Yeay.....a New Year, and a year of minimal political campaigning.......
Politics is still with us, of course.........
1/ For commentary on today's "fiscal cliff" deal, let's go to Andy Borowitz .......
January 1, 2013
WASHINGTON CELEBRATES SOLVING TOTALLY UNNECESSARY CRISIS THEY CREATED
Posted by Andy Borowitz
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Official Washington was in celebration mode on New Year’s Day after kind of averting a completely unnecessary crisis that was entirely of its own creation.
“This deal proves that if we all procrastinate long and hard enough, we can semi-solve any self-inflicted problem at the very last minute in a way that satisfies no one,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky).
But even as Sen. McConnell basked in self-congratulation, he warned Congress against the complacency that could come with having sort of fixed its own completely avoidable mess.
“This is a new year, and much work remains to be done,” he said. “It’s up to us to concoct entirely new optional disasters that we will have to undo at some later date in a more or less half-assed way.”
In a related story, an arsonist received an award for putting out his own fire.
2/ As this article says the Fiscal Cliff deal is defendable in itself as a reasonable compromise, but no compromise was necessary. Obama was elected to fight for the middle class, and in this "deal" he caved again.......he just doesn't get it.....he thinks the Congresssional Republicans are reasonable.
I’ll be blunt: I hate the fiscal-cliff compromise that Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden are hammering out today, which will make the Bush tax cuts permanent on income below $450,000, renew the current, relatively generous, duration of unemployment benefits for a year, along with some low- and middle-income tax credits, and grant the GOP a reprieve on the scheduled reversion of the estate tax to its Clinton-era level. I think the president made a huge mistake by negotiating over what he’d previously said was non-negotiable (namely, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts on income over $250,000). Then the White House compounded that mistake by sending Biden to “close” the deal when Harry Reid appeared to give up on it. As a practical matter, this signaled to Republicans that the White House wouldn’t walk away from the bargaining table, allowing the GOP to keep extracting concessions into the absolute final hours before the deadline.
Having said that, I disagree with my colleague Tim Noah a bit: I think a reasonable person can defend the bill on its own terms. The fact is that nudging up the tax threshold to $450,000 only sacrifices $100-200 billion in revenue over the next decade (against the $700-800 billion the administration would have secured with its original threshold), while allowing unemployment benefits to lapse would cause real pain to both the 2 million people directly affected and, indirectly, to the economy. Yes, Obama could have gotten the latter without giving up the former had he just waited another few days—at which point what the GOP considers a tax increase suddenly becomes a tax cut. But these things are always easier to pull the trigger on when you, er, don’t actually have to pull the trigger. I can’t begrudge Obama his wanting to avoid some downside risk for only a marginally better deal.
My far bigger gripe with the whole fiscal-cliff exercise has always been the strategic dimension—how it affects the next showdown with the GOP, and the one after that. Coming into the negotiation, Obama had two big problems: First, no matter how tough he talked, Republicans always assumed he’d blink in the end, for the simple reason that he pretty much always had. (This is one of the major themes of my book about his first term.) Second, despite the results of the most recent election, in which Obama won a fairly commanding victory on a platform of raising taxes on wealthy people, the GOP continued to believe that public opinion was mostly on its side. House Republicans cited the preservation of their majority—never mind that their own candidates received fewer total votes than House Democratic candidates—and polls showing most Americans still think government is too big.
3/ A funny story about the Lone Ranger, excellently told by Jay Thomas on the David Letterman show......5 minutes.....
4/ More fiscal cliff - A quick blog from Paul Krugman last night.......highlight below.....
OK, now for the really bad news. Anyone looking at these negotiations, especially given Obama’s previous behavior, can’t help but reach one main conclusion: whenever the president says that there’s an issue on which he absolutely, positively won’t give ground, you can count on him, you know, giving way — and soon, too. The idea that you should only make promises and threats you intend to make good on doesn’t seem to be one that this particular president can grasp.
And that means that Republicans will go right from this negotiation into the debt ceiling in the firm belief that Obama can be rolled.
