Recommend the Maddow segment #5 - a very intelligent discussion about wealth and economics.......
And #12 got your scribe a little moist-eyed.......
1/ Charles Blow is angry. And he calls the sequester crisis for what it is - we [maybe you] have elected a House of crazies, who are hell bent on hurting this country if at the same time they can nail the black guy.....
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Poison Pill Politics
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: March 1, 2013 291 Comments
The deadline has passed. The sequester is in effect. And Congress is not in session.
We now know that our political system is broken beyond anything even remotely resembling a functional government.
The ridiculous bill was designed as a poison pill, but Republicans popped it like a Pez. Now the body politic — weak with battle fatigue, jerked from crisis to crisis and struggling to recover from a recession — has to wait to see how severe the damage will be.
(The director of the Congressional Budget Officeestimates that the sequester could cost 750,000 jobs in 2013 alone.)
This is all because Republicans have refused to even consider new revenue as part of a deal. That includes revenue from closing tax loopholes, a move they supposedly support.
As Speaker John Boehner said after his Congressional leaders met with President Obama on Friday:
“Let’s make it clear that the president got his tax hikes on Jan. 1. This discussion about revenue, in my view, is over.”
Boehner’s intransigence during the talks drew “cheers,” according to a report in The New York Times, from his chronically intransigent colleagues. But their position is a twist of the truth that is coming dangerously close to becoming accepted wisdom by sheer volume of repetition. It must be battled back every time it is uttered.
Let’s make this clear: it is wrong to characterize the American Taxpayer Relief Act as a “tax hike.” In reality, much of what it did was allow 18 percent of the Bush tax cuts — mostly those affecting the wealthiest Americans — to expire while permanently locking in a whopping 82 percent of them.
But of course, that misrepresentation fit with the tired trope of Democrats as tax-and-spend liberals. It also completely ignores that it was Bush-era spending that dug the ditch we’re in.
Republicans have defined their position, regardless of how reckless: austerity or bust. However, as economists have warned, austerity generally precedes — and, in fact, can cause — bust. Just look at Europe.
But Republicans are so dizzy over the deficits and delighted to lick the boots of billionaires that they cannot — or will not — see it. They are still trying to sell cut-to-grow snake oil: cut spending and cut taxes, and the economy will grow because rich people will be happy, and when rich people are happy they hire poor people, and then everyone’s happy.
This is the vacuous talk of politicians trying to placate people with vacation homes, not a sensible solution for people trying to purchase, or simply retain, their first homes.
Now the president is trying to make the best of a bad situation and bring expectations in line with what is likely to happen.
2/ Bill Moyers interviews Susan Crawford, an expert on communications, and she explains how all of us are being exploited by the telecom industry. It's 17 minutes, but watch the first two minutes and get the gist of it......looks like an interesting book too.....
Susan Crawford on Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly, and Unfair
Susan Crawford, former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation, and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, joins Bill to discuss how our government has allowed a few powerful media conglomerates to put profit ahead of the public interest — rigging the rules, raising prices, and stifling competition. As a result, Crawford says, all of us are at the mercy of the biggest business monopoly since Standard Oil in the first Gilded Age a hundred years ago.
“The rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out, and this means that we’re creating, yet again, two Americas, and deepening inequality through this communications inequality,” Crawford tells Bill.
3/ Another excellent Bill Maher, and he takes on horse meat in our junk food, but then widens the discussion......5 great minutes......
If you are what you eat, then we're all pretty much Donald Trump's legal representation, according to Bill Maher. Addressing the horse meat scandal on this week's episode of "Real Time", Maher took Americans to task for being willfully ignorant about their food, and Californians in particular for voting down a GMO labeling proposition.
And according to Maher, it's only going to get worse. "If we don't fix how we grow food and don't stop turning our oceans into a carbon sink for coal... your grandkids are going to grow up dreaming of getting some horse meat while they munch down on their McPlankton sandwich."
4/ The big banks have been uncharacteristically quiet recently, so it was no surprise to read this story.......
Bastards......
Major Banks Aid in Payday Loans Banned by States
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG
Published: February 23, 2013
Major banks have quickly become behind-the-scenes allies of Internet-based payday lenders that offer short-term loans with interest rates sometimes exceeding 500 percent.
With 15 states banning payday loans, a growing number of the lenders have set up online operations in more hospitable states or far-flung locales like Belize, Malta and the West Indies to more easily evade statewide caps on interest rates.
