattern Stewart and Colbert set has held. Genteel liberals have allowed American conservatives to all but monopolise political fury since the banks went down. Considering what conservatives allowed financial markets to do, the fact that the right could be furious with anyone but itself is an astonishing story and one that Thomas Frank was born to cover.
Todays video - four quite funny commercials.......
Todays Scottish joke for guys
The amazing Scotsman
A salesman drove into a small town where a circus was in progress.
A sign read: 'Don't Miss Derek -The Amazing Scotsman'. The salesman bought a ticket and sat down.
There, on centre stage, was a table with three walnuts on it.
Standing next to it was an old Scotsman.
Suddenly the old man lifted his kilt, whipped out a huge willy and smashed all three walnuts with three
mighty swings!
The crowd erupted in applause as the elderly Scot was carried off on the shoulders of the crowd.
Ten years later the salesman visited the same little town and saw a faded poster for the same circus and
the same sign 'Don't Miss Derek - The Amazing Scotsman'.
He couldn't believe the old guy was still alive, much less still doing his act!
He bought a ticket. Again, the centre ring was illuminated.
This time, however, instead of walnuts, three coconuts were placed on the table.
The Scotsman stood before them, then suddenly lifted his kilt and shattered the coconuts with three swings
of his amazing member.
The crowd went wild! Flabbergasted, the salesman requested a meeting with him after the show.
'You're incredible!' he told the Scotsman. 'But I have to know something. You're older now, why
switch from walnuts to coconuts?'
'Well laddie,' said the Scot, 'Ma eyes are nae whit they used tae be.'
Todays joke for married people
After being married for 46 years, I took a careful look at my wife one day and said, "Forty six years ago we had a cheap house, a junk car, slept on a sofa bed and watched a 10-inch black and white TV, but I got to sleep every night with a hot 23-year-old girl.
Now .... I have a $500,000.00 home, a $35,000.00 car, a nice big bed and a large screen TV, but I'm sleeping with a 68-year-old woman. It seems to me that you're not holding up your side of things."
My wife is a very reasonable woman.
Now .... I have a $500,000.00 home, a $35,000.00 car, a nice big bed and a large screen TV, but I'm sleeping with a 68-year-old woman. It seems to me that you're not holding up your side of things."
My wife is a very reasonable woman.
She told me to go out and find a hot 23-year-old girl and she would make sure that I would once again be living in a cheap house, driving a junk car, sleeping on a sofa bed and watching a 10-inch black and white TV.
Aren't older women great? They really know how to solve an old guy's problems.
Aren't older women great? They really know how to solve an old guy's problems.
Another Scottish joke.....for the ladies
FEMALE COMPASSION
A man was sitting on a blanket at the beach. He had no arms and no legs.
Three women, from England, Wales and Scotland were walking past and felt sorry for the poor man.
The English woman said 'Have you ever had a hug?'
The man said 'No,' so she gave him a hug and walked on.
The Welsh woman said, 'Have you ever had a kiss?'
The man said, 'No,' so she gave him a kiss and walked on.
The Scottish woman came to him and said, 'Have you ever been fucked?'
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