1/ Most interesting column from Paul Krugman - he says the very rich feel that the rest of the common people should show more deference and politeness, and common persons of course include the President.
The problem is these whining, spoiled assholes have the billions to buy the government they want....and have already purchased one of our political parties.....
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” So wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald — and he didn’t just mean that they have more money. What he meant instead, at least in part, was that many of the very rich expect a level of deference that the rest of us never experience and are deeply distressed when they don’t get the special treatment they consider their birthright; their wealth “makes them soft where we are hard.”
And because money talks, this softness — call it the pathos of the plutocrats — has become a major factor in America’s political life.
It’s no secret that, at this point, many of America’s richest men — including some former Obama supporters — hate, just hate, President Obama. Why? Well, according to them, it’s because he “demonizes” business — or as Mitt Romney put it earlier this week, he “attacks success.” Listening to them, you’d think that the president was the second coming of Huey Long, preaching class hatred and the need to soak the rich.
Needless to say, this is crazy. In fact, Mr. Obama always bends over backward to declare his support for free enterprise and his belief that getting rich is perfectly fine. All that he has done is to suggest that sometimes businesses behave badly, and that this is one reason we need things like financial regulation. No matter: even this hint that sometimes the rich aren’t completely praiseworthy has been enough to drive plutocrats wild. For two years or more, Wall Street in particular has been crying: “Ma! He’s looking at me funny!”
Wait, there’s more. Not only do many of the superrich feel deeply aggrieved at the notion that anyone in their class might face criticism, they also insist that their perception that Mr. Obama doesn’t like them is at the root of our economic problems. Businesses aren’t investing, they say, because business leaders don’t feel valued. Mr. Romney repeated this line, too, arguing that because the president attacks success “we have less success.”
2/ Sometimes the internet produces original ideas and videos - this is one of them that has gone viral.
In 1992 a 12 year old boy recorded himself asking his future self questions, and 20 years later the 12 year old, now 32, answers his younger self.......
Quite an interesting 3 minutes......clever......
3/ Something is happening quietly that is scaring the shit out of the big banks - cities are using eminent domain to purchase under water mortgages and give the homeowners a new loan at market value.......
The community wins, the people are happy, and the banks have to write down their loans.....yeay! Another great story from Matt Taibbi.......
Something very interesting is happening.
There’s been so much corruption on Wall Street in recent years, and the federal government has appeared to be so deeply complicit in many of the problems, that many people have experienced something very like despair over the question of what to do about it all.
But there’s something brewing that looks like it might eventually turn into a blueprint to take on the financial services industry: a plan to allow local governments to take on the problem of neighborhoods blighted by toxic home loans and foreclosures through the use of eminent domain. I can't speak for how well this program will work, but it's certaily been effective in scaring the hell out of Wall Street.
Under the proposal, towns would essentially be seizing and condemning the man-made mess resulting from the housing bubble. Cooked up by a small group of businessmen and ex-venture capitalists, the audacious idea falls under the category of "That’s so crazy, it just might work!" One of the plan’s originators described it to me as a "four-bank pool shot."
Here’s how the New York Times described it in an article from earlier this week entitled, "California County Weighs Drastic Plan to Aid Homeowners":
Desperate for a way out of a housing collapse that has crippled the region, officials in San Bernardino County … are exploring a drastic option — using eminent domain to buy up mortgages for homes that are underwater.Then, the idea goes, the county could cut the mortgages to the current value of the homes and resell the mortgages to a private investment firm, which would allow homeowners to lower their monthly payments and hang onto their property.
4/ Jon Stewart with a wonderful 6 minutes exposing yet again the awfulness of Fox News.......you go Jon.......
5/ President Obama actually has the upper hand in the coming fight about the tax cuts expiring at the end of the year, and the mandatory cuts sheduled in January to defense and other government programs. Here Bill Keller in the Times urges Obama to hang tough.......
WASHINGTON is so immobilized by partisan rancor that those of us who crave a little common sense find it hard to ward off despair. Whether you blame Republican cynicism, Democratic fecklessness or presidential disengagement, it is now a given that Washington has become a sludge pit of dysfunction.
