1/ Hillary 2016 is gaining steam, and so is the right wing attacks on her accomplishments, character and her family......Frank Rich has a major story on the Clinton frenzy, and how bringing up the scandals of the 90's will backfire bigtime.
If you are interested in politics, this is a fascinating background of what's to come.....
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Hillary Clinton, in 1996, before testifying to a Whitewater grand jury.
(Photo: Mark Wilson/AP)
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About the only political conviction uniting Americans in Election Year 2014 is that Election Year 2016 will be about Hillary Clinton. The likelihood of her unannounced candidacy has stilled the rest of the slim Democratic field, forged a truce among most of the party’s congenitally warring factions, and induced past Clinton antagonists like David Geffen to disarm. At the fractured GOP, where the presidential timber is as thick as a forest if not as towering, Hillary is also a unifier of sorts as the de facto opponent-in-waiting. And Republicans are fine with that too. With the Clintons, you get scandal and the serious shot at victory that Clinton-scaled scandal seems to promise, even if you have no candidate of comparable stature to pit against them.
Such is the right’s undying theory, anyway. But what scandal are we talking about this time? There’s Benghazi, of course, pounded daily at every conservative venue, as it has been since emerging mid–Romney campaign as a last-ditch hope for bringing down the Obama administration. But Benghazi will be a nonfactor in 2016, as it was in 2012, because most voters don’t give a damn—any more than they care about Vladimir Putin’s Crimea grab, which will also be pinned on Clinton’s reign at State—in no small part because the Bush administration’s Iraq fiasco depressed public engagement in foreign affairs for a generation. A more promising alternative might be the persistent odor of sleaze that trails the Clinton Foundation, the subject of both New York Timesand Washington Post
Yet what the right really wants to talk about when it talks about the Clintons is none of the above. The conversation will quickly turn to sex. It always does. It always has. And it already is.
2/ Talk radio is a wasteland for anyone with a brain, an endless sea of crazy Christians and wannabe Limbaughs, and I really believe this drivel has driven down the national IQ as well as fueling the drift to the right. Of course, thanks to Reagan most of the radio stations in this country are owned by three corporations.....
Bill Maher calls this out in a fairly serious segment, with a few jokes but more of an angry message........four good minutes.....
Bill Maher ended his show Friday night going after right-wing talk radio and how, as he views it, the industry purely exists to “bitch” about the government where they can have a “greater effect on influencing stupidity outside of government,” and tear down any Republican who isn’t “the single biggest prick in the room.”
Maher was spurred on by the odd decision of Congressman Mike Rogers to resign for a position in talk radio, and Maher couldn’t figure out why someone who wants to have a bigger impact on policy would leave the very institution where policy is actually made.
“The GOP has kind of become talk radio, an echo chamber where people are not interested in actually legislating or compromising or fixing America, just in screeching about how liberals have ruined it. So why not do it on the radio? The money’s better. And no one can see your toupée.”
Maher argued that this “lucrative business of bitching about government” is so determined to take down any impure Republican that the only one they truly idolize is Ted Cruz, because as Maher put it, he views public office as “just a higher form of talk radio.”
3/ I have no idea how he does it, but it's amazing - watch David Blaine get kicked out of Harrison Ford's house after he does a magic trick......hmmmm.....maybe a black magic trick! Two minutes......
4/ We're an Apple household, but reading this make you think about what to replace the Macs with when they eventually fail. Apple since Steve Jobs passed seems to have lost the culture of innovation, according to this story in the Times, and doesn't seem to be a "nice" corporation any more. Couple this with the news they are hoarding half a trillion abroad to avoid taxes makes one think......
So they’re at it again, Apple and Samsung, fighting over patents in a courtroom in San Jose, Calif. They had a similar fight in 2012, in the same courtroom, which Apple won. Samsung has also won its share of these legal battles, including in Australia.
This time around, Apple alleges that Samsung has violated five of its patents, including the one that allows iPhone users to slide their finger across the bottom of the screen to unlock it. One of its experts testified the other day that Samsung should be forced to pay more than $2 billion for the harm done. Samsung, meanwhile, has retaliated by accusing Apple of violating several of its patents. The legal bills alone have to be running into the tens of millions of dollars.
Perhaps it is just coincidence that this latest trial coincides with the publication of a new book by Yukari Iwatani Kane, titled “Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs.” The coincidence is nonetheless telling. (Disclosure: Kane devotes several pages to a phone call I got from Steve Jobs in 2008 when I was working on a column about Apple’s unwillingness to disclose details of his health problems.)