While the banks, which include giants like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, do not make the loans, they are a critical link for the lenders, enabling the lenders to withdraw payments automatically from borrowers’ bank accounts, even in states where the loans are banned entirely. In some cases, the banks allow lenders to tap checking accounts even after the customers have begged them to stop the withdrawals.
“Without the assistance of the banks in processing and sending electronic funds, these lenders simply couldn’t operate,” said Josh Zinner, co-director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, which works with community groups in New York.
The banking industry says it is simply serving customers who have authorized the lenders to withdraw money from their accounts. “The industry is not in a position to monitor customer accounts to see where their payments are going,” said Virginia O’Neill, senior counsel with the American Bankers Association.
But state and federal officials are taking aim at the banks’ role at a time when authorities are increasing their efforts to clamp down on payday lending and its practice of providing quick money to borrowers who need cash.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are examining banks’ roles in the online loans, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter. Benjamin M. Lawsky, who heads New York State’s Department of Financial Services, is investigating how banks enable the online lenders to skirt New York law and make loans to residents of the state, where interest rates are capped at 25 percent.
For the banks, it can be a lucrative partnership. At first blush, processing automatic withdrawals hardly seems like a source of profit. But many customers are already on shaky financial footing. The withdrawals often set off a cascade of fees from problems like overdrafts. Roughly 27 percent of payday loan borrowers say that the loans caused them to overdraw their accounts, according to a report released this month by the Pew Charitable Trusts. That fee income is coveted, given that financial regulations limiting fees on debit and credit cards have cost banks billions of dollar
5/ Rachel Maddow had a fascinating discussion on economics, with guests Frank Rich and Joseph Stiglitz......her opening was about wealth distribution in the United States, and included the excellent chart of what we perceive "who has what", and compares it to the reality.
This is also an important discussion about the role of corporations, and definitely worth 17 minutes of your time.......
6/ O lordy - it's time for mayhem, stupidity, drunkenness and people being unlucky......the February Fails from TwisterNederland.....
There are a few accidents in this 11 minutes that will make you gentlemen wince.....
7/ If you ever hear a quote from Michael Goldfarb, or see him on Fox News, you will at least have a background if you read this article......he is the evil brain behind a lot of the language of the right, funded of course by the Koch Brothers......
At 11:42 a.m. on Feb. 14, a conservative online magazine called The Washington Free Beacon posted a dispatch about a speech Chuck Hagel gave in 2007 in which it said he called the State Department “an adjunct to the Israeli foreign minister’s office.”
The report was based on “contemporaneous” notes an attendee posted online. An hour later on the floor of the United States Senate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina urgently cited that statement as another reason to delay Mr. Hagel’s nomination as defense secretary.
Mr. Hagel denied saying it, and no recording has surfaced. But after a successful filibuster against the nominee, a group called the Emergency Committee for Israel effectively declared partial victory and vowed to “redouble its efforts to bring to light Mr. Hagel’s complete record.”
All in all, it was a very bad day for Mr. Hagel, and a smashingly good one for the conservative political operative of the moment — Michael Goldfarb.
At 32, Mr. Goldfarb is a founder of The Free Beacon, which is gaining prominence as a conservative clarion; a onetime presidential campaign aide to Senator John McCain, who provided critical support for the filibuster; and the strategist for the Emergency Committee for Israel, an anonymously financed group that advertises against President Obama and Congressional Democrats as insufficiently supportive of Israel. On top of that, he is a partner at Orion Strategies, a consulting firm whose clients have included the national governments of Taiwan and Georgia.
An all-around anti-liberal provocateur, Mr. Goldfarb has blazed a trail in the new era of campaign finance, in which loosened restrictions have flooded the political world with cash for a whole new array of organizations that operate outside the traditional bounds of the parties.
Often working with money from major Republican donors, most of whom have preferred anonymity, Mr. Goldfarb has been in the middle of nearly every major partisan dispute of Mr. Obama’s presidency — over Iran, Israel, terrorism policy and now Mr. Hagel and guns. For a time, Mr. Goldfarb worked as a communications strategist to the leading bêtes noires of liberals, the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.
8/ Marching bands normally perform at college football games, but not all of them are up to the complexity of this one's moves - the theme is a little jingoistic, but the maneuvers are wonderful......
The West Virginia U. Marching Band.....5 minutes.......
9/ Remember the overdubbed Coke ad in the last DDD, where Coke admitted to poisoning the world with empty sugar calories? It wasn't a spoof - as this story says sugar is the enemy, and the more you drink it the more unhealthy you will be.....and Diet sodas are full of chemicals.....
Water anyone?
