Make sure you watch #6......quite moving.......
1/ Absolutely fascinating article as always from Frank Rich, about the right wing and it's capture of the national political dialogue. Mr. Rich comes out with these major stories about every three weeks, and they are always worth reading even if they make one uncomfortable, as this one will for liberals. But if you need to know the reality behind where we are going politically in this country, or if you have even a passing interest in politics, you need to read this......
This is a nation that loathes government and always has. Liberals should not be deluded: The Goldwater revolution will ultimately triumph, regardless of what happens in November.
- By Frank Rich
- Published Oct 14, 2012
 |
(Photo: Alamy)
|
Were the 2012 campaign a Hitchcock movie, Mitt Romney would be the MacGuffin—a device that drives a lot of plot gyrations but proves inconsequential in itself. Then again, Barack Obama could be, too. Our down-to-the-wire presidential contest is arguably just a narrative speed bump in the scenario that has been gathering steam throughout the Obama presidency: the resurgence of the American right, the most determined and coherent political force in America. No matter who is elected president, what Romney calls severe conservatism will continue to consolidate its hold over one of our two major parties. And that party is hardly destined for oblivion. There’s a case to be made that a tea-party-infused GOP will have a serious shot at winning future national elections despite the widespread liberal belief (which I have shared) that any party as white, old, and male as the Republicans is doomed to near or complete extinction by the emerging demographics of 21st-century America.
But isn’t the tea party yesterday’s news, receding into the mists of history along with its left-wing doppelgänger, Occupy Wall Street? So it might seem. It draws consistently low poll numbers, earning just a 25 percent approval rating in a Wall Street Journal–NBC News survey in September. The tea-party harbinger from 2008, Sarah Palin, and the bomb throwers who dominated the primary process of 2012, led by the congressional tea-party caucus leader Michele Bachmann, were vanquished and lost whatever national political clout they had, along with much of their visibility (even on Fox News). So toxic is the brand that not one of the 51 prime-time speakers at the GOP convention in Tampa dared speak its name, including such tea-party heartthrobs as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. Scott Brown, who became an early tea-party hero for unexpectedly taking Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in 2010, has barely alluded to the affiliation since.
All this evidence is misleading. As one conservative commentator, Doug Mataconis of Outside the Beltway, wrote during the GOP convention, it means nothing that Republican leaders don’t mention the tea party anymore. “In reality, of course the Republican party of 2012 is pretty much the tea party at this point,” he wrote. “One need only look at the party platform and listen to what the speakers are actually saying to recognize that fact.” He saw the tea party as “likely to see its influence increase after the November elections regardless of what happens to the Romney/Ryan ticket”—and rightly so. Though the label itself had to be scrapped—it has been permanently soiled by images of mad-dog protesters waving don’t tread on me flags—its ideology is the ideology of the right in 2012. Its adherents will not back down or fade away, even if Obama regroups and wins the lopsided Electoral College victory that seemed in his grasp before the first debate. If anything, the right will be emboldened to purge the GOP of the small and ideologically deviant Romney claque that blew what it saw as a “historic” opportunity to deny a “socialist” president a second term.
H
istory tells us that American liberals have long underestimated the reach and resilience of the right, repeatedly dismissing it as a lunatic fringe and pronouncing it dead only to watch it bounce back stronger after each setback.
2/ There were some excellent articles about the VP debate, but it's old news at this point after the second Presidential battle, so no stories - just a funny 6 minute clip from SNL....... really good, Jason Sudekis has Biden cold......
3/ Arianna Huffington, the owner of Huffington Post is Greek, so her accent is distinctive whenever she is on TV and the new Kristen Wiig character [Nasim Pedrad] on SNL just nails her......excellent, and a very amusing 3 minutes.....and what the hell is a penes......
4/ Paul Krugman had an excellent column this morning in the Times about the Romney campaign's economic plan, which is complete fantasy and BS, but Matt Taibbi takes this thought to it's logical conclusion - Romney is free to say whatever he wants, and spouts any lies that will help him win......
You know those Balsa wood airplanes – not the glider-types but the deluxe models, powered by rubber bands, with little propellers on the nose? I thought of those planes watching Mitt Romney debate Barack Obama the other night.
Romney's journey toward the presidency has been a marvel to behold. Dating back to his first political steps – his race against Ted Kennedy, followed by his assault on the Massachusetts governorship – Romney has been constantly twisting and contorting himself, exchanging position for position, trading pro-choice for anti-choice, flirting with pro-gay rhetoric before shifting swiftly the other way, pioneering state health care reform before bashing virtually the same plan designed on a national scale, claiming the center on everything from guns to global warming before careening right as a presidential candidate.
