Your scribe has been busy moving house, which is incredibly time consuming, so apologise for the 9 day gap in DDD's.......
1/ Paul Krugman with a good column on how although some mainstream Republicans acknowledge they have to change, it is only on some issues - on wealth distribution they are getting worse......
Republicans have a problem. For years they could shout down any attempt to point out the extent to which their policies favored the elite over the poor and the middle class; all they had to do was yell “Class warfare!” and Democrats scurried away. In the 2012 election, however, that didn’t work: the picture of the G.O.P. as the party of sneering plutocrats stuck, even as Democrats became more openly populist than they have been in decades.
As a result, prominent Republicans have begun acknowledging that their party needs to improve its image. But here’s the thing: Their proposals for a makeover all involve changing the sales pitch rather than the product. When it comes to substance, the G.O.P. is more committed than ever to policies that take from most Americans and give to a wealthy handful.
Consider, as a case in point, how a widely reportedrecent speech by Bobby Jindal the governor of Louisiana, compares with his actual policies.
Mr. Jindal posed the problem in a way that would, I believe, have been unthinkable for a leading Republican even a year ago. “We must not,” he declared, “be the party that simply protects the well off so they can keep their toys. We have to be the party that shows all Americans how they can thrive.” After a campaign in which Mitt Romney denounced any attempt to talk about class divisions as an“attack on success,” this represents a major rhetorical shift.
But Mr. Jindal didn’t offer any suggestions about how Republicans might demonstrate that they aren’t just about letting the rich keep their toys, other than claiming even more loudly that their policies are good for everyone.
Meanwhile, back in Louisiana Mr. Jindal is pushinga plan to eliminate the state’s income tax, which falls most heavily on the affluent, and make up for the lost revenue by raising sales taxes, which fall much more heavily on the poor and the middle class. The result would be big gains for the top 1 percent, substantial losses for the bottom 60 percent. Similar plans are being pushed by a number of other Republican governors as well.
2/ The excellent Frank Rich with his take on the political stories of the week.......he gives his opinion on Chuck Hagel [Defense Secretary nominee] and immigration reform, and more on the media.......
Always worth reading.......
Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with assistant editor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Chuck Hagel's confirmation hearing, the latest Washington "gang," and a farewell to the original Mama Grizzly.
Chuck Hagel, President Obama's nominee for Defense secretary, had a rather rough seven-and-a-half-hour grilling at the hands of the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday. Do you think his lackluster performance will damage his chances of confirmation? And what do you think of Obama's choice of Hagel?
The undercaffeinated Hagel was clearly over-rehearsed into a near stupor by his White House handlers. He was hardly impressive. But compared to his inquisitors, he was Churchill. As Dave Weigel pointed out in Slate, the new Senator from the Texas tea party, Ted Cruz, misrepresented an Al-Jazeera clip to slur Hagel as an anti-Semite. (A visitor from outer space listening to the committee’s priorities would have thought Americans are dying in a war in Israel, not Afghanistan.) And then there’s John McCain, having another temper tantrum and branding Hagel as being on the “wrong side” of history because he opposed the Iraq “surge.” In 2009, I wrote a piece cataloguing McCain’s lethal blunders about Iraq. Just a short list would include his pimping for the fictitious Bush-Cheney rationale for the war (even linking Iraq to the post-9/11 Washington anthrax attacks), asserting that the Sunnis and Shiites would “probably get along,” and declaring that we’d win the war “easily.”McCain was not only on the wrong side of history; history will hold him responsible for being a primary enabler of one of the most costly foreign debacles — in blood, treasure, and American credibility — in our history.
3/ You saw this amusing commercial Sunday when you watched the Super Bowl......pardon me, OF COURSE you watched the SB as every red-blooded male and patriotic female in the country does, unless of course you are a Communist........
Note this VW spot has been attacked as racist, but only by people who have zero sense of humour.....
4/ And speaking of football which is over for another year, have you ever wondered what the NFL players are saying to each other on the field?
