1/ The excellent Frank Rich with an essay on the Republican Party's women problem - it's not just about contraception, as this hostility to women's issues has been brewing for many years. The great thing with Frank Rich is that he doesn't just tell you what is happening, but he also tells you why, and looks into the history.....
A long article, an insightful one and a must read if you are at all interested in politics.....
At the time, back in January in New Hampshire, it didn’t seem like that big a deal, certainly nothing to rival previous debate flash points like “9-9-9” and “Oops!” But in retrospect it may have been one of the more fateful twists of the Republican presidential campaign. The exchange was prompted by George Stephanopoulos, who seemingly out of nowhere asked Mitt Romney if he shared Rick Santorum’s view that “states have the right to ban contraception.” Romney stiffened, as he is wont to do, and took the tone of a men’s club factotum tut-tutting a member for violating the dress code. “George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising,” he said. “I know of no reason to talk about contraception in this regard.” The partisan audience would soon jeer the moderator for his effrontery.
Afterward, Romney’s spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom accused Stephanopoulos of asking “the oddest question in a debate this year” and of having “a strange obsession with contraception.” It was actually Santorum who had the strange obsession. He had first turned the subject into a cause in October by talking about “the dangers of contraception in this country.” Birth control is “not okay,” he said then. “It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
As we know now, Santorum, flaky though he may sound, is not some outlier in his party or in its presidential field. He was an advance man for a rancorous national brawl about to ambush an unsuspecting America that thought women’s access to birth control had been resolved by the Supreme Court almost a half century ago.
The hostilities would break out just weeks after the New Hampshire debate, with the back-to-back controversies of theWhite House health-care rule on contraceptives and the Komen Foundation’s dumping of Planned Parenthood. Though those two conflicts ended with speedy cease-fires, an emboldened GOP kept fighting. It had women’s sex lives on the brain and would not stop rolling out jaw-dropping sideshows: an all-male panel at a hearing on birth control in the House. A fat-cat Santorum bankroller joking that “gals” could stay out of trouble by putting Bayer aspirin “between their knees.” A Virginia governorendorsing a state bill requiring that an ultrasound “wand” be inserted into the vagina of any woman seeking an abortion.
It’s not news that the GOP is the anti-abortion party, that it panders to the religious right, and that it’s particularly dependent on white men with less education and less income—a displaced demographic that has been as threatened by the rise of the empowered modern woman as it has been by the cosmopolitan multiracial male elites symbolized by Barack Obama. That aggrieved class is, indeed, Santorum’s constituency. But, as Stephanopoulos was trying to get at when he challenged Romney, this new rush of anti-woman activity on the right isn’t coming exclusively from the Santorum crowd. It’s a phenomenon extending across the GOP. On March 1, every Republican in the Senate except the about-to-flee Olympia Snowe—that would be 45 in total—voted for the so-called Blunt Amendment, which would allow any employer with any undefined “moral” objection to veto any provision in health-care coverage, from birth control to mammograms to diabetes screening for women (or, for that matter, men) judged immorally overweight.
2/ A wonderful 4 minute Bill Maher rant on many topics, but ending with a riff on the Dos Equis ad "the most interesting man in the World".....of course it's Mitt, and he's not interesting.......
3/ Robyn Blumner with some thoughts on the ACA [Obamacare] deliberations currently before the Supreme Court - as of Wednesday it may be the justices will strike down the law, but we'll see.....
Good story on what's at stake......
Chief Justice John Roberts knows this is his hour. Like it or not, the legal challenge to President Barack Obama's health reform law to be heard for three days starting Monday will define the legacy of the Roberts court.
If the court's five-justice conservative majority votes to overturn the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act it will be remembered as an act of rank political decisionmaking and judicial activism. Unambiguous, long-standing legal precedent exists to uphold the law. But there is no sugar-coating what it will take for that result: an intellectually honest court.
The focus of this case is not individual liberty. It is easy to get confused since the premier issue before the court is whether Congress can tell people that they must have health insurance or pay a tax penalty. But remember, Mitt Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, imposed essentially the same individual mandate that exists in "ObamaCare" on Bay Staters in his "RomneyCare."