MARK BITTMAN February 27, 2013, 9:47 pm827 Comments
It’s the Sugar, Folks
By MARK BITTMAN
Mark Bittmanon food and all things related.
Sugar is indeed toxic. It may not be the only problem with the Standard American Diet, but it’s fast becoming clear that it’s the major one.
A study published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One links increased consumption of sugar with increased rates of diabetes by examining the data on sugar availability and the rate of diabetes in 175 countries over the past decade. And after accounting for many other factors, the researchers found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher diabetes rates independent of rates of obesity.
In other words, according to this study, it’s not just obesity that can cause diabetes: sugar can cause it, too, irrespective of obesity. And obesity does not always lead to diabetes.
The study demonstrates this with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s. As Rob Lustig, one of the study’s authors and a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said to me, “You could not enact a real-world study that would be more conclusive than this one.”
The study controlled for poverty, urbanization, aging, obesity and physical activity. It controlled for other foods and total calories. In short, it controlled for everything controllable, and it satisfied the longstanding “Bradford Hill” criteria for what’s called medical inference of causation by linking dose (the more sugar that’s available, the more occurrences of diabetes); duration (if sugar is available longer, the prevalence of diabetes increases); directionality (not only does diabetes increase with more sugar, it decreases with less sugar); and precedence (diabetics don’t start consuming more sugar; people who consume more sugar are more likely to become diabetics).
The key point in the article is this: “Each 150 kilocalories/person/day increase in total calorie availability related to a 0.1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence (not significant), whereas a 150 kilocalories/person/day rise in sugar availability (one 12-ounce can of soft drink) was associated with a 1.1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence.” Thus: for every 12 ounces of sugar-sweetened beverage introduced per person per day into a country’s food system, the rate of diabetes goes up 1 percent. (The study found no significant difference in results between those countries that rely more heavily on high-fructose corn syrup and those that rely primarily on cane sugar.)
This is as good (or bad) as it gets, the closest thing to causation and a smoking gun that we will see. (To prove “scientific” causality you’d have to completely control the diets of thousands of people for decades. It’s as technically impossible as “proving” climate change or football-related head injuries or, for that matter, tobacco-caused cancers.) And just as tobacco companies fought, ignored, lied and obfuscated in the ’60s (and, indeed, through the ’90s), thepushers of sugar will do the same now.
But as Lustig says, “This study is proof enough that sugar is toxic. Now it’s time to do something about it.”
10/ Gotye, an Australian musician was in the Grammys this year with "Somebody I Used To Know", and it could have been video of the year as well.....very unusual concept of bodypainting himself and his ex girlfriend against a backdrop......
It's very cool.......
You saw this about a year ago on DDD, but since it's viral here it is again......
11/ The healthiest diet in the world is the Mediterranean way of eating.......heavy on the fish, olive oil, fruit and vegetables......
Mediterranean Diet Shown to Ward Off Heart Attack and Stroke
The Benefits of Olive Oil: The Times’s Gina Kolata on a study looking at a Mediterranean diet.
By GINA KOLATA
Published: February 25, 2013 1045 Comments
The findings, published on TheNew England Journal of Medicine’s Web site on Monday, were based on the first major clinical trial to measure the diet’s effect on heart risks. The magnitude of the diet’s benefits startled experts. The study ended early, after almost five years, because the results were so clear it was considered unethical to continue.
The diet helped those following it even though they did not lose weight and most of them were already taking statins, or blood pressure or diabetes drugs to lower their heart disease risk.
“Really impressive,” said Rachel Johnson, a professor of nutrition at the University of Vermont and a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association. “And the really important thing — the coolest thing — is that they used very meaningful endpoints. They did not look at risk factors likecholesterol or hypertensio
Until now, evidence that the Mediterranean diet reduced the risk of heart disease was weak, based mostly on studies showing that people from Mediterranean countries seemed to have lower rates of heart disease — a pattern that could have been attributed to factors other than diet.
And some experts had been skeptical that the effect of diet could be detected, if it existed at all, because so many people are already taking powerful drugs to reduce heart disease risk, while other experts hesitated to recommend the diet to people who already had weight problems, since oils and nuts have a lot of calories.
Heart disease experts said the study was a triumph because it showed that a diet was powerful in reducing heart disease risk, and it did so using the most rigorous methods. Scientists randomly assigned 7,447 people in Spain who were overweight, were smokers, or had diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease to follow the Mediterranean diet or a low-fat one.