The Apple Kane chronicles in “Haunted Empire” is not the same company she used to cover as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, when Jobs was alive. That Apple was fearless in its willingness to take risks and bring innovative products to market. This Apple, the post-Jobs Apple, has become risk-averse, its innovative capacity reduced to making small tweaks on products it has already brought to market. Though its leadership still talks a good game, it has so far been unable to deliver on the kind of knock-your-socks-off products for which Apple was once famous.
Part of this was inevitable. Jobs was a once-in-a-generation leader, with product instincts that just aren’t replicable. It is a sobering tale of what happens when a corporation becomes so reliant on one man.
5/ If CNN made a pregnancy test it would probably look something like this.....an amusing two minutes from SNL.....
This week, Saturday Night Live found a creative way to mock CNN’s incessant MH370 coverage.
Beck Bennett and Vanessa Bayer starred in an ad for the most informative (but inaccurate) pregnancy test ever invented: The CNN pregnancy test. Not only does the device try to tell you whether you’re going to have a baby, but it gives you lots of neat factoids and pop culture news along the way!
“BREAKING: CNN more confident than ever that it will soon know if you’re pregnant,” read one alert from the test, in between updates about Oscar Pistorius removing his legs in court and Kesha. Ultimately, we learned nothing from the pregnancy test, but it sure was an… informative… ride
6/ I'm not sure I understand the science in this article exactly, but if there is a major event called "El Nino" coming this year apparently we all need to hunker down and batten the hatches, according to this story......
It doesn't explain it very well, but be afraid anyway. Be very afraid......
The news: Forecasters are increasingly confident that an El Niño is looming ahead of us for 2014 — and this one could be quite a doozy.
Writes Slate's Eric Holthaus:
If current forecasts stay on track, El Niño might end up being the biggest global weather story of 2014.The most commonly accepted definition of an El Niño is a persistent warming of the so-called "Niño3.4" region of the tropical Pacific Ocean south of Hawaii, lasting for at least five consecutive three-month "seasons." A recent reversal in the direction of the Pacific trade winds appears to have kicked off a warming trend during the last month or two. That was enough to prompt U.S. government forecasters to issue an El Niño watch last month.Forecasters are increasingly confident in a particularly big El Niño this time around because, deep below the Pacific Ocean's surface, off-the-charts warm water is lurking:
The giant red blob? It's a really, really big underwater wave of "anomalously warm water" that currently spans much of the tropical Pacific. And it's starting to come to the surface.
7/ A Southwest airlines flight attendant with a very funny safety briefing on a real plane with real passengers......she talks very fast, so you might need to watch it twice to get all of the jokes.....three minutes of jealousy - why can't I get on a flight like this!
8/ This is a sad story to read - the UK seems to have become infected by the same disease as the US for the same reason - the elites and the ultra wealthy have put in policies that make the rich richer, but don't help working people at all......
From food banks to property bubbles – the moral decay that blights Britain
Social historians will have no difficulty in giving an accurate portrait of the decline of today's Britain
Buckingham Palace has been employing staff on zero-hours contracts. Photograph: David Noton Photography / Alamy/Alamy
What image will social historians use to capture our times? Last week, after frenzied bidding, a drab garage next to a Camberwell industrial estate in what was once a cheap part of south London, sold for £550,000. That might do. No one who sniffs the air can fail to notice that London in the Osborne bubble has a whiff of Weimar Germany – but without the art or indeed the sex.
Yet alongside oligarchs buying the capital's streets, and the Bank of England and Treasury pumping asset prices, we also have poverty that those of us who remember the recessions of the 1970s and 80s have not seen before.
Food banks will be to the 2010s what hunger marches were to the 1930s. But they are not dramatic places. You don't see queues of distressed people waiting by their doors. The food banks are discreet. The Anglicans who run them show their kindness by doing nothing to draw attention to their clients' poverty.
For all their unobtrusiveness, food banks might do as a symbol of our times too. But for me, the best way of summing up the division between rich and poor, and high and low, is a contract stating that "hours of work will be advised by the visitor manager and will be dependent upon the requirements for retail assistants". The staff had no security, the contract made clear. Their employers guaranteed them no minimum income. The bosses might leave them at home from one week to the next, while still insisting that the casual workers remained available to work for them and them alone.
The contract says so much because the employer in question was not some crook but the Queen
9/ Ellen DeGeneres seems to be a lovely person, and here she talks with a model whose image caused controversy because her photo looked like it was photoshopped, giving an unrealistic image to women......so Ellen had the model on her show to prove there was nothing fake about her picture.....HA....
Three minutes, and amusing.....and watch Ellen's face!
10/ The Supreme Court is wholly owned by the corporations and the oligarchy, and in this excellent story Mike Lofgren explains how this happened, and why.
