Our international readers can't open a lot of the US TV segments like Jon Stewart, Bill Maher etc., so this week I have got clips that can be seen outside the US as well.......
Lots of Floriduh stories this week.....unfortunately......
1/ An intelligent commentary on the Jonathan Haidt article of last week.....accepting Haidt's philosophy in general, but rebutting Haidt's application to politics and the issue for liberals of why working class whites vote conservative.
George Monblot, writing in the Guardian UK argues the problem for the Dems is low turnout, and the reason for it is because the poor and lower middle class see the same two parties with the same policies.
This article should be read by all Democrats.......
It's an unlikely match, I know, but I have a friend who is a Jehovah's Witness. One day, after overcoming a certain amount of embarrassment on both sides, he asked whether he could try to persuade me to let Jesus into my life. I promised him a fair hearing. Some of what he said made sense, but the story fell apart for me when he claimed that in biblical times "people were a lot more moral than they are today". I argued that half the Old Testament appears to be a record of divinely inspired genocide, as God's people sought to exterminate the other tribes they encountered. "Ah yes," said my friend, "but there was a lot less fornication."
This was the point at which I understood that people of the same neighbourhood can entertain very different conceptions of morality. It is a theme on which the psychologist Jonathan Haidt expands, fascinatingly and persuasively, in his book The Righteous Mind. And it is the theme on which he stumbles, stupidly and disastrously, when seeking to apply his findings to politics, as he did in the Guardian last week, and as he has done to great effect within the Democratic party.
Drawing on a wealth of experimental evidence, Haidt argues that we tend to make moral decisions on the basis of intuition, rather than strategic reasoning. We then use our capacity for reason to find justifications for the decisions we have already made. "Our moral thinking," he says, "is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth."
2/ If the Mittster gets to the White House, apart from every liberal in the country being on suicide watch his term, according to this article, will be much easier because President Obama had to do the heavy lifting on the economy without getting credit for it - the next President, Obama or Romney, should preside over a country in recovery......
I have always had a theory that 'the boys" [oligarchs] selected McCain and Palin [the cranky old geezer and the Caribou Barbie] so they would deliberately lose the 08 election to Obama because they knew for the next four years whoever was President would have to endure a collapsing economy and would be blamed for it.........smart tactics.....
It’s way too early to say who the next president will be. But even now, in June, we can already predict at least one outcome of November’s election: if Mitt Romneyends up winning the White House, he will have a better shot at success than many of his presidential predecessors—and he will have Barack Obama to thank for the leg up.
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney shakes hands during a campaign stop at Production Products, Thursday, June 7, 2012, in St. Louis, Mo. (Evan Vucci / AP Photo)
When Obama arrived in Washington three-and-a-half years ago, he was forced, from day one, to deal with an unusually long list of world-historic hassles. A global financial meltdown. A ballooning budget deficit. A terrorist mastermind still at large. A broken health-care system. A pair of costly quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so on. He addressed as many of them as he thought possible, but persistent unemployment obscured pretty much all of his foreign and domestic accomplishments. As a result, Obama now stands a 50-50 chance of losingreelection—a loss that would basically guarantee him a spot in the history books as a middling commander in chief.
3/ Tom Tomorrow with his take on the economic austerity in Europe and the right wing Republicans......click on the strip to enlarge it......
4/ A 2010 video from SNL with a new take on the Shake-Weight ad......Kristen Wiig is very funny.....2 minutes......
International version......
5/ How racist are we as a nation? Noone is really sure because it's something that people don't readily admit to pollsters of strangers......so if you are trying to find out the true extent of racism, what to do?
Hey, let's ask 'The Google"......
And someone did........and it's more than we realised......more bad news for Dems......
How Racist Are We? Ask Google
By SETH STEPHENS-DAVIDOWITZBarack Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote in 2008 and 365 electoral votes, 95 more than he needed. Many naturallyconcluded that prejudice was not a major factor against a black presidential candidate in modern America. My research, a comparison of Americans’ Google searches and their voting patterns, found otherwise. If my results are correct, racial animus cost Mr. Obama many more votes than we may have realized.
Doug Mills/The New York TimesQuantifying the effects of racial prejudice on voting is notoriously problematic. Few people admit bias in surveys. So I used a newtool, Google Insights, which tells researchers how often words are searched in different parts of the United States.
Can we really quantify racial prejudice in different parts of the country based solely on how often certain words are used on Google? Not perfectly, but remarkably well. Google, aggregating information from billions of searches, has an uncanny ability to reveal meaningful social patterns. “God” is Googled more often in the Bible Belt, “Lakers” in Los Angeles.
