Make sure you watch #7.....beautiful......
1/ Every three weeks or so Frank Rich writes a major article for New York Magazine, and this one is his first post election. It's an analysis of the Republican Party and what happened to their rational thought processes about polling and the right wing bubble. This disconnect with reality has serious consequences for us as a country.....
If you are at all interested in politics this will be fascinating.......
Mitt Romney is already slithering into the mists of history, or at least La Jolla, gone and soon to be forgotten. A weightless figure unloved and distrusted by even his own supporters, he was always destined, win or lose, to be a transitory front man for a radical-right GOP intent on barreling full-speed down the Randian path laid out by its true 2012 standard-bearer, Paul Ryan. But as was said of another unsuccessful salesman who worked the New England territory, attention must be paid to Mitt as the door slams behind him in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s brilliant victory. Though Romney has no political heirs in his own party or elsewhere, he does leave behind a cultural legacy of sorts. He raised Truthiness to a level of chutzpah beyond Stephen Colbert’s fertile imagination, and on the grandest scale. That a presidential hopeful so cavalierly mendacious could get so close to the White House, winning some 48 percent of the popular vote, is no small accomplishment. The American weakness that Romney both apotheosized and exploited in achieving this feat—our post-fact syndrome where anyone on the public stage can make up anything and usually get away with it—won’t disappear with him. A slicker liar could have won, and still might.
A
all politicians lie, and some of them, as Bob Kerrey famously said of Bill Clinton in 1996, are “unusually good” at it. Every campaign (certainly including Obama’s) puts up ads that stretch or obliterate the truth. But Romney’s record was exceptional by any standard. The blogger Steve Benen, who meticulously curated and documented Mitt’s false statements during 2012, clocked a total of 917 as Election Day arrived. Those lies, which reached a crescendo with the last-ditch adsaccusing a bailed-out Chrysler of planning to ship American jobs to China, are not to be confused with the Romney flip-flops. The Etch-A-Sketches were a phenomenon of their own; if the left and right agreed about anything this year, it was that trying to pin down where Mitt “really” stood on any subject was a fool’s errand. His biography was no less Jell-O-like: There were the still-opaque dealings at Bain, and those Olympics, and a single (disowned) term in public service, and his churchgoing—and what else had he been up to for 65 years? We never did see those tax returns. We never did learn the numbers that might validate the Romney-Ryan budget. Given that Romney had about as much of a human touch with voters as an ATM, it sometimes seemed as if a hologram were running for president. Yet some 57 million Americans took him seriously enough to drag themselves to the polls and vote for a duplicitous cipher. Not all of this can be attributed to the unhinged Obama hatred typified by Mary Matalin’s postelection characterization of the president as “a political narcissistic sociopath.”
2/ Very funny Jon Stewart, and after he rips Fox News about their coverage of how single women voted, he talks with Kristen Schaal as the Daily Show "Young Women's Correspondent"......quite raunchy, with lots of vagina jokes!
Jon Stewart reminded viewers tonight that last week’s election was a bad one for the GOP, particularly among minority groups. But what interested Stewart was the big gap between married women, who overwhelmingly supported Mitt Romney, and single women, who overwhelmingly went for President Obama. Stewart brought on women’s issues correspondent Kristen Schaal to explain the logic behind this and offer the GOP some advice for how to win single women.
3/ A bonus this week - two Frank Rich's.........here he is again on the Petraeus affair, and as he says if everyone in Washington that had a mistress left office there'd be noone left!
I have to confess your scribe has not been following this story, but if it gets more coherent we'll get on it......
The David Petraeus story seems to get stranger and more convoluted by the day. What part should we be paying the most attention to?I think the entire country is asking the same question: Why would he resign, and why would Obama accept his resignation, if his only sin was an extramarital affair? Adultery is not a crime and not in itself a security breach. If it were sufficient cause for termination, then the American government would not only be gridlocked but decimated. After money, sex — more than a little of it illicit — is the second fuel that keeps Washington’s power corridors humming. So clearly we don’t know the whole story yet. What’s also fascinating to me is how Paula Broadwell, who had no professional writing experience and didn’t actually write the unfortunately titled All Inherself (there’s a credited co-author), had such tentacles not only into Petraeus’s world but into other elite circles in the political-media-Beltway arena.
