1/ If you are interested in politics, you will appreciate this story about how the Republican Party has engineered itself into a long term geriatric trap.......but don't forget they can do plenty of damage to the middle class even in decline. Because they represent the oligarchs, there is unlimited money for political ads, lobbying and general mayhem......
There are many ways to think about the Republican Party's electoral predicament — in racial terms, in sectional terms, in ideological terms. One clarifying way to conceive the problem is in generational terms — a geriatric trap.
David Frum has an essay in Foreign Affairs laying out his view of how the Republican Party must change in order to regain parity at the national level. Frum’s core insight is that the Republican Party fell into a self-perpetuating cycle whereby its ideas attracted mainly old people, and old people in turn shaped its ideas, and so they wound up “reinventing themselves as defenders of the fiscal status quo for older Americans — and only older Americans.” Even while fighting a desperate rear-guard campaign to prevent, and then to destroy, universal health insurance, Republicans exempted all Americans over the age of 55 from any cuts to Social Security or Medicare. As a Fox News ratings gambit, this works splendidly. As both a long-term Republican political strategy and as a governing doctrine, it is a catastrophe.
If anything, Frum’s essay actually understates the party’s failure. It wasn’t merely that Republicans protected the elderly and near-elderly from the austerity of the Ryan budget. They savagely attacked the Medicare cuts enacted by the Obama administration. The hyperbolic version of this attack was “rationing”; the insane version was “death panels.” As Lamar Alexander memorably put it, while rising in opposition to universal health insurance, "If you find savings by cutting waste, fraud and abuse in Grandma’s Medicare, spend those savings on Grandma." They also repeatedly turned down opportunities to cut Social Security spending out of a combination of anti-tax absolutism and sheer partisan spite.
The GOP’s old-person problem is on inadvertent display in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute. Biggs is professionally committed to cutting Social Security, and the column is devoted to the need to restore solvency to the Social Security Trust Fund, which certainly ought to be a conservative priority. Yet Biggs finds himself dancing awkwardly around the reality that Obama is the one who has proposed to do the thing he advocates, and Republicans are the ones who stopped him. His excruciating contortions highlight the impossible predicament faced by Republican entitlement hawks trying to defend the party line.
2/ Maureen Dowd, columnist for the Times, is not a great fan of the President and in this controversial column explains why - the President is aloof, and distant from everyone around him. He hates being a politician......
There is a link in the story to a Times front page article that details the president's isolation......if you read this and also Dowd's column, don't rush to judgement yet. Washington is prone to these witch hunts.....
WASHINGTON — Affectations can be dangerous, as Gertrude Stein said.
When Barack Obama first ran for president, he theatrically cast himself as the man alone on the stage. From his address in Berlin to his acceptance speech in Chicago, he eschewed ornaments and other politicians, conveying the sense that he was above the grubby political scene, unearthly and apart.
He began “Dreams From My Father” with a description of his time living on the Upper East Side while he was a student at Columbia, savoring his lone-wolf existence. He was, he wrote, “prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions.” When neighbors began to “cross the border into familiarity, I would soon find reason to excuse myself. I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew.”
His only “kindred spirit” was a silent old man who lived alone in the apartment next door. Obama carried groceries for him but never asked his name. When the old man died, Obama briefly regretted not knowing his name, then swiftly regretted his regret.
But what started as an affectation has turned into an affliction.
A front-page article in The Times by Carl Hulse, Jeremy Peters and Michael Shear chronicled how the president’s disdain for politics has alienated many of his most stalwart Democratic supporters on Capitol Hill.
His bored-bird-in-a-gilded-cage attitude, the article said, “has left him with few loyalists to effectively manage the issues erupting abroad and at home and could imperil his efforts to leave a legacy in his final stretch in office.”
Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, an early Obama backer, noted that “for him, eating his spinach is schmoozing with elected officials.”
First the president couldn’t work with Republicans because they were too obdurate. Then he tried to chase down reporters with subpoenas. Now he finds members of his own party an unnecessary distraction.
3/ Guy video time - the Summer 2014 TwisterNederland fails.....this is a combo of some old and some new, but what they all have in common is expensive pain.......some of the car crashes are amazing.....
Fourteen minutes of gritting your teeth......
4/ Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, is under indictment for "abuse of power" and facing a felony charge, which the right is united in saying it's total bullshit, politically motivated etc. As this article points out quite a number of liberals are agreeing with them......
But can you imagine what would happen if a Democrat was in the same position? The right would speak with one voice, condemning him repeatedly. There wouldn't be dissenters like the Democrats have - think the Benghazi "scandal" which has been proven over and over to be complete nonsense, but the lies get repeated enough so low information voters and conservatives believe it completely.
Sometimes the liberals shoot themselves in the foot by being "fair".....they need to be as ruthless as the crazies.....