6/ Every now and then Bill Maher makes a really good point, and here he takes the "Occupy" movement to task - start working within the political system if you want to make a difference, and take over the Democratic Party like the Tea Party has steamrollered the Republicans......
And it helps that he is really, really funny as well......4 minutes......
In a segment that's bound to ruffle the feathers of some progressives, Bill Maher had some strong, sarcastic words for the Occupy Wall Street movement on Friday's episode of "Real Time."
His overall message: it's time to leave the parks and get in the game. After citing some upcoming OWS plans, including an event on July 4 that will "facilitate a visioning process" as well as a gathering of the OWS "guitarmy" (i.e. a guitar army), Maher explained what OWS' next step should actually be:
Instead of organizing interstate hootenannies, maybe it's time for Occupy Wall Street to actually participate in the American political process. That means, boring stuff like canvassing neighborhoods, raising money, running candidates for office, manning phone banks and making a baby with John Edwards.
International version......
7/ A "cri de coeur" from a liberal......is this you? Read his solution for the left being a punching bag for the right.....and what we need is leaders with the confidence and strength to ignore the right wingnuts.......
Good article, and if you are a liberal it will make you think.....
RIFF
Liberals Are Ruining America. I Know Because I Am One.
Illustration by Tom Gauld
By STEVE ALMOND
Published: June 8, 2012 385 Comments
In the spring of 2006, I quit my job as an adjunct professor at Boston College to protest the school’s selection of Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker. My resignation letter, published online by The Boston Globe, went viral. Over the next few days, I received hundreds of e-mails, evenly divided between praise and condemnation, along with numerous invitations to appear on cable television.
The most tempting offer came from “Hannity & Colmes.” As I viewed it then, Sean Hannity represented the bane of American civic life: a blow-dried blowhard paid to vilify his enemies and incite his imbecilic fans. I leapt at the chance to confront him on live TV.
A producer promised me 10 minutes of airtime, during which I would be free to voice my objections to Rice, the former secretary of state. As it turned out, my interview ran just over three minutes, much of which I spent trying to fend off Hannity’s insistence that I voted for John Kerry. Not what I’d envisioned, but I managed to outlast his bullying and even launch a few zingers before my mike was cut. I was immensely pleased with myself, and I happily accepted kudos from fellow lefties.
Over the past few years, I’ve come to view my appearance as somewhat less heroic. I hadn’t spoken truth to power or caused anyone to reassess Secretary Rice’s record. I merely provided a few minutes of gladiatorial stimulation for Fox News. In seeking to assert my moral superiority, I enabled Hannity.
This, to be blunt, is the tragic flaw of the modern liberal. We choose to see ourselves as innocent victims of an escalating right-wing fanaticism. But too often we serve as willing accomplices to this escalation and to the resulting degradation of our civic discourse. We do this, without even meaning to, by consuming conservative folly as mass entertainment.
If this sounds like a harsh assessment, trust me, I’m among the worst offenders. Yes, I’m one of those enlightened masochists who tune in to conservative talk radio when driving alone. I recognize this as pathological behavior, and I always make sure to switch the station back to NPR before returning the car to my wife. But I can’t help myself. I take a perverse and complicated pleasure in listening to all the mean, manipulative things those people say.
Of course, not all right-wing pundits spew hate. But the ones who do are the ones we liberals dependably aggrandize
8/ "Under the Namibian Sky" - some astronomers set up a viewing area in Namibia [no light pollution}, and the result is a fascinating look at the universe and our solar system created 10,000 years ago.....
The view of the Milky Way is awesome.......the video is 15 minutes, but after 5 minutes you get the idea......set the picture to hi-def 1080.....
9/ Zack Galiflanakis does a schtick called "Between Two Ferns", which is a satire of celebrity interviews.....he gets a well known celeb, sits them down and throws weird lines at them in a strange way.......most famous people are well guarded when dealing with the media, so he gets some unusual reactions......
This one is with Charlize Theron, the beautiful ice queen in Snow White/ Huntsman and the corporate suit in Prometheus.....about 3 minutes........
10/ Great story from the Tampa Tribune on how the Florida "Stand Your Ground" law has actually worked out over the years since it was passed.....and the results are all over the map....
Most interesting.......reads like an episode of one of the TV law programs......
Florida's "stand your ground'' law has allowed drug dealers to avoid murder charges and gang members to walk free. It has stymied prosecutors and confused judges. • It has also served its intended purpose, exonerating dozens of people who were deemed to be legitimately acting in self-defense. Among them: a woman who was choked and beaten by an irate tenant and a man who was threatened in his driveway by a felon.
