1/ Interesting story about how the 'billionaires for Romney" movement may be getting through to the stupids in a negative way......but a few hundred million in ads will soon take care of that......
"Too much money" sounds like an oxymoron, especially when applied to American politics. But in the last week, Republicans are beginning to learn that lots of money can have its downside. Thursday's story that Romney may have actively directed Bain Capital three years longer than he claimed – a period in which Bain Capital-managed companies experienced bankruptcies and layoffs – caps what must be the worst weekly news cycle of any modern American presidential candidate. From images of corporate raiding, to luxury speedboats, to offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, to mega-mansions in the Hamptons, this week's stories suggest that the candidacy of Mitt Romney – poster-boy for the symbiotic relationship between big money and the modern Republican party – is in serious trouble.
Last weekend's photos of the Romney clan on a luxury speedboat cruising around a lake in New Hampshire, where their multimillion-dollar compound sits, were startling in their tone-deafness. And just to make sure the sentiment wasn't lost on anyone, at a campaign event the same week, Obama recounted childhood memories of touring the US with his grandmother by Greyhound bus, even the thrill of staying at a Howard Johnson motel. In a smart political calculation, the Obamas chose to forgo their annual summer vacation in Cape Cod (a nice upper-middle class vacation spot, mind you, but nowhere near the same league as the Romney estate). Instead, Obama was photographed visiting a senior citizens' home in the battleground state of Ohio.
And the hits kept coming. Next, Vanity Fair published an article listing theRomneys' various offshore investment accounts worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in the secretive tax havens of Cayman Islands and Bermuda, as well as a since-closed Swiss bank account.Democrats stoked the predictable outrage from the revelations. On the Sunday ABC news program "This Week", Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley thundered:
"Mitt Romney bets against America. He bet against America when he put his money in Swiss bank accounts and tax havens and shelters."
On the same program, Bobbie Jindal, Republican governor of Louisiana, could only lamely respond:
"In terms of Governor Romney's financial success, I'm happy that he's a successful businessman."
While there is no evidence that the Romneys illegally evaded taxes through their various offshore accounts (their secretiveness making it impossible to tell), the reek of entitlement became overwhelming when it was revealed that the Romneys had accumulated somewhere between $20m and $101m in an "IRA", a tax-advantaged retirement account designed for middle-class savers, limited to a few thousand dollars a year contribution. As one commenter parried, "I may be stupid, but I ain't no fool." In other words, we might be too stupid to understand how Romney was able to obtain all these tax breaks legally, but we aren't fooled about unfairness of it all.
2/ And speaking of ads, someone seems to have got to the Obama campaign with a cattle prod and juiced them up their spines a little - this is the President's new spot.....30 seconds......
3/ For those of you who prefer video, Rachael Maddow devotes 16 minutes to the Bain Capital story - Romney saying he left in 1999, and the Boston Globe said he was still CEO in 2002......Romney has since doubled down on this story....."I left Bain Capital in 1999".......
As always, a completely professional job by Ms. Maddow demolishing Romney's lies.........
The Boston Globe journalist who helped set off a huge controversy over discrepancies surrounding Mitt Romney's involvement with Bain Capital defended his reporting to Rachel Maddow on Thursday.
Romney has long said that he left the private equity firm in 1999. Yet, following up on reporting by Mother Jones andTalking Points Memo, the Globe reported that Securities and Exchange Commission filings showed Romney listed as "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president" of Bain in 2001, and as "Executive" in 2002.
4/ Speaker of the House John Boehner burst into tears again this week, and Jimmy Kimmel has a wonderful 2 minute skit on his "tearage" problem......and I want one of those dolls!
Very funny.....
5/ Paul Krugman with some commentary on the 1%, actually the 0.01%, and what a bunch of arrogant bastards they all seem to be......
No matter how much they have, they want more....and they want us all to pay for it......
“Is there a V.I.P. entrance? We are V.I.P.” That remark, by a donor waiting to get in to one of Mitt Romney’s recent fund-raisers in the Hamptons, pretty much sums up the attitude of America’s wealthy elite. Mr. Romney’s base — never mind the top 1 percent, we’re talking about the top 0.01 percent or higher — is composed of very self-important people.
Specifically, these are people who believe that they are, as another Romney donor put it, “the engine of the economy”; they should be cherished, and the taxes they pay, which are already at an 80-year low, should be cut even further. Unfortunately, said yet another donor, the “common person” — for example, the “nails ladies” — just doesn’t get it.
O.K., it’s easy to mock these people, but the joke’s really on us. For the “we are V.I.P.” crowd has fully captured the modern Republican Party, to such an extent that leading Republicans consider Mr. Romney’s apparent use of multimillion-dollar offshore accounts to dodge federal taxes not just acceptable but praiseworthy: “It’s really American to avoid paying taxes, legally,” declared Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. And there is, of course, a good chance that Republicans will control both Congress and the White House next year.
