It's almost over folks........another couple of days we can get back to what passes for normal.......
1/ This story cleverly lists the contradictory positions you have to hold if you are a Republican.....which is why Republicans don't give their beliefs much analysis, it's all visceral. As George W. used to say "it's in my gut"............
To be a Republican nowadays you have to believe concurrently that:
1. Jesus loves you, but shares your deep hatred of homosexuals, gay marriage, gun control advocates, conservationists, animal rights activists, and Barack Obama.
2. "Support our troops" means backing old white men who have no qualms about sending other people's kids to die in wars we can't win in countries whose people hate us for being there.
3. The best way to restore growth and prosperity to the US economy is to fire your workers and outsource everything possible to Asia.
4. Venture capitalists who makes millions of dollars slicing and dicing companies and loading the unlucky ones with so much debt that they have to declare bankruptcy and cease operations cannot possibly continue to create jobs unless they get huge tax breaks and pay at an average rate of 14% or less; otherwise, they won't be "incentivized" to go on making millions while transacting important business on the golf course.
5. Being a lesbian, petty thief, or drug addict is a sign of moral degeneracy unless you're the daughter of a conservative politician, investment banker, or extreme right-wing radio host. Then it's either laudable or an illness for which the appropriate remedy is prayer, not punishment.
2/ Bill Maher goes back to this endless campaign and lists the highlights, the highs and lows of our politics......quite funny.....about four minutes.....
Bill Maher used his final pre-election day New Rule to give voters a look back on memory lane with the good, the bad, and the ugly of the 2012 presidential campaign. Maher first said that people should stop saying they can’t wait for the election to be over, because they secretly love campaigns like this, which he succinctly described as “an insult to our intelligence.”
3/ A good column from Thomas Friedman on the election, and how we will wake up on Wednesday morning with a centrist.......
THERE are two things I’ll predict about Tuesday’s election: one is that America’s biggest voting bloc — the center-right/center-left — will win; the other is that there’s going to be a big civil war within the Republican Party and a small civil war within the Democratic Party starting the day after the election, as they’re each forced to accommodate this center-left/center-right victory.
By now, it should be obvious how much America is a center-right/center-left country and how much this center — not the extremes — has dominated this election. If Mitt Romney wins on Tuesday, it would be because he moved from the far-right, Tea Party-dictated nonsense that he used to win the G.O.P. primary to the center-right. Had Romney not “rebranded” himself a centrist Republican in the last month, this election would have been over long ago in President Obama’s favor. Conversely, had Romney run as an authentic center-right former Republican governor of Massachusetts from the start, this election might long ago have been over in his favor. Had Obama, though, embraced the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction plan and run from the center from the start, Romney would have been locked out on the fringes long ago and never been able to pull off his “born again” move to moderation. Obama may still squeak by, though, by stressing his “balanced” approach to lowering the deficit and pragmatic foreign policy, while downplaying his more leftward initiatives like health care.
The reason the center-left/center-right bloc is dominating this election is because it intuitively knows that the only way our country can progress is with some grand bargains forged at the center. One is a package deal that slows entitlement and defense spending, raises taxes, invests in infrastructure, education and research and institutes tax reforms that unleash more entrepreneurship — all in the right sequence and scale — so the economy is nursed back to health. Another is a deal on immigration reform. And a third is a deal that opens the way to exploit our newfound bounty of natural gas, but with a plan that is environmentally sound and doesn’t divert us from our long-term goal of a clean-energy economy that mitigates climate change.
4/ Timothy Egan in the Times with a piece that seems to be written in anger.......he is obviously somewhere that was devastated by the storm......
This story reminds me of my favourite saying....."you may not believe in climate change, but climate change believes in you".......
A catastrophic storm has no feelings, no fury, no compassion and certainly no political position. Hurricanes may sound like bridge partners at the Boca community center — Sandy, Irene and Katrina — until they land and become monsters. The mistake, perhaps, is trying to anthropomorphize them.
But that doesn’t mean that a fatal blow from Mother Nature will not alter the course of human nature. When the seas rose earlier this week, swamping the world’s greatest city and battering a helpless state, the turbulence of the elements washed away the sand castles of politics.
Climate change is to the Republican base what leprosy once was to healthy humans — untouchable and unmentionable. Their party is financed by people whose fortunes are dependent upon denying that humans have caused the earth’s weather patterns to change for the worse.
At the same time, Republicans have spent the last year trying to win an argument about the role of government as a helping hand. By now, most people know that Mitt Romney, in his base-pandering mode during the primaries, made the federal disaster agency FEMA sound like a costly nuisance, better off orphaned to the states or the private sector.
