1/ Most interesting article in New York Magazine about the Republican establishment's deepest fear - an open debate about the class war......Mitt Romney has even said this issue should only be discussed in "quiet rooms"......
Very good article from Jonathan Chait.......
During the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, John McCain opened up a brief violent fissure by assailing George W. Bush’s plan to cut taxes. McCain began by arguing that it was more prudent to use the temporary budget surplus to reduce the national debt, but he soon began making the case in moral terms, citing the widening gap between rich and poor and insisting it was wrong to cut taxes for the rich. Right-wingers were apoplectic, and even McCain’s GOP allies were shaken. Before that moment, McCain had been a largely conventional conservative with a handful of apostasies, and his campaign little more than an irritant. His populist opposition to the Bush tax cuts marked him as a full-fledged heretic and united the party Establishment against him in full fury.
There is an echo of this episode in the current fight over Bain Capital, the heart of which is this highly effective and even movinghalf-hour propaganda film detailing the victims and costs of Romney’s business career. It is not exactly the same thing. The fight is over biography, not policy, and, in this case, the Establishment candidate actually has less right-wing policies than the insurgent. (Though Romney’s program is more right-wing than Bush’s was.) But the dynamic is that the underdog insurgents are exploiting a rift between the Republican elite, which is worshipful of the rich, and the Party’s voters, who view the rich far more suspiciously.
Romney’s official line is that a huge debate over the human impact of his tenure at Bain Capital is a wonderful thing — a debate over free enterprise that he wants to have with Obama and is sure to win. But Republican behavior suggests it’s all a bluff. Even perpetual Republican Pollyanna Fred Barnes expresses his fear today that Gingrich has opened up a deep wound in Romney’s public image. Romney allies are applying intense pressure on Gingrich to ix-nay the ain-Bay.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/
If you are going to try cross-country skiing,
start with a small country.
2/ Stephen Colbert's SuperPac has released it's first Romney attack ad....you really have to watch this a couple of times to get the subtle jabs and the humour......this ad has also been a media sensation......one minute.....
3/ Hmmmm..........the Federal Reserve has been making noise recently saying that the biggest drag on our economic recovery is the state of the housing market, which is dragging down the net worth of 90% of the people who own homes, namely the middle class....this is actually true. But instead of the obvious, which is to change the law that forbids bankruptcy judges to write down the principal of a mortgage, saving the homeowner but making the banks take a loss, the Fed is proposing .....more of the same......making taxpayers prop up the banks again.
You won't hear a coherent story about this in the mainstream media, and the financial oligarchy are counting on their silence to slide this proposal by, screwing us all again.....
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke wants US taxpayers to purchase more of the garbage loans and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that the big banks still have on their books. (Cash for trash) That’s the impetus behind the Fed’s 26-page white paper that was delivered to Congress last Wednesday. The document outlines the Fed’s plan for ‘stabilizing the housing market’, which is a phrase that Bernanke employs when he wants to provide more buy-backs, giveaways, subsidies and other corporate welfare to big finance.
“Restoring the health of the housing market is a necessary part of a broader strategy for economic recovery,” Bernanke opined in a letter to the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees.
Indeed. The housing depression continues into its 5th year with no end in sight, mainly because the people who created the crisis are still in positions of power. And, they’re still offering the same remedies, too, like handing the banks another blank check to save them from losses on their bad bets. That’s what this new “housing stabilization” boondoggle is really all about, bailing out the bankers. Here’s a summary from Bloomberg:
“Bernanke’s Fed study said “more might be done,” including eliminating entirely the reduced fees for risky loans, “more comprehensively” cutting lenders’ put-back risks; and further streamlining refinancing for other Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac borrowers. The U.S. also should consider having Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac refinance loans not already backed by the government, which would add credit risk for the companies, according to the report….” (Bloomberg)
4/ Although this is a card trick, it's more like witchcraft to me......how the hell does he do this? Under 2 minutes.....