Low-fat diets have not been shown in any rigorous way to be helpful, and they are also very hard for patients to maintain — a reality borne out in the new study, said Dr. Steven E. Nissen, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.
12/ It's not all doom and gloom folks - occasionally DDD has a nice story that will give you a warm feeling and maybe even some moistness in the ocular region - like this one.
It's the story of Delta Airlines Flight 15, on September 11th, 2001.......and Canadians......
Delta Airlines Flight 15Frankfurt, Germany to Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Date: September 11, 2001
Date: September 11, 2001
This is a moving first-hand account of a Delta airlines flight attendant on board Delta Flight 15, which was diverted to Gander, Newfoundland on September 11, 2001. This story has been circulated on the Internet and we at CSA News felt that all of our readers should have the opportunity to read it.
Gander Airport, Newfoundland, September 11, 2001
We were about five hours out of Frankfurt flying over the North Atlantic, and I was in my crew rest-seat taking my scheduled rest break. All of a sudden, the curtains parted violently and I was told to go to the cockpit, right now, to see the captain.
13/ Floriduh.....corrupt to the max.....here is a story from Fred Grimm in the Miami Herald about billboards, the FDOT and a scumbag politician, Greg Evers from BFE Florida.......
Just the way business is done here folks......
N MY OPINION
Fred Grimm: Billboards trump trees when you have powerful pals
BY FRED GRIMM
FGRIMM@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Flout the law, you pay the price. Unless the transgressor happens to be a politically connected outdoor-advertising enterprise, happy to splash the mug of an influential state legislator across 32 billboards in his district. Then the price for ignoring state law comes with a very big discount.
In 2009, Bill Salter Advertising ignored legal caveats and chopped down 2,132 trees along the public right-of-way in six northwest Florida counties. Salter complained that these nuisance trees — laurel oaks, red maples, loblolly pine, water oak, sweet gum and slash pine — were obstructing the “view areas” of 61 company billboards along Interstate 10.
The Florida Department of Transportation paid a Tallahassee consultant $17,644 to calculate the losses. Stumps were measured. Market values were calculated. “Upon completion of the data collection, assessment, and calculations, mitigation value for all trees cut, was determined to be $1,915,259.05,” the consultant’s report said.
Salter got the final bill from FDOT this week. That $1.9 million rip-off will cost the Milton company just $100,000, to be paid off over the next five years, interest free.
Of course, Salter had obtained permits from FDOT before hacking away at the state’s trees. Except neither the company nor FDOT bothered with required mitigation plans, which could have cost Salter as much as $4 million.
Nor did FDOT enforce a state statute that would have required Salter to dismantle 56 older “non conforming” signs. Last February, a Leon County grand jury investigated and found FDOT had been “in flagrant violation of the law” when it issued the permits to Salter. The grand jury found that the company “knew the law but chose not to comply.”
But Salter Advertising was only doing what politically connected outfits do in our Florida plutocracy. The grand jury said Salter, “rather than submitting applications which complied with the requirements,” instead asked then-State Rep. Greg Evers of Crestview to “help with the permitting process.”
Evers, who happened to be on the House Transportation Committee, made calls and sent emails. The grand jury said Evers “was actively advocating on behalf of Salter Advertising regarding these permits.” And all those costly mitigation requirements mysteriously disappeared.
14/ This is an ad, but it's more like a mini-movie for a very cool machine - the Mercedes-Benz G63 AMG off road "creature"........an amazing 3 minutes........
I want one I want one I want one........
15/ Are you a gardener? Grow your own veggies because it's healthier? Have a good look at the seeds you are using.......
Scary isn't it how the world of food has been taken over by Monsanto-like techniques?
OPINION
Look Carefully at Those Seeds
Alexis Anne Mackenzie
By MARGARET ROACH
Published: March 2, 2013
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COPAKE FALLS, N.Y.
WHAT could be a greener, more feel-good purchase than seeds? Aren’t the tiny plant embryos, huddled in the suspended animation of dormancy inside a simple paper packet, true innocence incarnate?
I had held to that conviction for more than 25 growing seasons, dreamily lost, like other gardeners, in the annual onslaught of catalogs stacked on our kitchen tables in February and March. But those seeds may be far from innocent. It turns out that growing vegetables for their seed often involves more chemical use than growing those same crops for food.
I am not speaking of genetically engineered hybrids, the patentable plants created in laboratories by manipulating an organism’s genes. They get much press and concern, and it is a concern I share. But those seeds are not for sale in the home-garden catalogs; they’re a different story. I’m not even speaking of what I perceive as a false construct over hybrid-or-heirloom, as if it were an either-or debate and one could not ethically elect to grow both (as I do). Gregor Mendel made hybrids; nature has done it herself, though neither spliced anything in the process.