Exhibit A, of course, is the hapless quest for a grand budget bargain. Talk to any credible economist, wire any serious politician to a polygraph, and you will hear at least 80 percent agreement on what is to be done: investment to goose the lackluster recovery and rebuild our infrastructure, entitlement reforms and spending discipline to lower the debt, and a tax code that lets the government pay its way without stifling business, punishing the middle class or rewarding sleight of hand. The bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission assembled a grand bargain that does most of this.
Of course, in this Washington, in this election year, there is no chance of accomplishing anything constructive, right? So crisis be damned, let’s scream about Romney’s outsourcing and whether Obama hates capitalism.
But President Obama has a bold option at hand, should he choose to use it. And some of his fellow Democrats are starting to warm to the idea. It has been called the nuclear option and likened to falling off a cliff. It is widely regarded as a possible catastrophe. In fact, it may be our best hope.
In January, two fiscal time bombs planted by Congress are due to explode. On Jan. 1, all the Bush tax cuts expire, constituting a $400-billion-plus tax hike in 2013. The next day — unless Congress agrees on a major deficit-reduction plan — a fiscal discipline known as sequestration will slash about $100 billion a year from federal spending, divided between defense and nondefense.
6/ Paul Thomas Anderson is the director of "There Will Be Blood", one of the best movies made in the last few years, so his latest movie "The Master" which has a Scientology theme is causing a lot of buzz......this trailer was just released......
The Weinstein Company released the "Master" trailer on the heels of a brand new poster for the film (which debuted exclusively on HuffPost Entertainment on Wednesday), and the clip showcases what may very well end up being two of the 20 Oscar-nominated performances at the 85th annual Academy Awards: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix.
In the film, Anderson's first since "There Will Be Blood" in 2007, Hoffman plays Lancaster Dodd, "a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher," and creator of a cult-like religion that may or may not be a thinly veiled stand-in for Scientology. ("I don't know what you've heard and what script you've read," Philip Seymour Hoffman told Hollywood Elsewhere blogger Jeffrey Wells last year, "[but] trust me, it's not about Scientology.")
7/ A video of two guys putting rubber bands around a watermelon till it explodes......sounds goofy, but they have a high speed camera!
It's 4 minutes, but you get the idea after two....
8/ If you like Lewis Black, you will love this video.....his humour is an acquired taste to be sure, but I think he's terrific.......5 minutes.....
Blood pressure concerns aside, thank heaven for Lewis Black. If one person has the ability to embody the collective frustration Americans feel with lie upon little-white-campaign lie, it would be him.
Black appeared on Tuesday's edition of "The Daily Show" for his popular "Back In Black" segment, and boy did he have a bone to pick. And not a moment too soon. If campaign ads are bending the truth this much in July, they may be disrupting the space-time continuum by October.
While "The Daily Show," and Jon Stewart in particular, are occasionally accused by the left of making false equivalencies, Black's criticism of both sides was as fair as it was ferocious. And he underlined something that we've been trying to put our finger on since this election was just a glint in Karl Rove's eye:
9/ As a follow-on to the brilliant piece in Rolling Stone by Bill McKibben, here is an interesting story about how the midwest is well on the way to recreating the dust bowl conditions of the 30's - but worse. The disaster in the 30's was caused by a combination of bad farming practice and drought......we have drastically improved the way farms are managed, and this is just drought.....baaaaad drought.
This heat wave has broken thousands of temperature records. Climate Central reported Satuday, “In many cases, records that had stood since the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s have been equaled or exceeded, and this event is likely to go down in history as one of America’s worst.”
In general, we expect the greatest number of temperature records to be set during a widespread drought. I explained why that is that the case in my Nature article last year on “The next dust bowl” ( full text here ):
Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further
increase in air temperature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl; and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a US state.
Why is this bad news? Because the Earth has warmed only a bit more than 1°F
since the catastrophic Dust Bowl — and we are poised to warm an astounding 9-11°F this century if we stay anywhere near our current greenhouse gas emissions path.
