1/ Frank Rich with a brief Q&A about the primary result from Michigan.....all you need to know about this election in the long running farce that is the Republican primary race......
After Michigan, is Romney back to being “inevitable” again?
Yes, if only because the GOP really has no alternative. It says all you need to know about the depressed state of that party that its elders are rejoicing when Romney barely wins his native state against a poorly funded, self-immolating adversary who opposes public schools and said that JFK makes him want to “throw up.” Even in this victory, enthusiasm for Mitt among actual voters seemed close to nil. Turnout was low. Exit polls found that 44 of his own voters had “reservations” about him. He lost to Santorum in every income bracket except those making $100K+ a year.
Yes, if only because the GOP really has no alternative. It says all you need to know about the depressed state of that party that its elders are rejoicing when Romney barely wins his native state against a poorly funded, self-immolating adversary who opposes public schools and said that JFK makes him want to “throw up.” Even in this victory, enthusiasm for Mitt among actual voters seemed close to nil. Turnout was low. Exit polls found that 44 of his own voters had “reservations” about him. He lost to Santorum in every income bracket except those making $100K+ a year.
But in Arizona, Romney won by a spread of twenty points.
Some 14 percent of that state’s Republican primary electorate is Mormon, as opposed to 2 percent of the nation as a whole.
2/ Jon Stewart with an excellent 6 minutes, going after the Senate vote on contraception......exposing the Republicans voting for this travesty for what it really is.....a war on women.....
Jon Stewart picked up where he left off in the great contraception debate on Thursday night's "Daily Show," focusing on the Blunt Amendment, or one Republican Senator's attempt at overriding President Obama's healthcare mandate.
While the Senate voted against the measure suggested by Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt earlier on Thursday, Stewart used the first half of his show to sound off on how inane it is to allow employers torefuse to cover any kind of health care service by citing moral or religious reasons:
3/ Charles Pierce in Esquire with his unique style of commentary on the Michigan primary......love the title of this - "Michigan and the Great Humbling of Romneybot 2.0"......
His writing reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson........
Romney knew Santorum blew it, but he's got just enough traction now to roll through Super Tuesday as the resettling begins.
Well, it appears that, when it comes to staving off cataclysmically embarrassing public collapses, Willard Romney's our boy. He managed to stave off Rick Santorum in Michigan last night by just enough that, together with Romney's big win in Arizona, where he was supported by John McCain, Jan Brewer, and other less famous mummies, people aren't going spend all their time over the next week talking about what a complete stiff he is. Granted, the jury is still very much out on that one. After Rick Santorum gave a heartfelt, weepy performance of almost transcendental mendacity, complete with props, Romney came out and appeared to be attempting to sell his audience some handy home-cleaning products. He even plugged his website and begged for some small-money donations. The guy makes the average Amway salesman sound like Demosthenes.
(Can we pause right here and speculate that, some time in the past four years, Romney must have shot Chris Matthews's dog? I have never seen a single politician get on a single pundit's last nerve the way Romney apparently jumps on Matthews's. There's something very tribal going on here. It's like listening to my grandparents talk about the No Irish Need Apply signs.)
Nevertheless, it was a big night for what is laughingly referred to as the "Republican establishment." This is just enough traction to keep the Romneybot 2.0 rolling through Super Tuesday, even though he's going to get crisped in the South as N. Leroy Gingrich rolls back the stone one more time, and even though he could lose Ohio (and Tennessee) to Santorum's suitcoat full of miracles. ("Is that Marcellus shale in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?") It's still easy to picture how Romney can blow this thing. His campaign really does seem to be wheezing a bit; having counted on an early blowout, it seems in its own way to be as ill-suited to the long haul as Santorum's is. After last night, however, it's awfully hard to see how any of these other guys can win it now. And, if they did nothing else, last night's results probably buried forever any scenario that depended on the late entry of a white knight, or, dammit, the possibility of a brokered convention in Tampa, where the nomination could get parceled out over lap dances at Mons Venus.
4/ The wonderful Rachel Maddow with a 5 minute story on how the Virginia trans-vaginal abortion bill has sunk the Governor"s chances of a VP slot on the 2012 ticket.....
Rachel Maddow discussed who she considered controversial vice presidential hopefuls in the Republican party during her MSNBC show Thursday night, including Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.
Maddow has harshly criticized McDonnell in the past for supporting a controversial bill requiring Virginia women to have an ultrasound in order to undergo an abortion. On Thursday, the Virginia General Assembly approved this modified version of the bill. In its original form, the bill required women to undergo transvaginal ultrasounds before all abortions, including pregnancies that were a result from rape or incest. The approved bill, which requires externally administered ultrasounds, excludes incidents of rape or incest as long as the crime was reported to police.
