Well it looks like TS Isaac is going west, so we will have the treat of the Republican Convention in Tampa next week.....woop woop......and maybe some more rain.......
1/ The excellent Frank Rich with his take on Todd Akin's views, and how these beliefs are typical of the new Republican party.........the wise man of politics.....
Assuming he doesn't get out after all, perhaps after extracting some back-room favors, there's a chance he could still win. Missouri is the generally red state that gave us John Ashcroft. Akin’s base has now been energized by his martyrdom at the hands of the despised GOP Establishment (or what’s left of it). He still has strong support from both the national and local family values Ayatollahs, led by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. That the national GOP and Rove’s PACs have pulled their money out of the Akin race may prove meaningless. He can recruit his own billionaire sugar daddies, starting with Foster Friess, the Santorum bankroller who “joked” earlier this year that “gals” might best practice birth control by putting aspirin between their knees. And other money may find its way to Akin too this fall if that one seat is really all that stands in the way of Republican control of the Senate. While the Beltway commentariat may now be busy declaring Akin “unelectable” (as theCook Political Report put it), let’s not forget that much of this same crowd prematurely declared the death of the tea party. The truth is that Akin is typical of today’s GOP, not some outlier; only a handful of the House’s 241 Republican members differ at all from his hard-line stand on abortion. And on women’s rights, the Senate caucus is barely different: Only one of that chamber’s 47 GOP members voted against the so-called Blunt Amendment, another Republican jihad against women’s health care this year. (The one exception was Olympia Snowe, who is leaving the Senate.) Akin's sin in the eyes of GOP grandees has nothing to do with his standard-issue hard-right views — it's that he gave away the game by so candidly and vividly exposing how extreme those views are in an election year.
2/ With Jon Stewart on vacation they have put together some "best of" clips, and this one is on the Economy......3 minutes.....will bring back memories from the last year......
3/ This story in Vanity Fair horrified me - to see how our corrupt political process really works behind the scenes, orchestrated by the master manipulator, Karl Rove......he's back, and more dangerous than ever.....
if you are interested in politics, this will be very interesting......
Boss Rove
Not long ago, Karl Rove seemed toxic: the brains of a disastrous presidency, tarred by scandal. Today, as the mastermind of a billion-dollar war chest—and with surrogates in place in the Romney campaign—he’s the de facto leader of the Republican Party. But in Rove’s long game, 2012 may be just the beginning.
MONEYMAN Karl Rove has succeeded in creating a shadow Republican Party.
On Wednesday, April 21, 2010, about two dozen Republican power brokers gathered at Karl Rove’s Federal-style town house on Weaver Terrace in northwest Washington, D.C., to strategize about the fall midterm elections.
Rove, then 59, had hosted this kind of event many times before. Six years earlier, he’d held weekly breakfasts for high-level G.O.P. operatives to plan for the 2004 fall elections. Back then, as senior adviser to President George W. Bush, Rove oversaw Bush’s re-election campaign. More important, he was attempting to implement a master plan to build a permanent majority through which Republicans would maintain a stranglehold on all three branches of government for the foreseeable future. This was not simply about winning elections. It represented a far more grandiose vision—the forging of a historic re-alignment of America’s political landscape, the transformation of America into effectively a one-party state.
But now Rove was no longer in the White House. He had been one of the most powerful unelected officials in the United States, but, to many Republicans, his greatest achievement—engineering the presidency of George W. Bush—had become an ugly stain on the party’s reputation.
After the two biggest political scandals of the decade, the Valerie Plame affair and the outcry following the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, Rove resigned in 2007 under a cloud of suspicion, barely escaping indictment. His longtime patron then left the White House with the lowest approval rating in the history of the presidency—22 percent. And in 2008 the Democrats had vaporized Rove’s dreams by winning the ultimate political trifecta—the House, the Senate, and the White House. Finally, on the right, there was the insurgent Tea Party, to which he personified the free-spending Bush era and the Republican Party’s Establishment past, not its future.
But Rove had an incredibly powerful ally. It could be fairly said that no other political strategist in history was so deeply indebted to the United States Supreme Court. In December 2000, inBush v. Gore, one of the most notorious decisions in its history, by a five-to-four vote, the Court effectively resolved the 2000 United States presidential election in favor of Rove’s most famous client, George W. Bush. Then, on January 21, 2010, three months before his luncheon, the Supreme Court once again provided the answer to Karl Rove’s prayers, this time in the form ofCitizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
4/ The BBC still has some incredibly good programming, and this is a 2 minute commercial for the David Attenborough documentary "Life on Earth" on the beauty of the planet.....beautiful images......however, singer he is not.....
5/ Rachel Maddow looks at how the Todd Akin issue has developed in the Republican party over the last few days, and how the attempted expulsion of Akins has backfired.....she nails the choreographed reaction of the "Establishment" Republicans....