Much as our current monster heat wave has been made worse by human activity (man-made global warming) so too was the Dust Bowl — but in that case it was bad agricultural practices. As NOAA’s discussion of “ The Dust Bowl Drought ” explains:
The drought came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939-40, but some regions of the High Plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years. The “dust bowl” effect was caused by sustained drought conditions compounded by years of land management practices that left topsoil susceptible to the forces of the wind.
://www.alternet.org/
10/ One of the shortest, but yet the one of the most powerful songs ever recorded was Neil Young's "Needle and the Damage Done".....here he is live on stage, just him, his guitar and the song.....an excellent 2 minutes and 21 seconds.......
11/ And then there is this story - a heat wave over Greenland has melted the top layer of ice over 97% of the continent......oops....
Unprecedented melting of Greenland's ice sheet this month has stunned NASA scientists and has highlighted broader concerns that the region is losing a remarkable amount of ice overall.
According to a NASA press release, about half of Greenland's surface ice sheet naturally melts during an average summer. But the data from three independent satellites this July, analyzed by NASA and university scientists, showed that in less than a week, the amount of thawed ice sheet surface skyrocketed from 40 percent to 97 percent.
In over 30 years of observations, satellites have never measured this amount of melting, which reaches nearly all of Greenland's surface ice cover.
When Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory observed the recent melting phenomenon, he said in the NASA press release, "This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: Was this real or was it due to a data error?"
Scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, University of Georgia-Athens and City University of New York all confirmed the remarkable ice melt.
NASA's cryosphere program manager, Tom Wagner, credited the power of satellites for observing the melt and explained to The Huffington Post that, although this specific event may be part of a natural variation, "We have abundant evidence that Greenland is losing ice, probably because of global warming, and it's significantly contributing to sea level rise."
Wagner said that ice is clearly thinning around the periphery, changing Greenland's overall ice mass, and he believes this is primarily due to warming ocean waters "eating away at the ice." He cautiously added, "It seems likely that's correlated with anthropogenic warming."
This specific extreme melt occurred in large part due to an unusual weather pattern over Greenland this year, what the NASA press release describes as a series of "heat domes," or an "unusually strong ridge of warm air."
Notable melting occurred in specific regions of Greenland, such as the area aroundSummit Station, located two miles above sea level. Not since 1889 has this kind of melting occurred, according to ice core analysis described in NASA's press release.
12/ The July compilation of dumb, brave and unlucky people screwing up......OK mostly dumb.....July fails......10 minutes of pain......
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
13/ There's a new reality show on TV - South Beach Tow.......here's a riveting clip from it, with our intrepid repo team facing an unhappy client about to lose his Lexus......
Even though this is about as real as professional wrestling, it's well done.....2 minutes......
There is actually a real company called Tremont Towing on Miami South Beach......
14/ Sometimes you wonder how anything gets kept out of the hands of our greedy politicians, developers and other scum like our Governor. It's a few good people like this Federal Judge getting really pissed off with the games these bastards play.....
Read this one.....you'll feel better......
Politicians in both parties have resumed rhapsodizing about the magnificence of the Everglades, a phenomenon that occurs every four years with varying degrees of sincerity.
Polls show that most Floridians want the Everglades restored and preserved. This requires candidates to show some love. Neither Democrats nor Republicans want to look like obstructionists on this issue in an election year.
That’s one reason why the Obama administration and the state have reached an agreement tentatively resolving 20 years’ worth of lawsuits that have hobbled efforts to clean the polluted water being pumped into the Everglades.
It’s true that under Obama, funding for Everglades restoration is way up from the Bush years. It’s also true that Gov. Rick Scott pushed for the recent settlement with Washington, which should restart some projects that will help the cleanup.
However, the semi-miraculous truce between Florida and the feds wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for a fellow named Alan Gold. He’s a U.S. district judge in Miami who got so fed up with the stalling of both sides that he gave them a glorious reaming two years ago.
You couldn’t blame the man for being ticked off.
Gold was presiding over drawn-out litigation that was holding up some of the Everglades projects. The Miccosukee tribe had sued because phosphorus pollution from farms, ranches and subdivisions was being flushed into the reservation.
