1/ We've always had the backup plan that if it gets really, really bad here we could always move to Canada where the sensible people live - kinder, gentler Americans. No more.
As this article says the corporate oligarchy has reached into the Canadian government and purchased significant sections of it just like the US.....it's hard to imagine the travesty of the Alberta oil sands, pillaging the province's environment, happening in Canada, but it is.....
What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.
But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up theAlberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.
The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.
The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.
This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is important. It targets the center of power—global financial institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris. The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere.
2/ Bill Maher with his top ten list of movies conservatives love......very funny 2 minutes.....
3/ Mitt Romney won the Florida primary Tuesday, and the Newtster has retreated in confusion.....but the fight goes on. This horror show is going to continue for months unless Romney can give Newt a knockout punch, or Newt's backer Sheldon Adelson pulls the plug on funding Newt's SuperPac.
But when it all ends at the convention in Tampa Mitt Romney is likely to be the Republican candidate for President, which makes this Frank Rich article required reading for any of you interested in politics. Rich takes a look at Romneys record, his Bain Capital legacy and his religion and concludes that the one thing that Romney believes in is his faith, and he hides it - which makes him seem to be the plastic man to us humble folk.......he is a mask, and under it is Mormonism.
Most interesting article from the best political journalist in America.....
Back in the thick of the 2008 Republican presidential race, I asked a captain of American finance what he had made of Mitt Romney when they were young colleagues at Bain & Company. “Mitt was a nice guy, a smart businessman, and an excellent team player,” he responded without missing a beat. Then came the CEO’s one footnote, delivered with bemusement, not pique: “Still, whenever the rest of us would go out at the end of the day, we’d always find ourselves having the same conversation: None of us had any idea who this guy was.”
Here we are in 2012, and nothing has changed. What Romney’s former colleague observed of the young Mitt at close range decades ago could stand as the judgment of most Americans watching him at a cable-news remove now. That’s why his campaign has so often been on the ropes. That’s why, in a highly polarized nation, the belief that Romney is a phony may be among the very last convictions still bringing left, right, and center together. As a focus-group participant evocativelytold pollster Peter Hart in November, Romney reminded him of the “dad who’s never home.” Nonetheless, this phantom has spent most of the campaign as the “presumed” front-runner for his party’s nomination. Amazingly, this conventional wisdom held up throughout 2011, even though 75 percent of Romney’s own party was searching so frantically for an alternative that Donald Trump enjoyed a nanosecond bump in the polls.
4/ A classic video from 2009 - Lady Gaga with "Bad Romance", with it's disturbing imagery and sado-masochistic story line......love the stony guy who she likes - cool dude......
By the way this video has had 444 million hits......
5/ In contrast to Frank Rich's writing, cool, always logical and flowing, Matt Taibbi is a bombthrower, with delicious verbal abuse for his subjects, in this case Gingrich and Romney who well deserve it.
If you are interested in what happened in South Carolina primary election this is for you......and if you are a fan of Taibbi's style, he's on fire in this article.....you can tell he really loathes both of these bastards....
They may be shit for choosing a good candidate for the presidency, but say this for the Republican primaries: They're fast turning into the most luridly entertaining political spectacle of our time. In an inherently conservative, bottomlessly moneyed, scrupulously stage-managed electoral system designed to preclude chance or weirdness from playing any part in determining our political future, the unthinkable is happening: real drama. This isn't part of some clever but inscrutable master plan, put on by the hidden hands who run this country, to fool or distract the masses. This is an unscripted fuck-up of heroic dimensions, radiating downward from the highest levels of our society, playing out in real time for all of us to watch. Our oligarchy has thrown a rod.
If you're not a conservative voter with a dog in this fight, watching Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and whoever else is running for the GOP nomination this week try to hold on to front-runner status has been great slapstick, like watching a cruel experiment involving baboons, laughing gas and a forklift. No matter how many times you ring the bell, those poor animals are never going to figure out how to move that pallet of bananas – yet they keep trying, taking the sorry show from one state to the next, over and over, as if something is going to change.