Maddow played clips of a radio interview McDonnell gave to WTOP, where he vehemently supported the ultrasound requirement.
5/ Stephen Colbert has a segment he calls "People who are destroying America", and he looks at a teacher in Florida who has been indicted for fraud by registering her students to vote as part of her civics class.....5 minutes of a very clever way to highlight the Republican legislature's efforts to disenfranchise potential Democratic voters......he's sooooo good.......
People Who Are Destroying America - Teachers
Dawn Quarles, a Florida high school teacher, faces voter fraud fines for registering her students to vote.
6/ When someone in public life dies unexpectedly it's as if a huge whitewash machine comes down and covers up all of the bad stuff they were up to - Matt Taibbi is having none of it. Here is his "In Memoriam" for Andrew Breitbart, the blogger behind the ACORN video......
I guarantee you have never read anything like this article about someone who has just passed away! The title is "Death of a Douche"......
So Andrew Breitbart is dead. Here’s what I have to say to that, and I’m sure Breitbart himself would have respected this reaction: Good! Fuck him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead.
I say this in the nicest possible way. I actually kind of liked Andrew Breitbart. Not in the sense that I would ever have wanted to hang out with him, or even be caught within a hundred yards of him without a Haz-Mat suit on, but I respected the shamelessness. Breitbart didn’t do anything by halves, and even his most ardent detractors had to admit that he had a highly developed, if not always funny, sense of humor.
For instance, it would be dishonest not to tip a hat to him for that famous scene when he hijacked Anthony Weiner’s own self-immolating "apology" press conference, and held up the entire event by standing at the lectern and congratulating himself at length, before Weiner could let the humiliating healing begin.
For that one, brief, shining moment– still one of the most painful-to-watch YouTube spectacles of all time, right there with Mitt Romney’s priceless attempt at singing "Who Let the Dogs Out?" with a group of black voters in Florida in 2008 – Breitbart could legitimately claim to have the biggest, hairiest balls on earth.
Watching Weiner apologize to Breitbart later in that same event was certainly chilling for a number of reasons (if I were Weiner, I wouldn’t have apologized to that fucker even under torture) but it was hard not to appreciate the deliciousness of the scene from Breitbart’s point of view. Watching Weiner pause, swallow hard, and make the extraordinary decision to plant his lips squarely on the loathsome Breitbart’s ass on national television, that was like the ultimate Mona Lisa masterpiece of right-wing media provocations. That the outrageous Breitbart was standing right there, looking gorgeously gassy in his unbuttoned shirt, bloated Joey Buttafuoco cheeks and splendiforous silver half-mullet, made the humiliation of the trim and neatly-groomed Weiner even more abject.
Furthermore, the ACORN videos made by Breitbart and his two young acolytes, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe – it’s hard not to see the inspired humor behind their elaborate stunt. And anyone who’s heard their proposals before ACORN staffers to bring underage girls over the border as part of a white-(or nonwhite-) slaving startup firm, and doesn’t think the ACORN responses (or non-responses, as it were) were shocking, they’re deluding themselves. In the Baltimore office, they ran the whole underage hooker-den spiel past an ACORN staffer, and got the following response: "You are gonna use three of them – they are gonna be under 16, so you is eligible to get child tax credit and additional child tax credit."
http://www.rollingstone.com/7/ "Bob", a lovely little three minute video about a hamster......clever, with a kicker after the credits....
8/ Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine with some commentary on Olympia Snowe's retirement from her Maine Senate seat......he is not a fan of Ms. Snowe, unlike most of the other fawning media who are making her out to be a martyr.....
The retirement of Olympia Snowe, at the young (by senatorial standards) age of 65, has again dramatized the perilous condition of the Senate moderates. They have been scorned, marginalized, and hunted close to extinction. Yet the striking fact about Snowe’s career is that, far from being shunted to the sidelines, she has wielded, or been given the opportunity to wield, enormous power. She has used it, on the whole, quite badly.
When George W. Bush proposed a huge, regressive tax cut in 2001, Snowe, sitting at the heart of a decisive block of centrists, used her leverage to support the passage of a modestly smaller and less regressive version. When Barack Obama proposed a large fiscal stimulus in 2009, Snowe (citing fears of deficits that she had helped create) decided to shave a nice round $100 billion off his figure and call it a day. If a Gingrich administration proposed spending a trillion dollars to erect a 100- foot-tall solid-gold Winston Churchill statue on Mars, Snowe would no doubt decide, after careful deliberation, that the wise course was to trim the height down to 90 feet and perhaps use a cheaper bronze alloy in the base.
