1/ Watch the SOTU [State Of The Union] last night? Want to know what the President really said? Read this Times editorial which gives an excellent summary of the themes in his address.....
Americans who have become weary of Washington’s endless battles over spending and taxes — and the stagnating economy that stalemate has produced — got a chance to hear about a different path on Tuesday night. President Obama’s message in the State of the Union address was clear: It doesn’t have to be this way.
The country doesn’t have to get bogged down by demands for endless austerity and government contraction. It doesn’t have to defer investments in education and public works. The poor don’t have to remain on society’s lower rungs, and the middle class can aspire to do better. Mr. Obama said his proposals to bring about growth with government action would not have to raise the deficit.
What is required to move the country forward is political will, which has been missing for too long. While many of the president’s proposals were familiar, and will probably be snuffed out by politics, his speech explained to a wide audience what could be achieved if there were even a minimal consensus in Washington.
Mr. Obama called for a series of steps that would provide enormous benefit for the middle class and for those hoping to enter it: universal public preschool in every state, a tax code that encourages manufacturing, a higher minimum wage and vital repairs to infrastructure. These and other investments could be paid for by ending tax loopholes for corporations and the wealthy, the kind of tax reform that Republicans have already said they support. The effect on jobs and incomes would be significant.
“Most Americans — Democrats, Republicans and independents — understand that we can’t just cut our way to prosperity,” he said. “They know that broad-based economic growth requires a balanced approach to deficit reduction, with spending cuts and revenue.”
Repairing the economy was only one of the challenges the president set before Congress. If lawmakers could overcome ideology and extreme partisanship, they could make real progress on things that most Americans say they want, including immigration and an improved voting system. In the most emotional moment of the night, drawing sustained cheers, he said victims of gun violence deserve a vote on each of his gun control proposals, from background checks to a ban on assault weapons.
But on virtually every one of these issues, Republicans are standing in the way. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the Republicans’ designated responder, wielded the party’s ancient cliché that the president simply wanted more “big government.”
2/ I found this very interesting - Paul Krugman's column this week focused on the Republicans as the party of ignorance. The GOP just doesn't believe in facts.....kind of scary isn't it?
There's no global warming....
The world is 8000 years old.....
Austerity will stimulate the economy...
The list goes on and on, but the GOP believes in BS, as policy!
Last week Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, gave what his office told us would be a major policy speech. And we should be grateful for the heads-up about the speech’s majorness. Otherwise, a read of the speech might have suggested that he was offering nothing more than a meager, warmed-over selection of stale ideas.
To be sure, Mr. Cantor tried to sound interested in serious policy discussion. But he didn’t succeed — and that was no accident. For these days his party dislikes the whole idea of applying critical thinking and evidence to policy questions. And no, that’s not a caricature: Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
And such is the influence of what we might call the ignorance caucus that even when giving a speech intended to demonstrate his openness to new ideas, Mr. Cantor felt obliged to give that caucus a shout-out, calling for a complete end to federal funding of social science research. Because it’s surely a waste of money seeking to understand the society we’re trying to change.
Want other examples of the ignorance caucus at work? Start with health care, an area in which Mr. Cantor tried not to sound anti-intellectual; he lavished praise on medical research just before attacking federal support for social science. (By the way, how much money are we talking about? Well, the entire National Science Foundation budget for social and economic sciences amounts to a whopping 0.01 percent of the budget deficit.)
But Mr. Cantor’s support for medical research is curiously limited. He’s all for developing new treatments, but he and his colleagues have adamantly opposed “comparative effectiveness research,” which seeks to determine how well such treatments work.
What they fear, of course, is that the people running Medicare and other government programs might use the results of such research to determine what they’re willing to pay for. Instead, they want to turn Medicare into a voucher system and let individuals make decisions about treatment.
3/ Maya Rudolph and Paul Tompkins sing a duet - "Home", live on SNL.....one of the catchiest songs I have heard for a while......very nice indeed.......
You may recognise Maya as a former regular on SNL, and one of the stars in "Bridesmaids"......
4/ Power is addictive, the ultimate rush, so the Republican Party as it slips away into craziness is also scheming to hold on to political power by rigging the rules so that even if the Democrats win in numbers, it won't matter because the rules will be gerrymandered to ensure right wing rule for years to come.......
Think it won't happen? Get ready......
Good article by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine......
Who Needs to Win to Win?
Can a party rule by capturing most of the country but less than half of the people? We might be about to find out.