The latest ape to fall off the heavy machinery is Romney, who in a single week before the South Carolina primary went from near-certain nominee to national punch line, in genuine peril of becoming one of America's all-time electoral catastrophes. The overwhelming expectation was that Romney would roll into South Carolina, kneel on the ball a few times, and run out the clock on the party's yearlong display of manic instability. Heading into South Carolina, he'd raised $32 million; none of his competitors appeared to have enough cash to keep the lights on for more than a few more weeks, let alone a whole campaign. This experienced national politician, who had run a superbly organized campaign for president in 2008, a man whose very trademark is inoffensiveness and caution, and who for the year has appeared dedicated to saying nothing in public more controversial than "God bless America," needed to hang on for only 10 or 11 more days after his decisive win in New Hampshire without completely wetting himself on television, and the nomination was his.
But he couldn't do it. Less than a week after New Hampshire, Romney committed a series of gaffes that revealed his crucial character flaw: He's a hypernervous control freak who flips out if you try digging around below the paper-thin veneer of his schlock patriotic presentation. The robotic Mormon financier looks like a walking OCD diagnosis, a trim coil of tightly wound energy with perfect coif and tie, seemingly living in permanent terror of a single hair falling out of place. For this type of anal-retentive personality, the messy chaos of South Carolina was a phobic horror. Faced with actual opposition, he lost his grip on everything.
6/ Brevard County Sheriff's chopper pursuing two subjects suspected of stealing a boat.....about 20 minutes of aerial footage at night......a little repetitive, but just like Afghanistan without the machine guns, and quite hypnotic.....the end is never in doubt, but the getting there is fascinating - especially for guys.....
7/ Mitt Romney made another gaffe last week when he said he didn't care about the poor, which he immediately tried to walk back....
Too late - Paul Krugman on why he meant what he said, and the mitt-truth just slipped out.....
If you’re an American down on your luck, Mitt Romney has a message for you: He doesn’t feel your pain. Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”
Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.
First of all, just a few days ago, Mr. Romney was denying that the very programs he now says take care of the poor actually provide any significant help. On Jan. 22, he asserted that safety-net programs — yes, he specifically used that term — have “massive overhead,” and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.”
This claim, like much of what Mr. Romney says, was completely false: U.S. poverty programs have nothing like as much bureaucracy and overhead as, say, private health insurance companies. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, between 90 percent and 99 percent of the dollars allocated to safety-net programs do, in fact, reach the beneficiaries. But the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for their welfare?
Also, given this whopper about how safety-net programs actually work, how credible was Mr. Romney’s assertion, after expressing his lack of concern about the poor, that if the safety net needs a repair, “I’ll fix it”?
8/ And continuing on with the "screw the poor" remarks, here's the Daily Show's take on the issue......with a very funny piece from John Oliver and Jason Jones.....excellent.....
9/ No wonder the mortgage market is so screwed up, with loans very difficult to get with double the paperwork and endless hassles. Freddie Mac has been betting against homeowners trying to refinance, so that if they couldn't Refi their bad loans Freddie Mac would make billions.....
Here's the irony - we, the public, own Freddie Mac but not directly, and their regulator {FHFA - Federal Housing Finance Agency] which is supposed to oversee them is obviously captured, i.e.corrupted.
The oligarchs win again.....
The Treasury Department is investigating a report thatFreddie Mac, the mortgage giant, bet against homeowners’ ability to refinance their loans even as it was making it more difficult for them to do so, Jay Carney, a White House spokesman, said on Monday.
The report came just as the Obama administration had been escalating its efforts to push Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to ease conditions for homeowners, including those who owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.
Last Friday, the Treasury announced that it would offer increased incentives to lenders to forgive portions of homeowner debt, saying pointedly that for the first time the incentives would be offered on loans held by Fannie and Freddie.