The characteristic Snowe episode came during the health care fight. The Obama administration, desperate to win her vote, wooed her with endless meetings and pleas, affording her a once-in-a-generation chance to not only help pass health care reform but make it smarter, more efficient, and more compassionate. Instead, Snowe tormented the administration by dangling an elusive and ever-changing criteria before their noses. She at first centered her objections around the inclusion of a public option. Democrats removed it, and she voted for the bill in the Finance Committee, only to turn against it when it reached the decisive vote on the Senate floor. Snowe complained that the process was happening too fast, and that it was too partisan, which seemed to be her way of saying she wouldn’t vote for it unless other Republicans joined her.
9/ Imagine the fairy story "Three Little Pigs" being interpreted by today's media.....a two minute ad for The Guardian.....
Love this clever stuff.......
The Guardian has a hilarious new ad based on none other than the Three Little Pigs.
The ad, released on Wednesday, envisions how the paper would cover the story of the Three Little Pigs in print and online. The spot follows the developing story of the pigs' arrest for killing the Big Bad Wolf.
The Guardian covers it all with gusto, from the paper's front page headline, to outcry on Twitter, a simulation of the Big Bad Wolf blowing the houses down, and finally, a very surprising conclusion to the age-old fairy tale.
It is the first major television campaign for the Guardian in over twenty-five years,according to the paper. It promotes the paper's concept of "open journalism," and multimedia platforms.
10/ A four minute video by Robert Greenwald about how our military has wasted billions in Iraq by outsourcing to contractors like KBR and Halliburton.....features soldiers, former employees and Officers telling the truth....and of course Congress didn't want to hear it.....
11/ Excellent story from Rolling Stone focusing on Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest fracking operations in the country and one of the most unstable financially, almost a Ponzi scheme.
It's a fair and balanced article with facts, well written and non-partisan, so if you need a primer about the natural gas industry read this....
Aubrey McClendon, America's second-largest producer of natural gas, has never been afraid of a fight. He has become a billionaire by directing his company, Chesapeake Energy, to blast apart gas-soaked rocks a mile underground and pump the fuel to the surface. "We're the biggest frackers in the world," he declares proudly over a $400 bottle of French Bordeaux at a restaurant he co-owns in his hometown of Oklahoma City. "We frack all the time. What's the big deal?"
McClendon dominates America's supply of natural gas the same way the Tea Party-financing Koch brothers control the nation's pipelines and refineries. Like them, McClendon is an influential right-wing power broker – he helped fund the Swift Boat attacks against John Kerry in 2004, donated $250,000 to the presidential campaign of Rick Perry, and contributed more than $500,000 to stop gay marriage. But unlike his fellow energy czars, McClendon knows how to tone down his politics and present a friendlier, less ideological face to the public. He secretly gave $26 million to the Sierra Club to fight Big Coal, and built a Google-like campus for Chesapeake's 4,600 employees in Oklahoma City, complete with a 63,000-square-foot day care center, a luxurious gym and four cafes manned by cook-to-order chefs. He even voted for Barack Obama because he thought the country needed "an inspirational figure."
At 52, McClendon still looks like the whip-smart accountant he once aspired to be – crisp white shirt, polished shoes, a toss of white hair. To hear him tell it, the cleaner-than-coal fuel he produces will revive our faltering economy, free us from the tyranny of foreign oil and save the planet from global warming. "I have a fossil fuel that makes other fossil fuels obsolete," he boasts. By McClendon's estimate, the industry has drilled more than 1.2 million wells nationwide, yet so far there have been only a few confirmed cases where things have gone wrong – despite dire warnings from scientists and environmentalists that fracking pollutes rivers and streams, contaminates drinking water and turns large swaths of farmland into industrial moonscapes. "Where is the mushroom cloud?" McClendon asks. "Where are the dogs with one leg? Where are the people that have been maimed or hurt?"
He sips his Bordeaux; his own private wine cellar once boasted more than 10,000 bottles. It's a good riff, with some truth to it. But what McClendon leaves out is the real nature of the business he's in. Fracking, it turns out, is about producing cheap energy the same way the mortgage crisis was about helping realize the dreams of middle-class homeowners. For Chesapeake, the primary profit in fracking comes not from selling the gas itself, but from buying and flipping the land that contains the gas. The company is now the largest leaseholder in the United States, owning the drilling rights to some 15 million acres – an area more than twice the size of Maryland. McClendon has financed this land grab with junk bonds and complex partnerships and future production deals, creating a highly leveraged, deeply indebted company that has more in common with Enron than ExxonMobil.