4/ I'm sure very few readers of DDD listen to Rush Limbaugh regularily, but Matt Taibbi made the ultimate sacrifice and tuned in.....he exerpts some of Rush's ranting about how the right wing can attract more minority voters......
Like a lot of people, I listened to Rush Limbaugh the day after the election. Pure Schadenfreude, I admit it; I just wanted to hear the reaction. I searched the right-wing media landscape far and wide and tried to find even a hint of self-examination, self-criticism, and I didn't find much. Then again, they didn't lose the presidential vote by much, so they didn't take the election result as a total repudiation of their belief system, as they probably shouldn't have, anyway.
But some introspection was probably in order, particularly with the question – soon to become the dominant question in American major party-politics – of what the Republicans have to do to do better with women and minorities. They dominated with white males, but lagged with almost all other groups.
Rush addressed the question with a long, passionate soliloquy. It was fascinating. Let me excerpt it here. He began with the difficult (for him) admission that his party is not doing well with minority groups. The emphasis here is mine:
5/ Steven Colbert just called Windsor, Ontario the location of the Earth's rectum which has annoyed the Canadians.....so in this three minute segment he defends his position in one of the funniest clips ever......truly laugh-out-loud comedy, especially if you like rectum jokes....
Bonus - Colbert has a new book out! Mary....Christmas is coming!
6/ The only state that's worse than Florida for election abuse is Arizona, the redoubt of old, angry white people.....and they have completely screwed up the elections process so that even now the count isn't finished.....
Rachel Maddow has a three minute segment on these losers.....
I hate Arizona almost as much as I hate The Villages......
7/ Beautiful, hypnotising footage of an osprey catching fish including a trout it can only just lift - what a magnificent bird, a graceful hunting machine.......two minutes of wonderful photography.....
8/ The best political jokes of last week, with lots of material! Some very amusing stuff in here.....Stephen Colbert's lament for Mitt was wonderful.....8 good minutes......
9/ This was in DDD a couple of weeks ago, and if you missed it it's worth watching......if you saw it, it's just as good the second time.....
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.......
10/ Now she's been elected she has faded from the headlines, but Elizabeth Warren winning a Senate seat was one of the more important results from the election....Simon Johnson tells us why......
The Importance Of Elizabeth Warren
By Simon Johnson
One of the most important results on Tuesday was the election of Elizabeth Warren as United States senator for Massachusetts. Her victory matters not only because it helps the Democrats keep control of the Senate but because Ms. Warren has a proven track record of speaking truth to authority on financial issues – both to officials in Washington and to powerful people on Wall Street.
During the campaign, Ms. Warren’s opponent and his allies made repeated attempts to portray her as antibusiness. In the most bizarre episode, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS ran an ad that contended that she favored bailing out large Wall Street banks. All of this was misdirection and disinformation.
Ms. Warren has long stood for transparency and accountability. She has insisted that consumers need protection relative to financial products – when the customer cannot understand what is really on offer, this encourages bad behavior by some companies. If this behavior spreads sufficiently, the entire market can become contaminated – damaging the entire macroeconomy, exactly as we have seen in the last decade.
11/ This is interesting - a sociologist looks at the election, and concludes we have become "tribal" politically, so no matter what the issue if the other "tribe" wants it we are bitterly opposed to it......
This actually explains some of the dumb stuff that has been happening, and why your neighbors rip out your political signs.....
As another bitterly fought, closely contested presidential campaign comes to an end, the American electorate appears hopelessly conflicted. Even as we plead for compromise and bipartisanship in Washington, we increasingly split into two mutually antagonistic camps.
This apparent contradiction has led puzzled academics to different conclusions: Some insist the public is becoming strongly polarized, while others believe the phenomenon is largely limited to the political and media elite. Political scientist Lilliana Mason’s analysis is more subtle, and more disturbing.
Her research suggests that, in terms of our attitudes towards issues, we are no more polarized than we were decades ago. But our emotions, and the behaviors they drive, have largely uncoupled from our actual analysis of the issues.