Seven years since it was passed, Florida's "stand your ground" law is being invoked with unexpected frequency, in ways no one imagined, to free killers and violent attackers whose self-defense claims seem questionable at best.
Cases with similar facts show surprising — sometimes shocking — differences in outcomes. If you claim "stand your ground" as the reason you shot someone, what happens to you can depend less on the merits of the case than on who you are, whom you kill and where your case is decided.
Today, the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen, by a Hispanic neighborhood watch captain has prompted a renewed look at Florida's controversial law.
In the most comprehensive effort of its kind, the Tampa Bay Times has identified nearly 200 "stand your ground'' casesand their outcomes. The Times identified cases through media reports, court records and dozens of interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys across the state.
Among the findings:
• Those who invoke "stand your ground" to avoid prosecution have been extremely successful. Nearly 70 percent have gone free.
• Defendants claiming "stand your ground" are more likely to prevail if the victim is black. Seventy-three percent of those who killed a black person faced no penalty compared to 59 percent of those who killed a white.
11/ A cruel video, but amusing as well.....shows runway models teetering and crashing to the floor......2 distasteful but funny minutes......
12/ Our Floriduh education system has been so screwed up by the legislature and politicians it's even making the New York Times.....Pearson, the company processing the FCAT results, was caught fudging the results and had to correct them this year, which resulted in a significant drop in scores statewide.
Read what the school boards did to get through this crisis.......
Sometimes you just give up hope that anyone can ever fix this corrupt, incompetent system......
The extensive test preparation has paid off. In 2011, among the state’s 67 districts, Seminole (which serves 64,000 students, half of whom qualify for federally subsidized lunches) ranked third in math, fourth in reading and sixth in writing.
Then, last month, the state dropped a bomb. The 2012 scores on the writing test — given to 4th, 8th and 10th graders — plummeted in all districts. Only 27 percent of Florida’s fourth graders were rated proficient, compared with 81 percent the year before. In Seminole, 30 percent were proficient, down from 83 percent.
Something snapped in Dr. Vogel. “We’ve all worked so hard to make sure the state testing system is credible and meaningful, but we’ve reached the tipping point,” he said. “The whole system needs to be readdressed.”
The numbers fell so drastically because, as announced last summer, state officials toughened the standards, paying more attention to grammar and spelling as well as to the factual accuracy of supporting details in essays.
But they did not change the scoring system, resulting in a public relations disaster.
What to do?
They could live with the results — that after 15 years of education reform, three-fourths of Florida children could not write. Or they could scale the results upward after the fact, an embarrassment, but people probably would not be so angry if they had good scores.
The high failure rate was based on measuring proficiency as a score of at least 4.
First, the state considered lowering the cutoff to 3.5.
That would have resulted in a passage rate of about 50 percent. People would probably still be angry.
So on May 15, Florida’s education commissioner, Gerard Robinson, held an emergency conference call with State Education Board members, while 800 school administrators from all over Florida listened in. The board voted to lower the cutoff to 3.
Presto! Problem solved. The proficiency rate for fourth graders was now exactly what it had been in the 2010-11 school year, 81 percent.
For 10th graders, the results actually improved, to 84 percent from 80 percent, meaning scores plummeted but proficiency increased.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/
13/ One of the best Jon Stewart segments for a while, and his target this time is our very own Governor, the certified asshole Rick Scott, who won't let go in his voter purging efforts......Jon evicerates him for 4 minutes, then John Oliver does a field trip to Florida to interview people involved in this travesty....an additional 4 minutes....
Very funny, but it's a pity it's our state again that is the laughing stock of the country.....
Florida Governor Rick Scott recentlypassed a law requiring all new voters in the state to submit their completed voter registration forms within 48 hours of filling them out. If they wait even a minute longer than that allotted time, the forms become void. While the law may not sound absurd at first blush, things get more complicated when you consider how many people register through third parties -- like volunteers from the League of Women Voters. And how many newly-registered voters are Democrats and Independents.
After "The Daily Show" heard that the law has already caused a 20% decrease in new voter registration, they decided to head down to Florida and see what's really going on.
John Oliver sat down and talked to John Fund from the National Review and Ann McFall, the Volusia County Supervisor of Elections, and found something shocking: these forms are out of control.
International version......
14/ And continuing the theme of voter purging, here is a well researched and well documented story of how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush stole the 2000 election for "W", by purging mainly black voters from the electoral rolls......almost 100,000 of them........and remember Bush beat Gore by 537 votes.......