5/ A wonderful first show from Bill Moyers, returning to TV from his retirement....it's called Moyers and Company, and airs on our local Orlando PBS station at 11am on Sundays.
In case you missed the first episode, here it is......a discussion of the wealth inequality in this country and how this is a deliberate policy unfolded over the last 30 years by the elites.....
His guests are the authors of a very important book - "Winner Take All Politics".......
For all of you interested in intelligent people having a real conversation..........it's a one hour show.......
In this show segment, Moyers & Company dives into one of the most important and controversial issues of our time: How Washington and Big Business colluded to make the super-rich richer and turn their backs on the rest of us.
Bill’s guests – Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, argue that America’s vast inequality is no accident, but in fact has been politically engineered.
How, in a nation as wealthy as America, can the economy simply stop working for people at large, while super-serving those at the very top? Through exhaustive research and analysis, the political scientists Hacker and Pierson — whom Bill regards as the “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson” of economics — detail important truths behind a 30-year economic assault against the middle class.
Who’s the culprit? “American politics did it– far more than we would have believed when we started this research,” Hacker explains. “What government has done and not done, and the politics that produced it, is really at the heart of the rise of an economy that has showered huge riches on the very, very, very well off.”
Bill considers their book the best he’s seen detailing “how politicians rewrote the rules to create a winner-take-all economy that favors the 1% over everyone else, p
6/ Now she's out of the race the question can be asked - did the media treat Michelle Bachmann unfairly? Onion News looks at the issue.....2 minutes......
7/ Why do the big banks want to get bigger? Because their size gives them more power and lobbying ability......but there is some bipartisan traction to limit the size of these megabanks, but since most of the Congress are on the payroll of the oligarchs don't hold your breath that anything will get done.......
The debate over megabanks and – in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis – how to deal with all the problems associated with “too big to fail” in the financial sector has not been easy for many politicians. The problems and potential real solutions do not map readily into the standard left vs. right divide in American politics.
The left generally wants the state to do more, and these days most of the right usually wants the state to do much less. But in this space regulators are “captured”, meaning that too many of them are effectively working to promote the interests of the big banks rather than to limit the dangers to the rest of us – so “more regulation” does not make much sense. And these big banks have a strong incentive to get even bigger – it’s their size that gives them economic and political power. If you leave these banks to their own devices, they will become even bigger and blow themselves up at greater cost to ordinary citizens (see Western Europe for details). So “no regulation” is also not an appealing proposition.
8/ Even though this movie, coming January 20th, will be of minority interest only [all guys] I've included it because of it's ultrasupercool heroine [Kate Beckinsale in her leather suit] and what looks like beaucoup well staged ultraviolence.....'Underworld Awakening in 3D".......
9/ Interesting take on the attacks on Mitt Romney focusing on Bain Capital - the reason is the attacks are coming from the right wing of the Republican party......
But the point of the article is that both Obama and Romney are essentially captured by Wall Street, and what is new is the opposition of the Republican base......
For some reason I can't give you a sample, but it's a fascinating read for anyone interested in politics.....
10/ Oh lordy - sucked in again to a "Kleenex moment".......a clip of "Korea's Got Talent" where a homeless teenager steals the show.......
11/ Jon Stewart evicerates the Newtster for his blatant racism in the South Carolina race.....but as of tonight Newt has doubled down on his "food stamp President" narrative.....
What a slimeball Gingrich is......
It's one thing if you make a less than sensitive remark on the campaign trail, but it's another thing altogether when you ask for praise instead of forgiveness afterwards.
That's just what former GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich did in New Hampshire earlier this month, when the fourth-place candidate told a town hall meeting that African Americans should ask the government for paychecks, not food stamps, and that he'd be happy to speak to that effect at an NAACP conference.