But Fannie and Freddie, which said they would review the increased incentives, have long declined to allow debt reduction on the loans it holds or guarantees, saying that it would create unnecessary losses for taxpayers. The companies, which are financed by taxpayers, have also maintained barriers to refinancing, like risk-based fees for homeowners, even as mortgage interest rates have dropped below 4 percent.
In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama said a new refinancing program would cut through government red tape. He has yet to provide details of the program.
The Obama administration has tried, with scant results, to persuade Fannie and Freddie to ease refinancing restrictions and participate in debt forgiveness programs.
The Federal Reserve, which has made low interest rates a crucial part of its response to the financial crisis, has also objected to some of the barriers to refinancing, including fees it has said are unjustified.
On Monday, ProPublica and National Public Radio reported that Freddie Mac, which maintained slightly tighter restrictions than Fannie on homeowners’ eligibility to refinance, had a multibillion-dollar investment whose value hinged on borrowers continuing to pay higher interest rates.
10/ A lovely video - the British Military Wives choir with a 3 minute song for their loved ones in Afghanistan.....almost brought moisture to your scribe's eyes.....Mary, where's the kleenex?
11/ I have never, ever had any desire to live in a development or gated community, and much prefer a town or city environment with a downtown where one can walk to shops, restaurants etc.
My instincts were right - according to this study, living in the burbs is unhealthy.....
Developers in the last half-century called it progress when they built homes and shopping malls far from city centers throughout the country, sounding the death knell for many downtowns. But now an alarmed cadre of public health experts say these expanded metropolitan areas have had a far more serious impact on the people who live there by creating vehicle-dependent environments that foster obesity, poor health, social isolation, excessive stress and depression.
As a result, these experts say, our “built environment” — where we live, work, play and shop — has become a leading cause of disability and death in the 21st century. Physical activity has been disappearing from the lives of young and old, and many communities are virtual “food deserts,” serviced only by convenience stores that stock nutrient-poor prepared foods and drinks.
According to Dr. Richard J. Jackson, professor and chairman of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, unless changes are made soon in the way many of our neighborhoods are constructed, people in the current generation (born since 1980) will be the first in America to live shorter lives than their parents do.
In a healthy environment, he said, “people who are young, elderly, sick or poor can meet their life needs without getting in a car,” which means creating places where it is safe and enjoyable to walk, bike, take in nature and socialize.
“People who walk more weigh less and live longer,” Dr. Jackson said. “People who are fit live longer. People who have friends and remain socially active live longer. We don’t need to prove all of this,” despite the plethora of research reports demonstrating the ill effects of current community structures.
The Price of Progress
“We’ve become the victims of our own success,” Dr. Jackson said of the public health mission that cleared cities of congested slums. “By living far from where we work, we reduced crowding and improved the quality of our air and water, which drove down rates of infectious disease.” But as people have moved farther and farther from where they work, shop and socialize, the rates of chronic diseases have soared.
12/ A three minute ABC News segment [Diane Sawyer] on how our crumbling infrastructure is being rebuilt.....by Chinese companies......
There is a $7 billion project in California rebuilding the SF/Oakland bridge that US companies say they could have handled.....but it was given to the Chinese......
Note - there are no effective bribery laws in China, and the CA state official in the video was probably 'encouraged" to give the contract to the little bastards.....
13/ This 3 minute video is titled "The Beauty of Pollination", with some amazing video of bees, butterflies, bats and birds......wonderful images.....
The pollination of plants and flowers is vital for our food supply, and it's a pity the bees and bats in this video are threatened by pesticides and bee and bat colonies are collapsing across the country.....b
But who cares, Monsanto is doing just fine........
14/ The money boys in Tallahassee really want to privatise Florida's prisons so they can get campaign contributions [aka bribes] from the prison companies, so the Senate President removed a committee chairman who was opposed to the idea.
The good news is there has been such resistance to this idea of privatising prisons it may be dead this session.....
TALLAHASSEE — Angered at his inability to win votes to privatize Florida prisons, Senate President Mike Haridopolos on Wednesday ousted a budget committee chairman leading the charge against the bill.