Essentially, the Stony Brook University scholar argues, our identities have become increasingly intertwined with our political affiliation. As a result, we feel ever more certain that our party is right and the other is wrong—even in cases where their positions aren’t far apart.
Our attitude towards the opposing party has become, basically, tribal: We detest them simply because they’re the other side.
“The American public can hold remarkably moderate and constant issue positions, while nonetheless becoming progressively more biased, active and angry when it comes to politics,” she argues. “Even as we agree on most issues, we are becoming increasingly uncivil in our approach to politics.”
12/ Oh Lordy......this is "Sxxt Southern Girls Say"......amazing how they roll them vowels......3 minutes of white racial profiling......
13/ Clever, very clear, fact based and not political......this is why the country is in debt in simple, easy to understand graphics.....three minutes of clarity.....
Pass this on to your right wing friends.........
14/ Our serially evil, two-faced, corrupt scumbag of a Governor is continuing his attacks on Florida"s environment.....this is a proposal to order the St. Johns WMD to sell off conservation wetlands here in Eustis to his developer buddies.....
Excellent article from the Orlando Sentinel by Lauren Ritchie........and we have to stop this bastard.....
What does "forever" mean?
For Florida Gov. Rick Scott, the definition likely won't be the same as yours. His idea of the "Florida Forever" land-buying conservation program is more like "Florida Until I Say Otherwise."
And now he has said otherwise.
At Scott's order, the St. Johns River Water Management District started in December examining the nearly 600,000 acres it owns, including some bought under the Florida Forever program, to see what is "surplus" and could be sold.
This is puzzling. If a particular piece of land is needed for conservation or water management, how does it become "surplus"? It's not as if the topography of this 18-county chunk of Florida experienced the creation of a mountain or sank into the ocean in the decade since Florida Forever was created
Among the properties that were considered for the auction block are 22,881 acres the St. Johns owns inLake County. And now, as the process is drawing to a close, water-district officials propose getting rid of 2,434 of them in one way or another. That's a particularly bad idea for 800 of those acres, an area called Pine Meadows, just east of Eustis.
Local environmentalists at a community meeting last week fought to keep the water agency from selling the property. They fear it will fall into the hands of a peat company, and they accused the St. Johns of smoothing the way for the company, which is seeking county approval to mine the property next door. (Never mind that a big chunk of the land is in protected Wekiva Riverareas where all new mines are prohibited.)
"Now, who's the most logical buyer?" asked Joan Bryant, president of Trout Lake Nature Center. Trout Lake is a badly polluted water body that could only get worse if the property were sold and mined.
Ken LaRoe, First Green Bank president and CEO who led a successful Lake County preservation effort in 2004, said trying to sell the land was a "subterfuge" and a "nicey-nice way for something insidious."
http://www.orlandosentinel.
15/ And speaking of the St. Johns WMD, the head of the agency who was long ago bought and sold by the Niagara Bottling Company issued an emergency order to allow the good folks at Niagara to pump more of our precious aquifer water - the reason? A totally bogus excuse that it was for Hurricane Sandy relief......
Whatever Niagara wants, Niagara gets.They own our hopelessly corrupt politicians.....
After superstorm Sandy slammed ashore late last month in the Northeastern U.S., Niagara Bottling LLC sought to boost the amount of water it pumps from the Floridan Aquifer in Central Florida to help victims of what it called the nation's "worst natural disaster."
Whether Sandy's victims were unable to obtain bottled water is questionable. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been adamant that there were no shortages in the region affected by the superstorm. Also not clear: whether the extra water would be donated to victims and emergency-response workers — or sold.
Still, the head of the St. Johns River Water Management District issued an emergency order that authorized Niagara's south Lake County plant to pump an extra 1.5 million gallons from the Floridan Aquifer during five days "to protect the health, safety and welfare of persons stricken by Hurricane Sandy."
16/ Movie review
Another movie with Oscar buzz out this weekend - "Silver Linings Playbook", directed by David O. Russell. Not your average movie, but character driven and very well acted....