- By Jonathan Chait
- Published Feb 3, 2013
 |
In the immediate aftermath of last November’s election, the Republican Party, snapped suddenly out of the self-delusion of imminent victory promulgated by the Karl Roves and Dick Morrises of their party, came face-to-face with grim reality: Most of America hated them. And the Americans who didn’t hate them were dying off at a disconcerting pace. Something, nearly everybody both inside and outside the party agreed, would have to be done to rehabilitate the party brand. These were the choices: change, or continue to lose.
Since the New Year, though, a third possibility has emerged. What if Republicans don’t compromise with public opinion, but also don’t lose?
A glimpse of such a future came slowly into view in the weeks following the election, when Republican legislators in Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio floated, with varying levels of commitment, a plan to rig the Electoral College. Each of those states voted for Obama, yet Republicans controlled each of their state governments. The plan would entail allocating the electoral vote in each state not in a lump sum to the candidate who gets more votes, but piecemeal, to the winner of each congressional district.
As it happens, Republicans in those states had already stacked the congressional districts in their party’s favor, so that roughly two thirds of the districts supported Mitt Romney in the last election even though all the states went for Obama. Allocating blue-state electors by congressional district would hand the GOP a massive advantage in the presidential election. Had those states allocated electors this way in 2012, Wisconsin, where Obama won by 7 percent, would have split its electoral votes 5-5. Michigan, which Obama carried with 54 percent of the vote, would have given Romney nine of its sixteen electoral votes. Romney would have needed only to flip his razor-thin loss in Florida to win the presidency despite losing the national vote by four percentage points.
“It’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red ought to be looking at,” asserted Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee. Republican officials in the states conspicuously left the door open. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has called it “an interesting idea” and “worth looking at.” Michigan governor Rick Snyder said, “It could be done in a thoughtful [way] over the next couple years, and people can have a thoughtful discussion.” Republicans in all these states, being blue states, left themselves room to retreat in the face of a backlash, as most of them did once national reporters grasped the implications of the proposal.
5/ And for you "Downton Abbey" watchers, here is the Jimmy Fallon version - Episode 4........features an incredible variety of expressions for going to browntown in this one........7 minutes......
6/ For a different political perspective Michael Tomasky thinks the GOP needs to hit rock bottom before it becomes more like an alternative party.....
A New GOP? Not Yet
by Michael Tomasky Feb 7, 2013 11:12 AM ESTWhy it’s going to take four more years before Republicans truly hit rock bottom—and begin moving back to the center. By Michael Tomasky.
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You remember the famous Bertolt Brecht line about how the government should just “dissolve the people and elect another”? I keep thinking about it as I read more and more about the Republican attempts at redefinition—Eric Cantor’s speech, Karl Rove’s new group, Fox’s quasi makeover, Marco Rubio’s beer with Ben Smith, and so on. They have all these fancy ideas about how to rebrand. But they can have all the fancy ideas they want. They still have an electoral base that sees politics basically as an arena to exact revenge for a series of resentments and grudges. Until they change that, they are stuck—and it isn’t happening anytime soon.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor arrives to speak at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday. As the GOP tries to reinvent itself, Cantor spoke of conservative reforms to make life easier for more people in regards to education, health care, workforce reform, and immigration. (Mark Wilson/Getty)
Cantor’s “Make Life Work” speech Tuesday was more about repackaging than rethinking. He put forward one actually excellent idea, for which I give him credit. He proposed that colleges be required to make public data revealing employment and earning patterns among their graduates. Universities fear this to death, for reasons that education expert Kevin Carey explained in an article in the journal I edit,Democracy, as it could ultimately lead to a reduction in tuition costs.
So I applaud that one. Otherwise, the ideas ranged from OK to largely irrelevant to done before to actively bad. You’ve got to hold on to your wallet any time a Republican talks about “modernizing” Medicare. Endorsing a path to citizenship for DREAM Act recipients is fine, but small potatoes. It is interesting, though, as E.J. Dionne observed, that Cantor was mostly playing on the Democrats’ side of the field, talking about using government to improve people’s lives. Noted.
The Rove–Tea Party feud is a joyous thing to watch. Rove, after an utterly disastrous run around the track in 2012, is now suckering people into writing him checks for a new outfit that will allegedly hold the zanies at bay, filter out the Sharron Angles and Richard Mourdocks of the world, and promote electable conservatives.
First of all, I hardly have the words to describe how happy this makes me, after decades of watching conservatives chortle about unelectable Democrats.