12/ Never watched Oprah, so I can't comment on he accuracy of Maya Rudolph's imitation of her but this is a dress rehearsal of a SNL skit that didn't make it in the show.....
And it's funny.....2 minutes.....
13/ A brand new show this week on NBC got this pretty good review in the Times, so we TIVO'd it and watched it - most interesting premise, and very well done......
Remember the Pink Floyd lyric from "The Wall"? When the major networks make a decent show it just disappears in all of the other garbage.....the updated lyric would be "Got 313 channels of shit on the TV to choose from".....
I got elastic bands keepin my shoes on.
Got those swollen hand blues.
Got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from.
I've got electric light.
And I've got second sight.
And amazing powers of observation.
And that is how I know
When I try to get through
On the telephone to you
There'll be nobody home.
Got those swollen hand blues.
Got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from.
I've got electric light.
And I've got second sight.
And amazing powers of observation.
And that is how I know
When I try to get through
On the telephone to you
There'll be nobody home.
I really like this type of psychological mystery stuff as well as sci-fi ["Fringe"], so if this review rings a bell with you - enjoy.....
The hero of “Awake” is living in not one dream world but two. When one of his therapists assures him that their session is real, not imaginary, the patient replies, “That’s exactly what the other shrink said.”
A “mental Möbius strip” is how one of the doctors describes this condition, and that’s not a bad way to describe “Awake,” a clever, intriguing new NBC series that starts on Thursday. It’s a hard-boiled procedural that twists into a moody psychological thriller where dreams offer clues to the detective’s unconscious, and also the truth.
It’s confusing, but artfully so.
After a terrible car accident Detective Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) doesn’t remember the crash or its consequences. Instead, he awakens to find himself living what he sees as parallel lives. One day he rises to find his wife, Hannah (Laura Allen), alive and mourning the death of their teenage son, Rex (Dylan Minnette). The next, his eyes open to Rex getting ready for school, surly and uncommunicative in his grief over losing his mother.
Michael moves back and forth between those two worlds, and each has its own psychiatrist, partner and homicide cases. But sometimes a detail or a clue from one dream spills into the other, helping Michael find a killer.
There are new cases in each episode and also deepening complications. As the series progresses, small signs suggest that there is more — or perhaps less — to the story than conflicting realities.
“Awake” is perhaps not as brilliantly inventive and bizarre as the famous 1980s BBC series “The Singing Detective,” which starred Michael Gambon as a hospitalized pulp-fiction writer with delusions lived out in both musical comedy and film noir. But it’s still a pretty dazzling conceit. Kyle Killen, the creator, previously came up with “Lone Star,” an ingenious if short-lived series about a con man living a double life in Texas. Howard Gordon is an executive producer, and his résumé includes both “Homeland” and “24.”
In other words, “Awake” stands out. There are a lot of series at the moment that feature crime fighters with freakish abilities, including “Unforgettable,” about a detective with a perfect memory, or “Person of Interest,” about a former C.I.A. officer who can anticipate crimes before they happen. There are too many mysteries that rely on the supernatural, including “A Gifted Man” and “Alcatraz” and “The River.”
The hero of “Awake” has a psychiatric problem; there are no aliens or ghosts to explain away the more improbable turns, and this adventure is far more compelling.
It is hard to follow, which is probably why the two worlds are lighted differently: the one with Rex is filmed in a cold bluish hue; Hannah’s is warm and golden. But some places are dark, no matter which narrative they inhabit, notably the therapists’ offices.
14/ Take your pick - some of the 1/ stupidest, or 2/ bravest people in the world doing really dumb things.....4 minutes of "oh shit" moments.......
15/ And speaking of good TV, this is a show we TIVO and watch regularly - "Southland", on TNT.....one of the best cop shows out there - Entertainment Weekly agrees.....
Southland looks as if it were conceived as a kind of bridge show between network and cable cop series. When it premiered on NBC in 2009, its handheld-camera chase scenes and expletive-bleeped dialogue sent signals to viewers that this was bold and daring, when it might have done better to send out the opposite signals. Because, as it turns out, Southland's great strengths are the old-fashioned ones: vivid characterizations and engrossing storytelling.