So if you have stuck in your craw the idea that government can't force people under any circumstances to buy a product they don't want from a private company, forget it. Massachusetts is doing it under its police powers, as could any other state. And the federal government did so in 1792 when it told every white male of a certain age to buy a musket or rifle and ammunition. President George Washington signed the militia measure — indicating that the founders were not averse to forcing commerce on the populace.
The case before the Supreme Court is a federalism dispute: whether the federal government has the power under the Commerce Clause to impose a health insurance regulation that would otherwise be the province of states.
http://www.tampabay.com/
4/ When Jon Stewart comes back from his breaks he is recharged, and has some of his best shows......this one is excellent, on Trayvon and Dick Cheney's new heart.......8 minutes.....some great Cheney moments.....
"The Daily Show" returned from vacation Monday night to cover the big stories that occurred while they were away. While Jon Stewart tried to joke about Dick Cheney's heart transplant, he had to resist the easy set-up to tackle the outrageous circumstances of Trayvon Martin's death.
"I feel like Florida and Arizona are locked in a harms race," Stewart joked after learning that Martin's shooter George Zimmerman was walking free due to Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which allows people to use deadly force any time they feel threatened.
"How can this state have that law -- and Spring Break?" Stewart wondered. "It's like New York, the signs we have in the subway: 'If you see something, shoot something.'"
Stewart also took note of how the cable news networks have been handling the story, finding it particularly funny when they tried to solve the crime themselves like some C.S.I. spinoff, "C.N.I" (Cable News Investigation). He found it touching when people all over the world started wearing hoodies to show solidarity, but when all the anchors started wearing them on-air, he couldn't resist playing a round of "Jedi or Sith Lord?".
5/ Now this is interesting - Nicolas Kristof looks at liberals and conservatives and finds conservatives totally understand liberals, but liberals are baffled by what motivates the right.....
This clicked with me.....how about you?
Conservatives may not like liberals, but they seem to understand them. In contrast, many liberals find conservative voters not just wrong but also bewildering.
One academic study asked 2,000 Americans to fill out questionnaires about moral questions. In some cases, they were asked to fill them out as they thought a “typical liberal” or a “typical conservative” would respond.
Moderates and conservatives were adept at guessing how liberals would answer questions. Liberals, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal,” were least able to put themselves in the minds of their adversaries and guess how conservatives would answer.
Now a fascinating new book comes along that, to a liberal like myself, helps demystify the right — and illuminates the kind of messaging that might connect with voters of all stripes. “The Righteous Mind,” by Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor, argues that, for liberals, morality is largely a matter of three values: caring for the weak, fairness and liberty. Conservatives share those concerns (although they think of fairness and liberty differently) and add three others: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity
6/ Boardwalk Empire is set in Atlantic City in the roaring 20's, and if you have seen the show you might wonder how they got those sets of AC long ago.....here's your answer....technology......3 minutes.....
7/ Good article on who is the voice of the Republican party...is it Rush? The Koch Brothers? Fox News? Or "all of the above"?
Kevin Baker in the Times looks at how the domination of the airwaves by right wing points of view has evolved over the decades, including the origins of Fox News, and where we are now....
Who speaks for the Republican party? The answer is that everyone does — and therefore, no one does.
Much air time and many trees have been wasted trying to explain the division, rancor and lethargy that have beset the Republican nominating campaign, now into its second year and threatening to run all the way to the party’s national convention in late August. But it’s no great mystery. Republicans have fallen prey to one of the favorite tactics of just the sort of heedless, improvident, twenty-first century capitalism they revere. Their party has been outsourced.
For decades, Republicans have recruited outside groups and individuals to amplify their party’s message and its influence. This is a legitimate democratic tactic that they have carried off brilliantly, helping to shift the political spectrum in the United States significantly to the right.
When Republicans came to believe in the 1960s that they were up against a “liberal biased” media that would never give them a fair shake, they began the long march to build their own, alternative information establishment. As chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Mark Fowler, led the fight to abolish the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987, further empowering what was already a legion of right-wing talk radio programs.
In 1949, drawing on a long history of court decisions; on public hearings; and on legislation mandating “equal time” for political candidates, the F.C.C. ruled that holders of radio and television broadcast licenses must “devote a reasonable percentage of their broadcast time to the presentation of news and programs devoted to the consideration and discussion of public issues of interest in the community,” and that this must include “different attitudes and viewpoints concerning these vital and often controversial issues.”