Then, just within this year, the contortions took him all the way around again, in a corkscrewish motion, as he first careened as far right as he could stand to win the primary season, and then twisted some more to come all the way back to his version of the center to run as a kindler, gentler sort of centrist alternative to Obama. I was shocked to hear him say aloud in the second debate that the richest people would not have their tax burdens reduced, especially since he spent the entire primary season running as a supply-sider who would create growth by cutting taxes on capital gains, interest, dividends, and eliminating the estate tax, cuts that overwhelmingly favor the very rich.
From the start of the first debate, Romney has almost seemed liberated, spouting line after line of breathless, ecstatic inventions – things that are, if not lies exactly, at the very least just simply made up out of thin air, and seemingly on the spot, too. The business about the $25,000 "bucket" of deductions which he prefaced, with seemingly half of America watching, with the phrase, "Let's pick a number": awesome.
5/ Tom Tomorrow's take on the first Presidential debate.......
6/ Wow. WOW. It's not often a video actually brings moistness to your cynical scribe's eyes, but this did - it was part of a benefit for autism, and part of it was an autistic girl singing "Firework" with megastar Katy Perry.....wonderful......7 minutes.......
7/ All of the focus is on the Presidential race, but this is for only one of the three bodies of government being decided in November - there are the House and Senate races as well, and inherent in the structure of these elections is a huge Republican advantage.......
Just more stuff the mainstream media doesn't tell you........
One thing you may have missed even if you’re following the election really, really closely is that Americans get to vote this November to decide control of not on one or even two but three bodies: The president, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. The relative importance of the three could be apportioned about 50:25:25. The ratio of news coverage to the race for control is about 80:19:1. Hardly any public polls exist. Every couple of weeks, the handful of Congressional handicappers update their projections, based on entrail-reading about the national mood and the cut of this or that candidate’s jib. But nobody has much of an idea what will happen in the House, and hardly anybody cares, either.
The primary reason for this is that the House is not a competitive national election. People are naturally, and increasingly, self-segregated by partisanship. On top of that, Democrats tend to bunch together in urban areas, where their votes are packed into districts with huge, wasted majorities. And on top of that, Republicans were fortunate enough to have a big wave election right before it was time to redraw the House district maps following the census, an opportunity they used to lock in their majority in many states.
The upshot is that it would take a huge wave for Democrats to win the House. The median House district is three percentage points more Republican than the country as a whole. Republicans could maintain control merely by winning their own natural territory. Democrats could only win the House by penetrating deep into red America.
There are two incredibly depressing lessons here. The first is that the incredibly important decision of which party controls the House is something we Americans have little say over. But conceding Republican control of the House means allowing all manner of extreme and unpopular policies. One is that Republican control means that the debt ceiling will become a regular game of Russian roulette with the world economy rather than a posturing opportunity, at least as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House. Another is that bipartisan agreement on the long-term budget is impossible.
8/ Remember the Muppet Show? It ran from 1976 to 1981, and they made two very successful movies.....here is a classic skit with guest Rudolph Nureyev dancing with.....Miss Piggy!
Ladies - no swooning over Rudi.........3 minutes......
9/ One of the best campaign ads we have yet seen is this one from a North Carolina Democratic State Senate candidate.......30 seconds....
http://www.debbutler4senate.
10/ Rachel Maddow with a five minute segment on the certifiably crazy Republicans on the House Science Committee.....when you watch this 5 minute segment you have to shake your head and sigh......how stupid is this country to elect these wackos.....
11/ Jon Stewart on the same theme.......he has one bozo in common with Maddow's clip - Paul Broun of Georgia.....4 minutes.......
If you think that suggesting some rapes are more "legitimate" than others and believing the earth was created 9,000 years ago in, literally, 6 days sounds a little crazy, you haven't heard anything yet. On Thursday's "Daily Show," Jon Stewart explained exactly how people like Todd Akin and Paul Broun not only squeak by, but also enjoy plum posts like sitting on the House Science, Space and Technology committee. It's quite simple: politicians at the state level are even more insane.
Watch part one above of Stewart's look at the "marvelous bastards" of smaller GOP races, and part two below where he shows why leaving everything to the states could be a terrible idea. In a word: "THANKS."
12/ Bill Maher with an excellent "New Rules".......our sharpest political comedian......
Bill Maher ended his show tonight by asking the Christian group Focus on the Family a simple question: “If you’re doing God’s work and God is perfect, how come you’re always wrong?” He brought up a huge list of things the group warned would happen four years ago if Barack Obamawas elected to the presidency. It’s four years later, and none of their predictions came to pass, leaving Maher to suggest an apology to the president might be in order.