7/ Arguably the biggest asshole in the country, Donald Trump, is suing Bill Maher for $5 million.....I'll let Maher explain, but it's very funny indeed......5 minutes.....
One of his better ones.....
8/ Movie trailer time
Wow - this looks like a very cool movie - "Dead Man Down", from the Swedish director of the "Dragon Tattoo", coming in March........here is the trailer......
And another - "Star Trek Into Darkness", coming in August.....a moodier and tougher Star Trek is the word.......can't wait, here is a teaser trailer......
9/ This story proves the old dictum - institutions really have to fall apart before you can start to fix them, so this is a lesson in the fundamentals of how to improve our school system - there are no easy answers or quick fixes.
It's back to the basics of good management and more funding, and if this can make an inner city New Jersey school system function in the top 20% of the country you know it's fundamentally sound......
The President mentioned in SOTU one of the things this school system is trying - universal preschool.......
OPINION
The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools
By DAVID L. KIRP
WHAT would it really take to give students a first-rate education? Some argue that our schools are irremediably broken and that charter schools offer the only solution. The striking achievement of Union City, N.J. — bringing poor, mostly immigrant kids into the educational mainstream — argues for reinventing the public schools we have.
Union City makes an unlikely poster child for education reform. It’s a poor community with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average. Three-quarters of the students live in homes where only Spanish is spoken. A quarter are thought to be undocumented, living in fear of deportation.
Public schools in such communities have often operated as factories for failure. This used to be true in Union City, where the schools were once so wretched that state officials almost seized control of them. How things have changed. From third grade through high school, students’ achievement scores now approximate the statewide average. What’s more, in 2011, Union City boasted a high school graduation rate of 89.5 percent — roughly 10 percentage points higher than the national average. Last year, 75 percent of Union City graduates enrolled in college, with top students winning scholarships to the Ivies.
As someone who has worked on education policy for four decades, I’ve never seen the likes of this. After spending a year in Union City working on a book, I believe its transformation offers a nationwide strategy.
Ask school officials to explain Union City’s success and they start with prekindergarten, which enrolls almost every 3- and 4-year-old. There’s abundant research showing the lifetime benefits of early education. Here, seeing is believing.
10/ "30 Rock" is one of the wittiest shows on TV, and here is a compilation of insults hurled at Liz Lemon [Tina Fey] by Jack Donaghy [Alec Baldwin]....you have to be alert for these, and may want to watch them twice.....3 minutes......
There was a lot to love about "30 Rock," but the love/hate relationship between the polar-opposite Jack Donaghy and Liz Lemon was what really made the show special.
During their first meeting, Jack introduced himself to Liz as "The new VP of development for NBC/GE/Universal/Kmart." Pete Hornberger, who was accompanying Liz, seemed surprised, "We own Kmart now?" After looking Liz up and down, Jack quipped, "No. So why are you dressed like we do?" And thus, Jack's first insult was recorded.
Now, hundreds of insults later, "30 Rock" has finally come to a close. In honor of the hilarious relationship between Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy, we've compiled Jack's best insults into the video above. Enjoy!
11/ All politicians are scum, even some Democrats. Carl Hiaasen in the Miami Herald writes how Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey is embroiled in a controversy about how he "helped" a friend of his........
Corruption is a cancer in this country......
IN MY OPINION | CARL HIAASEN
Carl Hiaasen: The eye doctor and the ‘I’ pol
BY CARL HIAASEN
CHIAASEN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Living in the intergalactic capital of Medicare fraud, South Floridians are accustomed to the sight of blue-jacketed federal agents swarming a doctor’s office and marching out with boxes of files.
Normally this is unpleasant news for the doctor, and so it is for Salomon E. Melgen, a prolific eye surgeon whose medical facilities in Palm Beach County were raided Jan. 29.
But it’s even worse news for Sen. Bob Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who is friends with Melgen. The doctor has donated a fortune to Menendez’s political campaigns, and brought the senator on vacation jaunts aboard his jet.
Originally, the story broke as a potential sex scandal when a conservative website reported that the FBI was investigating reports that Menendez consorted with underage prostitutes while hanging out with Dr. Melgen in the Dominican Republican.
The doctor and the senator deny it, but at this point gabby hookers would be the least of their worries. That FBI raid on Melgen’s West Palm Beach offices was strictly about Medicare money.
According to the Washington Post, U.S. healthcare officials have been scrutinizing the doctor’s practice for years. Of particular attention to the government was his billing methods for eye injections, laser treatments and other surgery.