Mike Lofgren | Can't We Just Say the Roberts Court Is Corrupt?
Monday, 07 April 2014 09:12By Mike Lofgren, Truthout | Op-Ed
US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, seen in a 2006 file photo. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)Even in the absence of what Justice Roberts narrowly defines as "quid pro quo corruption," a court that consistently decides all relevant cases on behalf of corporate interests - most recently McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission - undermines its own legitimacy as well as the Constitution.You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.Humbert Wolf, from The Uncelestial City (1930)
The Supreme Court's decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission was not about aggregate limits on individual campaign donations to candidates in federal elections. The case was about what constitutes a bribe, how big that bribe has to be, and whether an electoral system can be corrupt even in the absence of a legally demonstrable cash payment to an office holder or candidate for an explicitly specified favor. The Roberts court, or five of its nine members, adopted the misanthrope's faux-naïve pose in ruling that private money in politics, far from promoting corruption, causes democracy to thrive because, money being speech, the more speech, the freer the politics. Anatole France mocked this kind of legal casuistry by saying "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
11/ Damien Walters is a super stuntman, doing things with his body we can only dream [or reminisce] about.....if ever the phrase "don't try this at home" would apply it's this two minute video, but obviously some young men do and they end up in the TwisterNederland fail collection.....
12/ Most Americans eat garbage - foods that are bad for them and make them obese and unhealthy, so this primer of what NOT to eat is useful for all of us. You may occasionally decide as we all do to eat something unhealthy, but at least you know you are having a guilty moment. My mother used to tell me "a little bit of what you fancy does you good", and it's all about quantity......
A useful guide to staying healthy......
10 Foods You Should Never Eat
By: Erin Schumacher,
We indeed are what we eat and what we are eating in many ‘first world nations’ is quite scary. The chemicals added to these ‘foods’ are disrupting our hormones, causing cancer and leading to a variety of health issues.
“In the 21st century our tastes buds, our brain chemistry, our biochemistry, our hormones and our kitchens have been hijacked by the food industry.” ~ Mark Hyman
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan is one of my favorite books. He describes his journey through 4 different ways of obtaining food: industrialized (or fast) food, conventional farming practices, organic/symbiotic farming practices, and people that hunt/forage for their meals. He follows the food chain literally from the ground to the table.
“Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner; cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it’s a short way from not knowing who’s at the other end of your food chain to not caring–to the carelessness of both producers and consumers that characterizes our economy today. Of course, the global economy couldn’t very well function without this wall of ignorance and the indifference it breeds. This is why the American food industry and its international counterparts fight to keep their products from telling even the simplest stories–”dolphin safe,” “humanely slaughtered,” etc.–about how they were produced. The more knowledge people have about the way their food is produced, the more likely it is that their values–and not just “value”–will inform their purchasing decisions.” ~ Michael Pollan
I highly encourage you to do your own research in regards to not only the products that you put into your body but also the products you put onto your body (check out the Skindeep website to research your personal care products). If you’d like to live a life full of health and vitality, start by controlling your food choices. This is the easiest and most controllable factor in regards to health. I always aim for fresh, local and in season produce. And in regards to what I DON’T ever eat, well that’s this list below.
13/ This is fun - seven minutes of Geico Gecko commercials, most of which you probably haven't seen.....he's a cute [and funny] little lizard......
14/ Every now and then I get raked over the coals for being rude to our wonderful Governor, Rick "Voldemort" Scott, but he is truly awful for us all. This excellent article from the Tampa Bay Times is a reminder of all of the bad policies and decisions this asshole has inflicted on us......
This should be required reading for all Floridians.......
Editorial: If Gov. Rick Scott only had a heart
This time four years ago Rick Scott was a stranger to Floridians. Then he spent $73 million on his first political campaign and rode an angry voter wave to the Governor's Mansion. For Florida, this has been a hostile takeover by the former CEO of the nation's largest hospital chain. In three years Scott has done more harm than any modern governor, from voting rights to privacy rights, public schools to higher education, environmental protection to health care. One more legislative session and a $100 million re-election campaign will not undo the damage.
This is the tin man as governor, a chief executive who shows no heartfelt connection to the state, appreciation for its values or compassion for its residents. Duke Energy is charging its electric customers billions for nuclear plants that were botched or never built. Homeowners are being pushed out of the state-run Citizens Property Insurance Corp. and into private insurers with higher premiums and no track records. Federal flood insurance rates are soaring so high that many property owners cannot afford the premiums but also cannot sell their homes. The governor sides with the electric utilities and property insurers. He criticizes the president rather than fellow Republicans in Congress for failing to fix the flood insurance fiasco they helped create.