Maddow does her usual excellent reporting and gives a primer on the whole idiotic mess......her interview in the final third of the segment is with EJ Dionne.....
Nice to see intelligent, fact based news coverage......
6/ A roundup of last week's best political jokes, mostly late night comedians......a funny 3 minutes......
7/ Two theories on why Mitt Romney won't release his tax returns, and both are plausible........
The first is from the Guardian - Mitt's tax returns have his California address on them, but he has voted in Massachusetts for the last elections......voter fraud?
Friday's exchange of letters between the election campaigns of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, in which Romney rejected Obama's offer to drop the tax return issue if Romney will produce just three more years' records, has moved the long-simmering brouhaha over Romney's tax returns back to the front media burner. Romney has only produced two tax returns so far. That's many fewer than any presidential candidate has disclosed in decades, setting up the hearsay accusation disseminated joyfully by Harry Reid (who may or may not actually believe it) that Romney is afraid to tell voters that he sometimes pays no taxes at all. (Romney has answered that, saying he has never paid less than 13% in taxes on his income.)
Meanwhile, Romney appears to have escaped relatively unsinged from the apparently unrelated revelation that he may have committed voter fraud in January 2010, when – despite not owning a house inMassachusetts and having given every appearance of having moved to California – he registered and voted in the Massachusetts special election to replace the deceased Senator Ted Kennedy. Given the GOP's ongoing use of the "voter fraud" fable to justify modern Jim Crow laws and its highly-publicized persecution of the voter registration groupAcorn, an actual case of felony voter fraud committed by the Republican nominee could have been a big story – but Romney was able to tamp down the flames by claiming, not very credibly but also not disprovably, that he and Ann actually were living in their son Tagg's Belmont, Massachusetts basement in 2010. Without proof that Romney lied about where he lived, there's no felony – and no big national story.
The second is that Mitt used the IRS tax amnesty offered in 2009 for Americans with undeclared foreign bank accounts to own up and pay a fine.....if he did it means his tax returns would show he was a cheat......and he's running for President......
A lot of theories have been put forward to try and explain why Romney has allowed his campaign to become bedeviled by charges of tax dodging, but what if what he is hiding is felonious tax fraud?
Okay, so he's taken the legal option of delaying filing his 2011 taxes, which every taxpayer is entitled to do without penalty and without having to give any explanation until October 15 this year (I agree it's a little weird when a super-rich guy who pays accountants by the dozen does this, but hey). The nagging question though is why he hasn't just responded to the demand that he release two years of tax returns like John McCain did in 2008 by simply releasing his 2009 tax filing, along with the 2010 return he already released?
The answer may well be that 2009 was the year that the Treasury Department decided to offer an amnesty from prosecution for tax fraud to any of the tens of thousands of millionaires who were known or suspected to have illegally hidden income abroad in the Cayman Islands or in Swiss banks -- a felony, but one that people thought they'd never be caught at.
That year alone, some nearly 30,000 people, many of them no doubt prominent in society, politics and business, and customers of the finest accounting firms, reportedly voluntarily came forward to the IRS to admit that they had hidden some of the estimated $100 billion in income that crooked rich Americans have for years been secreting away in banks overseas. Under the terms of the program, they were able to just report their fraud, pay the taxes, penalties and interest on the money and then walk away scott free, with no charges and with their returns kept confidential by the agency.
That is, unless they decided to run for national office, where the expectation is that they have to release their income tax returns to the media for inspection.
Y'know - what if both were true?
8/ The Killers - "Human"....shot in Utah or somewhere beautiful in the West, with a tiger and a puma.......love the song, and a decent video......
9/ I'm sure you can finish the phrase starting "Hell hath no fury...."
Judith Regan with an amusing [if a tad vitriolic] essay on the female reproductive system and old white christian guys.......
Judith Regan counts the ways she loves Republican men—the guys who still believe in immaculate conception and Santa Claus, and think rape is sex between two adults and that women bewitch men.
You have to love Republican men like Rep. Todd Akin. They still believe in unicorns and true love. They believe not only in immaculate conceptions, but in spontaneous abortions and magical miscarriages too. They believe in divine interventions and Santa Claus. They believe in the absolute power of the female. They believe we are so powerful, so amazing, so superhuman that we can snap our magic little bewitching fingers and will our own pregnancies to end, especially if we are raped, but then again who really gets raped? I mean really. What is rape? Isn’t it sex between two adults? Seriously, if women stopped having sex outside of marriage no one would get raped.
10/ If you saw "The Hunger Games", the spring blockbuster, you may be amused by this......an honest trailer, where movie junkies rework a trailer with funny comments.....quite good.....2 minutes......