His party can get away with fact-denial — in global warming’s case — and win cable-television arguments about FEMA, so long as something like a major news event, e.g., reality, does not shatter the picture. That’s where the storm upset a somewhat predictable race.
Did global warming cause Sandy to be so massive, so destructive, so unfathomable? There’s no consensus on this specific storm. But virtually every reputable atmospheric scientist who is not tied by money to an oil or coal company says that this week’s storm is a picture of what’s to come, if not already here. Many of the world’s premier cities, New York foremost among them, are at the mercy of the rising seas that accompany a hotter earth. Record low levels of sea ice in the Arctic and record warm temperatures in the Atlantic were likely part of the brew that contributed to Sandy’s very high storm surge.
Did global warming cause Sandy to be so massive, so destructive, so unfathomable? There’s no consensus on this specific storm. But virtually every reputable atmospheric scientist who is not tied by money to an oil or coal company says that this week’s storm is a picture of what’s to come, if not already here. Many of the world’s premier cities, New York foremost among them, are at the mercy of the rising seas that accompany a hotter earth. Record low levels of sea ice in the Arctic and record warm temperatures in the Atlantic were likely part of the brew that contributed to Sandy’s very high storm surge.
5/ Chris Rock is one of the funniest comedians out there, and here he is with a hilarious two minute explanation of why you should vote for the Barack Obama, the white candidate, tomorrow.....
With election day nearly upon us, Brooklyn native Chris Rock wanted to take an opportunity to address white voters while Jimmy Kimmel is still in town doing "Live!"
So he came on the show and delivered a very special, PSA-style message to everyone out there who may feel like Obama is just too Black a candidate for them.
6/ Paul Krugman has been a little "off" recently, so it's good to read an excellent column again......here he takes on the myth that Romney will be better positioned to get bipartisanship because he will be able to tame the wilder elements in the GOP.....which is of course bullshit.....
If President Obama is re-elected, health care coverage will expand dramatically, taxes on the wealthy will go up and Wall Street will face tougher regulation. If Mitt Romney wins instead, health coverage will shrink substantially, taxes on the wealthy will fall to levels not seen in 80 years and financial regulation will be rolled back.
Given the starkness of this difference, you might have expected to see people from both sides of the political divide urging voters to cast their ballots based on the issues. Lately, however, I’ve seen a growing number of Romney supporters making a quite different argument. Vote for Mr. Romney, they say, because if he loses, Republicans will destroy the economy.
O.K., they don’t quite put it that way. The argument is phrased in terms of “partisan gridlock,” as if both parties were equally extreme. But they aren’t. This is, in reality, all about appeasing the hard men of the Republican Party.
If you want an example of what I’m talking about, consider the remarkable — in a bad way — editorial in which The Des Moines Register endorsed Mr. Romney. The paper acknowledged that Mr. Obama’s signature economic policy, the 2009 stimulus, was the right thing to do. It also acknowledged that Mr. Obama tried hard to reach out across the partisan divide, but was rebuffed.
Yet it endorsed his opponent anyway, offering some half-hearted support for Romneynomics, but mainly asserting that Mr. Romney would be able to work with Democrats in a way that Mr. Obama has not been able to work with Republicans. Why? Well, the paper claims — as many of those making this argument do — that, in office, Mr. Romney would be far more centrist than anything he has said in the campaign would indicate. (And the notion that he has been lying all along is supposed to be a point in his favor?) But mostly it just takes it for granted that Democrats would be more reasonable.
Is this a good argument?
7/ "Fox and Friends" has the most douches of any show on this revolting channel, and SNL has an excellent takeoff on their coverage of Hurricane Sandy and the aftermath.....Louis C.K. also stars......five minutes.....
"Saturday Night Live" brought back their spot-on "Fox & Friends" parody on this week's show, mocking Fox News wrapping their collective heads around a national emergency during a presidential election. As always, Gretchen Carlson and Steve Doocy (Vanessa Bayer and Taran Killam) fail to understand how President Obama could possibly act responsibly, and Brian Kilmeade (Bobby Moynihan) continues to be a bumbling idiot. Only on "SNL," of course.
Louis C.K. also shows up as a FEMA responder, and Jason Sudeikis plays Donald Trump to perfection. So there's that, too.
8/ Bill McKibben with an excellent story on how Hurricane Sandy has started the change in the political dialogue we need if anything is ever going to get done about global warming.....
The devastation and sheer power of the storm has temporarily drowned out the clout of the fossil fuel industry, and let's hope this momentum lasts.....