For example, auditors found that Melgen was billing Medicare $6,000 to $8,000 for a vial of eye medicine for which he should have been reimbursed $2,000.
The doctor’s attorneys said he was using the same vial to treat more than one patient; therefore, multiplying the charges was proper. That explanation might have made sense to, say, a kindergarten class, but the auditors didn’t go for it.
Melgen was ordered to repay $8.9 million to the agency in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. He did.
Not many ophthalmologists can write a check that large, but not many ophthalmologists have their own jet, either.
12/ This is wonderful - a harmonica player gets to perform in Carnegie Hall, and gets a standing O doing it......an excellent 4 minutes......
13/ The Times sent their books editor on a transatlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2, and his report is quite a good perspective on the Cunard experience.....
Quite a chatty review, but he liked the experience......
Seven Days on the Queen Mary 2
Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times
The Queen Mary 2 passes under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. It sails from the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook to Southampton, England. More Photos »
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: February 8, 2013 396 Comm
The first rule about traveling between America and England aboard the Queen Mary 2, the flagship of the Cunard Line and the world’s largest ocean liner, is to never refer to your adventure as a cruise. You are, it is understood, making a crossing. The second rule is to refrain, when speaking to those who travel frequently on Cunard’s ships, from calling them regulars. The term of art — it is best pronounced while approximating Maggie Smith’s cut-glass accent on “Downton Abbey” — is Cunardists.
The third rule, unspoken, is to not fling your Champagne flutes into the roiling North Atlantic. My wife, Cree, broke this one. It was our second night aboard the ship. We were crossing, in January, from New York to Southampton. I was in black tie. She was in an extraordinary little black dress. We’d been flailing about, in the ship’s ballroom, to an adroit orchestra. We were happy, and tipsy.
We pushed open a door to the promenade deck. The icy wind heartlessly X-rayed us, but it was impossible to pull away from the railing. The North Atlantic in January is no joke; its heaving beauty is mesmerizing. It’s a volcano of sorts, one that seems to demand an offering. Better a Champagne flute than to leap over the railing yourself.
This stemware-tossing impulse is, apparently, an old one. Evelyn Waugh, in his travel book “Labels” (1930), described being alone on a boat deck at night in the Mediterranean, Champagne glass in hand. “For no good reason that I can now think of,” he wrote, “I threw it out over the side, watched it hover for a moment in the air as it lost momentum and was caught by the wind, then saw it flutter and tumble into the swirl of water.” Waugh added, “This gesture ... has become oddly important to me.”
If travel makes you a bit reckless and sharpens your senses, being aboard the Queen Mary 2 in winter doubles this sense of intoxication. The churning ocean, splashing up the sides of the elegant dining room’s windows, two feet from your bottle of white Burgundy and your tuna tartare, flips the switch on your survival instincts. You find yourself ravenous: eating a bit more; planning to stay out a bit later; dwelling a bit more upon sex.
What is it about ships (and trains and planes) and sex? We were left to ponder this question with fresh avidity after an unfamiliar QM2 waiter approached Cree early one afternoon while she was reading alone by a window in the ship’s pub.
14/ Steven Soderbergh is one of the finest Directors in American cinema, so it's an event when he has a new movie out......"Side Effects", and this review in the Times is excellent.....
It stars Jude Law and Rooney Mara.........
The marketing campaign for “Side Effects,” Steven Soderbergh’s tight and twisty new pharma-caper, includes aWeb site for a fictitious antidepressant called Ablixa. You can tell the site is fake because the “professional consultation” it offers is provided by Jude Law, who plays a psychiatrist in the film. But the embedded commercial is a perfect parody of something that has become very familiar in recent years: a vague and seductive montage of sad and happy scenes accompanied by new-agey music and, interrupting the inspiring sales pitch, a sotto voce recitation of warnings and possible complications.
Mr. Soderbergh, who serves as his own cinematographer (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews), cleverly evokes the style of these ubiquitous drug advertisements in the movie itself. We spend most of the first half-hour in the company of Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), a young New Yorker who lives in a gray fog of hopelessness. The Ablixa ad represents this condition with cartoon clouds, while Mr. Soderbergh paints Manhattan in watery shades of gloom. Thomas Newman’s score mimics and subverts the soothing music of antidepressant sales pitches, composing lullabies that portend a sleep full of nightmares. Ms. Mara, fine-boned and fragile-looking, but with a deep reservoir of scary intensity (see “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”), moves through her scenes with a blunted, haunted affect, and Emily stirs the protective instincts of the audience, of Mr. Law’s Dr. Jonathan Banks and also of her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum).