Bad Lip Reading has the scoop.....quite funny.....2 minutes.....
This is funnier the second time.......
5/ Remember the story two weeks ago when Amgen the drug maker slipped a clause into the "Fiscal Cliff" bill that will save them billions? Well they are at it again at the state level, trying to ban generic copies of their drugs even when the go out of patent.....
In statehouses around the country, some of the nation’s biggest biotechnology companies are lobbying intensively to limit generic competition to their blockbuster drugs, potentially cutting into the billions of dollars in savings on drug costs contemplated in the federal health care overhaul law.
The complex drugs, made in living cells instead of chemical factories, account for roughly one-quarter of the nation’s $320 billion in spending on drugs, according to IMS Health. And that percentage is growing. They include some of the world’s best-selling drugs, like the rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis drugs Humira and Enbrel and the cancer treatments Herceptin, Avastin and Rituxan. The drugs now cost patients — or their insurers — tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Two companies, Amgen and Genentech
Bills have been introduced in at least eight states since the new legislative sessions began this month. Others are pending.
The Virginia House of Delegates already passed one such bill last week, by a 91-to-6 vote.
The companies and other proponents say such measures are needed to protect patient safety because the generic versions of biological drugs are not identical to the originals. For that reason, they are usually called biosimilars rather than generics.
Generic drug companies and insurers are taking their own steps to oppose or amend the state bills, which they characterize as pre-emptive moves to deter the use of biosimilars, even before any get to market.
“All of these things are put in there for a chilling effect on these biosimilars,” said Brynna M. Clark, director of state affairs for the Generic Pharmaceutical Association. The limits, she said, “don’t sound too onerous but undermine confidence in these drugs and are burdensome.”
Genentech, which is owned by Roche, makes Rituxan, Herceptin and Avastin, the best-selling cancer drugs in the world. Amgen makes Enbrel, the anemiadrugs Epogen and Aranesp, and the drugs Neupogen and Neulasta for protecting chemotherapy
6/ Bill Moyers talked to Rep. Peter Welch about the Amgen scandal.....
Rep. Welch is introducing a bill taking the sweetheart deal away from Amgen, who recently pleaded guilty to fraud and was fined $762 million dollars. Note the Fiscal Cliff sweetener will just about cover this fine.....
Corruption is everywhere.......
A recent article in The New York Times reported on a cost-control exception provided to Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology firm. According to the report, the sweetheart deal — hidden in the Senate’s final “fiscal cliff” bill — will cost taxpayers half a billion dollars. Bill talks to U.S. Representative Peter Welch (D-VT) about the bi-partisan bill he recently sponsored to repeal that giveaway and the political factors that allow such crony capitalism to occur.
7/ In Spain the running of the bulls is a tradition, but sometimes the bull wins as this four minute video shows.......ouch......
This is a doozey of a bill just introduced - if a woman is raped and becomes pregnant, the law would send her to prison if she had an abortion because she would be "tampering with evidence"......
So ladies - vote Republican, they know what's best for you.......
Should a recently introduced bill in New Mexico become law, rape victims will be required to carry their pregnancies to term during their sexual assault trials or face charges of “tampering with evidence.”
Under HB 206, if a woman ended her pregnancy after being raped, both she and her doctor would be charged with a felonypunishable by up to 3 years in state prison:
Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.
Sexual assault trials are infamously grueling for survivors, who are often subjected to character assassination and other attempts to discredit their accounts. State Rep. Cathrynn Brown’s (R) bill would add the forced choice between prison or an unwanted pregnancy to these proceedings.
After several failed GOP candidates, including Todd Akin (R-MO) and Richard Mourdock (R-IN), made offensive comments about rape victims during the last election season, Republican consultants launched sensitivity training to teach candidates how to avoid talking about rape. But GOP policy speaks for itself. At the federal level, former vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) introduced a failed bill that would negate sexual assault that are not deemed “forcible rape.” And another New Mexico lawmaker, Gov. Susana Martinez (R), advanced a proposal to require women who become pregnant from rape to prove they were “forcibly raped” in order to qualify for childcare assistance.