In Scott's Florida, it is harder for citizens to vote and for the jobless to collect unemployment. It is easier for renters to be evicted and for borrowers to be charged high interest rates on short-term loans. It is harder for patients to win claims against doctors who hurt them and for consumers to get fair treatment from car dealers who deceive them. It is easier for businesses to avoid paying taxes, building roads and repairing environmental damage.
Florida's modern political era began in 1954 with the election of Gov. LeRoy Collins, who skillfully steered the state through the early years of desegregation and is widely regarded as the state's greatest governor. Other governors from both political parties had an instinctive feel for Florida and a passion to help its people. In the 1970s, there was Reubin Askew. In the 1980s, Bob Graham. In the 1990s, Lawton Chiles. In the 2000s, Jeb Bush. There were some mediocre and average governors along the way, but even the least of them demonstrated a deep affection for this state and its residents
15/ This Week's Music Video
Lily Allen has a career based on her being a "Bad Girl From London", and many of her songs have quite explicit lyrics.....like this one "Hard Out Here For A Bitch"......
A fairly raunchy video, but she does it all well while giving the impression she's not taking it too seriously....a typical Londoner.....
16/ You wonder why many people hate the gumment.....it's because of stupidity like this done by the right wing Cubans in Miami.......or they might be a rare group of left wing Cubans, who knows......
During the 2012 presidential election, voters reportedly waited on line for upwards of six hours. That wait alone is enough to deter would-be voters from going to the polls. But now residents in Florida’s most populous county will have another disincentive: they won’t be able to go to the bathroom.
Earlier this year, the Miami-Dade County Elections Department quietly implemented a policy to close the bathrooms at all polling facilities, according to disability rights lawyer Marc Dubin. Dubin said the policy change was in “direct response” to an inquiry to the Elections Department about whether they had assessed accessibility of polling place bathrooms to those with disabilities.
“I was expecting them to say either yes we have or yes we will,” Dubin said.
Todays video - Nina Conti is one of the funniest acts out there - she uses her ventriloquism wonderfully with two [new] unsuspecting volunteers.....very funny indeed......
Todays puns
I know a guy who is addicted to Brake FluidSays he can stop any time.
Didn't like my beard at firstBut it grew on meWhen you get a bladder infectionUrine trouble.And finally, see if these work:Make holy water... Boil the hell out of it
Broken pencils...are pointless
Todays pirate joke
A pirate walked into a bar, and the bartender said, "Hey, I haven't seen
you in a while. What happened? You look terrible."
"What do you mean?" said the pirate, "I feel fine."
"What about the wooden leg? You didn't have that before."
"Well," said the pirate,
"We were in a battle, and I got hit with a cannon ball, but I'm fine now."
The bartender replied, "Well, OK, but what about that hook? What
happened to your hand?"
The pirate explained,"We were in another battle. I boarded a ship and got
into a sword fight. My hand was cut off. I got fitted with a hook but I'm
fine, really."
"What about that eye patch?"
"Oh," said the pirate, "One day we were at sea, and a flock of birds flew
over. I looked up, and one of them shit in my eye."
"You're kidding," said the bartender. "You couldn't lose an eye just from
bird shit."
"It was my first day with the hook" said the pirate.
Todays Irish joke
Paddy's pregnant sister was in a terrible car accident and went into a deep coma. After being in the coma for nearly six months, she wakes up and sees that she is no longer pregnant. Frantically, she asks the doctor about her baby.
The doctor replies, 'Ma'am, you had twins.... a boy and a girl. The babies are fine, however, they were poorly at birth and had to be christened immediately so your brother Paddy came in and named them.
The woman thinks to herself, ' Oh suffering Jesus, no, not me brother, he's a fecking clueless idiot...
Expecting the worst, she asks the doctor,' Well, what's my daughter's name?'
' Denise' says the doctor. The new mother is somewhat relieved, 'Wow, that's a beautiful name, I guess I was wrong about my brother', she thought....'I really like Denise '
Then she asks, ' What's the boy's name?'
The doctor replies ' Denephew '
The doctor replies, 'Ma'am, you had twins.... a boy and a girl. The babies are fine, however, they were poorly at birth and had to be christened immediately so your brother Paddy came in and named them.
The woman thinks to herself, ' Oh suffering Jesus, no, not me brother, he's a fecking clueless idiot...
Expecting the worst, she asks the doctor,' Well, what's my daughter's name?'
' Denise' says the doctor. The new mother is somewhat relieved, 'Wow, that's a beautiful name, I guess I was wrong about my brother', she thought....'I really like Denise '
Then she asks, ' What's the boy's name?'
The doctor replies ' Denephew '
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