The Supreme Court repeatedly upheld the F.C.C.’s power to make such a rule — but never gave it the power of law. In 1986, a pair of Ronald Reagan’s judicial appointees on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, ruled that the Fairness Doctrine was not “a binding statutory obligation.”
8/ One of Stephen Colbert's funniest segments is "The Word", with funny zingers that follow his dialogue.....this one is excellent, and he argues about hoodies and Geraldo.....
A funny four minutes......
9/ Last summer President Obama tried hard to forge a bi-partisan agreement with the House and John Boehner, and this insightful story by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine tells how the President almost became a RINO by selling out the liberals in his own party......
Last summer, President Obama desperately attempted to forge a long-term deficit reduction deal with Congressional Republicans. The notion that he could get the House GOP to accept any remotely balanced agreement was preposterous and doomed from the start, but Obama responded to the increasingly obvious reality by reducing his demands of the Republicans to virtually nothing.
The Washington Post has a long narrative report about the negotiations between Obama and the House Republicans. The narrative frame of the Post’s account is that Obama blew the potential deal at the last minute. That’s a story that people close to Obama’s fired chief of staff, Bill Daley, have been peddling for a long time. But that conclusion is utterly belied by the facts in the Post’s own account. But let’s put that aside for now, because the facts in thePost’s account support a different and far more disturbing conclusion: Obama was even more desperate to cut a deal than previously believed — dangerously desperate, in fact.
It has previously been reported that Obama had offered to John Boehner to make a series of cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and the domestic budget, to reduce top-end tax rates, and to prevent the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, in return for increasing tax revenue (over current tax levels) by about $800 billion over ten years. That is a pitiful sum of new revenue, less than half as much as recommended by deficit proposals by Bowles-Simpson, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and other bipartisan worthies. The blockbuster fact in the Post’s report, which the story does not in any way grapple with, is that even the $800 billion in tax revenue offered by Boehner was not, in fact, $800 billion in tax revenue:
10/ This is definitely a guy video - shows a railroad track laying machine working on a high speed rail line between Chicago and St. Louis - one of only two machines like this in the world.....5 minutes......
11/ Fred Grimm in the Miami Herald with more on the "Stand Your Ground" law that is central to the Trayvon Martin killing, and the travesties of justice it has produced in South Florida....
The killing of Trayvon Martin was only the most infamous Florida homicide complicated by the legal inanity known as “Stand Your Ground.”
Police in Sanford, maddeningly hesitant in their dealings with the 28-year-old neighborhood watch zealot who shot young Martin, have been widely disparaged for citing the 2005 Florida statute that grotesquely altered the doctrine of self-defense.
But just last week, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Beth Bloom bolstered the Sanford cops’ contention that state law now trumps common sense. She sprang another stand-your-ground killer.
Stand Your Ground, the way the law has been interpreted, has proven to be a wild misnomer. Like Trayvon Martin, Pedro Roteta was pursued down a city street by his killer.
On Jan. 25, Roteta had apparently been trying to steal the radio from a truck owned by Greyston Garcia, parked outside his apartment in southwest Miami. Truck burglary’s a crime of course, but not a capital case. Not before 2005.
12/ Katy Perry's funniest video - the extended version of "Last Friday Night", where the beautiful Katy plays a nerdette after a wild party.......
An amusing big budget video, with actual actors playing bit parts and Kenny G. on sax......and a decent song as well......
13/ There's no global warming......so this story from the Times is obviously the liberal media being it's usual self, quoting scientists and other fact based sources.....
According to this if I can hang on for another century I will be living in "Mount Dora by the Sea".....wow, oceanfront property.......Mary get me the number for the cyronics lab.....
About 3.7 million Americans live within a few feet of high tide and risk being hit by more frequent coastal flooding in coming decades because of the sea level rise caused by global warming, according to new research.
If the pace of the rise accelerates as much as expected, researchers found, coastal flooding at levels that were once exceedingly rarecould become an every-few-years occurrence by the middle of this century.
By far the most vulnerable state is Florida, the new analysis found, with roughly half of the nation’s at-risk population living near the coast on the porous, low-lying limestone shelf that constitutes much of that state. But Louisiana, California, New York and New Jersey are also particularly vulnerable, researchers found, and virtually the entire American coastline is at some degree of risk.