At that point he can redeem himself by holding firm — but because the Republicans don’t think he will, they will play tough, almost surely forcing him to actually hit the ceiling with all the costs that entails. And look, if I were a Republican I would also be betting that he’ll cave.
So Obama has set himself and the nation up for a much uglier confrontation than we would have had if he had set a negotiating position and held to it.
5/ Great 9 minute video - for all of us of a "certain age" the music will delight you, and the cars will bring memories.......
6/ A most interesting article, summarising the last year in lies and misleading information that various forms of corporate media and all politicians have been trying to sell us as sensible policies....
A clearly written primer that you should read, because we are going to get more of the same in 2013.....
Our nation was gripped by so many fallacies and delusions in 2012 that the whole Mayan calendar end-of-the-world thing didn’t even make the list.
Even those apocalyptic prophecies were more plausible than the idea that cutting Social Security will help the deficit, that government spending cuts will jump-start the economy, there were no crimes on Wall Street, or that we live in a “divided nation” whose “center” wants more business as usual in Washington.
Here then, without further ado, are our Top 12 Political Fallacies for 2012.
1. Austerity works.
Last year we said austerity economics was dead. It is. Unfortunately nobody told the politicians. They’re still trying to force it onto the people of Europe, even as its effects make the economies there progressively worse.
They’re trying to force more of it on us, too. The Republicans want to decimate Social Security, Medicare, roads and highways, education, programs for the poor … The Democrats offer a more modest form of austerity, but austerity’s exactly what the President last proposed to Congress.
If austerity’s so good for us, why are they trying to terrify us with the a”fiscal cliff”? T heirMonster In the Closet is austerity. Apparently they don’t see the irony in that. But there’s something else they shouldn’t overlook.
Obama will never run for office again, but most of Democrats on the Hill will. Hope they don’t forget that – because we won’t.
2. We need less government spending.
The flip side of this delusion is the notion that government spending is our problem. It’s not. In fact, right now it’s the solution.
7/ Bruno Mars, the hearthrob of the young has released a new album, and this is a track from it - "Locked Out Of Heaven". Most interesting, shot in sepia colours in a live setting.....the sound definitely reminds me of the Police with Bruno as the Sting character......quite an exciting video, the lad has talent......
8/ Thomas Friedman with the essence of what is wrong with the Republican Party......and why we are going to have a rough two years with the crazies in charge of the House.....
WHEN thinking about the state of the Republican Party, I defer to a point that the Democratic consultant James Carville made the other day: “When I hear people talking about the troubled state of today’s Republican Party, it calls to mind something Lester Maddox said one time back when he was governor of Georgia. He said the problem with Georgia prisons was ‘the quality of the inmates.’ The problem with the Republican Party is the quality of the people who vote in their primaries and caucuses. Everybody says they need a better candidate, or they need a better message but — in my opinion — the Republicans have an inmate problem.” The political obsessions of the Republican base — from denying global warming to defending assault weapons to opposing any tax increases under any conditions, to resisting any immigration reform — are making it impossible to be a Republican moderate, said Carville. And without more Republican moderates, there is no way to strike the kind of centrist bargains that have been at the heart of American progress — that got us where we are and are essential for where we need to go.
9/ In case you had forgotten some of the highlights of the year [or had blocked them out] Tom Tomorrow presents the year in review, parts 1 and 2.......click on the strip to enlarge it......
10/ There is no question in my mind that the biggest and overriding issue facing us all globally is the warming of the planet, but not only are world governments not facing this issue, there is no discussion, no acknowledgement and no action at all. If anything measures are being taken to accelerate the process of warming.....
George Monblot in the Guardian with a bleak, depressing story........in the words of George Carlin "nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care".......
It was the year of living dangerously. In 2012 governments turned their backs on the living planet, demonstrating that no chronic problem, however grave, will take priority over an immediate concern, however trivial. I believe there has been no worse year for the natural world in the past half-century.
Three weeks before the minimum occurred, the melting of the Arctic's sea ice broke the previous record. Remnants of the global megafauna – such as rhinos and bluefin tuna – were shoved violently towards extinction. Novel tree diseases raged across continents. Bird and insect numbers continued to plummet, coral reefs retreated, marine life dwindled. And those charged with protecting us and the world in which we live pretended that none of it was happening.