An excellent story, that at the time was published in Britain but not here.......it's also an indictment of our corporate media......
So what Rick Scott is doing is nothing new.......
Greg Palast on the Stolen Presidency, Part I
JIM CROW IN CYBERSPACE: The Unreported Story of How They Fixed the Vote in Florida
In the days following the presidential election, there were so many stories of African Americans erased from voter rolls you might think they were targeted by some kind of racial computer program.
They were.
I have a copy of it: two silvery CD-ROM disks right out of the office computers of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Once decoded and flowed into a database, they make for interesting, if chilling, reading. They tell us how our president was, elected—and it wasn’t by the voters.
Here’s how it worked: Mostly, the disks contain data on Florida citizens—57,700 of them. In the months leading up to the November 2000 balloting, Florida Secretary of State Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local elections supervisors to purge these 57,700 from voter registries. In Harris’s computers, they are named as felons who have no right to vote in Florida.
Thomas Cooper is on the list: criminal scum, bad guy, felon, attempted voter. The Harris hit list says Cooper was convicted of a felony on January 30, 2007.
2007?
You may suspect something’s wrong with the list. You’d be right. At least 90.2 percent of those on this “scrub” list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, over half—about 54 percent—are Black and Hispanic voters. Overwhelmingly, it is a list of Democrats.
15/ Afrojack and Eva Symons with "Take Over Control"......a trippy dance music video with scantily clad dancers, a cool Audi and a junkyard......watch this and you will either say "this is lively" or babble something to do with Babylon or Imperial Rome......enjoy......
16/ Another Floriduh story - instead of actually planing for rising sea levels our Tallahassee numbskulls are banning any mention of climate change.....ignore it and it won't happen......
We are governed by morons.......
IN MY OPINION
Banned words in some states: Rising sea levels
BY FRED GRIMM
FGRIMM@MIAMIHERALD.COM
It must be frustrating for our guys in Tallahassee. The governor and the legislative leadership have made it plenty clear that they have no use for this global warming stuff. Yet climate scientists keep dumping water on Florida’s future.
The latest damper comes from Climate Central, which just published two papers in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters, warning that due to global warming and rising sea levels, 3.7 million Americans reside in areas with an escalating risk of storm surge and coastal flooding. Half of them are in Florida. South Florida comes out looking particularly soggy.
Last year, Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions warned that rising sea levels will back up drainage canals, inundate roads, farms and low-lying neighborhoods, cause sewage systems and septic tanks to fail and inject salt water into water wells.
Obviously, something needs to be done. About those damn scientists, of course. Not global warming.
Like-minded legislators and state officials in Texas, Virginia and North Carolina — states with their own coastal vulnerabilities — have shown Florida just how to deal with such annoyances. They erase offending words and passages. They made it flat out illegal for state planners and zoning officials to refer to nettlesome scientific findings that might hurt coastal property values.
Todays video - four funny commercials......
Todays kids joke
A family was driving behind a garbage truck when a large dildo flies out
and hits the windshield.
To hide her embarrassment the mother turns and says to her young kids,
"My what a big insect!"
To which her 7 year old says, " I'm surprised it could fly with a dick that big."
Todays dentist joke
A guy goes to a female dentist to have a tooth extracted.
She pulls out a numbing needle to give the man a shot.
"No way! No needles. I hate needles" the patient said.
The dentist starts to hook up the nitrous oxide and the man says: " I can't do the gas thing. The thought of having the gas mask on suffocates me!'
The dentist then asks the patient if he has any objections to taking a pill."No objection," he says. "I'm fine with pills."
The dentist gives him a couple of pills. He swallows them. "What are they?" he says.
"Viagra," says the dentist.
"Heck," the patient says, "I didn't know Viagra worked as a pain killer."
"It doesn't" said the dentist, "But it will give you something to hold onto when I pull your tooth."
Todays Chinese jokes
Passionate kiss, like spider web, leads to undoing of fly.
Better to be pissed off than pissed on.
Lady who goes camping must beware of evil intent.
Squirrel who runs up womans' leg will not find nuts.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Man who runs in front of car gets tired, man who runs behind car gets exhausted.
Man who eats many prunes get good run for money.
War does not determine who is right, it determines who is left.
Man who fight with wife all day get no piece at night.
It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it.
Man who drives like hell is bound to get there.
Man who stands on toilet is high on pot.
Man who live in glass house should change clothes in basement.
Man who fish in other man's well often catch crabs.
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