“Sea level rise is like an invisible tsunami, building force while we do almost nothing,” said Benjamin H. Strauss, an author, with other scientists, of two new papers outlining the research. “We have a closing window of time to prevent the worst by preparing for higher seas.”
14/ Another Susan Boyle moment from Britain's Got Talent.....and even worse looking than Boyle......nice to see Simon Cowell doing his usual schtick......
Five minutes, but you can fast forward the interview and go straight to the performance [about 1 min, 15 seconds], which is amazing....
15/ Oh lordy - a recent study says that any amount of red meat is bad for you......and that's meat without WalMart pink slime......
For instance, adding just one 3-ounce serving of unprocessed red meat — picture a piece of steak no bigger than a deck of cards — to one's daily diet was associated with a 13% greater chance of dying during the course of the study.
Even worse, adding an extra daily serving of processed red meat, such as a hot dog or two slices of bacon, was linked to a 20% higher risk of death during the study.
"Any red meat you eat contributes to the risk," said An Pan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study, published onlineMonday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
16/ And after that article, hope - the Dutch have perfected an artificial chicken product, made from vegetables, that is actually worth eating......
If there is one product of Big Ag that we all should avoid it's cheap chicken.....stuffed with hormones, factory farmed in horrid conditions and tasteless.....mass produced chicken is actually bad for you.......so this is good news......
IT is pretty well established that animals are capable of suffering; we’ve come a long way since Descartes famously compared them to nonfeeling machines put on earth to serve man. (Rousseau later countered this, saying that animals shared “some measure” of human nature and should partake of “natural right.”) No matter where you stand on this spectrum, you probably agree that it’s a noble goal to reduce the level of the suffering of animals raised for meat in industrial conditions.
There are four ways to move toward fixing this. One, we can improve the animals’ living conditions; two (this is distasteful but would shock no one), we might see producers reduce or eveneliminate animals’ consciousness, say, by removing the cerebral cortex, in effect converting them to a kind of vegetable (see Margaret Atwood’s horrifying description in her prescient “Oryx and Crake”); three, we can consume fewer industrially raised animals, concentrating on those raised more humanely.
Or four, we can reduce consumption, period. That is perhaps difficult when people eat an average of a half-pound of meat daily. But as better fake plant-based “meat” products are created, that option becomes more palatable. My personal approval of fake meat, for what it’s worth, has been long in coming. I like traditional meat substitutes, like tofu, bean burgers, vegetable cutlets and so on, but have been mostly repelled by unconvincing nuggets and hot dogs, which lack bite, chew, juiciness and flavor. I’m also annoyed by the cost: why pay more for fake meat than real meat, especially since the production process is faster, easier and involves no butchering? And, I have felt, if you want to eat less meat, why not just eat more of other real things?
But in October I visited a place in The Hague calledThe Vegetarian Butcher, where the “butcher” said to me, “We slaughter soy” — ha-ha. The plant-based products were actually pretty good — the chicken would have fooled me if I hadn’t known what it was — and I began to consider that it might be better to eat fake meat that harms no animals and causes less environmental damage than meat raised industrially.
17/ Here in Mount Dora we pride ourselves on our gentility, which is why this column from Lauren Ritchie was a revelation that we have the same traumas that the rest of Florida has, just on a smaller scale.
I mean look at Sanford, 18 miles away.......they have REAL problems, we have Buddy Atkins......
Hours of police time in Mount Dora have gone into solving a perplexing problem.
Neighbors aren't speaking to one another. Surveillance cameras have been installed. An exasperated police chief briefed a tense City Council.
The owner of a local real-estate company is so furious he hired a lawyer.
I am not making this up.And the nature of this all-consuming problem? A kid is throwing a football in his neighbor's yard.
When folks in Mount Dora go off the rails, the boxcar doesn't just tip over quietly and lay there. Oh, no. It's as if everyone piles into one of those undersized roller coaster cars drawn by Dr. Seuss and goes wildly racing from the peak of a mountain into a gully, perhaps with one of the occupants holding aloft a tray of green eggs and ham.
18/ "Hunger Games" has had a blockbuster opening week, with record ticket sales, so now in the second week you might want to consider going to the less crowded theaters.....to help you make up your mind here are two reviews, from the NYTimes and Entertainment Weekly, saying about the same message.....it's pretty good, but could have been better.....
No trailer, you've already seen them......
