1/ Mary woke up in the middle of the night with this song going through her head, and how perfectly it described Mitt Romney....."Nowhere Man" by the Beatles, off the Rubber Soul album......
Listen to the first minute.....wow.....
Memo to the Obama campaign.....make an ad with this song.......
You have a choice - read this article, or watch the video.......or both, or not.......etc.etc.....but it's excellent.....
2/ Frank Rich made the ultimate sacrifice - he immersed himself for a week in right wing media, and survived mentally intact to write about it......a fascinating essay from the master of politics.....and his conclusions may surprise you.....
On the sixth day, I listened to Glenn Beck, and I saw that he was good. Or if not exactly good, then honest-to-God funny.
I had tuned in as part of a thought experiment then entering its final lap: an attempt to put myself in the Republican brain by spending a solid week listening to, watching, reading, surfing, and otherwise gorging on conservative media. As would also be true of an overdose of liberal media, it was lulling me into a stupor, and I was desperate for a jolt. Beck provided exactly that, in the form of comedy, and to my astonishment, I found myself laughing out loud—with him, not at him.
His subject was Clint Eastwood, who had stopped the show, so to speak, at the Republican National Convention the night before. Beck paid brief lip service to his party’s line—“I love Clint Eastwood”—but confessed he’d found the performance “painful to look at.” From that followed an extended comic riff, with studio sidekicks as straight men, in which he imagined the hasty backstage conference where a campaign strategist signed off on Clint’s solo act. In Beck’s fantasy, someone in the Romney camp did have qualms about letting an 82-year-old geezer vamp with an empty chair. But the skeptic had been overruled by a higher-up saying just “three magic words”—to wit, “It’s Clint Eastwood!” As in: “What could possibly go wrong? It’s Clint Eastwood!” Beck kept repeating this scenario with ever-more-manic variations, turning “It’s Clint Eastwood!” into a burlesque tagline akin to Gene Wilder’s crazed “No way out!” in The Producers (a Beck favorite). Only at the end of his shtick did politics intrude. Unless the person who said the three magic words “now has been terminated,” Beck said, he wouldn’t “trust Mitt Romney’s ability to run the country.” As he explained, it was only a small step from “It’s Clint Eastwood!” to “It’s Ben Bernanke!”—and the next thing you know, a Romney administration would be extending the term of the despised Fed chairman. He had a point.
If you are a Fox News–loathing liberal, chances are that you, like me, had not given much thought to Beck in the fifteen months since he and Fox parted ways and his heyday as a self-appointed generalissimo of the tea-party movement had passed. Since then, he has retreated into his own web bunker, the Blaze, and been largely forgotten by what Sarah Palin branded the “lamestream media.” But if he’s yesterday’s cause célèbre to the left, he remains a fixture in the right’s media firmament (and will soon be returning to television). His morning radio show, heard on more than 400 stations, attracts a cumulative weekly audience of at least 8.25 million listeners, according to the trade publication Talkers. That makes him the fourth-most-popular talk-show jock in the country, in a three-way tie for that spot with the conservative doomsayer Mark Levin and the (apolitical) money guru Dave Ramsey. The trinity of talk-radio giants at the top of the Talkers list are also right-wing icons: Rush Limbaugh (with 14.75 million listeners), Sean Hannity (14 million), and Michael Savage (8.75 million). You can devote every weekday cycling in succession through these four horsemen preaching a liberal apocalypse, with detours to second-tier conservative talkers like Neal Boortz, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt whenever you feel like a palate cleanser. That’s what I did all week. After which I settled in with Fox’s prime-time schedule each night.
3/ Here is Frank Rich being interviewed by Rachel Maddow on the above article.....eight minutes of intelligent conversation......
4/ The best political jokes of last week, and there are two really good bits - at the beginning there is a "spoof" Romney ad, where concerned parents try to persuade their daughter to "break up" with Barack, and at the end SNL introduces their new President Obama actor Jay Pharoah.....a funny six minutes....
5/ It's becoming clearer and clearer that Mitt Romney truly is a certified asshole........but as Charles Blow states it's because he doesn't have a core.....
I Know Why the Caged Bird Shrieks
By CHARLES M. BLOW
“When people show you who they are believe them; the first time.”
That comes from the inimitable Maya Angelou (via the equally inimitable Oprah). And I agree.
So I’m inclined to take Mitt Romney at his word when he disparages nearly half the country to a roomful of wealthy donors on a secretly recorded tape.
As I’m sure you know by now, Romney said that the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes are people who are
dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.
He also said:
My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
There is no amount of backtracking and truth bending that can make this right. It’s just wrong. It’s not just the patently false implication that half the country is parasitic. It’s not just the bleak view that they wallow in victimization. It is also his utter dismissal of this group: “my job is not to worry about those people.”