11/ The Gulf of Mexico's seafood is being badly affected by not just the oil spill, but the chemicals used to disperse the oil. The American media are ignoring this story and all government agencies are denying there is a problem, so Al Jazeera went out and talked to scientists and old line fishermen.....and there is a major issue with the Gulf's seafood......
Good story, and a two minute video as well......
he fishermen have never seen anything like this," Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. "And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I've never seen anything like this either."Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University's Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.
Cowan's findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP's oil and dispersants.
Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP's 2010 oil disaster.
Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp - and interviewees' fingers point towards BP's oil pollution disaster as being the cause.
Eyeless Shrimp
Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp.
12/ "People are Awesome 2011", a compilation of young athletic guys doing just amazing stuff.......4 minutes.....noone gets hurt in this one......
13/ Remember the Florida DEP scientist who was ousted for refusing to sign a permit for wetland mitigation that was bogus? The DEP just approved it.......but was there any doubt that in this hopelessly corrupt administration in Rick Scott's Florida anything a large campaign donor wants will be done? Of course not......
A controversial wetlands project that already has been the focus of two inspector general investigations was granted its permit last week by the state Department of Environmental Protection.
The Highlands Ranch Mitigation Bank project has been embroiled in controversy since May, when the DEP's top wetlands expert, Connie Bersok, refused to approve the permit and subsequently was suspended.
Bersok contended that the project would be bad for the environment. Her bosses suspected she was leaking damaging information about it to activists and reporters, but an inspector general's investigation cleared her.
Bersok, a longtime DEP employee with a stellar work record, did not sign the just-issued permit. Instead, it was signed by her division director, Mark Thomasson, a recent DEP hire who at one point was ready to oust Bersok for her opposition to approving it. DEP spokeswoman Dee Ann Miller said Bersok was replaced by one of her bosses as the permit reviewer while she was on suspension.
An official statement posted on the DEP website said the permit is "the first of its kind … pilot project intended to address widely reported inconsistencies" in the permitting for similar projects. "This proposed project provides reasonable assurance that the environment will be protected."
However, Jerry Phillips, a former DEP attorney who now heads up the Florida chapter of the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said the permit was the end result of having "a secretary who is beholden to industry and a deputy secretary who is beholden to industry."
14/ Another story of Rick Scott's Florida - you have been paying into unemployment insurance your whole working life, but when you need it the State has changed the rules so drastically that only one third of people eligible for this check actually get it......
Scott's motto - kick them when they're down.......if you're poor, need food or help....move out of state......
Only one in three applicants for unemployment compensation in Florida receives any money, ranking the state dead last among the 50 states. Raymond Togyer of Fort Lauderdale tells his frustrating experience.
BY TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA
HERALD/TIMES TALLAHASSEE BUREAU
TALLAHASSEE -- When 65-year-old Raymond Togyer isn’t polishing his resume or cold calling potential employers, he’s spending hours trying, unsuccessfully, to navigate Florida’s labyrinthine unemployment compensation system.
Togyer — who was laid off for the first time in his adult life from a high-paying civil engineering job in June — has spent the last seven weeks sending and resending letters, staying on hold for hours and checking state websites, all to no avail.
He is one of hundreds of thousands of out-of-work Floridians flummoxed by what has become the most tightfisted unemployment compensation system in the nation.
“They told me that I was eligible and that I was going to be getting $275 a week,” said the Togyer, ofFort Lauderdale . “That was seven weeks ago. To this day I have not received anything. I’m draining my savings to pay my bills.”
Critics say Gov. Rick Scott and Florida’s Legislature are behind a multipronged effort to restrict payments to eligible Floridians. A required 45-question “skills review” and an online-only application system have combined to restrict thousands of applicants from receiving aid. The U.S. Labor Department is investigating the complaints. A spokesman told the Herald/Times that Florida is cooperating with their inquiry, but they would not comment further.
Scott’s office did not respond to a request for comment, but in the past he has touted the required 45-question “skills review” as a commonsense reform intended to create a more skilled workforce.
Whatever the intention, the impact is clear: Hundreds of thousands of unemployed Floridians have been cut off from a safety net system for those who find themselves suddenly without income.
15/ Movie review - "Premium Rush", starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt.......sounds like a really good guy movie.....lots of action, stunts and sweat......
Pushing pedal to the mettle and its breezily thin, goofy story to the breaking point, “Premium Rush” provides just about all the late summer air-conditioned relief you could hope for. It’s buoyant dumb-fun, a ticking-clock thriller about a New York bicycle messenger who has to get from here to there without being taken out. Stuffed with zingers and zippy stunts, it comes with pretty young things of all hues and hair types — few prettier than its lead, Joseph Gordon-Levitt — and start-to-finish clever special effects, none more clever or special than Michael Shannon. If you want to see a political undertow in its urban band of multicultural renegades, there’s that for the taking too.