For as long as this brief scene lasts, it seems possible that Gary Ross, the unlikely and at times frustratingly ill-matched director for this brutal, unnerving story, has caught the heart-skipping pulse of Michael Mann’s “Last of the Mohicans” if not that film’s ravishing technique and propulsive energy. Alas, Mr. Ross, the director of the genial entertainments “Pleasantville”
It may be that Mr. Ross is too nice a guy for a hard case like Katniss. A brilliant, possibly historic creation — stripped of sentimentality and psychosexual ornamentation, armed with Diana’s bow and a ferocious will — Katniss is a new female warrior, and she keeps you watching even while you’re hoping for something better the next time around.
The film version of The Hunger Games is a fine example of the contemporary Hollywood franchise picture. It features a cast full of next-big-things breakout actors supported by old-pro ringers having a blast with funny wigs. It conjures up an intriguing new fantasy world without overdosing on world-building (like John Carter) or mythology (like Green Lantern.) More importantly, it manages to capture the propulsive energy of Suzanne Collins’ novel. Adapting a great book into a good movie is not an easy task, and the makers of Hunger Games deserve credit just for the bad decisions they didn’t make. (They didn’t Twilight the movie into a romantic “triangle;” they didn’t turn Peeta into someone who could even remotely be construed as a badass; the kids still kill each other.) But there is one important aspect of the original novel that is almost entirely absent from the movie: The darkly funny way in which Collins directly accuses the audience. As in, us. Weirdly, by turning the book into such a fan-baiting crowdpleaser, the movie version of Hunger Games seems to oddly miss the point of its own source material.
Todays video - the wonderful French taunting scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.....
Todays medical joke
Yesterday I had an appointment to see the urologist for a prostate exam. Of
course I was a bit on edge because all my friends have either gone under the
knife or had those pellets implanted.
The waiting room was filled with patients.
As I approached the receptionist's desk, I noticed that the receptionist was
a large unfriendly woman who looked like a Sumo wrestler. I gave her my
name.
In a very loud voice, the receptionist said, "YES, I HAVE YOUR NAME HERE;
YOU WANT TO SEE THE DOCTOR ABOUT IMPOTENCE, RIGHT?"
All the patients in the waiting room snapped their heads around to look at
me, a now very embarrassed man.
But as usual, I recovered quickly, and in an equally loud voice replied,
"NO, I'VE COME TO INQUIRE ABOUT A SEX CHANGE OPERATION, BUT I DON'T WANT
THE SAME DOCTOR THAT DID YOURS."
The room erupted in applause!
course I was a bit on edge because all my friends have either gone under the
knife or had those pellets implanted.
The waiting room was filled with patients.
As I approached the receptionist's desk, I noticed that the receptionist was
a large unfriendly woman who looked like a Sumo wrestler. I gave her my
name.
In a very loud voice, the receptionist said, "YES, I HAVE YOUR NAME HERE;
YOU WANT TO SEE THE DOCTOR ABOUT IMPOTENCE, RIGHT?"
All the patients in the waiting room snapped their heads around to look at
me, a now very embarrassed man.
But as usual, I recovered quickly, and in an equally loud voice replied,
"NO, I'VE COME TO INQUIRE ABOUT A SEX CHANGE OPERATION, BUT I DON'T WANT
THE SAME DOCTOR THAT DID YOURS."
The room erupted in applause!
Todays pun collection
2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.
3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.
4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.
5. No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.
6. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.
7. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.
8. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.
9. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
10. Atheism is a non-prophetorganization.
11. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: "You stay here; I'll go on a head."
12. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
13. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: 'Keep off the Grass.'
14. A backward poet writes inverse.
15. In a democracy it's your vote that counts. In feudalism it's your count that votes.
16. If you jumped off the bridge in Paris ,you'd be in Seine .
17. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, "I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger."
18. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says "Dam!"
19. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it too.
20. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, "I've lost my electron." The other says "Are you sure?" The first replies, "Yes, I'm positive."
21. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.
22. There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.
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I was standing in a bar and this little Chinese guy comes in and stands next to me.After a few minutes, I said to him, "Do you know any of those martial arts things, like Kung-Fu, Karate, or Ju-Jitsu?"
He says "No, why the fock you ask me dat? Is eet coz I Chinee"?
"No", I said, "It's because you're drinking my fucking beer, you slanty-eyed little cocksucker!"
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