Canceled by NBC after it aired one season (the network had other things to worry about, such as another highly promoted, low-rated drama, Trauma, and an ill-fated experiment that was sucking up its 10 p.m. hour Monday through Friday: The Jay Leno Show), Southland was picked up by TNT. Its survival spoke as much to the faith executives had in the people behind the show (creator Ann Biderman was anNYPD Blue vet; executive producers John Wells and Christopher Chulack were ER guys) as it did to the people on our screens. The most frequently lauded of those were Regina King, making the streets of Los Angeles safe for nuanced law enforcement as Det. Lydia Adams, and Ben McKenzie, moving from The O.C. to L.A. with ease as rookie cop Ben Sherman.
On TNT, Southland found its groove. It balances neck-snapping perp chases and brutal beat-downs with delicately delineated examinations of the way the cop life can ruin romantic relationships
Todays video - Benny Hill with the "Firing Squad".....
Todays little old lady joke
A little old lady went to the grocery store to buy cat food.
She picked up four cans and took them to the check-out
Counter.
The girl at the cash register said, "I'm sorry, but we cannot
sell you cat food without proof that you have a cat. A lot of
old people buy cat food to eat, and the management wants
proof that you are buying the cat food for your cat."
The little old lady went home, picked up her cat and brought
it back to the store. They sold her the cat food. The next day,
she tried to buy two cans of dog food. Again the cashier said
"I'm sorry, but we cannot sell you dog food without proof that
you have a dog. A lot of old people buy dog food to eat, but
the management wants proof that you are buying the dog
food for your dog."
So she went home and brought in her dog. She then was
able to buy the dog food.
The next day she brought in a box with a hole in the lid. The
little old lady asked the cashier to stick her finger in the hole.
The cashier said, "No, you might have a snake in there."
The little old lady assured her that there was nothing in the
box that would harm her. So the cashier put her finger into
the box and pulled it out. She said to the little old lady, "That
smells like shit."
The little old lady said, "It is. I want to buy three rolls of toilet
paper."
So........... Don't mess with old people.
Todays big city joke
In a crowded city at a busy bus stop, a woman who was waiting for a bus was wearing a tight leather skirt. As the bus stopped and it was her turn to get on, she became aware that her skirt was too tight to allow her leg to come up to the height of the first step of the bus.Slightly embarrassed and with a quick smile to the bus driver, she reached behind her to unzip her skirt a little, thinking that this would give her enough slack to raise her leg.Again, she tried to make the step only to discover she still couldn't.So, a little more embarrassed, she once again reached behind her to unzip her skirt a little more.For the second time, attempted the step, and, once again, much to her chagrin, she could not raise her leg. With little smile to the driver, sheagain reached behind to unzip a little more and again was unable tomake the step.About this time, a large Texan who was standing behind her picked her up easily by the waist and placed her gently on the step of the bus.She went ballistic and turned to the would-be Samaritan and screeched, "How dare you touch my body!I don't even know who you are?'The Texan smiled and drawled, "Well, ma'am, normally I would agree with you, but after you unzipped my fly three times, I kinda figured we was friends."
Todays heavenly joke
SYLVIA: Hi Wanda.
WANDA:
Hi Sylvia. How'd you die?
SYLVIA:
I froze to death.
WANDA:
How horrible!
SYLVIA:
It wasn't so bad. After I quit shaking from
the cold, I began to get warm & sleepy,
and finally died a peaceful death.
What about you?
WANDA:
I died of a massive heart attack.
I suspected that my husband was cheating,
so I came home early to catch him in the act.
But instead, I found him all by himself
in the den watching TV.
SYLVIA:
So, what happened?
WANDA:
I was so sure there was another woman
there somewhere that I started running
all over the house looking. I ran up into
the attic and searched, and down into the
basement. Then I went through every closet
and checked under all the beds. I kept this up
until I had looked everywhere, and finally
I became so exhausted that I just keeled over
with a heart attack and died.
SYLVIA:
Too bad you didn't look in the freezer
---we'd both still be alive.
WANDA:
Hi Sylvia. How'd you die?
SYLVIA:
I froze to death.
WANDA:
How horrible!
SYLVIA:
It wasn't so bad. After I quit shaking from
the cold, I began to get warm & sleepy,
and finally died a peaceful death.
What about you?
WANDA:
I died of a massive heart attack.
I suspected that my husband was cheating,
so I came home early to catch him in the act.
But instead, I found him all by himself
in the den watching TV.
SYLVIA:
So, what happened?
WANDA:
I was so sure there was another woman
there somewhere that I started running
all over the house looking. I ran up into
the attic and searched, and down into the
basement. Then I went through every closet
and checked under all the beds. I kept this up
until I had looked everywhere, and finally
I became so exhausted that I just keeled over
with a heart attack and died.
SYLVIA:
Too bad you didn't look in the freezer
---we'd both still be alive.
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