Their indifference was distilled into a great collective shrug at the Earth Summit in June. The first summit, 20 years before, was supposed to have heralded a new age of environmental responsibility. During that time, thanks largely to the empowerment of corporations and the ultra-rich, the square root of nothing has been achieved. Far from mobilising to address this, in 2012 the leaders of some of the world's most powerful governments – the US, the UK, Germany and Russia – didn't even bother to turn up.
But they did send their representatives to sabotage it. The Obama administration even sought to reverse commitments made by George Bush Sr in 1992. The final declaration was a parody of inaction. While the 190 countries that signed it expressed "deep concern" about the world's escalating crises, they agreed no new targets, dates or commitments, with one exception. Sixteen times they committed themselves to "sustained growth", a term they used interchangeably with its polar opposite, "sustainability".
11/ Fox News anchors and guests often come out and say some very stupid things, and this is a list of the 9 dumbest in 2012......2 minutes of Foxisms.....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
12/ This might interest the 55% of you who believe the earth is 4.5 billion years old - an article from Scientific American that argues finding another planet like Earth in the universe will be rarer than you might think......
For you 45% who think the earth is 8000 years old, praise Jesus and skip this one......
In the past 12 months we’ve gained increasingly good statistics on the incredibleabundance of planets around other stars and their multiplicity. We also finally seem to have evidence that our neighboring star Alpha Centauri B does indeed harbor at least one world. It is by any set of standards, a great haul.
But I continue to be a bugged by the claims of ‘habitable’ worlds and ‘Earth-like planets’ that seem to beset many scientific announcements (including I’m ashamed to say my own). In the spirit of closing out the passage of our 4,500,000,000 th or so orbit around the Sun I thought I’d try to set the record straight, because I think we have so much more to look forward to than simply finding ‘another Earth’.
First, when press releases state that a ‘habitable’ world may have been found, the truth is far more complex. Astronomers and astrobiologists tend to use the termhabitable as a shorthand for the presence of liquid water on a planetary surface, implying a range of temperatures between the freezing and boiling point of water. But this also requires a surface atmospheric pressure high enough for water to exist as a liquid without boiling off to vapor, and an atmosphere will alter the transfer of radiation to and from the surface – often by way of a greenhouse effect.
And this is just the beginning. By this simple criterion even the Earth is only partially habitable – about 85% of its area remains amenable to liquid water over a year (a fact that my colleagues Dave Spiegel, Kristen Menou and I reiterated a few years ago). So strictly speaking ‘habitable’ includes a range of environments that we would find appallingly hostile, including high-pressure, high-temperature climates and those in a sub-arctic category with thin atmospheres.
13/ Harry Hanrahan puts together compilations of clips from the movies, and this one is the "100 best movie threats of all time"....see how many movies you recognise......12 pretty intense minutes....
Note - lots and lots of really bad language......really bad! Really loud.....and bad.....did I mention the bad language?
My favourite and scariest clip - the Chinese lady Lucy Liu from "Kill Bill"......
YouTuber Harry Hanrahan is back at it with an awesome supercut tribute to film's greatest threats. You know, the lines you channel in the mirror when you practice telling your boss how you really feel.
He even included a full list of every quote he used to help you follow along at home.
There's some NSFW language, so we're not going to make you watch it, but let's just say you don't want to know what happens if you don't...
14/ Fisher Island is familiar to anyone who has taken a cruise out of Miami, as it's the last thing you see of the city as you leave Government Cut and go into the ocean......it's a fabulous enclave of wealthy luxury apartments, that is now been taken over by wealthy expat Russians......intrigue and lawsuits follow.....
PHYLLIS WINICK’S blue eyes flashed excitedly as she drove thegolf cart around this wealthy 216-acre enclave.
She pointed to pink flamingos standing on a grassy bank, a marina that holds yachts up to 250 feet long and the country club built around a former Vanderbilt mansion that is undergoing $60 million in renovations. She ticked off the celebrities who have owned homes on the island, including Oprah Winfrey, Mel Brooks and the tennis star Boris Becker.