“Silver Linings Playbook,” the exuberant new movie fromDavid O. Russell, does almost everything right. The story tracks the feverish, happy, sad, absurdly funny ups and downs of a head case named Pat Solatano, played by a surprisingly effective, intensely focused Bradley Cooper, just as he returns to his parents’ home after eight months in a mental institution. Pat had been put away for a scarily violent crime, but now, having shed fat and the defense it offered him, and feeding on the shiny philosophy of the title instead, he feels ready to tackle the What the world is — at least, as it’s personified by the family and friends zigzagging through the movie fielding jokes, confessing fears and tightly holding onto a man who nearly spun into the void — is welcoming, accepting, loving.
“Silver Linings Playbook” is an outright comedy, but like Pat, it’s a bipolar one that swings between passionate highs and intentionally painful lows. When Pat’s mother, Dolores (a sensational Jacki Weaver), brings him home from the asylum— briefly accompanied by his pal in kookiness, Danny (Chris Tucker) — her husband, Pat Sr. (a movingRobert De Niro), complains that she didn’t tell him about springing their son. Dolores, her Kewpie Doll eyes darting with animal panic, responds the only way any loving mother and wife could: “It’s all under control.”
It isn’t, and not by a long shot, at least as far as these characters are concerned. Mr. Russell, on the other hand, a virtuoso of chaos, has supreme command over a movie that regularly feels as if it’s teetering on the edge of hysteria, in respect to the characters and director both. But Mr. Russell doesn’t just choreograph bedlam, he also tames it, and worrying that it might all go kablooey with one shout too many is one of the pleasures of his work, which includes films like the aptly titled “Flirting With Disaster.” Like a singer who quavers tauntingly, thrillingly close to going off-key, Mr. Russell never loses control. Watching him pull back from the brink can be a delight.
The movie is adapted from the 2008 novel of the same title by Matthew Quick, which Mr. Russell has gently bent to his own purposes. In the book Pat was hospitalized for years, which knocks him into a heavier, potentially more alarming mental-health diagnosis than the guy in the movie who breezes out of a psychiatric facility. Not that the character, with Mr. Cooper’s Hollywood smile straining maniacally, appears or sounds ready for ordinary human contact. Shortly after he returns home Pat immediately takes up the physical and psychological regimen that he created while locked away and believes will win back his estranged wife, Nikki (Brea Bee). That she’s taken out a restraining order against him is a minor obstacle.
The world may not be ready.
The trailer explains the movie a little better......looks really interesting.....
Todays video - the opening and closing scenes from Pulp Fiction were amazing, and someone has edited them together so they flow .......so get ready for this 17 minute segment from what many consider to be among the best movies ever made.....the early scenes are cut together with two sound tracks, which is a little disconcerting but that's only for about three minutes......
Tim Roth, John Travolta and the incredible Samuel L. Jackson......wow......
Note - salty language......
Todays fairy joke
I met a fairy today...he said I will grant you one wish.
"I want to live forever", I said.
"Sorry", said the fairy. "I cannot grant wishes like that."
"Fine", I said. "Then I want to die after congress get its head out of its ass!"
"You crafty bastard", said the fairy.
Todays blonde joke
A blonde goes to the post office to buy stamps for her Christmas cards.
She says to the clerk, "May I have 50 Christmas stamps?"
The clerk says, "What denomination?"
The blonde says, "God help us. Has it come to this? Give me 6 Catholic, 12
The clerk says, "What denomination?"
The blonde says, "God help us. Has it come to this? Give me 6 Catholic, 12
Presbyterian, 10 Lutheran and 22 Baptists."
Todays Texas joke
A drunken cowboy lay sprawled across three entire seats in the posh Amarillo Theater. When the usher came by and noticed this, he whispered to the cowboy, "Sorry, sir, but you're only allowed one seat." The cowboy groaned but didn't budge. The usher became more impatient: "Sir, if you don't get up from there I'm going to have to call the manager." Once again, the cowboy just groaned. The usher marched briskly back up the aisle, and in a moment he returned with the manager. Together the two of them tried repeatedly to move the cowboy, but with no success. Finally, they summoned the police. The Texas Ranger surveyed the situation briefly, then asked, "All right buddy, what's your name?" "Fred," the cowboy moaned. "Where ya come from, Fred?" asked the Ranger. With terrible pain in his voice, and without moving a muscle, Fred replied, "the balcony."
Todays bonus joke
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