Happy 4th of July.......here is a DDD from 'the road".......even though we have been out of touch for a week or so, the news is still the same.......nothing changes.......
1/ A part of the Republican campaign that is leaving the President flatfooted - the lies coming from Mitt Romney, even when challenged, are repeated over and over, aided and abetted by our wonderful corporate media until the lies become truths......the technique is to repeat something totally untrue about Obama over and over till it sinks into the skulls of the vast sea of stupids - and once it's in there, no amount of facts will change their minds.
An almost numbingly cynical strategy, but brilliant......very good story from the Guardian UK.....
Four years ago, when I was writing about the 2008 presidential campaign, I wrote with dismay and surprise at the spate of falsehoods coming out of John McCain's campaign for president. McCain had falsely accused his opponent Barack Obama of supporting "comprehensive sex education" for children, and of wanting to raise taxes on the middle class, while his running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, took credit for opposing the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere", which she had actually supported.
At the time, such false and misleading claims from a presidential candidate seemed shocking: they crossed an unstated line in American politics – going from the usual garden-variety campaign exaggeration to wilful lying.
Ah, those were the days … after watching Mitt Romney run for president the past few months, he makes John McCain look like George Washington (of "I Can't Tell A Lie" fame).
Granted, presidential candidates are no strangers to disingenuous or overstated claims; it's pretty much endemic to the business. But Romney is doing something very different and far more pernicious. Quite simply, the United States has never been witness to a presidential candidate, in modern American history, who lies as frequently, as flagrantly and as brazenly as Mitt Romney.
2/ Jon Stewart with what he does best, and I think truly enjoys - nailing Fox News........excellent segment, about 9 minutes......
International version........
3/ Paul Krugman,my favourite economist, with a sobering look at the political realities of Europe's policies - no matter what the spin, what the oligarchs want you to believe, the Euro zone is in deep, deep trouble........this story is especially relevant to our European readers.....
Over the past few months I’ve read a number of optimistic assessments of the prospects for Europe. Oddly, however, none of these assessments argue that Europe’s German-dictated formula of redemption through suffering has any chance of working. Instead, the case for optimism is that failure — in particular, a breakup of the euro — would be a disaster for everyone, including the Germans, and that in the end this prospect will induce European leaders to do whatever it takes to save the situation.
I hope this argument is right. But every time I read an article along these lines, I find myself thinking about Norman Angell.
Who? Back in 1910 Angell published a famous book titled “The Great Illusion,” arguing that war had become obsolete. Trade and industry, he pointed out, not the exploitation of subject peoples, were the keys to national wealth, so there was nothing to be gained from the vast costs of military conquest.
Moreover, he argued that mankind was beginning to appreciate this reality, that the “passions of patriotism” were rapidly declining. He didn’t actually say that there would be no more major wars, but he did give that impression.
We all know what came next.
The point is that the prospect of disaster, no matter how obvious, is no guarantee that nations will do what it takes to avoid that disaster. And this is especially true when pride and prejudice make leaders unwilling to see what should be obvious.
Which brings me back to Europe’s still extremely dire economic situation.
4/ The Euro crisis #2 - Simon Johnson, my second favourite economist, with an analysis of what is happening with the Euro zone from a different direction- no matter what the inept EU banks and regulators tell you, the Euro zone has to fundamentally change.....
Most of the current policy discussion concerning the euro area is about austerity. Some people – particularly in German government circles – are pushing for tighter fiscal policies in troubled countries (i.e., higher taxes and lower government spending). Others – including in the new French government — are more inclined to push for a more expansive fiscal policy where possible and to resist fiscal contraction elsewhere.
The recently concluded G20 summit is being interpreted as shifting the balance away from the “austerity now” group, at least to some extent. But both sides of this debate are missing the important issue. As a result, the euro area continues its slide towards deeper crisis and likely eventual disruptive break-up.
The underlying problem in the euro area is the exchange rate system itself – the fact that these European countries locked themselves into an initial exchange rate, i.e., the relative price of their currencies, and promised to never change that exchange rate. This amounted to a very big bet that their economies would converge in productivity – that the Greeks (and others in what we now call the “periphery”) would in effect become more like the Germans. Alternatively, if the economies did not converge, the implicit presumption was that people would move – i.e., Greek workers go to Germany and converge to German productivity levels by working in factories and offices there.
It’s hard to say which version of convergence was more unrealistic.
5/ An amusing four minutes, part travelogue, part a parade of cultures, part just plain goofy....."Where In The Hell Is Matt?"