13/ Are your mom and dad or any older people you know considering a reverse mortgage? Show them this article from the Times first......the scam artists are very active in this market......
The very loans that are supposed to help seniors stay in their homes are in many cases pushing them out.
Related
Times Topic: Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (C.F.P.B.)
Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Reverse mortgages, which allow homeowners 62 and older to borrow money against the value of their homes and not pay it back until they move out or die, have long been fraught with problems. But federal and state regulators are documenting new instances of abuse as smaller mortgage brokers, including former subprime lenders, flood the market after the recent exit of big banks and as defaults on the loans hit record rates.
Some lenders are aggressively pitching loans to seniors who cannot afford the fees associated with them, not to mention the property taxes and maintenance. Others are wooing seniors with promises that the loans are free money that can be used to finance long-coveted cruises, without clearly explaining the risks. Some widows are facing eviction after they say they were pressured to keep their name off the deed without being told that they could be left facingforeclosure after their husbands died.
Now, as the vast baby boomer generation heads for retirement and more seniors grapple with dwindling savings, the newly minted Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is working on new rules that could mean better disclosure for consumers and stricter supervision of lenders. More than 775,000 of such loans are outstanding, according to the federal government.
Concerns about the multibillion-dollar reverse mortgage market echo those raised in the lead-up to the financial crisis when consumers were marketed loans — often carrying hidden risks — that they could not afford.
“There are many of the same red flags, including explosive growth and the fact that these loans are often peddled aggressively without regard to suitability,” said Lori Swanson, the Minnesota attorney general, who is working on reforming the reverse mortgage market.
14/ Remember we mentioned the movie "The Queen of Versailles a few weeks ago? Mary and I saw it, and it is an incredible movie, a story of American excess ........
The billionaire pictured was David Siegel, and he just made the news again by sending an email threatening his employees if they vote for President Obama.......what an old, cranky asshole......
Good column from Fred Grimm in the Miami herald......
15/ "The Sessions" is a critically acclaimed movie opening in major cities this week, and nationwide next week.......and it sounds like a fabulous movie in the "My Left Foot" genre, which if you read the plot you would never in a million years go and see, but it was an incredible film.
"The Sessions" is the same......a polio victim wants to lose his virginity before he dies, and hires a sex surrogate.....
Here is the review from EW, and the trailer is in the beginning of the article.......
Mark O'Brien, 38 years old and devoutly Catholic, hires a sex surrogate to relieve him of his virginity in The Sessions, and we watch him up close and in bed as he achieves his goal. But wait, there's more. Because of childhood polio, O'Brien (John Hawkes) can't move his body below his neck, and when he isn't lying flat in the iron lung that helps him breathe, he's lying flat on a gurney, bathed and fed by a rotation of attendants. Cheryl Cohen Greene (Helen Hunt), the woman he hires, is experienced at working with the disabled, and she strips naked to teach her client — whose equipment seems to have a mind of its own — about sensation, control, and cues. Mission accomplished!
All this might have seemed too much of a high concept — a pruriently graphic, NC-17 endeavor made noble-mindedly R by the therapeutic setting and the participation of esteemed actors. (There's even Father Mike, a charismatic full-fledged Roman Catholic priest played by William H. Macy, who counsels O'Brien to go for it.) Except there really was a Mark O'Brien, a published poet and journalist who died in 1999 at the age of 49. He was 4'7'' and 60 pounds, and he took the spotlight in Jessica Wu's terrific 1996 documentary, Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien. And O'Brien's bracingly direct, explicit 1990 magazine article about his experience with the real Cheryl Cohen Greene is the basis of this similarly frank, frequently funny, uncoyly sexual crowd-pleaser by writer-director Ben Lewin.
As it happens, the 66-year-old Lewin contracted polio himself as a child and walks with crutches. Until this singular work of iron-lung sex and spirituality, his directorial territory was TV, including an episode ofAlly McBeal. That training in keeping track of schmaltz and dispensing dry wit makes all the difference between The Sessions being a movie of sharp sweetness and one of button-pushing sap. (The dang music, though, gums up scenes better served without cue-giving melodic tinkles.)
So the story is a head turner. But The Sessions is first and foremost about Hawkes' virtuoso performance, one of those My Left Foot-y transformations that make audiences verklemmt and generate awards talk. And second, it's about the elegant matter-of-factness with which the 49-year-old Hunt bares herself, body and actorly soul, for the job. (Because it must be said: wowza.) In an extraordinary approximation of the real O'Brien, Hawkes continues to burnish his reputation as one of those rare artists who know how to disappear into a role with a modesty that cloaks the complexity of the work. And in the lovely choreography between Hawkes and Hunt, as natural-looking as it is unusual, The Sessionsbecomes a dance of joy in the midst of severe challenge, and a movie with a light spirit that lifts a tale of heavy fate. B+
16/ Occasionally the movie reviewers at the Times are stunned by a movie - this is one of them, "Holy Motors" directed by French director Leos Carax.......