Rick Perry (Credit: AP/Kathy Willens)
Rick Perry is under indictment. For a guy trying to put together a comeback bid for the White House in 2016, that’s obviously not the greatest news. Late in the evening on Friday, a Texas grand jury indicted its governor on charges that he abused his authority and attempted to coerce a public servant. The news exploded on Twitter with a mixture ofconfusion, Schadenfreude
Then people actually read through the indictment and got a grasp of the circumstances surrounding it. The whole story revolves around Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, one of the few Democrats to hold a position of real power in Perry’s government, and her 2013 arrest for driving drunk. After she was taken in, Lehmberg berated her arresting officers and made some poorly concealed threats against them. And it was all caught on videotape. She ended up pleading guilty and served a couple of weeks in prison.
Perry saw the opportunity to evict Lehmberg and replace her with an ally, so he threatened to veto funding for the Public Integrity Unit (which investigates ethics violations in the government and is under the Travis County DA’s control) if Lehmberg didn’t resign. Lehmberg refused, so Perry followed through in his threat and vetoed the funding. The coercion and abuse of authority charges derive from Perry’s veto threat. It was undoubtedly a cynical and arguably scummy use of the governor’s power, but did it rise to the level of a crime?
5/ Todays nice video - Celine Dion and a 16 year old sing a duet on stage....the young lady won a contest on "Oprah", and to sing with Dion was her reward.......and she sings as well, if not better than Celine.....amazing voice. Five inspiring minutes......
She's only 4-foot-9, but Charice has a towering voice. When she applies her vocal pipes to a Whitney Houston ballad, she makes it look as easy as tying her shoelaces.
"She's incredible," says her producer and mentor, Grammy-winner David Foster. A veteran at nurturing new artists, he likens Charice's star power to another talent he helped discover. "It's like the first time I saw Celine Dion. It's exactly the same to me."
Even Dion is paying attention to the teen. She invited Charice on stage at Madison Square Garden in New York for a duet of her hit song "Because You Loved Me." Charice, who has idolized Dion since she was 4, was only 16 at the time.
6/ Both Tom Tomorrow and Brian McFadden in the Times nail it as usual......our police, militarized......sometimes a cartoon can say it all......
Click on the strip to enlarge it - Tom Tomorrow......
Brian McFadden......
7/ We don't often put in sports clips, but this one of the European Cup women's 10,000 meters is amazing......a British athlete who's 40 years old, a British announcer so the commentary is close to South American soccer exciting [gooooooooooooal] because there's real drama in this final minute of the race. You can see the two leaders giving it all! A wonderful two minutes.....
8/ "The Google" knows everything, including every web search inputted from everywhere.....so it's no surprise "the corporation that knows it all" has mapped out web search differences, illustrating the polarisation of America, showing the differences between stupid Merika and the bluer states......actually they break it down between the easiest and hardest places to live.....
Read on folks, this is actual data, applicable to where YOU hang your hat......
In the hardest places to live in the United States, people spend a lot of time thinking about diets and religion. In the easiest places to live, people spend a lot of time thinking about cameras.
This summer, The Upshot conducted an analysis of every county in the country to determine which were the toughest places to live, based on an index of six factors including income, education and life expectancy. Afterward, we heard from Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google, who suggested looking at how web searches differ on either end of our index.
The results, based on a decade of search data, offer a portrait of the very different subjects that occupy the thoughts of richer America and poorer America. They’re a glimpse into the id of our national inequality.
In the hardest places to live – which include large areas of Kentucky, Arkansas, Maine, New Mexico and Oregon – health problems, weight-loss diets, guns, video games and religion are all common search topics. The dark side of religion is of special interest: Antichrist has the second-highest correlation with the hardest places, and searches containing “hell” and “rapture” also make the top 10.
To be clear, these aren’t the most common searches in our list of hardest places. They’re the searches with the highest correlation to our index. Searches on some topics, like Oprah Winfrey or the Super Bowl, are popular almost everywhere. The terms on these lists are relatively common subjects for web searches in one kind of place — and rarely a subject in the other.
9/ It's not often [actually never] a music video generates a story from the dance critic of the New York Times, but Taylor Swift's new song "Shake it Off" has generated a lot of buzz, some of it critical, so here is the backstory on Swift's new video.
I watched it cold, then read the piece, and watched it again with a new perspective and her remarks are spot on.......if you approach this nicely done video knowing it's amusing, it's pretty good. Of course Ms. Swift is stunningly beautiful which helps get you through the three minutes.....
The controversial music video of the moment is Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” which was released on Monday.
The controversy seems mainly to be about three things: 1) Ms. Swift’s move to pop material
(a sign, for certain fans, of selling out); 2) her dancing; and 3) the supposed racism in a section
on twerking. On Twitter, the rapper Earl Sweatshirt, after admitting that he hadn’t actually watched the
video, rather swiftly accused Ms. Swift of “perpetuating black stereotypes.”