6/ Fascinating story about how Margaret Thatcher singlehandedly resisted taking Britain into the Euro, and how this [in retrospect] brave and farsighted decision brought her down politically......for Brits and all of you admirers of the "Iron Lady".......
Next week it will be 20 years since Margaret Thatcher fell. Pressure had been building on a number of fronts, but the issue which finally destroyed her was the yet-to-be-born euro. In the last weekend of October 1990, she travelled to a European summit in Rome, where Jacques Delors’ dream of European Monetary Union was high on the agenda. But while Mrs Thatcher was fighting her lone battle against the prospective single currency abroad, she was being fatally undermined at home. Geoffrey Howe, her bitterest cabinet critic, went on television to tell the interviewer Brian Walden that in principle Britain did not oppose the euro.
In her Commons statement after returning home, she was forced to slap Howe down: “this government believes in the pound sterling.” Howe resigned, and days later delivered the famous speech from the back benches that set in motion a leadership contest.
Today, Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography, first published in 1993, reads like a prophecy. It shows how deeply and with what extraordinary wisdom she had examined Delors’ proposals for the single currency. Her overriding objection was not ill-considered or xenophobic, as subsequent critics have repeatedly claimed.
They were economic. Right back in 1990, Mrs Thatcher foresaw with painful clarity the devastation it was bound to cause. Her autobiography records how she warned John Major, her euro-friendly chancellor of the exchequer, that the single currency could not accommodate both industrial powerhouses such as Germany and smaller countries such as Greece. Germany, forecast Thatcher, would be phobic about inflation, while the euro would prove fatal to the poorer countries because it would “devastate their inefficient economies”.
It is as if, all those years ago, the British prime minister possessed a crystal ball that enabled her to foresee the catastrophic events of the past year or so in Ireland, Greece and Portugal. Indeed, it is one of the tragedies of European history that the world chose not to believe her.
7/ Time for our monthly compilation of dumb and/or unlucky people doing things they didn't quite think through.......5 minutes of fails......
8/ Got 56 minutes for some intelligent conversation about dark money in politics? No? Never mind, I'm sure you will enjoy "Hoarders" or some of the other wonderful summer shows on our 356 channels of shit.....
Bill Moyers with Thomas Frank and others......
9/ Bill Maher's last show of the summer, and a wonderful finale where he pick's Mitt Romney's running mate - George Zimmerman...or is it a mystery person?........6 minutes of sophisticated and very funny political commentary.....
10/ It never fails to baffle me how misinformed Republicans are about world affairs, and indeed facts. Polls indicate an astonishing 63% of conservatives still believe iraq had WMD......
WASHINGTON -- How misinformed are Republicans about world affairs? If presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney's assertion that Russia is "without question our number one geopolitical foe" is any indication, then the answer would appear to be very.
The poll, constructed by Dartmouth government professor Benjamin Valentino and conducted by YouGov from April 26 to May 2, found that fully 63 percent of Republican respondents still believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003. By contrast, 27 percent of independents and 15 percent of Democrats shared that view.
Jim Lobe, chief of the Inter Press Service's Washington bureau, reported the finding in his blog on Wednesday.
The Bush administration's insistence that the Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction and might give them to terrorists was a key selling point in its campaign to take the country to war. It turned out to be untrue.
11/ We have been in southwest France this last week, so missed TS Debby dropping feet of rain on Florida and record heatwaves across the US, fires in Colorado etc. etc.
But is this climate change? Naaaaa.......the stupids still haven't put it together, but the day the American public realises climate change is man made and affecting their daily lives is the day the oil, coal and gas industry decides they need to know about it and gives Fox News permission to tell them.....and not before........
Look at the previous story - facts don't matter........
This summer is 'what global warming looks like'
By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer
AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Is it just freakish weather or something more? Climate scientists suggest that if you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, take a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.
Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.
These are the kinds of extremes experts have predicted will come with climate change, although it's far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.
Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and lots of time. Sometimes it isn't caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.
And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren't having similar disasters now, although they've had their own extreme events in recent years.
But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.
12/ And speaking of heat waves, here is Rihanna with "I'll Drink to That", part concert footage, part "I'm a cool pop star" video, part travelogue where she goes back to her native Barbados.....actually very interesting.....
13/ Remember the phrase "peak oil"? The environmentalists were wrong - the world is now awash with oil and it isn't running out any time soon.....but there's another problem - all of this energy is frying the planet.....
The facts have changed, now we must change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil – the decline of global supplies – is just around the corner. We had some strong reasons for doing so: production had slowed, the price had risen sharply, depletion was widespread and appeared to be escalating. The first of the great resource crunches seemed about to strike.