Here's a sentence I wish I hadn't written – it rolled out of my Macbook in May, part of an article for Rolling Stone that quickly went viral:
"Say something so big finally happens (a giant hurricane swamps Manhattan, a megadrought wipes out Midwest agriculture) that even the political power of the industry is inadequate to restrain legislators, who manage to regulate carbon."
I wish I hadn't written it because the first half gives me entirely undeserved credit for prescience: I had no idea both would, in fact, happen in the next six months. And I wish I hadn't written it because now that my bluff's been called, I'm doubting that even Sandy, the largest storm ever, will be enough to make our political class serious aboutclimate change.
Maybe I'm wrong, though. Maybe – just maybe – the arrival of a giant wall of water in the exact middle of the financial and media capital of our home planet will be enough to get this conversation unstuck. Maybe that obscene slick of ocean spreading unnaturally into the tubes and tunnels of the greatest city on earth will shock enough people to change the debate. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, at a press conference Tuesday afternoon, allowed as how:
"There has been a series of extreme weather incidents. That is not a political statement, that is a factual statement … Anyone who says there's not a dramatic change in weather patterns, I think, is denying reality."
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg added:
"What is clear is that the storms we've experienced in the last year or so around this country and around the world are much more severe than before."
Truthfully, I think I'd just as soon see statements like that as carefully thought-out endorsements of climate science. It's experience that changes people: the summer's drought left more than half of American counties as federal disaster areas, and meteorologist Jeff Masters estimates Sandy hit 100 million Americans with "extreme weather". Add in the largest forest fires in Colorado and New Mexico, the hottest month in US history, and the completely absurd summer-in-March heatwave that kicked off our year of living sweatily, and you can begin to understand why the percentage of Americans worrying about global warming has spiked sharply this year. Spiked high enough that even a few politicians are willing to speak out.
9/ The impossibly beautiful Taylor Swift with her new video "Begin Again"........shot in Paris, with La Swift with various flowing gowns and Paris looking wonderful.....song is pretty good too......
10/ If you have any lingering doubt, even a smidgen, that Fox News is a shill for the Republican Party/oligarchs and lives in a right wing bubble, their behaviour this week seals it......
Fox News prime-time hosts barely mentioned Hurricane Sandy on Wednesday night, even as MSNBC and CNN reported non-stop on the massive cleanup efforts just south of Fox's Manhattan studio and throughout the surrounding region devastated by the storm.
Instead, the Fox News hosts focused on the upcoming presidential election and the Sept. 11, 2012, consulate attack in Benghazi, Libya -- a story that’s been a mainstay on the cable network over the past six weeks amid suggestions of a White House cover-up. While Fox News correspondents have done solid reporting and raised legitimate questions for the Obama administration to answer, some of the network’s on-air hosts have been fanning the flames of conspiracy in what's been dubbed "Benghazi-gate."
"The White House was quick to release a picture of the president from the Situation Room watching the bin Laden raid and then Hurricane Sandy two days ago," said Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, in his only mention of the natural disaster during his hourlong 9 p.m. show. "Where's the photo from the night four Americans died in Benghazi?"
None of Fox News' prime-time hosts brought up President Barack Obama's response to the storm, which included touring the battered New Jersey shore with Republican Gov. Chris Christie earlier on Wednesday. Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist and Fox News contributor, did bring up that bipartisan moment, which shows the president in a light more positive than he typically receives on the Roger Ailes-run network. But immediately after Trippi's segment on the election, host Greta Van Susteren teased the next one: "Did the Obama administration deliberately mislead Americans about Libya?" she asked.
11/ Louis C. K. opened SNL this week with a monologue about an old lady........pretty good........5 minutes.......
Louis C.K. hosted "Saturday Night Live" for the first time this weekend, and opened his show the best way he knew how: With a stand-up comedy routine.
Unlike most hosts, Louie did not perform in a comedy sketch to open the show, or perform a song and dance. (Although we would have killed to see that.) Instead, he did what George Carlin did on the very first episode of "SNL," and told an extended story about the oldest of comedic tropes: When someone falls down, it's funny. Even if it's an old lady during a hurricane.
12/ Good story from Mother Jones on the dirty tricks being used in our elections process......
And since when has the act of voting seemed to be a big deal, instead of a right that should be exercised by every citizen? When the right wing started to lose, that's when.....
