1/ Carl Gibson calls out the leaders and strategists of the Democratic party for their failure to get behind the Wisconsin recall election last week.....painful reading for anyone on the left, and he makes some excellent points......
ear Democratic Party leaders,Your lackluster 2012 recall performance in Wisconsin reminded me of another lackluster performance I saw in Mississippi in 2010.
At a local bar's karaoke night in downtown Jackson, a dopey-looking middle-aged man in a jet-black toupee sang "Gimme All Your Lovin" by ZZ Top, drunkenly and off-key, to a group of young women at a nearby table. He was really getting into it until he stumbled off of the stage, knocked over their drinks, and spilled beer all over himself. The music stopped, and the women started laughing at him instead of with him. He sat by himself in the back of the room for the rest of the night. That was the second most painful thing I've ever watched.
The most painful thing I ever watched was when Tom Barrett got his ass handed to him by a proto-fascist governor who ran on punishing working families to reward his wealthy campaign donors with the salaries of public servants. This happened despite massive populist protests in Madison, an army of volunteers getting 1,000,000 recall signatures in the dead of winter and tirelessly knocking on over 1,000,000 doors leading up to the election, and his opponent's brand being associated with corruption. Despite what should have been a slam-dunk at a time when the far right is losing the battle of public opinion, Barrett's recall attempt fell flat on its face.
The Dems lost to Walker but took back the Senate, so I don't blame the unions or the volunteers. I don't even fully blame Wisconsin's shameless corporate-owned media, Super PACs, Citizens United, or Scott Walker's campaign war chest. Rather, Democratic Party leaders simply ignored and dismissed the powerful economic populist narrative that united the world around the Wisconsin State Capitol and Wall Street Occupations of 2011, and proved how out of touch they are with the 99 percent.
President Obama and DNC leadership treated the Wisconsin recall like a statewide race that didn't have national significance and put it on the backburner while the president campaigned for himself in neighboring states. But the RNC and their fascist wing, the Tea Party, outsmarted you in Wisconsin, so their multi-state class war will continue unabated, and perhaps even exacerbated. You'll continue to get pounded until you nominate and fundraise for candidates that are as far to the left as Scott Walker is to the right. I'm talking the kind of candidates who make stump speeches in the same vein of anti-robber-baron populism as FDR in 1934, or Martin Luther King in 1968.
Even British media smelled the stink of your failure in Wisconsin, calling out Clinton and Barrett for their milquetoast, plain-vanilla pitch to crucial voters at a crucial campaign stop. When your opponents actively seek to crush working families and the institutions that protect them, you don't energize those workers by telling them you'll work hand-in-hand with their oppressors. Wisconsin voters didn't force a recall to seek consensus with Republicans. They forced a recall to make a statement against a corrupt Republican regime that cares more about punishing its political enemies than serving the public interest.
Even though Blue Dog Democrat Tom Barrett lost handily to Scott Walker in 2010, establishment leaders still tapped him as the nominee for the recall election. Answer this: Why would the same guy, saying the same things, somehow have a different result against the same opponent he already lost to not even two years beforehand? Would it have killed you to nominate a woman, a person of color, someone younger than sixty, or at the very least, someone who doesn't wear the same color tie as his opponent? Why did you have to pick a boring white male career politician to challenge another boring white male career politician in a historic recall attempt?
Scott Walker made a mockery of the Badger State by ruling as the manager of the Midwest subsidiary for Koch Industries instead of serving as the Governor of Wisconsin. He proudly replaced union workers with prison labor, and oversaw the loss of over 30,000 jobs while middle class wages decreased and corporate profits have never been higher. Democrats chose instead to play defense to Walker's lies.
2/ Carly Rae Jepsen with "Call me Maybe", a perky young Canadian with a fairly forgettable song.....but since her music video has had 111 million hits I could be wrong about that......and ladies check out the lawnmower guy........
3/ Radio commentator Thom Hartmann reviews a new book that among other things details a meeting in Washington in January 2008, where Republican leaders hammered out a strategy to cripple President Obama's term by opposing any and all legislation he might try to get passed......so if you want to find out why you are disappointed with the President for not accomplishing much on the progressive agenda, watch this....
Hartmann is very good on the radio, and pretty decent on camera.....9 minute video.....
4/ "Your Daily Dose of Drama".......fun, exciting and funny video of some strange happenings in Belgium.......again an excellent 2 minutes.....
5/ A piece from the Guardian directly relevant to the Hartmann clip - as a deliberate strategy the Republicans in the House and Senate are crashing the US economy to make Obama a one term President......