On Thursday night's "Daily Show," Jon Stewart and Wyatt Cenac had a field day analyzing Gingrich's remarks, including how irritated he was when people were outraged by them. Aside from forgetting that both white people and people with jobs need to use food stamps, Gingrich's biggest gaffe was saying that "African Americans have made many contributions to America" and that he himself has "served" with them, during his non-apology.
12/ Christina Perri with "A Thousand Years", from the soundtrack of the latest "Breaking Dawn" movie.....a romantic vampire movie, if there is such a thing.
Nice video with a big budget, and actually a decent song.....and she's not bad to look at either......
13/ Time lapse video of a 30 story Chinese hotel being built in 15 days.....not really much to say, is there......
Constructing a skyscraper once took months if not years to build. But not anymore, and certainly not inChina.
In this recently released time-lapse video, a 30-story hotel is built in just 15 days, or 360 hours.
Constructed in Dongting Lake in Hunan province, the hotel is 170,000 square feet and can withstand a 9.0 earthquake reports Treehugger.
According to the International Business Times, the prefabricated modules were put together in a factory and then placed on steel structures at the construction site.
The Chinese company behind the speedy design and building is Broad Group, a firm which previously built the 15-story Ark Hotel in Changsha, China, in just six days.
14/ "Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street, in One Brief Tale"....
Matt Taibbi with a story that will make you disgusted with the corruption of our financial system, and illustrates how the oligarchs are just laughing at us......
The best investigative journalist in the country opens our eyes again with a very good story........
If there was ever a news story that crystalized the moral dementia of modern Wall Street in one little vignette, this is it.
Newspapers in Colorado today are reporting that the elegant Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado, will be closed to the public from today through Monday at noon.
Why? Because a local squire has apparently decided to rent out all 94 rooms of the hotel for three-plus days for his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.
The hotel’s general manager, Tony DiLucia, would say only that the party was being thrown by a "nice family," but newspapers are now reporting that the Daddy of the lucky little gal is one Jeffrey Verschleiser, currently an executive with Goldman, Sachs.
At first, I couldn't remember how I knew that name. But then I looked it up and saw an explosive Atlantic magazine story, published last year, called, "E-mails Suggest Bear Stearns Cheated Clients Out Of Millions." And then I remembered that piece, and it hit me: Jeffrey Verschleiser is one of the biggest assholes in the entire world!
The story begins at Bear Stearns, where Verschleiser used to work, up until the company exploded, in large part because of him personally.
Back in the day, you see, Verschleiser headed Bear’s mortgage-backed securities operations. Toward the end of his tenure, his particular specialty began with what at the time was the usual industry-wide practice, putting together gigantic packages of crappy subprime mortgages and dumping them on unsuspecting clients
Todays video - a sensitive, intelligent and articulate guy explains why he is staring at a beautiful girl's boobs......sounds good anyway......
Todays education joke.....
STUDENT WHO OBTAINED 0% ON AN EXAM Q1. In which battle did Napoleon die? * his last battle Q2. Where was the Declaration of Independence signed? * at the bottom of the page Q3. River Ravi flows in which state? * liquid Q4. What is the main reason for divorce? * marriage Q5. What is the main reason for failure? * exams Q6. What can you never eat for breakfast? * Lunch & dinner Q7. What looks like half an apple? * The other half Q8. If you throw a red stone into the blue sea what it will become? * It will simply become wet Q9. How can a man go eight days without sleeping ? * No problem, he sleeps at night. Q10. How can you lift an elephant with one hand? * You will never find an elephant that has only one hand.. Q11. If you had three apples and four oranges in one hand and four apples and three oranges in other hand, what would you have ? * Very large hands Q12. If it took eight men ten hours to build a wall, how long would it take four men to build it? * No time at all, the wall is already built. Q13. How can u drop a raw egg onto a concrete floor without cracking it? *Any way you want, concrete floors are very hard to crack. |
Todays short joke.......
If you are going to try cross-country skiing,
start with a small country.
Todays family joke....
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