6/ It's been a lean week for funny TV segments, with both Jon Stewart and Colbert on vacation and Bill Maher on hiatus till October......so here's a rerun of Jon with a 7 minute segment called "For Fox's Sake"......
Very good........
7/ Our final Mitt story today is from Gail Collins, amusing as always, with her take on the Bain Capital 'entity" issue.......and she only mentions the dog once......
Do you think it’s a coincidence that ever since the world’s physicists announced that they had discovered a possible breakthrough in the study of mass and energy last week, our politics has taken on a kind of black-hole quality?
First, Bain Capital. Let’s see if we can get this straight. In 1999, Mitt Romney quit his hypersuccessful financial career at the private-equity firm in order to run the troubled Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. “I would walk away from my leadership at Bain Capital at the height of its profitability and take a position without compensation,” he wrote in his book “Turnaround.”
He was out, gone — walked away. Get it? It is very important that you do because given the hysteria with which the Romney campaign is defending this 1999 termination marker, you would think that in the next few years Bain had embarked on a new and lucrative path involving the slave labor of My Little Ponies.
Romney gave five network television interviews on the subject on Friday. While it was true that a bunch of Securities and Exchange Commission filings submitted into the new millennium described Romney as Bain Capital’s boss, that was a technicality, he told CNN.
Well, actually, he said, “I was the owner of an entity that is filing that information.” Also that there’s a difference between an owner and “a person who’s running an entity.”
It was Romney’s Star Trek moment. They were always talking about entities on Star Trek, and entities were very seldom good news.
By the time Mitt had cleared the interview decks, he was sounding more earthbound and demanding that President Obama apologize for an aide who said that Romney had either lied or committed a felony. I believe I speak for all Americans when I say that it would be nice if presidential campaigns avoided the use of the word “felony” except perhaps when discussing the occasional member of Congress.
8/ Tom Tomorrow with the "invisible Hand of the Market", our corporate democracy......click on the cartoon to enlarge it.......
9/ A compilation of 10 of the funniest commercials ever made.....note on some of them the quality isn't very good, but you still get the gist.....5 amusing minutes......
10/ The Hubble telescope, up in orbit around the earth, has given us some incredible images of deep space and galaxies never before seen - this story features a picture of a dying star......
But also included below the picture is a gallery of space photos, wonderful images of our incredible universe......hard to believe it's only 10,000 years old....... make sure you click on fullscreen.......
This is the last death gasp of a dying star.
NASA's Hubble Telescope captured this telling image of U Camelopardalis (or U Cam for short), a red giant star in the Camelopardalis constellation, as it became increasingly unstable.
According to NASA, as a carbon star -- U Cam has more carbon than oxygen in its atmosphere -- an eruption like this happens every few thousand years when its core begins to fuse.
The celestial fireworks occur on a much smaller level than this image might suggest. Proportionally, the actual star is just a tiny fraction of what's displayed in this image.
11/ We [humans] don't like facing unpleasant facts, which explains the astonishing attitudes of our institutions to climate change - a collective myopia. The same reluctance to acknowledge problems applies to how global warming is affecting our oceans, and as this Times editorial points out it's already too late to do anything about it - the change is irreversible......coral reefs will be gone in a generation......
IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants here and there, but the global coral reef ecosystem — with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s poor — will cease to be.
Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are pushing coral reefs into oblivion. Each of those forces alone is fully capable of causing the global collapse of coral reefs; together, they assure it. The scientific evidence for this is compelling and unequivocal, but there seems to be a collective reluctance to accept the logical conclusion — that there is no hope of saving the global coral reef ecosystem.
What we hear instead is an airbrushed view of the crisis — a view endorsed by coral reef scientists, amplified by environmentalists and accepted by governments. Coral reefs, like rain forests, are a symbol of biodiversity. And, like rain forests, they are portrayed as existentially threatened — but salvageable. The message is: “There is yet hope.”
Indeed, this view is echoed in the “consensus statement” of the just-concludedInternational Coral Reef Symposium, which called “on all governments to ensure the future of coral reefs.” It was signed by more than 2,000 scientists, officials and conservationists.
This is less a conspiracy than a sort of institutional inertia. Governments don’t want to be blamed for disasters on their watch, conservationists apparently value hope over truth, and scientists often don’t see the reefs for the corals.
But by persisting in the false belief that coral reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the fallout from their collapse.
12/ The Killers with "When You Were Young", a strange video featuring what seems to be a Mexican couple courting......and something to do with Jesus.....and heartbreak.....and a great song.....
But it's actually an interesting little film, ends with the Killers playing in a sleazy Mexican bar to watch the couple make up....awwww.......