So why does the US economy stink?
Why has job creation in America slowed to a crawl? Why, after several months of economic hope, are things suddenly turning sour? The culprits might seem obvious – uncertainty in Europe, an uneven economic recovery, fiscal and monetary policymakers immobilized and incapable of acting. But increasingly, Democrats are making the argument that the real culprit for the country's economic woes lies in a more discrete location: with the Republican Party.
In recent days, Democrats have started coming out and saying publicly what many have been mumbling privately for years – Republicans are so intent on defeating President Obama for re-election that they are purposely sabotaging the country's economic recovery. These charges are now being levied by Democrats such as Senate majority leaderHarry Reid and Obama's key political adviser, David Axelrod.
For Democrats, perhaps the most obvious piece of evidence of GOP premeditated malice is the 2010 quote from Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell:
"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
6/ An amusing 2 minute vid of people at the seaside doing really dumb things.........ignore the music.......
Jamie Dimon, head of the megabank J. P. Morgan and ranking financial oligarch testified before the Senate banking committee this week, and we have three interesting takes on his testimony and the reactions of the Senators to Mr. Dimon.....
7/ The first from Bill Moyers interviewing Thomas Frank, author of the terrific book "What's The Matter With Kansas".......three minutes....
Jamie Dimon’s ‘Family Reunion’ with the Senate Banking Committee
Thomas Frank talks about the friendly reception the JPMorgan CEO received when he appeared before the Senate Banking Committee.
8/ The second is Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine with an article on the significance of Dimon's testimony, and as he says any shame, blame or moral outrage against the big banks for crashing the world economy is gone....the attitude from most of the Senators questioning him was:
"Dimon was just another Job Creator threatened by bureaucrats and red tape."
Jamie Dimon’s testimony before Congress today appears to be a watershed moment in the rehabilitation of Wall Street. The industry has emerged from the financial crisis feeling its oats and fully realigned as a conservative political force.
In the years before the financial crisis, Wall Street took on a bipartisan hue, for the simple reason that neither party posed any serious threat to its business model. Republicans offered them lower tax rates, but Democrats offered them more congenial social positions that may have allowed them to hold their heads up high in rarified social circles as progressive businessmen.
The financial crisis ushered in a kind of transition period. Americans were in a purple-faced rage at an industry they more or less correctly perceive as having first destroyed the economy, then received a generous bailout and resumed making obscene money while the rest of the country suffered. The rage was strong enough to make politicians of all stripes leery of appearing close to the industry. That hesitation is what allowed liberals to pass the Dodd-Frank law — just enough Republicans and moderate Democrats were frightened to be seen as carrying Wall Street water to force them to support a potentially serious reform.
But Wall Street was slowly building up a rage against the public that it resented it, a rage it blamed primarily on President Obama and the Democrats. (Gabriel Sherman and Alec MacGillis have captured Wall Street’s bizarre feeling of persecution and entitlement.) Wall Street now tilts overwhelmingly Republican in its political orientation — the industry, reports Politico today, is directing nearly eight times as much money to Romney as to Obama.
And that new partisan orientation was on full display in Jamie Dimon’s testimony before the Senate today. It’s not that the Democrats were uniformly hostile — several of them treated Dimon rather deferentially. It’s that the only source of skepticism came from Democrats, especially liberal ones. Republicans tripped over themselves to display ideological solidarity with Dimon. The sense that Wall Street was more suspect than other businesses, for its systemic risks or having received a bailout, was completely gone. Dimon was just another Job Creator threatened by bureaucrats and red tape
9/ The third is a wonderful Jon Stewart, mocking the reaction of the Republican Senators to Dimon......Jon at his best, with some nice big juicy targets.......7 minutes......he calls the segment "Bank Yankers"......
So on Thursday night's "Daily Show," Jon Stewart had a few bones to pick.
"Why don't you just put Jamie Dimon in a chair like Cee Lo's from 'The Voice,' and if he hears something he likes, boom. You just earned yourself another term in Congress," Stewart joked.
But not everyone at the hearings has been so lighthearted. Dimon himself actually seems quite apologetic and focused on improvement.
"The truth is, the person hardest on Jamie Dimon was Jamie Dimon," Stewart said. "See, as bad as the banks and the bankers may have been, the one thing that the senators wanted to remind everyone is that government is worse."
The real cherry on the sundae for Stewart, though, was when Tennessee senator Bob Corker tried to get Dimon to speak out against Dodd-Frank in his line of questioning.