6/ This video is titled "People are Awesome", and it's true. Four minutes of beautifully photographed athletic feats, majestic vistas and more cool stuff......you may have seen this before, but it's just as great the second time......
Two items on voter fraud....
7/ You have to give conservatives credit - they are going all out to steal this election. A group called "True the Vote" is going to intimidate voters and poll workers to discourage voting especially in minority precincts.....all in the name of voter fraud, which doesn't exist.
It might as well be Harry Potter’s invisible Knight Bus, because no one can prove it exists.
The bus has been repeatedly cited by True the Vote, a national group focused on voter fraud. Catherine Engelbrecht, the group’s leader, told a gathering in July about buses carrying dozens of voters showing up at polling places during the recent Wisconsin recall election.
“Magically, all of them needed to register and vote at the same time,” Ms. Engelbrecht said. “Do you think maybe they registered falsely under false pretenses? Probably so.”
Weeks later, another True the Vote representative told a meeting of conservative women about a bus seen at a San Diego polling place in 2010 offloading people “who did not appear to be from this country.”
Officials in both San Diego and Wisconsin said they had no evidence that the buses were real. “It’s so stealthy that no one is ever able to get a picture and no one is able to get a license plate,” said Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin agency that oversees elections. In some versions the bus is from an Indian reservation; in others it is full of voters from Chicago or Detroit. “Pick your minority group,” he said.
The buses are part of the election fraud gospel according to True the Vote, which is mobilizing a small army of volunteers to combat what it sees as a force out to subvert elections. Ms. Engelbrecht’s July speech in Montana was titled “Voter Fraud: The Plot to Undermine American Democracy.”
True the Vote’s plan is to scrutinize the validity of voter registration rolls and voters who appear at the polls. Among those in their cross hairs: noncitizens who are registered to vote, those without proper identification, others who may be registered twice, and dead people. In Ohio and Indiana, True the Vote recently filed lawsuits to force officials to clean up voter rolls.
Efforts to tighten voter requirements have become a major issue in the presidential election. Over the last few years, many states have passed voter identification laws, and many of those are being challenged in court.
Now, a network of conservative groups is waging an aggressive campaign on the ground. In a report this month, the liberal-leaning organizations Common Cause and Demos cited True the Vote as the central player in this effort, which it called a threat to the fundamental right to vote.
8/ And a video - Sarah Silverman is worried about voter fraud as well, and she has a message for all of you - don't be intimidated!
Fair warning - very rude language indeed from the pretty Ms. Silverman......she must have been a longshoreman before she was a comedienne.......3 minutes........
9/ Oh lordy - Jon Stewart takes on Fox News again, but he really gets into it as he emasculates the anchors trying to spin the 97% remarks by Mitt Romney. Love the title - "Chaos on Bullshit Mountain"......on a scale of 1-10 of Daily Shows, this is an 9.5........
Mitt Romney hasn't been having the best week. A leaked video of seemingly classist remarks he made during a fundraiser in May has caused a media firestorm, and his campaign has taken a major hit as a result.
But on Wednesday night's "Daily Show," Jon Stewart was far more interested in the network that's going out of its way to give a positive spin to the story: Fox News.
He debuted a new segment called "Chaos on Bullshit Mountain," and used the news network as a shining example of "turd containment."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ 2012/09/20/jon-stewart-fox- news-romney-47-percent-video_ n_1899787.html
10/ Friday afternoon is normally the time politicians and corporations , Mitt Romney released his 2011 tax returns.....but as Rachel Maddow points out the returns raise even more questions about his integrity.....and the way the wealthy operate.....
If you are into politics, this is an excellent clip......11 minutes......
11/ Here's something interesting - it's a performance of Carly Rae Jepsen's huge hit "Call Me Maybe", written for a choir and full orchestra......I think they're British......
And the original.....cute song.......
12/ One of the most depressing articles I have read for a while, from the Business section of the Times - with the melting of the Arctic ice, all of the powerful governments around the icecap including the Chinese are making plans to exploit the riches of the Arctic that will be revealed when the ice is gone......
There is not one mention, not one, of the consequences of this climate disaster on our weather, environment or really any negatives. This article is the way the elites think.....no thoughts at all for the future, no conscience, no sense of the morality of allowing our planet to be drastically changed.
We are truly toast because as we know the energy oligarchs own most global governments......if you are in your 50's or 60's it won't be too bad, but if you are in your 30's and expect to live another 50 years life will get "interesting"......
If I was an intelligent person in my 20's or 30's I would be seriously thinking about not having children.......hopefully there will still be birth control for them.....
NUUK, Greenland — With Arctic ice melting at record pace, the world’s superpowers are increasingly jockeying for political influence and economic position in outposts like this one, previously regarded as barren wastelands.