After 27 years of working here, Ms. Winick, the longtime sales director for Fisher Island Real Estate, is still a bundle of energy when she tours the place. But when she slowed the cart next to an abandoned construction site facing the shipping channel that separates the island from Miami Beach, she grew tense and silent. A lone sign on the road — “Future site of ocean view residences” — only hinted at the behind-the-scenes intrigue casting a cloud over Fisher Island.
A protracted legal battle over real estate holdings here, pitting the family of a dead East European billionaire, Arkady (Badri) Patarkatsishvili from the Republic of Georgia, against investors aligned with his cousin and former business associate Joseph Kay, is holding any new development on the island at bay.
Ms. Winick is worried that if the battle isn’t resolved soon, Fisher Island will miss out on the current boom in luxury properties in Miami Beach, which set sale-price records for apartments and houses in 2012. The last condo development on the island was completed in 2007. Two planned buildings would have apartments big and lavish enough to command $20 million apiece, she said, pointing out that this would break the island’s apartment sales record of $14.2 million set last year for a 7,000-square-foot resale.
15/ Mount Dora
Not sure if you have been to the Farmers Market on Sundays at Evans Park, but the vendors are getting better and better.......one of the few negatives that we have found about living here in Central Florida is the lack of variety of interesting food at affordable prices, and also [apart from one vendor] a dearth of seafood.
Well that's changed - this market is pretty good, with a variety of ethnic and farm fresh goods.....give it a try people......
Todays video - Steve Martin as "The Great Flydini" from the Johnny Carson show....a classic.....
Todays Redneck jokes
Normally more money than Days
Todays guy joke
Two days before the group is to leave, Ron's wife puts her foot down and tells him he isn't going.
Ron's mates are very upset that he can't go, but what can they do.
Two days later the three get to the camping site to find Ron sitting there with a tent set up, firewood gathered, and dinner cooking on the fire, sitting having a cold beer.
"Damn Ron, how long you been here, and how did you talk your missus into letting you go?"
"Well, I've been here since last night.
Yesterday evening, I was sitting in my living room chair and my wife came up behind me and put her hands over my eyes and asked, 'Guess who?" I pulled her hands off, and there she was, wearing a nightie.She took my hand and pulled me into our bedroom. The room had candles and rose petals all over. Well she's been reading 50 Shades of Gray......On the bed she had handcuffs, and ropes! She told me to tie her up and cuff her to the bed, so I did. And then she said, "Do whatever you want." So, Here I am!Moral: Don't never mess with a guy's fishing!
The Jack Schitt joke
Who is Jack Schitt?
For some time, many of us have wondered just who is Jack Schitt? We find ourselves at a loss when someone says, 'You don't know Jack Schitt!' Well, thanks to genealogy, you can now respond intelligently.Jack Schitt is the only son of Awe Schitt and O. Schitt, the fertilizer magnate, and owner of Needeep N. Schitt, Inc. They had one son, Jack.Jack Schitt married Noe Schitt. The deeply religious couple produced six children: Holie Schitt, Giva Schitt, Fulla Schitt, Bull Schitt, and the twins Deep Schitt and Dip Schitt.Against her parents' wishes, Deep Schitt married Dumb Schitt, a high school dropout.After 15 years of marriage, Jack and Noe Schitt divorced. Noe Schitt later married Ted Sherlock, and because her kids lived with them, she wanted to keep her previous name. She was then known as Noe Schitt-Sherlock.Meanwhile, Dip Schitt married Loda Schitt, and they produced a son with a rather nervous disposition, who was nick-named Chicken Schitt. Two of the other six children, Fulla Schitt and Giva Schitt, were inseparable throughout childhood, and subsequently married the Happens brothers in a double ceremony. That weekend, the newspaper announced the Schitt-Happens nuptials in the society section.The Schitt-Happens children were Dawg, Byrd, and Horse. Bull Schitt, the prodigal son, left home to tour the world. He recently returned from Italy with his new Italian bride, Pisa Schitt.Now when someone says, 'You don't know Jack Schitt,' you can correct them.Sincerely,Crock O. Schitt
No comments:
Post a Comment