Sexual assault trials are infamously grueling for survivors, who are often subjected to character assassination and other attempts to discredit their accounts. State Rep. Cathrynn Brown’s (R) bill would add the forced choice between prison or an unwanted pregnancy to these proceedings.
9/ Trust you all saw the SB halftime show with Beyonce? Wasn't she amazing? We were with two teenage girls watching it and their comment was "awesome"......
She also sang the Star Spangled Banner at the inauguration, and our obsessed media created a firestorm because she allegedly lip-synced.....Beyonce had a press conference to explain, and this is one of the finest putdowns of the idiots in the media ever.......
She opened the meeting by singing the SSB live, "just to prove I can sing it", then explained the reason why she lip-synced - professionalism. Wonderful stuff......
10/ Just to refresh your memory here is Beyonce from 2010 with Lady Gaga [when Gaga was slim] in "Telephone"..... Beyonce was just a very popular singer, not an icon......maybe she now regrets doing this video with Gaga, because it has to be one of the raunchiest ever made.
Lady Gaga has the starring role in this mini-film, being sent to prison with bull dyke wardens, lesbians and more lesbians dancing in their undies and fighting......Beyonce bails her out, and they then poison an entire diner full of truckers.
I know, I know...it makes no sense at all especially Lady Gaga's incredible costumes, but what a sexytime spectacle.......
Catch the line after the wardens leave the cell......an urban myth put to rest.......
11/ Excellent three minute video explaining the debt limit.....send this out to your right wing friends, it's pretty simple.......
12/ Stephen Colbert had a wonderful segment on climate change Thursday, skewering the climate deniers royally.....very funny, one of his better ones....5 minutes.....
The first conservative line of defense against climate action is outright denial that climate change exists. The second is that the climate is changing, but it’s not our fault and won’t be so bad and isn’t worth worrying about. Both those are getting tougher, what with all the crazy weather and increasingly shrill warnings from scientists, so it looks like cons are now falling back to their third line of defense: there’s nothing we can do about it. This can take the shape of the “sophisticated objection” I wrote about earlier. Or it can take the shape of the rather-less-sophisticated “China! China!” stuff Colbert so artfully skewers.
Some of this, perhaps, has to do with the ascension of Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) to ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee. He just introduced a bill that would prohibit the U.S. from cutting its emissions until China, India, and Russia have “proposed, implemented, and enforced measures requiring carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emission reductions.”
13/ Are you a cat person? Did you know your beloved felines kill billions of birds and mammals every year, and may have something to do with the declining bird population? Although they suspect the feral cat population is mainly responsible, this label of "killer" applies to every outside cat......
For all the adorable images of cats that play the piano, flush the toilet, mew melodiously and find their way back home over hundreds of miles, scientists have identified a shocking new truth: cats are far deadlier than anyone realized.
In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.
The estimated kill rates are two to four times higher than mortality figures previously bandied about, and position the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes.
Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and an author of the report, said the mortality figures that emerge from the new model “are shockingly high.”
“When we ran the model, we didn’t know what to expect,” said Dr. Marra, who performed the analysis with a colleague, Scott R. Loss, and Tom Will of the Fish and Wildlife Service. “We were absolutely stunned by the results.” The study appeared Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
This is called "Please Adopt Pinky The Cat", and is applicable to the previous article......one minute and the inevitable ending......very funny.......
14/ Carl Hiaasen is first and foremost a funny writer, but he is also an excellent investigative journalist, as he proves in this sordid little tale of one of our corrupt institutions.....the South Florida Water Management District......Hiaasen should visit the St. Johns WMD.......
In our sunshine state the corruption encompasses anything politicians touch.......
Even in a state of perpetual sleaze, some dirty deals stink more than others.
The most recent is a weird little law approved last spring that allows the South Florida Water Management District to enter the commercial billboard business.