He is a former hedge fund cowboy recently (and not all that repentantly) released from prison after serving four years for insider trading. His return coincides with — or perhaps sets off — a severe depressive episode for his wife, including a suicide attempt in an underground parking garage. Martin, affable, hunky and upbeat (as I said, Channing Tatum), also represents the principal happiness that Emily has known in her life. A flashback renders the time before his incarceration as a bright blur of delicious shared luxury: Champagne in crystal flutes, a handsome sailboat, a cute little Mercedes in the driveway of a grand Greenwich mansion.
You will note that those signifiers of the good life are material rather than mental. Abundance is bliss. And though “Side Effects” (written by Scott Z. Burns, Mr. Soderbergh’s collaborator on“Contagion” and “The Informant!”) starts out on the pharmacologically renovated terrain of the psychological thriller — locating drama and suspense in the puzzles of Emily’s inner experience — it eventually separates the thrills from the psychology, flattening into a somewhat conventional story of double crosses and disguised motives. The movie is finally less about madness and medicine than about lust, jealousy and greed.
Interesting trailer......
Todays video - four funny European commercials.......
Todays Cinderella joke
After a fulfilling life with the now dead prince, she happily sits upon her rocking chair, watching
the world go by from her front porch, with a cat
named Ted for companionship.
One sunny afternoon out of nowhere, appeared the
fairy godmother.
Cinderella said, 'Fairy Godmother, what are you
doing here after all these years'?
The fairy godmother replied, 'Cinderella, you have
lived an exemplary life since I last saw you. Is there
anything for which your heart still yearns?'
Cinderella was taken aback, overjoyed, and after some
thoughtful consideration, she uttered her first wish:
'The prince was wonderful, but not much of an investor.
I'm living hand to mouth on my disability cheques, and
I wish I were wealthy beyond comprehension.Instantly her rocking chair turned into solid gold.
Cinderella said,
'Ooh, thank you, Fairy Godmother'
The fairy godmother replied,
'It is the least that I can do..
What do you want for your second wish?'
Cinderella looked down at her frail body, and said,
'I wish I were young and full of the beauty and youth
I once had.'
At once, her wish became reality, and her beautiful
young visage returned. Cinderella felt stirrings inside
her that had been dormant for years.
And then the fairy godmother spoke once more:
'You have one more wish; what shall it be?'
Cinderella looks over to the frightened cat in the
corner and says, 'I wish for you to transform Ted,
my old cat, into a kind and handsome young man.'
Magically, Ted suddenly underwent so fundamental
a change in his biological make-up that, when he stood
before her, he was a man so beautiful the likes of him
neither she nor the world had ever seen.
The fairy godmother said, 'Congratulations, Cinderella, enjoy your new life.'
With a blazing shock of bright blue electricity, the fairy godmother was gone as suddenly as she appeared.
For a few eerie moments,
Ted and Cinderella looked into each other's eyes.
Cinderella sat, breathless, gazing at the most beautiful,
stunningly perfect man she had ever seen..
Then Ted walked over to Cinderella, who sat transfixed
in her rocking chair, & held her close in his young
muscular arms.
He leaned in close, blowing her golden hair with his warm breath as he whispered...
'Bet you're sorry now that you cut my nuts off.'
Todays Italian joke
At St. Peter's Catholic Church in Adelaide, they have weekly husbands' Marriage seminars.
At the session last week, the priest asked Giuseppe, who said he was approaching his 50th wedding anniversary, to take a few minutes and share some insight into how he had managedto stay married to the same woman all these years.
Giuseppe replied to the assembled husbands,'Wella, I'va tried to treat her nicea, spenda da money on her,but besta of all is, I tooka
her to Italy for the 25th anniversary!'
The priest responded, 'Giuseppe, you are an amazing inspiration to all the husbands here!Please tell us what you are planning for your wife
for your 50th anniversary?'
Giuseppe proudly replied,"I gonna go pick her up."
Todays guy joke
He was in ecstasy, with a huge smile on his face, as his wife moved forwards, then backwards, forward, then backwards again ....... back and forth ..... back and forth ..... in and out ..... in and out.
She could feel the sweat on her forehead and between her breasts, and trickling down the small of her back, she was getting near to the end.Her heart was pounding ... her face was flushed ... then she moaned, softly at first, then began to groan louder.Finally, totally exhausted, she let out an almighty scream and shouted,"OK, OK! I can't park the friggin’ car! You do it, you Smug bastard!"
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