Among environmentalists it was never clear, even to ourselves, whether or not we wanted it to happen. It had the potential both to shock the world into economic transformation, averting future catastrophes, and to generate catastrophes of its own, including a shift into even more damaging technologies, such as biofuels and petrol made from coal. Even so, peak oil was a powerful lever. Governments, businesses and voters who seemed impervious to the moral case for cutting the use of fossil fuels might, we hoped, respond to the economic case.
Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. In 1975 MK Hubbert, a geoscientist working for Shell who had correctly predicted the decline in US oil production, suggested that global supplies could peak in 1995. In 1997 the petroleum geologist Colin Campbell estimated that it would happen before 2010. In 2003 the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes said he was "99% confident" that peak oil would occur in 2004. In 2004, the Texas tycoon T Boone Pickens predicted that "never again will we pump more than 82m barrels" per day of liquid fuels. (Average daily supply in May 2012 was 91m.) In 2005 the investment banker Matthew Simmons maintained that "Saudi Arabia … cannot materially grow its oil production". (Since then its output has risen from 9m barrels a day to 10m, and it has another 1.5m in spare capacity.)
Peak oil hasn't happened, and it's unlikely to happen for a very long time.
Read this last paragraph of this article from the Guardian.....
There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground. Twenty years of efforts to prevent climate breakdown through moral persuasion have failed, with the collapse of the multilateral process at Rio de Janeiro last month. The world's most powerful nation is again becoming an oil state, and if the political transformation of its northern neighbour is anything to go by, the results will not be pretty.
Humanity seems to be like the girl in Guillermo del Toro's masterpiecePan's Labyrinth: she knows that if she eats the exquisite feast laid out in front of her, she too will be consumed, but she cannot help herself. I don't like raising problems when I cannot see a solution. But right now I'm not sure how I can look my children in the eyes.
14/ And if that last article scares you and you hope in November a newly reelected President Obama will help the situation, don't read this story. It's actually quite fascinating because it explains the behaviour of perhaps the most evil bastard ever to rule this country, Dick Cheney. Yes, rule. Whatever you think of his actions, he was focused on one thing - oil supplies for American corporations and the huge oil companies.
The problem is that Obama is following in his footsteps......
Is Barack Obama Morphing Into Dick Cheney?
Four Ways the President Is Pursuing Cheney’s Geopolitics of Global Energy
By Michael T. KlareAs details of his administration’s global war against terrorists, insurgents, and hostile warlords have become more widely known -- a war that involves a mélange of drone attacks, covert operations, and presidentially selected assassinations -- President Obama has been compared to President George W. Bush in his appetite for military action. “As shown through his stepped-up drone campaign,” Aaron David Miller, an advisor to six secretaries of state,wrote at Foreign Policy, “Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.”When it comes to international energy politics, however, it is not Bush but his vice president, Dick Cheney, who has been providing the role model for the president. As recent events have demonstrated, Obama’s energy policies globally bear an eerie likeness to Cheney’s, especially in the way he has engaged in the geopolitics of oil as part of an American global struggle for future dominance among the major powers.More than any of the other top officials of the Bush administration -- many with oil-company backgrounds -- Cheney focused on the role of energy in global power politics. From 1995 to 2000, he served as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Halliburton, a major supplier of services to the oil industry. Soon after taking office as vice president he was asked by Bush to devise a new national energy strategy that has largely governed U.S. policy ever since.
Early on, Cheney concluded that the global supply of energy was not growing fast enough to satisfy rising world demand, and that securing control over the world’s remaining oil and natural gas supplies would therefore be an essential task for any state seeking to acquire or retain a paramount position globally. He similarly grasped that a nation’s rise to prominence could be thwarted by being denied access to essential energy supplies. As coal was to the architects of the British empire, oil was for Cheney -- a critical resource over which it would sometimes be necessary to go to war.
15/ Jon Stewart with a wonderful short analysis of how both Fox News, but especially CNN screwed up the coverage of the SCOTUS decision on health care......an excellent 4 minutes......
16/ This article spells out what Rick Scott has done in refusing to expand Medicaid in Florida, and why he doing this essentially evil act......Tea Party politics.......
Pure Spite
By James Kwak
In my Atlantic column on Thursday, I wrote the following about the Roberts Court’s decision to allow states to opt out of Medicaid expansion without losing their existing Medicaid funding:
“What we are going to see is Republican-controlled state governments refusing to expand Medicaid out of bitter hatred toward President Obama and spite for the working poor who need access to health care.”