The water agency usually sticks to flood control and Everglades restoration, touting itself as a defender of imperiled wetlands. Yet in coming months, 10 large electronic billboards are due to be installed on district holdings, which are public lands, with another 20 signs to follow in 2014.
And dig this: The water agency’s staff, parroting the coy language in the law, refers to these digital monstrosities as “public information systems.” The term billboard is being avoided like an embarrassing disease.
How did this latest travesty occur? Palm Beach Post reporter Christine Stapleton broke the story and did a fine job connecting the dots.
The billboard provision was quietly shoehorned into a crucial bill for the water district. Oddly, the amendment had no named sponsor in the Legislature, no footprints anywhere.
Even stranger: The billboard industry’s main lobby group apparently knew nothing about the proposal, including where it came from.
In time, though, the muddy waters would clear.
After the law took effect in July, the district’s staff informed its governing board that the agency could now erect these “public information systems” to display important service announcements such as flood warnings, drought advisories and Amber alerts. And oh, by the way, they could sell some advertising on them, too.
15/ Men - does your wife get catalogues in the mail? Make sure those bad boys are disposed of quickly.....watch how an innocent object is turned into a weapon!
One minute......guys only please......ladies please don't watch.....
16/ Fascinating review in the Times of the new Ford C-Max - based on the Ford Focus platform, it's only sold as a hybrid, with two different battery packages......
With the C-Max Energi which is a plug-in, if you use it for shortish trips [25 miles or less] it functions as a full electric vehicle....
I am going to have a look at this car.....when our local dealer Prestige Ford gets one in, which will be about a month........
BERKELEY, CALIF. — For many Americans, the basic compact car stands as a matter of sacrifice — to financial constraints, to fuel economy demands, to the exigencies of urban crowding. But what if the design of small cars could be reformulated to transcend their size?
Multimedia
For an answer, Ford Motor looked to Europe, where small cars, like small apartments and un-Gulplike beverage servings, are accepted realities of life. The company found a solution in its C-Max, a five-seat people mover it has sold in Europe since 2002 but began offering in the United States only last fall.
Ford made a bet that American drivers would get used to, and even come to like, the high-roof design of the C-Max. Its tall proportions create a spacious interior in a small format — a layout common on the other side of the Atlantic but one that has struggled for acceptance in this market.
Then, one might say, Ford went “all California” and remade the American-market C-Max into the company’s first exclusively hybrid model. There is no gasoline-only C-Max offered in the United States, only hybrids: a standard gas-electric C-Max Hybrid and a plug-in version, called the C-Max Energi, that can recharge from the power grid.
Though it shares its basic dimensions with a Ford sibling, the Focus, the C-Max is more spacious and comfortable; tall passengers gape in amazement at its generous headroom.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/
Todays video - Voodoo Mama.......a little rude, but funny.......
Todays potpourri of jokes
Todays Snowbird joke
I was on Ft. Myers Beach, Florida the other day and I saw a bumper sticker on a parked car that read, "I miss Detroit."
So I broke the window, stole the GPS, shot out two of the tires and left a note that read, "I hope this helps!"
Todays "The Donald" joke
Donald Trump was invited to address a major gathering of the American Indian Nation two weeks ago in upstate New York.
He spoke for almost an hour about his plans for increasing every Native American's present standard of living. He referred to how he had supported every Native American issue that came to the news media.
Although Mr Trump was vague about the details of his plans, he seemed most enthusiastic and spoke eloquently about his ideas for helping his "red sisters and brothers."
At the conclusion of his speech, the Tribes presented him with a plaque inscribed with his new Indian name, "Walking Eagle."
The proud Mr Trump accepted the plaque and then departed in his motorcade to a fundraiser, waving to the crowds.
A news reporter later asked the group of chiefs how they came to select the new name they had given to the "want-to-be" Presidential Candidate.
They explained that "Walking Eagle" is the name given to a bird so full of shit it can no longer fly.
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