At stake are the Arctic’s abundant supplies of oil, gas and minerals that are, thanks to climate change, becoming newly accessible along with increasingly navigable polar shipping shortcuts. This year, China has become a far more aggressive player in this frigid field, experts say, provoking alarm among Western powers.
While the United States, Russia and several nations of the European Union have Arctic territory, China has none, and as a result, has been deploying its wealth and diplomatic clout to secure toeholds in the region.
“The Arctic has risen rapidly on China’s foreign policy agenda in the past two years,” said Linda Jakobson, East Asia program director at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia. So, she said, the Chinese are exploring “how they could get involved.”
In August, China sent its first ship across the Arctic to Europe and it is lobbying intensely for permanent observer status on the Arctic Council, the loose international body of eight Arctic nations that develops policy for the region, arguing that it is a “near Arctic state” and proclaiming that the Arctic is “the inherited wealth of all humankind,” in the words of China’s State Oceanic Administration.
To promote the council bid and improve relations with Arctic nations, its ministers visited Denmark, Sweden and Iceland this summer, offering lucrative trade deals. High-level diplomats have also visited Greenland, where Chinese companies are investing in a developing mining industry, with proposals to import Chinese work crews for construction.
Western nations have been particularly anxious about Chinese overtures to this poor and sparsely populated island, a self-governing state within the Kingdom of Denmark, because the retreat of its ice cap has unveiled coveted mineral deposits, including rare earth metals that are crucial for new technologies like cellphones and military guidance systems. A European Union vice president, Antonio Tajani, rushed here to Greenland’s capital in June, offering hundreds of millions in development aid in exchange for guarantees that Greenland would not give China exclusive access to its rare earth metals, calling his trip “raw mineral diplomacy.”
13/ Sorry about more bad news, but this story is a bummer as well - not only are our public schools under attack for failing the poorest kids, but with the budget cuts public schools have mostly stopped any classes for the smart kids.....
So the oligarchs have their dream, just like the "Hunger Games". Not only are lower middle class kids destined for a menial serf-like job, there is no chance for the brighter children to fight their way out of poverty with education.....
The elites just don't give a shit about the 47%......
BARACK OBAMA and Mitt Romney both attended elite private high schools. Both are undeniably smart and well educated and owe much of their success to the strong foundation laid by excellent schools.
Every motivated, high-potential young American deserves a similar opportunity. But the majority of very smart kids lack the wherewithal to enroll in rigorous private schools. They depend on public education to prepare them for life. Yet that system is failing to create enough opportunities for hundreds of thousands of these high-potential girls and boys.
Mostly, the system ignores them, with policies and budget priorities that concentrate on raising the floor under low-achieving students. A good and necessary thing to do, yes, but we’ve failed to raise the ceiling for those already well above the floor.
Public education’s neglect of high-ability students doesn’t just deny individuals opportunities they deserve. It also imperils the country’s future supply of scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs.
Today’s systemic failure takes three forms.
First, we’re weak at identifying “gifted and talented” children early, particularly if they’re poor or members of minority groups or don’t have savvy, pushy parents.
Second, at the primary and middle-school levels, we don’t have enough gifted-education classrooms (with suitable teachers and curriculums) to serve even the existing demand. Congress has “zero-funded” the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program, Washington’s sole effort to encourage such education. Faced with budget crunches and federal pressure to turn around awful schools, many districts are cutting their advanced classes as well as art and music.
Third, many high schools have just a smattering of honors or Advanced Placement classes, sometimes populated by kids who are bright but not truly prepared to succeed in them.
Here and there, however, entire public schools focus exclusively on high-ability, highly motivated students. Some are nationally famous (Boston Latin, Bronx Science), others known mainly in their own communities (Cincinnati’s Walnut Hills, Austin’s Liberal Arts and Science Academy). When my colleague Jessica A. Hockett and I went searching for schools like these to study, we discovered that no one had ever fully mapped this terrain.
14/ For any of you pointy headed intellekchuals [53%'ers!] out there who saw "Les Miserables" on stage, the movie is coming out over Christmas.....one of the reviews said "it might actually be good".....lets see.....all star cast......
Great trailer, lovely song in the background........gives one goosebumps.....
15/ The war on the poor is having an effect - you know, the poor - the 47%, society's moochers - the life expectancy of poor American white males with no high school diploma is 14 years lower than college educated males and decreasing......we're getting to Russian levels......
No health care, eating Big Ag garbage, smoking and abusing their bodies with drugs/alcohol is having an effect......
For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.
Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.
The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.
The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study,published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.
White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks.
“We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality rates haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is deeply troubling,” said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social Processes Branch of the National Institute on Aging, who was not involved in the new study.
The five-year decline for white women rivals the catastrophic seven-year drop for Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity in London.