“Holy Motors,” from the French filmmaker Leos Carax, is a dream of the movies that looks like a movie of dreams. It is a reverie that begins, appropriately, with a seated audience waiting in the dark (like us) and then cuts to a dimly lighted room, where a man (Mr. Carax) rises from a bed that he shares with a dog. He lets the sleeping dog lie (no need for trouble just yet) and creeps over to a mysterious door hidden in a wall. With a strange metal key that’s apparently grafted to one of his fingers, he unlocks the door and — like Little Nemo tumbling into Slumberland, Dorothy crossing over the rainbow and Alice falling down the rabbit hole — leaves one world for another.
That world is full of laughter, horror, rapture and eddies and swells of despair. It’s an episodic work of great visual invention — from scene to scene, you never see what’s coming — that reminds you just how drearily conventional many movies are. You want three acts? How dull. A pretty protagonist? Oh, please. The triumph of the human spirit? Go away. Mr. Carax has nothing for you. What he has are weird tales; beautifully whirling, gyrating bodies; an anguished song, a sense of drift and the steady (heart) beat of lament. And still, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet: at one point a diabolical creature crawls out of a Paris sewer, bites off a woman’s fingers and then licks Eva Mendes’s bare underarm, painting her creamy skin red with his tongue.
Ms. Mendes, as a fashion model kidnapped from a shoot, scarcely seems to notice. She comes across as an almost indifferent damsel in distress, even after a sly wardrobe change, and she’s one of several characters or types who circulate throughout, sometimes briefly. The most important of these is a chameleon of a thousand faces played and sometimes just pantomimed by Denis Lavant. An extraordinary physical specimen, with a lumpy, pockmarked mug suggestive of volcanic stone and a body that’s jumpy with sinew and muscle, Mr. Lavant has appeared in most of Mr. Carax’s movies, including as an acrobatic fire eater in the 1991 gorgeous swoon of a film “Les Amants du Pont-Neuf.” Here Mr. Lavant plays male and female, old and young, the living, the dying and the dead.
"Holy Motors" trailer......as mysterious as the review.......but visually arresting......
Todays video - Before we witnessed the inability of the Romney/Ryan campaign to explain their tax plans, there was Monty Python......."I have a theory"......
Todays political joke
Dear Red States:
We're ticked off at the way you've treated California and we've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country and we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware that includes Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation and especially to the people of the new country of New California. To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay. We get the Statue of Liberty. You get OpryLand. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss. We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue. You get to make the red states pay their fair share. Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms. Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro choice and anti war and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. With the Blue States in hand we will have firm control of 80% of the country's fresh water, more than 90% of the pineapple and lettuce, 92% of the nation's fresh fruit, 95% of America's quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90% of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the US low sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT. With the Red States you will have to cope with 88% of all obese Americans and their projected health care costs, 92% of all US mosquitoes, nearly 100% of the tornadoes, 90% of the hurricanes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100% of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you. 38% of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62% believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44% say that evolution is only a theory, 53% that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61% of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties. We're taking the good pot too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico. Sincerely, Author Unknown in New California. |
Todays Scottish joke
As a bagpiper, I play many gigs. Recently I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. He had no family or friends, so the service was to be at a pauper's cemetery in the Kentucky back country.
As I was not familiar with the backwoods, I got lost and, being a typical man, I didn't stop for directions.
I finally arrived an hour late and saw the funeral guy had evidently gone and the hearse was nowhere in sight. There were only the diggers and crew left and they were eating lunch.
I felt badly and apologized to the men for being late. I went to the side of the grave and looked down and the vault lid was already in place. I didn't know what else to do, so I started to play.
The workers put down their lunches and began to gather around. I played
out my heart and soul for this man with no family and friends. I played like
I've never played before for this homeless man.
And as I played 'Amazing Grace,' the workers began to weep. They
wept, I wept, we all wept together. When I finished I packed up my
bagpipes and started for my car. Though my head hung low, my heart was full.
As I opened the door to my car, I heard one of the workers say, "I never
seen nothin' like that before and I've been putting in septic tanks for
twenty years."
Apparently I'm still lost.... it's a man thing
Todays dating joke
|
No comments:
Post a Comment