In the summer of 2008, Gold had ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection to start enforcing clean-water standards that had been set to take effect back in 2006.
But in the face of heavy lobbying, the feds and the state decided on a 10-year extension — a nice break for the polluters. That didn’t sit well with the Miccosukees, most environmental groups or the judge.
In 2010, Gold issued a ruling that scalded the EPA and the DEP for showing “glacial slowness” in cleaning up the flow into Everglades. He characterized the restoration plan as “rudderless.”
“The hard reality,” he wrote, “is that ongoing destruction due to pollution within the Everglades Protection Area continues to this day at an alarming rate.”
15/ A recent poll showed a majority of Floridians approve of the "Stand your Ground" law, which is a depressing picture of Floriduh.......but most Floridians don't know the law has mostly benefited criminals as this story from the Miami Herald illustrates.
The Trayvon Martin case has cemented the institutional racism in our state..... if 'Stand yer Ground" means we get to shoot some black people, we like it.......
Maurice Moorer is not the kind of person whom lawmakers had in mind when they gave Florida the broadest self-defense law in the nation in 2005.
State legislators sold “stand your ground” as a legal protection for law-abiding Floridians who were forced, through no fault of their own, to defend their families and properties.
But the day in 2008 when Moorer killed his ex-wife’s boyfriend in Miami capped two years of violent behavior that had landed Moorer in jail multiple times and left his wife living in fear.
Still, Miami-Dade prosecutors set Moorer free, saying Florida’s “stand your ground” law prevented them from pursuing murder charges.
A Tampa Bay Times analysis of “stand your ground” cases found that it has been people like Moorer — those with records of crime and violence — who have benefited the most from the controversial legislation. A review of arrest records for those involved in more than 100 fatal “stand your ground” cases shows:
• Nearly 60 percent of those who claimed self-defense had been arrested at least once before the day they killed someone.
More than 30 of those defendants, about 1 in 3, had been accused of violent crimes, including assault, battery or robbery. Dozens had drug offenses on their records.
• Killers have invoked “stand your ground” even after repeated run-ins with the law. Forty percent had three arrests or more. Dozens had at least four arrests.
• More than a third of the defendants had previously been in trouble for threatening someone with a gun or illegally carrying a weapon.
• In dozens of cases, both the defendant and the victim had criminal records, sometimes related to long-running feuds or criminal enterprises. Of the victims that could be identified in state records, 64 percent had at least one arrest. Several had 20 or more arrests.
16/ William Friedkin is famous for directing "The Exorcist", and his latest is "Killer Joe", one for the guys with lots of ultraviolence and raw sex......review in the Times is a "B".......
It says something about William Friedkin’s big-screen adaptation of the Tracy Letts play “Killer Joe” that the title psycho, played by Matthew McConaughey, is, by a long Texas mile, its least objectionable character. Dressed in nearly all black from cowboy hat to boot, with a miserly smile and a dead man’s empty eyes, Joe Cooper, a k a Killer Joe, looks sharp, talks smart. As given demented life by Mr. McConaughey, he is a welcome presence among a collection of nitwits so irremediably disposable that they’re as evanescent as drops of water on a hot wood stove. These are people, the filmmakers suggest, who by their deep-fried stupidity and avarice deserve to fade quickly.
Not fast enough, it turns out. The bad times begin with Chris (a miscast Emile Hirsch), a gambler who tries to pay off his debts by having his mother killed for an insurance jackpot. He’s the story’s first idiot. He shares his plan with its second, his father, Ansel (Thomas Haden Church, good), a mechanic, and suddenly it’s a family affair. Ansel’s new wife, Sharla (Gina Gershon, working hard in a wretched role), learns about the scheme, as does Chris’s virginal sister, Dottie (Juno Temple, also miscast), aDaisy Mae type in cutoffs without any baby doll appeal. Together they scheme and scream, biding and wasting time in a trailer park where a barking pit bull and a blaring television add to the art-directed squalor.