No, it was this other, less-spoken matter that hit me hard where I garden. In my own vegetable beds I use no chemical heroics, and yet I had been using some conventionally produced seed that is often coddled and adapted to a life of “high inputs” that it won’t get from me or from an increasing number of other chemical-averse home gardeners.
That packet of seed may not grow as well in my garden as one that wasn’t grown with chemicals, and it also probably contributed to upstream pollution.
16/ Good TV
"Southland", on TNT Wednesdays at 10pm is a really good cop show, with real people, real problems and what looks like real procedures and villains.....
I have asked a few policemen about this drama and all of them say it's good, and a lot of cops watch it.....
The Times agrees - good review......
Most of us have no way of judging how realistically television shows portray the lives of police officers. If you scan Web sites where law enforcement professionals gather to chat, however, you can assemble a list of series that get some grudging praise for being slightly more authentic than the norm: “Adam-12,” “High Incident,” “Hill Street Blues,” “Homicide,” “The Wire” and — many a deskbound cop’s favorite — “Barney Miller.”
When it comes to current series, perhaps the most often mentioned is TNT’s Los Angeles beat-cops-and-detectives drama,“Southland,” which began its fifth season this month. Civilians may not be able to gauge the show’s verisimilitude with any certainty, but television watchers can attest that it feels more real than any other cop series at the moment.
This is partly a matter of technique — an expert melding of hand-held camera work and jittery editing to achieve a restless immediacy — and partly a matter of writing. Under the supervision of the executive producers Christopher Chulack and John Wells (who worked together on another show cops profess to like, “Third Watch”), the dialogue is mostly plain-spoken, and the story lines, which give the patrol officers equal time with the detectives, have a carefully constructed appearance of everyday randomness.
Success for the overworked, mostly dedicated characters is not guaranteed, and at times it’s close to illusory, an unusual state of affairs among mainstream crime dramas. The foot pursuits that have become a trademark of the show exact a painful toll of bruises, bloody noses and dangerous wounds. Miraculous coincidences aren’t unheard-of, but neither are they a weekly occurrence.
If you haven’t caught on to “Southland” yet, the time may be approaching when you’ll need to do it through DVD sets or streaming video — the show’s realism, no matter how artfully achieved, has not helped its ratings. TNT rescued “Southland” after its lowly rated first season on NBC, but the numbers have only become worse. Last year the series averaged fewer than two million viewers in its original broadcasts on Tuesday nights, and the approximately 1.2 million who watched each of this season’s first two episodes (now at 10 p.m. on Wednesday) were the smallest audiences in the show’s history.
No trailer, but here is the Southland website and you can watch full episodes.......
Todays video [mainly for guys!]
Some friends of ours went to see the Orlando Solar Bears play last week, which reminded me of the definitive movie about ice hockey, "Slap Shot" with Paul Newman.
Very funny, and here is the famous scene where the Hanson Brothers debut, and the resulting mayhem .....
Todays heaven joke
Meeting St Peter
A man appeared before St. Peter at the Pearly Gates.
"Have you ever done
anything of particular merit?" St. Peter asked.
"Well, I can think of one thing," the man offered. "Once, on a trip to
the Black Hills out in South Dakota, I came upon a gang of bikers
threatening a young woman. I directed them to leave her alone, but
they wouldn't listen.”
“So I approached the largest and most heavily tattooed biker and smacked
him in his face, kicked his bike over, ripped out his nose ring and
threw it on the ground.”
Then I yelled, "Now back off or I'll kick the sh*t out of all of you!"
St. Peter was impressed... "When did this happen?"
"Just a couple of minutes ago" said the man.
Todays pervert joke
Pervert Calling...
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"I bet you have a tight ass, with no hair."
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Todays Norwegian joke
Ole vas vorking at the fish plant up north in Dulut, MN vhen he accidentally cut off all ten of his finkers.
He vent to da emergency room in the Clinik and vhen he got dar da Norsky doctor looked at Ole and said, "Let's have da finkers and I'll see vhat I can do."
Ole said, "I hafn't got da finkers."
"Vhat do you mean, you hafn't got da finkers?" he said. "Lord-it's 2013 and I'ves got microsurgery and all kinds of incredible techniques. I could haff put dem back on and made you like new! Vhy didn't you brink da finkers?"
Ole says... "How da fock vas I suppose to pick dem up?"
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