Haridopolos stripped Sen. Mike Fasano of his chairmanship of the Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriations Committee, telling reporters, "I just felt I had lost confidence in him" in cutting government costs. The committee oversees state spending on prisons and courts.
"It was a very difficult decision, but I just felt he was not rowing in the same direction. He was not ready to make the tough choices. He couldn't handle the responsibility."
Haridopolos ousted Fasano as chairman and from the larger budget committee after it became clear Fasano had garnered support for an amendment to a prison privatization bill that would have done away with the outsourcing of the 18-county region of Department of Corrections operations in the southern portion of the state.
The privatization has been a priority of GOP leadership since last year.
15/ Although you will see it Sunday, here's an advance glimpse at one of the funnier commercials.....the Acura spot, with Jerry Seinfeld.....
Jerry Seinfeld stars in a hilarious new Super Bowl commercial for Acura.
In the newly released extended spot, Seinfeld lusts after the 2012 Acura NSX very badly, but is told he is the second person on the waiting list. So he launches an extremely intensive campaign to bribe the man who is the first one on the list to give him his spot. Seinfeld's tactics include: cash, use of the Soup Nazi ("I own all the characters"), small talk with the omelet guy, stand-up at the man's house, re-enacting reality TV using sock-puppets, showing the man an alien, and much much more.
16/ One of the better deals for parents was to sign up for the Florida pre-paid college tuition plan when the kid was born, and the affordable payments meant your children could get a decent college education. No more - this is not in the "dumbing down of America" plan, so the oligarchs have made university only affordable for the top 20%....
Scott Maxwell with a column that will get to you if you have young kids or grandkids.....all part of the plan to destroy the middle class......
Nine years ago, when my son was born, we decided to enroll him in Florida's prepaid tuition plan.
We paid $173 a month as part of a five-year plan. And by the time he started kindergarten, we had spent $9,500 to ensure his tuition was covered.
It was simple and affordable — with the emphasis on was
Nowadays, the same five-year plan costs Floridians $49,000 — or $900 a month.
Many families are struggling to hold onto their homes. For them, the idea of spending another $900 a month — a mortgage payment for some — is unfathomable
And the price is destined to go higher.
The result: College is rapidly becoming out of reach for more Floridians.
A growing number can't afford it upfront. And those relying on loans often graduate with staggering debt loads. Last year, total student debt in the U.S. topped $1 trillion, surpassing credit-card debt for the first time, according to the Federal Reserve.
And it's not just students who are saddled with the debt. So are taxpayers, who often pay it off when students don't. (An entirely different problem worthy of serious discussion and reform as well.)
The bad news doesn't stop there. On the heels of several 15-percent hikes, Florida is prepared for more of the same.
If we continue that sky-high trajectory for the next decade, as some expect, a prepaid tuition package in 2022 could cost $200,000.
Yes, the five-year plan would have risen from the $173 my wife and I paid to more than $3,000 … a month.
That is simply unsustainable. And unreasonable.
College isn't for everyone. But if we want to compete with the rest of the world, we must keep educating our high-school graduates in health, science, business and everything else that keeps America at the forefront of innovation and prosperity.
So, what to do?
Well, one senator recently suggested simply suspending the prepaid tuition program altogether.
17/ Movie review - "The Woman In Black" with Daniel Radcliffe.......sounds like a decent little horror movie in the old fashioned sense of having a plot, scary bits but minimal gore.....
A creaking, shrieking haunted-house amusement and a solid addition to the recently resurrected Hammer Films — the company where Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing once reigned — “The Woman in Black” makes the most of its old-fashioned virtues. Duded out in a period frock coat and pocket-watch chain for his first post-Potter film role, Daniel Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a British lawyer who, years after his wife, Stella (Sophie Stuckey), died in childbirth, has the haunted eyes of the eternal mourner. It’s no wonder too, given that Stella, a beauty in luminous white, periodically hovers around him, either because she’s a ghost or a figment of his enduring longing and grief.