Mr. Shannon, having grabbed the Crazy Man baton from Christopher Walken, enters, teeth gnashing, eyes bulging, to play Bobby Monday, a bad, bad New York detective. Monday has a gambling problem and, as he freely confesses, issues with impulse control. He’s also a big-time loser who’s deep in dangerous debt. His deliverance may come in a mysterious chit that will lead to a payout that, in turn, involves a money-lending outfit; a visiting student, Nima (Jamie Chung); some cuteness back in mainland China; and other easily forgotten particulars. None of these story bits matter much because it’s the telling and not the tale — along with Mr. Gordon-Levitt’s innate appeal, Mr. Shannon’s volatile menace and a certain je ne say what — that makes the movie pop.
The chit ends up with Wilee (Mr. Gordon-Levitt), who has to race it from uptown to down while biking a gantlet of darting cars, buses, trucks and pedestrians, and dodging Bobby Monday and other obstacles, including the obligatory girl trouble, Vanessa (Dania Ramirez).
16/ Yeay - a new zombie movie is out this week - "The Revenant"........a horror comedy, yummy stuff.......crunch crunch......
A middling zombie movie elevated by clever writing and gooeylicious special effects, Kerry Prior’s “Revenant” toys with big themes but settles for uneasy laughs. Even so, when you consider that most American horror-comedies are about as funny as rotting flesh, this small sleeper delivers a surprising number of pleasingly putrid punch lines.
When Bart (David Anders), a good-hearted soldier killed in Iraq, is unable to remain deceased, he turns for help to his best buddy, Joey (Chris Wylde). Joey of course turns to Google, deducing that Bart will require regular infusions of human blood to remain animate. Refusing to kill the innocent, the pair turn vigilante, preying on a selection of violent Los Angeles lowlifes with increasing skill and decreasing reluctance.
Though in need of a more ruthless editor than the intriguingly named Walter Montague Urch, Mr. Prior mines ghoulish humor in refreshingly novel ways. “I’m kind of decomposing,” Bart apologizes when friends recoil, and a series of zombie suicide attempts is, like the film’s politically chilling ending, a witty treat.
Todays video - an ironic Bud Lite commercial......must have had a musing moment.....
Todays golf jokes
#10 Golfer: "Think I'm going to drown myself in the lake." Caddy: "Think you can keep your head down that long?" #9 Golfer: "I'd move heaven and earth to break 100 on this course." Caddy: "Try heaven, you've already moved most of the earth." #8 Golfer: "Do you think my game is improving?" Caddy: "Yes sir, you miss the ball much closer now." #7 Golfer: "Do you think I can get there with a 5 iron?" Caddy: "Eventually." #6 Golfer: "You've got to be the worst caddy in the world." Caddy: "I don't think so sir. That would be too much of a coincidence." #5 Golfer: "Please stop checking your watch all the time. It's too much of a distraction." Caddy: "It's not a watch - it's a compass." #4 Golfer: "How do you like my game?" Caddy: "Very good sir, but personally, I prefer golf." #3 Golfer: "Do you think it's a sin to play on Sunday? Caddy: "The way you play, sir, it's a sin on any day." #2 Golfer: "This is the worst course I've ever played on." Caddy: "This isn't the golf course. We left that an hour ago." and the #1 best caddy comment: Golfer: "That can't be my ball, it's too old." Caddy: "It's been a long time since we teed off, sir."
Todays Ann Romney joke
Two Beverly Hills women are shopping on Rodeo Drive when one of them notices a child in a baby carriage.
"Oh, look at that beautiful baby!" says the woman.
"Aww, how adorable," says her friend. Then the first woman gasps.
"Oh my God, that’s my baby!"
"How do you know?"
"I recognize the nanny."
Todays corporate joke
A sales rep, an administration clerk, and a manager are walking to lunch when they find an antique oil lamp. One of them rubs it and a Genie appears from inside it. The Genie says, 'I'll give each of you just one wish.'
'Me first! Me first!' says the admin clerk. 'I want to be in the Bahamas, driving a speedboat, without a care in the world.'
Poof! He's gone.
'Me next! Me next!' says the sales rep. 'I want to be in Hawaii, relaxing on the beach with my own personal masseuse, an endless supply of Pina Coladas and three Playboy Playmates!' Poof! He's gone.
'OK, you're next,' the Genie says to the manager.
The manager says, 'I want those two slackers back in the office after lunch.'
Todays texting joke
From a Teacher - short and to the point.
In the world of hi-tech gadgetry, I've noticed that more and more people who send text messages and emails have long forgotten the art of capital letters. For those of you who fall into this category, please take note of the following statement:
"Capitalization is the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse."
No comments:
Post a Comment