Chris hires his hit man, Joe, and discovers that he’s signed on with the devil. Here, as in other movies that use violence to jolt up the dreary proceedings, Chris and his problem turn out to be the warm-up act for Killer Joe. And Mr. McConaughey’s magnetic murderer is definitely the main attraction. He dominates his every scene with a hushed voice that carries a threat and a tensed, restrained physicality that suggests a rattler before it strikes. He’s a queasily compelling nut job reminiscent of the one in Jim Thompson’s pulp classic, “The Killer Inside Me,” and because Joe has the best lines, a mysterious back story and is played by a real star, the movie needs his juice badly.
"Killer Joe" trailer........
Todays video - a classic Monty Python, "The Cheese Shop"......have you heard of all of these cheeses?
Todays married guys joke
My wife was screaming at me: "Leave!! Get out of this house!" she ordered.
As I was walking out the door she yelled, "I hope you die a slow and painful death!"
So I turned around and replied, "So now you want me to stay?"
Todays kids joke
Should children witness childbirth?
Due to a power cut, only one paramedic responded to the call that Heidi was about to give birth.
Due to a power cut, only one paramedic responded to the call that Heidi was about to give birth.
The house was very dark so the paramedic asked Kathleen, a 3-yr old girl, to hold a torch high over her mummy so he could see while he helped deliver the baby.
Very diligently, Kathleen did as she was asked.
Heidi pushed and pushed and after a little while, Connor was born.
The paramedic lifted him by his little feet and spanked him on his bottom.
Connor began to cry.
The paramedic then thanked Kathleen for her help and asked the wide-eyed 3-yr old what she thought about what she had just witnessed ....
Kathleen quickly responded, "He shouldn't have crawled in there in the first place .... Smack him again!"
Very diligently, Kathleen did as she was asked.
Heidi pushed and pushed and after a little while, Connor was born.
The paramedic lifted him by his little feet and spanked him on his bottom.
Connor began to cry.
The paramedic then thanked Kathleen for her help and asked the wide-eyed 3-yr old what she thought about what she had just witnessed ....
Kathleen quickly responded, "He shouldn't have crawled in there in the first place .... Smack him again!"
Todays Irish drunk joke
Todays married guys joke
Ellen and her husband Bob went for counseling after 25
years of marriage. When asked what the problem was,
Ellen went into a passionate, painful tirade listing
every problem they had ever had in the 25 years they
had been married.
She went on and on and on: neglect, lack of
intimacy, emptiness, loneliness, feeling unloved and unlovable,
an entire laundry list of unmet needs she had endured
over the course of their marriage.
Finally, after allowing this to go on for a sufficient
length of time, the therapist got up, walked around the
desk and after asking Ellen to stand, embraced her,
unbuttoned her blouse and bra, put his hands on her
breasts and massaged them thoroughly, while kissing
her passionately as her husband Bob watched with a
raised eyebrow!
Ellen shut up, buttoned up her blouse, and quietly
sat down while basking in the glow of being highly
aroused.
The therapist turned to Bob and said, 'This is what
your wife needs at least three times a week...
Can you do this?'
Bob thought for a moment and replied, 'Well, I can
drop her off here on Mondays and Wednesdays, but onFriday, I play golf.
years of marriage. When asked what the problem was,
Ellen went into a passionate, painful tirade listing
every problem they had ever had in the 25 years they
had been married.
She went on and on and on: neglect, lack of
intimacy, emptiness, loneliness, feeling unloved and unlovable,
an entire laundry list of unmet needs she had endured
over the course of their marriage.
Finally, after allowing this to go on for a sufficient
length of time, the therapist got up, walked around the
desk and after asking Ellen to stand, embraced her,
unbuttoned her blouse and bra, put his hands on her
breasts and massaged them thoroughly, while kissing
her passionately as her husband Bob watched with a
raised eyebrow!
Ellen shut up, buttoned up her blouse, and quietly
sat down while basking in the glow of being highly
aroused.
The therapist turned to Bob and said, 'This is what
your wife needs at least three times a week...
Can you do this?'
Bob thought for a moment and replied, 'Well, I can
drop her off here on Mondays and Wednesdays, but onFriday, I play golf.