10 Dirty Ways to Swing an Election
Phyllis Cleveland/Twitter
America has come a long way from the days of Jim Crow segregation, but our voting system is far from perfect, and even today there are organizations committed to preventing legitimate voters from excercising the franchise. Here are 10 of the most common legal and illegal paths to keeping Americans from the ballot box:
Voter Caging
Voter caging is the process of sending mail to the addresses of registered voters with the intent of challenging their votes if the mail goes undelivered and the voter still shows up at the polls. It still happens, but the most famous instance occurred in 1981, when Republicans sent thousands of letters to black and Latino voters in New Jersey, hoping to block as many as possible of these likely Democratic voters from voting. As a result of that stunt, the Republican National Committee entered into a consent decree with the Democratic National Committee agreeing not to engage in voter caging unless a court says it's okay. They leave it to third-party conservative groups now.
Lying Flyers
13/ Time for mayhem - the October edition of Twister Nederland fails, with drunks, sportsmen, kids on skateboards and other idiots doing painful things.....15 minutes of eeek moments.....
Guys, and I know it's mostly guys who like this ultraviolence - your monthly dose!!!
14/ If you are in the market for a new car, and you want a midsize sedan you might give some thought to a Ford Fusion.....an enthusiastic review in the Times......
NOW that the Fusion has restored Ford’s standing as a maker of top-flight family sedans, it might perform one other service: kicking the Taurus, its couch-potato roommate, out of the apartment.
For five years, the Fusion and the reborn Taurus have coexisted uneasily in showrooms. The Taurus had been treated heedlessly by Ford, relegated to rental fleets and finally put down in 2006 — an undignified end for a sedan that had been America’s best seller of 1992-97. Then Ford clumsily revived the name, re-christening its tepid Five Hundred sedan as a Taurus before creating the underwhelming model offered today.
In contrast, the second-generation Fusion, with its rakish style and engaging performance, belongs on any midsize sedan shopping list. And Ford loyalists, unless they prefer a cinder block to Cinderella, can skip the larger, less space-efficient Taurus.
That’s because the Fusion runs the midsize bases and bowls over lingering misconceptions about Detroit’s ability to make top-notch family cars.
A requisite bottom-line version, the Fusion S, lures bargain hunters with a $22,495 base price and a 2.5-liter 4-cylinder engine that makes 170 horsepower.
The Fusion SE, at $24,495 and up, sprinkles in 17-inch wheels and other goodies, and for another $795 you can add a 179-horse 1.6-liter turbocharged Ecoboost 4-cylinder. A fuel-saving stop-start system — it cuts the engine when the car isn’t moving — is $295 more.
Adding muscle, with a 2-liter, 240-horse turbo 4-cylinder, kicks the SE’s starting price to $26,745.
I tested two upper-tier models, including the Fusion Hybrid that starts at $27,995. Its 47 m.p.g. rating crushes midsize rivals, including the Toyota Camry Hybrid, beneath its green feet.
My other test car was a Fusion Titanium with a base price of $30,995; all-wheel drive costs $2,000 more. Options, including a navigation system, kicked my maxed-out Titanium test car to $37,670. That is $3,450 more than the most expensive Honda Accord sedan, the V-6 Touring, though the Honda doesn’t offer all-wheel drive.
Every Fusion gets a handsome metal wrapper that puts it among the few family sedans — the Hyundai Sonata and Kia Optima are others — to poke their heads above the sea of anonymity. The Ford leads with an Anglophile face: a ribbed Aston Martin-style grille that seems a vestige of Ford’s previous ownership of that British marque. Perhaps Ford’s leaders borrowed the look on the reasoning that, since Aston never made them a dime, they might as well get something out of the deal.
15/ "Flight", with Denzel Washington and directed by Robert Zemekis opened this weekend, and according to this review is really, really good......
There is a single image in “Flight” of a miniature bottle of vodka that’s more nerve-racking than almost anything in the thrillers released this year. Shot in close-up with a room blurred in the background, the bottle looks so very big for something so small, like a totem of some mystical deity. It represents a million earlier drinks downed in a forlorn, existential frenzy, but it also resonates with a foreboding that the director Robert Zemeckis sustains for several unsettling seconds. What gives the image such tension, an almost unbearable throb of suspense, is that you know that right outside the frame is a man who is just dying for that drink. And you’re dying a little along with him.
The man going down, down, down is Whip Whitaker. Played by a titanic Denzel Washington, he’s a veteran commercial pilot whose greatest vocation should be his flying but, for this and that reason, has become his drinking. Whip doesn’t drink to excess and quietly fade, he stumbles, shouts, flails, blacks out. Mr. Zemeckis, directing his best movie since “Cast Away” (2000), about a different kind of disaster, makes you see that Whip is a beautiful indulger, as does the erotically hyped-up Mr. Washington, with his switchblade strut and aviator shades. As crucially, they also show you the ugly, mean, angrily unrepentant drunk, the one whose sunglasses hide bloodshot eyes and who, when he passes out on the floor, needs someone to tilt his head so he doesn’t choke on his own vomit.