13/ Climate change #2 - great story from Al Jazeera English about last week's record heatwave in the US - and how this is what global warming looks like, for now, in the US......
They also make an excellent point that rich countries and indeed individuals can protect themselves from weather extremes, but the world's poor can't.....
Of course, no specific weather event can be directly tied to global warming, just as any individual person's heart attack cannot be directly attributed to the fact that they don't exercise and are 50 pounds(22.6 kgs) overweight. In both cases it is a question of probabilities. And the fact that greenhouse gas emissions are raising the planet's temperature substantially increases the probability that we will get long stretches of extraordinary heat like the one that hit the Midwest and Northeast over the last 10 days.
In short, this is what global warming looks like, or least what it looks like in the United States. If there were an environmental movement in the United States, they would be screaming at the top of their lungs about the harm to life and property from this heat wave and power outage.
These costs are likely to be considerable. Hundreds of thousands of people had to discard food in their refrigerators and freezers as a result of the power outages. Many gathered their family together and went to stay with friends or spend time in a hotel. There were likely hundreds of thousands of days of lost work.
Putting it all together, we are easily talking about tens of millions and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars of damage caused by just this one weather event. And that doesn't even count the threat to life and health to the sick and elderly people who had to endure intense heat without air conditioning.
The right will be yelling about the $500m that the government is at risk of losing on its loan guarantee to Solyndra (a green energy company) long after we all are dead; yet we have an enormous tragedy in front of our eyes that is attributable to our failure to take serious steps to stem global warming and everyone is too polite to say anything. Does anyone wonder why the right seems to be winning?
14/ Is Rick Scott a sociopath? He seems to hate the poor, and wants to deny them Medicaid which will kill more than a few of the uninsured.....
Excellent story from Robyn Blumner about our certified asshole Governor......
Throughout Rick Scott's governorship he has had a tenuous relationship with the truth. It's beyond Stephen Colbert's truthiness. If facts don't serve Scott's purpose, he revises them until they do.
Maybe this penchant started as a businessman when he led the Columbia/HCA hospital chain while it engaged in massive Medicare and Medicaid fraud; the company later pleaded guilty to at least 14 corporate felonies. Scott maintains that he didn't know what was going on.
Maybe he broke ranks with the truth after invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination 75 times during a deposition that otherwise requires the subject to be honest.
But whenever Scott decided that the truth is just not his cup of tediousness, his predilection for making stuff up has been on full display since the federal health care law was largely upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court last month.
Scott clearly hates the law. He is refusing to enforce its key provisions in Florida, including the expansion of Medicaid to more than 1 million additional poor, uninsured adults in the state. The cost would be borne in large measure by the federal government, bringing billions of federal dollars into the state. But it's not for him.
15/ The Florida legislature and the Rickster have had another of their ridiculous laws struck down....this is the one saying Doctors can't ask if you have a gun in the house when treating a child for a gunshot wound.....it's embarrassing to have these morons represent us......
Carl Hiaasen from the Miami Herald with a good column.......
Florida loses another ridiculous legal battle
BY CARL HIAASEN
CHIAASEN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Another one bites the dust.
A Miami federal judge has struck down the new law prohibiting Florida doctors from discussing gun ownership with their patients. The ruling extends the legal losing streak of Gov. Rick Scott and right-wing lawmakers, who have set a pathetic record for unconstitutional bills.
Written by the National Rifle Association, the so-called Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act would have prevented concerned physicians from asking patients about guns kept in their houses. It’s a reasonable query in domestic situations in which children might be at risk.
But the GOP-controlled Legislature wants doctors to shut up about guns and stick to lecturing women about their abortion decisions. So much for privacy.
By necessity, doctors ask lots of personal questions. Are you using any illegal drugs? How much alcohol do you drink in a week? Do you smoke cigarettes? Do you suffer from depression?
We’ve all filled out the checklists while sitting in the waiting room. And, on the examination table, we’ve all heard doctors and nurses ask things we wouldn’t post on Facebook.
Say, have you noticed if your urine is changing color?
Uh, no.
Most of us have never been asked by our health-care providers whether we have a gun, or where on the premises we keep it. However, most of us don’t have bullet scars, needle tracks or booze on our breath when showing up for a medical appointment.
Some people do, and too often they have kids. Doctors who ask questions are usually just doctors who care, and the best doctors have more questions than others.
The ban on asking about gun habits originated after an Ocala couple reportedly claimed their physician wouldn’t treat them anymore because they refused to talk about it. Cue the NRA, which had no trouble finding a stooge in the Legislature to sponsor a bill that effectively prohibited physicians from raising the subject.
Todays video - it's only 10 seconds long but I guarantee you will replay this more than once to try to work out how/what happened.....amazing......I tried to read the road sign but couldn't....it's on a major highway "50"......