International version.....
10/ One for you science geeks, and others with inquiring minds......this fascinating sliding scale gives us relative dimensions of our world, from the tiniest particles to galaxies unimaginable distances away.....humbling.....
11/ Sheldon Adelson, the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove have joined forces to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at the November election to defeat the President........and Adelson alone will contribute almost $100 million, but since he's worth about $26 billion to him it's just a minor investment. By the way his main money making casino is in Macau, so you could say Chinese money is buying this election, or purchasing President Romney..........
WASHINGTON -- Casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, whose net worth makes him one of the world's richest men, is on a check-writing spree that will soon bring his total political contributions in this election cycle to at least $71 million, according to sources familiar with his spending. That money is spread across the spectrum of GOP super PACs, which are required to disclose donors, and nonprofits, which are not.
Adelson and his wife, Miriam, along with other family donations, have already reached $36 million, including $10 million to the Romney-backing super PAC Restore Our Future that was reported this week. But two GOP fundraisers familiar with his plans say that Adelson has given or pledged at least $35 million more to three conservative nonprofit groups: the Karl Rove-linked Crossroads GPS, another with ties to billionaires Charles and David Koch and a third with links to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).
12/ The Voice - Australia unleashed a new talent, or rather a new version of a 60's star this season........Janis redux.......3 minutes........
13/ Talk about the law of unintended consequences.....a visitor to London had his car break down near Parliament, so he goes off to get help and look at the sights, but when he returns he finds his car has been blown up by the anti-terrorist police.....oops.....and he got a ticket......
A tourist had his car blown up by anti-terrorist police after it broke down – and he also got a parking ticket.
Nima Hosseini Razi's Ford Mondeo broke down near the Houses of Parliament. He left a note on the car saying "this car is broke – please do not fine me" before going sightseeing. When he returned he found that anti-terrorist officers, fearing the vehicle might have contained a bomb, had blown open the boot in a controlled explosion. To add insult to injury, a parking attendant issued a ticket before Mr Razi's car was towed away.
14/ Tom Tomorrow nails it again - how Action McNews spins everything, even a giant asteroid coming directly at the Earth......
15/ Worth another look - an incredible magic act with the comely assistant a magician as well......how do they do this amazing stuff.....yeesh......3 minutes......
16/ Rick Scott, our Governor, has a favourite talking point about Citizens Insurance which he says is grossly underfunded because of the $500 billion in potential risk of a major hurricane. He is using this to push up the rates again, after 6 years of no claims.....
But he is lying.....it's complete bullshit, and read why......
It’s become Gov. Rick Scott’s favorite talking point in the escalating debate over raising rates at Citizens Property Insurance: The state-run insurer has a whopping $500 billion in risk exposure, and a paltry $6 billion in surplus, or cash-on-hand.
In interviews, at Cabinet meetings and even in a pop-quiz-styled survey to the Florida Council of 100, Scott repeatedly uses these two numbers to illustrate the financial health of Citizens.
"I’m not sure how much smaller Citizens can get. But here’s the position Citizens is in now," Scott said during a May trip to the Florida Keys. "They have over $500 billion worth of risk, with less than $10 billion worth of surplus. So that’s a lot of risk, and I think one of the most important things homeowners want is if there ever is a disaster that their insurance company is going to be able to pay the bill."
In a survey given to the Florida Council of 100 last month, Scott got more specific, stating that the state-run insurer had $504.8 billion in total risk exposure and only $6.1 billion in cash surplus.
It’s a jarring numerical juxtaposition used to show that Citizens is severely undercapitalized and, if a major hurricane hits, would spur untold financial calamity for the state.
In interviews, at Cabinet meetings and even in a pop-quiz-styled survey to the Florida Council of 100, Scott repeatedly uses these two numbers to illustrate the financial health of Citizens.
"I’m not sure how much smaller Citizens can get. But here’s the position Citizens is in now," Scott said during a May trip to the Florida Keys. "They have over $500 billion worth of risk, with less than $10 billion worth of surplus. So that’s a lot of risk, and I think one of the most important things homeowners want is if there ever is a disaster that their insurance company is going to be able to pay the bill."
In a survey given to the Florida Council of 100 last month, Scott got more specific, stating that the state-run insurer had $504.8 billion in total risk exposure and only $6.1 billion in cash surplus.
It’s a jarring numerical juxtaposition used to show that Citizens is severely undercapitalized and, if a major hurricane hits, would spur untold financial calamity for the state.
Todays video - Mrs Brown's big shock.......