The story, based on a 1983 novel by Susan Hill and adapted by Jane Goldman (who had a hand in writing “Kick-Ass” and “The Debt”), weaves together a compendium of familiar themes. Arthur’s employer, who’s all but run out of patience with his doleful solicitor, gives him one last chance to prove his worth: he’s to travel to the remote village of Crythin Gifford to sort out the large estate of a woman who’s recently died. So Arthur parks his son with the nanny, boards a train and heads straight into the creeping mists and mysteries of an isolated hamlet where the children scatter when he approaches, and the adults have darts in their eyes if not pitchforks in hand.
Something wicked does come, of course, slowly and at times with unsettling effectiveness. It seems there’s a ghost troubling the area, haunting the estate and sowing great misery, though appearances, like apparitions, can be deceiving.
Spooky trailer......
Todays video - golf trick shots with Gareth Maybin.....amazing.......
Todays golfer joke
Sal was at the country club for his weekly round of golf. He
began his round with an eagle on the first hole and a birdie on the
second.
On the third hole he had just scored his first ever hole-in-one when his
cell phone rang... It was a doctor notifying him that his wife had just
been in an accident and was in critical condition and in ICU.
was shaping up to be his best ever round of golf.
He decided to get in a couple of more holes before heading to the
hospital. He ended up playing all eighteen, finishing his round shooting
a personal best 61, shattering the club record by five strokes and
beating his previous best game by more than 10. He was jubilant....
Then he remembered his wife. Feeling guilty he dashed to the hospital.
He saw the doctor in the corridor and asked about his wife's condition.
The doctor glared at him and shouted, "You went ahead and finished your
round of golf didn't you! I hope you're proud of yourself!"
"While you were out for the past four hours enjoying yourself at the
country club your wife has been languishing in the ICU! It's just as
well you went ahead and finished that round because it will be more than
likely your last!
For the rest of her life she will require round the
clock care and you will be her care giver! She will need IV's; you will
have to change her colostomy bag every 3 hours; she will have to be
spoon fed 3 times a day and don't forget the hygiene care."
The man broke down and sobbed.
The doctor chuckled and said, "I'm just fuckin' with you. She's dead.
What'd you shoot?"
Todays political jokes
The problem with political jokes is they get elected. ~Henry Cate, VII
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. ~Aesop
If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn't be any inducement to go to heaven. ~Will Rogers
Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber. ~Plato
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river. ~Nikita Khrushchev
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it. ~Clarence Darrow
Why pay money to have your family tree traced; go into politics and your opponents will do it for you. ~Author Unknown
If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates. ~Jay Leno
Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel. ~John Quinton
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. ~Aesop
If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn't be any inducement to go to heaven. ~Will Rogers
Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber. ~Plato
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river. ~Nikita Khrushchev
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it. ~Clarence Darrow
Why pay money to have your family tree traced; go into politics and your opponents will do it for you. ~Author Unknown
If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates. ~Jay Leno
Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel. ~John Quinton
Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other. ~Oscar Ameringer
I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them. ~Adlai Stevenson, campaign speech, 1952
A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country. ~Texas Guinan
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. ~Gore Vidal
I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians. ~Charles de Gaulle
Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks. ~Doug Larson
Don't vote, it only encourages them. ~Author Unknown
There ought to be one day - just one - when there is open season on Senators. ~Will Rogers
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. ~Gore Vidal
I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians. ~Charles de Gaulle
Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks. ~Doug Larson
Don't vote, it only encourages them. ~Author Unknown
There ought to be one day - just one - when there is open season on Senators. ~Will Rogers
Todays ethnic/racist joke
I was sitting at a stoplight yesterday ....minding my own business, waiting for it to turn green.
A carload of young, loud Muslims shouting anti American slogans stopped next to me.
The light changed, the Muslims shook their fists, hit the gas and darted off ahead of me.
Suddenly an 18-wheeler came speeding through and ran directly over their car, crushing it completely.
For several minutes I sat in my car thinking to myself, "Man, that could have been me!"
So, today......bright and early, I went out and got me a job as a truck driver.
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