Todays Swedish joke
The old Swede was hit by a truck owned by the Quarry on Drummond Island.
In court, the Quarry Company's hot-shot attorney questioned him thus:
'Didn't you say to the state trooper at the scene of the accident, 'I'm fine?"
Olie responded: 'vell, I'lla tell you vat happened dere. I'd yust loaded my fav'rit cow, Bessie, into da... '
'I didn't ask for any details', the lawyer interrupted. 'Just answer the question. Did you not say, at the scene of the accident, 'I'm fine!'?'
Olie said, 'vell, I'd yust got Bessie into da trailer and I vas drivin' down da road.... '
The lawyer interrupted again and said, 'Your Honor, I am trying to establish the fact that, at the scene of the accident, this man told the police on the scene that he was fine. Now several weeks after the accident, he is trying to sue my client. I believe he is a fraud. Please tell him to simply answer the question. '
By this time, the Judge was fairly interested in Olie's answer and said to the attorney:
'I'd like to hear what he has to say about his favorite cow, Bessie'.
Olie said: 'Tank you' and proceeded. 'vell as I vas saying, I had yust loaded Bessie, my fav'rit cow, into de trailer and was drivin' her down de road vindis huge Quarry truck and trailer came tundering tru a stop sign and hit me trailer right indaside by golly. KaBung! I was trown into one ditch and Bessie was trown into da udder ditch.
By yimminy yahosaphat I vas hurt, purty durn bad, and didn't want to move. An even vurse dan dat, I could hear old Bessie a moanin' and a groanin'. I knew she vas in terrible pain yust by her groans.
Shortly after da accident, a policeman turned up. He could hear Bessie a moanin' and a groanin' too, so he vent over to her. After he looked at her, and saw her condition, he took out his gun and shot her right between the eyes.
Den da policeman came across de road, gun still in hand, looked at me, and said, 'How are you feelin'?'
'Now wot da heck vud you say?'
Todays blonde joke
One hot summer day, a blonde came to town with her dog, tied it under the shade of a tree, and headed into a restaurant for something cold to drink.
Twenty minutes later, a policeman entered the restaurant and asked, 'Who owns the dog tied under that tree outside?'
The blonde said it was hers.
'Your dog seems to be in heat', the officer said.
The blonde replied, 'No way. She's cool 'cause she's tied up under that shady tree.'
The policeman said, 'No! You don't understand. Your dog needs to be bred.'
'No way,' said the blonde. 'My dog doesn't need bread she isn't hungry 'cause I fed her this morning'.
The exasperated policeman said, 'NO! You don't understand. Your dog wants to have sex!'
The blonde looked at the cop and said, 'Well, go ahead. I always wanted a police dog.....
Todays collection of jokes
Father O'Malley answers the phone. 'Hello, is this Father O'Malley?'
'It is!'
'This is the Internal Revenue Service . Can you help us?'
'I can!'
'It is!'
'This is the Internal Revenue Service . Can you help us?'
'I can!'
'Do you know a Ted Houlihan ?
'I do!'
'Is he a member of your congregation?'
'He is!'
'Did he donate $10,000 to the church?'
'He will.'
An elderly man walks into a confessional. The following conversation ensues:
Man: 'I am 92 years old, have a wonderful wife of 70 years, many children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Yesterday, I picked up two college girls, hitch-hiking. We went to a motel, where I had sex with each of them three times.'
Priest: 'Are you sorry for your sins?'
Man: 'What sins?'
Priest: 'What kind of a Catholic are you?'
Man: 'I'm Jewish.'
Priest: 'Then why are you telling me all this?'
Man: 'I'm 92 years old ..... I'm telling everybody!'
Man: 'I am 92 years old, have a wonderful wife of 70 years, many children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Yesterday, I picked up two college girls, hitch-hiking. We went to a motel, where I had sex with each of them three times.'
Priest: 'Are you sorry for your sins?'
Man: 'What sins?'
Priest: 'What kind of a Catholic are you?'
Man: 'I'm Jewish.'
Priest: 'Then why are you telling me all this?'
Man: 'I'm 92 years old ..... I'm telling everybody!'
An elderly man goes into a brothel and tells the madam he would like a young girl for the night. Surprised, she looks at the ancient man and asks how old he is.
'I'm 90 years old,' he says.
'90!' replies the woman. 'Don't you realize you've had it?'
'Oh, sorry,' says the old man. 'How much do I owe you?'
'I'm 90 years old,' he says.
'90!' replies the woman. 'Don't you realize you've had it?'
'Oh, sorry,' says the old man. 'How much do I owe you?'
An elderly man went to his doctor and said, 'Doc, I think I'm getting senile.. Several times lately, I have forgotten to zip up.'
'That's not senility,' replied the doctor. 'Senility is when you forget to zip down.'
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