16/ Movie review - this weekend had no "big" movies opening - the Clint Eastwood baseball movie "Trouble With the Curve" review was just OK, and "Dredd 3D" appears to be moronic......but this one "End of Watch" looks to be a decent LA cop movie.......decent cast, lots of mayhem and narcos.....I'm there.....
An ode to beat cops and the expansive literature on them,David Ayer’s “End of Watch” is a muscular, maddening exploitation movie embellished with art-house style and anchored by solid performances. As visually kinetic as it is politically dubious, it sings the song of two Los Angeles police officers, Brian (a good Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike (an equally fine Michael Peña), brothers in blue who roll in a black and white. Like the cops in Joseph Wambaugh’s 1970 novel “The New Centurions” they are soldiers amid, in Mr. Wambaugh’s roll call, “whores, flimflammers, paddy hustlers, hugger muggers, ex-cons of all descriptions, and anybody else with a kink of some kind or other.”
The villains in “End of Watch” are less flamboyantly diverse (and quaint sounding) than those rattling around “The New Centurions.” Here the baddies are primarily Latino gangbangers (and their cartel masters), men and women with neck tattoos, dead eyes and names as blunt as their violence: Demon, Wicked, Big Evil.
Their ethnicity partly reflects changes to the neighborhood that the cops patrol, identified in the movie as South Central, but since 2003 officially known as South Los Angeles. The new name was an attempt to distance the area from the civil disobedience that has convulsed the city and the more localized violence that, depending on your take, has been immortalized or exploited in films like “Training Day,” which Mr. Ayer wrote.
As with “Training Day” this movie pivots on a fundamentally decent cop, Brian, who endures a crucible of violence and experiences something of a moral education. A former Marine (Mr. Ayer was in the Navy), Brian is ambitious and taking prelaw classes for which he’s making an epically long video. This plot device allows Mr. Ayer to tell the story through Brian’s hand-held camera, the mini-cameras he pins to his and Mike’s uniforms, the surveillance camera in their squad car and images shot by other characters, including the gangbangers. Mr. Ayer was clearly after a hyper-verisimilitude of the sort deployed in some contemporary horror flicks, an unmediated realism that’s meant to suggest the truth of the image but, as it does here, only confirms its entertaining artifice.
Mr. Ayer has said he wanted “End of Watch” to look like something on YouTube; happily, it just looks and plays like a mainstream multi-act movie with a lot of super-shaky, run-and-gun imagery.
"End of Watch" trailer.....
Todays video - Monty Python's "Ministry of Silly Walks"........
Todays senior jokes
1:
2: 3: 4: 5: 6: 7: 8: 9: 10: How to be cruel to old guys: AARP Eye Chart 11: 12: |
Another oldies joke
Harold is 95 and lives in a Old Folks Home.
Every night after dinner, Harold goes to a secluded garden behind the Center to sit and ponder his accomplishments and long life.
One evening, Mildred, age 87, wanders into the garden. They begin to chat and before they know it, several hours have passed.
After a short lull in their conversation, Harold turns to Mildred and asks, “Do you know what I miss most of all?”
She asks, “What?”
“Sex!!” he replies.
Mildred exclaims, “Why you old fart. You couldn't get it up if I held a gun to your head!”
“I know,” Harold says, “but it would be nice if a woman could just hold it for a while.”
“Well, I can oblige,” says Mildred, who unzips his trousers, removes his manhood and proceeds to hold it. Afterward, they agree to meet secretly each night in the garden where they would sit and talk and Mildred would hold Harold's manhood.
Then one night Harold didn't show up at their usual meeting place. Alarmed, Mildred decided to find Harold and make sure he was O.K.
She walked around the Old Folks Home where she found him sitting by the pool with Ethel, another female resident, who was holding Harold's manhood!
Furious, Mildred yelled, “You two-timing son-of-a-bitch! What does Ethel have that I don't have?”
Old Harold smiled happily and replied, “Parkinson's.”
Todays redneck joke
Ma was in the kitchen fiddling around when she hollers out , " Pa ! You need to go out and fix the outhouse !"Pa replies , " There ain't nuthin wrong with the outhouse ."Ma yells back , " Yes there is , now git out there and fix it ."So Pa mosies out to the outhouse , looks around and yells back , " Ma ! There ain't nuthin wrong with the outhouse !"Ma replies , " Stick yur head in the hole !"Pa yells back , " I ain't stickin my head in that hole !"Ma says , " Ya have to stick yur head in the hole to see what to fix ."So with that , Pa sticks his head in the hole , looks around and yells back , " Ma ! There ain't nuthin wrong with this outhouse !"Ma hollers back , " Now take your head out of the hole !"Pa proceeds to pull his head out of the hole , then starts yelling , " Ma ! Help ! My beard is stuck in the cracks in the toilet seat !"To which Ma replies , " Hurts , don't it ?"
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