For those who aren’t up to speed, the deal is basically this. Medicaid is administered by states (which often outsource it to third parties), but the federal government sets certain minimum coverage requirements that states must meet in order to receive federal funding. Those requirements are pretty low, states can choose not to cover able-bodied adults without children, regardless of their income. The Affordable Care Act required states to dramatically increase their Medicaid coverage, with the federal government kicking in 90 percent of the additional funding required (100 percent in the early years).
So, you’re a Republican state governor. (Assume that your party controls the legislature.) You have some working class households in your state that make, say, $25,000 and don’t get health insurance through work. Currently many of them are uninsured. As governor, you have some obligation to look after their interests, even if it’s not a technical legal obligation. You could buy all of them health insurance (not very good health insurance, mind you, but it’s far better than nothing) at a 90 percent discount because the federal government will pick up the rest of the tab.
17/ The Times with an alarming story about Florida's water supply....whether the recent rains have made up some of the drought conditions remains to be seen, but this is a systemic problem that will take years to fix.
However there is one thing we can count on - if it's up to our intrepid Governor to act to solve this problem, we're screwed.
SILVER SPRINGS, Fla. — Of Florida’s 700 artesian springs, Silver Springs shimmered the brightest. Its fresh water was so translucent that the white sand and tiny shells at the bottom glistened, giving the river and springs a beautiful blue tint from above.
..............................
The culprits, environmental experts say, are a recent drought in north-central Florida and decades of pumping groundwater out of the aquifer to meet the demands of Florida’s population boom, its sprinklers and its agricultural industry. To what degree the overconsumption of groundwater is to blame for the changes is being batted back and forth between environmentalists and the state’s water keepers. But, for the first time, a state with so much rain — the vast majority of it uncaptured — is beginning to seriously fret about water.
“It’s a very dramatic drop-off in flow; it raises the hair on the back of your neck if you are concerned about springs,” said Robert L. Knight, the director of the Howard T. Odum Florida Springs Institute who has spent decades studying Florida springs. “Springs are a very good canary in a coal mine because they pull water off the top of the aquifer.”
But Silver Springs is not alone in its distress. In the last 10 years, many of the famous freshwater springs and rivers in the central and northern parts of the state have seen a sharp drop-off in flows and a steady rise in algae. Nearby Rainbow Springs and River are also suffering, although not as much. The declines have accelerated rapidly in the past five years, so much so that they have galvanized Florida environmentalists to launch a broad campaign to bring attention to the problem and spur Gov. Rick Scott to act
Todays video - a very unusual ad.....one for the guys - "Voodoo Mama"......
Todays Jewish joke
A man goes to see his Rabbi.
“Rabbi,” he says, “something terrible is happening and I need to talk to you about it.”
“What's the problem?” the Rabbi asks.
The man replies, “My wife is poisoning me.”
The Rabbi is very surprised by this. “How can that be?” he says.
“'I'm telling you,” the man says, “I'm certain she's poisoning me. What should I do?”
“Tell you what,” says the Rabbi. “Let me talk to her. I'll see what I can find out and I'll let you know.”
A week later the Rabbi calls the man and says, “Well, I spoke to your wife on the phone. I spoke to her for three
hours. You want my advice?”
”Yes,” says the man.
“Take the poison.”
Todays Henny Youngman jokes
I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back.
I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.
I've got all the money I'll ever need, if I die by four o'clock.
If you had your life to live over again, do it overseas.
Todays religious joke
A 54 year old woman had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital.
While on the operating table she had a near death experience.
Seeing God she asked "Is my time up?"
God said, "No, you have another 43 years, 2 months and 8 days to live."
Upon recovery, the woman decided to stay in the hospital and have a face-lift, liposuction, breast implants and a tummy tuck. She even had someone come in and change her hair colour and brighten her teeth! Since she had so much more time to live, she figured she might as well make the most of it.
After her last operation, she was released from the hospital. While crossing the street on her way home, she was killed by an ambulance.
Arriving in front of God, she demanded,
"I thought you said I had another 43 years? Why didn't you pull me from out of the path of the ambulance?"
God replied: "I didn't bloody recognize you."
Todays "Pearls of Wisdom" joke
1. Money cannot buy happiness but somehow, it’s more comfortable to
cry in a Mercedes Benz than it is on a bicycle.
2. Forgive your enemy but remember the bastard’s name.
3. Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
4. Many people are alive only because it’s illegal to shoot them.
5. Alcohol does not solve any problem, but then neither does milk.
2. Forgive your enemy but remember the bastard’s name.
3. Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
4. Many people are alive only because it’s illegal to shoot them.
5. Alcohol does not solve any problem, but then neither does milk.
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