Todays drunk joke
A few weeks ago a routine police patrol was parked outside a bar in Alabama. After last call, the officer noticed a man leaving the bar so apparently intoxicated that he could barely walk.
The man stumbled around the parking lot for a few minutes —— with the officer quietly observing. After what seemed an eternity, the man tried his keys on five different vehicles then his car and fell into it. He sat there for a few minutes as a number of other patrons left the bar and drove off.
Finally he started the car, switched the wipers on and off —— it was a dry summer night —— then flicked the blinkers on and off a couple of times, honked the horn switched on the lights. He moved the vehicle forward a few inches, reversed a little and then remained still for a few more minutes while more of the other patrons' vehicles left the bar.
At last, when he was the only car left in the parking lot, he pulled out and drove slowly down the road.
The police officer, having waited patiently all this time, started up his patrol car, put on his flashing lights and promptly pulled the man over —— then administered a breathalyzer test.
To his amazement, the breathalyzer indicated no evidence that the man had consumed any alcohol at all! Dumbfounded, the officer said, "I'll have to ask you to accompany me to the police station. This breathalyzer equipment must be broken."
"I doubt it," said the proud Redneck.
"Tonight I'm the designated decoy."
At last, when he was the only car left in the parking lot, he pulled out and drove slowly down the road.
The police officer, having waited patiently all this time, started up his patrol car, put on his flashing lights and promptly pulled the man over —— then administered a breathalyzer test.
To his amazement, the breathalyzer indicated no evidence that the man had consumed any alcohol at all! Dumbfounded, the officer said, "I'll have to ask you to accompany me to the police station. This breathalyzer equipment must be broken."
"I doubt it," said the proud Redneck.
"Tonight I'm the designated decoy."
Another drunk joke
Two buddies, Fred and Jerry, were getting very drunk at a bar when
suddenly Jerry throws up all over himself.
'Oh, no... Now my wife will kill me!'
Fred says, 'Don't worry, pal. Just tuck a twenty in your breast
pocket and tell your wife that someone threw up on you and gave you
twenty dollars for the dry cleaning bill.'
So they stay for another couple of hours and get even drunker.
Eventually Jerry stumbles home and his wife starts to give him a bad time.
'You reek of alcohol and you've puked all over yourself! My God,
you're disgusting!'
Speaking very carefully so as not to slur his words, Jerry says,
Nowainaminit, I can e'splain everythin. Itsh snot wha jewthink. I only
had a cupla drrrinks. But thiss other guy got sick on me...he had one
too many and he juss koudin hold hizz liquor He said he's was berry
sorry an' gave me twenties bucks for the cleaning bill!'
His wife looks in the breast pocket and says, 'But this is forty bucks...'
'Oh, yeah... I almos' fergot, he shhhit in my pants, too.'
A quick pervert joke
A WOMAN ANSWERS A PHONE CALL.
A PERVERT WITH HEAVY BREATHING SAYS;
"I BET YOU HAVE A TIGHT ASSHOLE WITH NO HAIR"
SHE REPLIES, "YES, HE'S WATCHING TV....
WHO SHALL I SAY IS CALLING"
Todays police joke
A police motorcycle cop stops a driver for running a red light. The
driver is a real jerk, steps out of his car and comes strides toward the
officer, demanding to know why he is being harassed by the Gestapo!
instantly goes on a tirade, questioning the officer's ancestry, sexual
orientation, etc., in rather explicit terms.
The tirade goes on without the officer saying anything.
When the officer finishes writing the ticket he puts an "AH" in the
lower right corner of the narrative portion of the ticket. He then hands
it to the 'violator' for his signature.
to the "AH" and demands to know what it stands for.
The officer says, "That's so when we go to court, I'll remember that
you're an asshole!"
Two months later they're in court. The 'violator' has a bad driving
record and he is in danger of losing his license, so he hired a lawyer
to represent him..
On the stand the officer testifies to seeing the man run the red light.
Under cross examination the defense attorney asks; "Officer is this a
reasonable facsimile of the ticket that you issued to my client?"
Officer responds, "Yes, sir, that is the defendant's copy, his signature
and mine, same number at the top."
Lawyer: "Officer, is there any particular marking or notation on this
ticket you don't normally make?"
"Yes, sir, in the lower right corner of the narrative there is an "AH,"
underlined."
"What does the "AH" stand for, officer?"
"Aggressive and hostile, Sir."
"Aggressive and hostile?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Officer, are you sure it doesn't stand for asshole?"
"Well, sir, you know your client better than I do."
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