The story, by the screenwriter John Gatins, turns on a crash that takes place soon after the movie opens. During a hop from Orlando, Fla., to Atlanta in a bad storm, a catastrophic event occurs. Whip manages to land the plane, but after saving others, begins losing himself. His unraveling brings on mood swings, rock oldies and a genre sampler, with the movie shifting from thriller to romance, family melodrama, legal drama and bitterly delivered inspirational tract. The calamity stirs up a mystery — what did Whip do, and was he sober when he did it? — feeding the inquiry and his relationships, including with a drug addict (the lyrically melancholic Kelly Reilly); his son (a fine Justin Martin); a friend (a blustery John Goodman); and a lawyer (Don Cheadle, doing a lot with little).
Even more than the plane crash in “Cast Away” (about a survivor, played by Tom Hanks, marooned on an unpopulated island), the accident in “Flight” is freakishly real; it’s one of those big-screen nightmares that will inspire fear-of-flying moviegoers to run home and Google car rental deals and Greyhound schedules. It’s a showstopper, with thrashing inverted bodies amid sickening screams and engine noises. The coordinated chaos makes a sharp contrast with the movie’s equally pivotal low-key opener, which introduces Whip as he groggily wakes in a hotel room, swigs some booze and leers at the naked woman, Katerina (Nadine Velazquez), bent over next to him. It’s initially amusing to see Mr. Washington, who excels at square-jaw decency, getting down and dirty.
Mr. Zemeckis sets this scene efficiently, using his restless cameras, the pinpoint editing and seemingly nonchalant performances to home in on details that will register more meaningfully later,
The "Flight" trailer.....looks damn good......
Todays video - the tipping scene from Quentin Tarantino's great movie "Reservoir Dogs", with Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink, who doesn't believe in tipping.....a classic.......
Todays Cabbie joke
A man walked out to the street and caught a taxi just going by.
He got into the taxi, and the cabbie said, "Perfect timing. You're just like Brian"
Passenger: "Who?"
Cabbie: "Brian Sullivan. He's a guy who did everything right all the time. Like my coming along when you needed a cab, things happened like that to Brian Sullivan, every single time."
Passenger: "There are always a few clouds over everybody."
Cabbie: "Not Brian Sullivan. He was a terrific athlete. He could have won the Grand Slam at tennis. He could golf with the pros. He sang like an opera baritone and danced like a Broadway star and you should have heard him play the piano. He was an amazing guy."
Passenger: "Sounds like he was something really special."
Cabbie: "There's more. He had a memory like a computer. He remembered everybody's birthday. He knew all about wine, which foods to order and which fork to eat them with. He could fix anything. Not like me. I change a fuse, and the whole street blacks out. But Brian Sullivan, he could do everything right."
Passenger: "Wow. Some guy then."
Cabbie: "He always knew the quickest way to go in traffic and avoid traffic jams. Not like me, I always seem to get stuck in them. But Brian, he never made a mistake, and he really knew how to treat a woman and make her feel good. He would never answer her back even if she was in the wrong; and his clothing was always immaculate, shoes highly polished too. He was the perfect man! He never made a mistake. No one could ever measure up to Brian Sullivan."
Passenger: "An amazing fellow. How did you meet him?"
Cabbie: "Well, I never actually met Brian. He died. I'm married to his f-king widow."
Todays poem about aging.....
....Walk With Me While I Age
I hope this poem has the same effect on you as
did on me - then my forwarding it will be worth the effort.
Walk with me by the water - worth the read...
A BEAUTIFUL POEM ABOUT GROWING OLDER:
Todays retiree joke
Yesterday I was at my local Publix buying a large bag of Purina dog chow for my loyal pet, Jake, the Wonder Dog and was in the check-out line when a woman behind me asked if I had a dog.
What did she think I had an elephant?
So because I'm retired and have little to do, on impulse I told her that no, I didn't have a dog, I was starting the Purina Diet again. I added that I probably shouldn't, because I ended up in the hospital last time, but that I'd lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IVs in both arms.
I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Purina Nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry. The food is nutritionally complete so it works well and I was going to try it again. (I have to mention here that practically everyone in line was now enthralled with my story.)
Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food poisoned me.
I told her no, I stopped to pee on a fire hydrant and a car hit me.
I thought the guy behind her was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard.
Publix won't let me shop there anymore.
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