The joke in each case is that Ms. Swift doesn’t fit in. Only in the final section does she
belong: a zone where “normal people” (including fans of Ms. Swift chosen over social media)
just do their own thing and shake off outside expectations. The dancing by the professionals
around her is extremely fragmentary and not especially remarkable. The snatches of movement,
none longer than two seconds, are there as eye candy, to establish each genre and to set up
the visual punchlines.
The punchlines, as this dance critic was happy to see, are mostly dance jokes. The way that Ms. Swift trips over the crossed legs of the ballerinas and topples while trying to bow deeply in toe shoes is not highly clever or knowing, but it’s funny. And the frightened and confused look that she gives the overwrought contemporary dancers earns a dance critic’s immediate empathy. Ms. Swift in “Shake It Off” is like Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett, a heroine triumphing through klutziness. It is probably too generous to interpret the video as a satire of how dance gets used in pop videos, but it certainly is a satire of pop video conventions.
Which brings us to the twerking. The moment when Ms. Swift crawls between the lined-up legs of the twerking ladies, advancing through the colonnades of jiggling flesh as if she were the camera of Busby Berkeley, is very silly. A second later, when Ms. Swift breaks out in giggles, she is laughing at the absurdity of herself in that video genre, but also, I think, at the absurdity of the genre.
With respect to racial politics, it would have been better if the shots of ballerinas had included some darker complexions. But if Mr. Sweatshirt had bothered to watch the video before commenting, he might have noticed the carefully placed black faces among the cheerleaders, the contemporary dancers and the regular people, and also the trashy white women among the twerkers. For him to have accused Ms. Swift of racism without watching the video is as unjust as if she had accused him of misogyny without first listening to his tracks. Yes, everyone knows that there is racism and misogyny in pop music. Fortunately, there’s also humor.
10/ There are a lot of web articles that purport to "open your eyes with one chart", but this one is for real. Look at these costs - what the hell has happened to college tuition?
Is it going to the professors? No.
Is it going to improve facilities for the students? No.
It's going to corporate profits for private colleges, and salaries, administrators, sports, stadiums and buildings for the public universities, who are unaccountable and immune from criticism. This is part of the problem, but factor in the for-profit joke factories like University of Phoenix and this is your result.
And as always, it's the middle class that's being screwed.......
1,225%. That's how much the price of higher education has increased in the past four decades. No, that's not a typo, and yes, it's as scary as it sounds.
Image Credit: Bloomberg Visual Data
Since 1978, college tuition is rising at a rate faster than medical care and other basic costs like food, according to Bloomberg's data analysis. The horrifying stats just add to a slew of bad news permeating the dialogue about college tuition.
College enrollment is dropping. Students are accruing overwhelming amounts of debt from student loans, or are opting out of college completely. For the first time since the Great Recession, when university enrollment steadily rose, students are questioning whether hefty financial investment for college is really worth it, especially considering the uphill battle to secure work in this competitive job market after graduation.
11/ "Shit Southern Women Say" is a collection of southernisms......said charmingly, of course......an amusing three minutes.....
This is episode 2 and even though episode one was great this one trumps it by a long shot. I showed it to my wife’s family who are all born, raised and still live in the south and they all asked, “so what’s the big deal?” Hahahaaaaaa! This is so spot on that it sounds completely normal to southerners. This is just awesome!!
12/ I haven't been to SeaWorld, and haven't watched "Blackfish" yet either, but this movie has had a drastic effect on SeaWorld's earnings and stock price, which is the only kind of pressure corporations take seriously after months of vicious attacks on the film.
Good story, and also watch the 2 minute trailer for "Blackfish".....looks like an excellent movie [Netflix streaming]......
How 'BlackFish' Completely Revolutionized Activism in AmericaImage Credit: AP
SeaWorld may have just given animal rights activists a new playbook.
After months of vigorously fighting the allegations of abuse and neglect made in the 2013 documentaryBlackfish, the theme park has recently taken steps towards acknowledging and rectifying their past mistakes. All it took was a 30% drop in their stock price.
Just days after news broke of their pitiful quarterly report, executives at SeaWorld went into damage control mode and announced they would be upgrading the enclosures in which their orcas spend the vast majority of their shortened lives. The new tanks, currently being built, will be 50 feet deep and have a surface area of 1.5 acres, giving their captive orcas more room to swim and, theoretically, reducing the psychological damage caused by their confinement.
While SeaWorld execs claim that the tanks have been in development for some time, it is easy to connect the dots between the success of Blackfish to SeaWorld's reduced business and finally to this last-ditch attempt to lure back their customers. It remains to be seen if the public will be swayed, or if they would rather see SeaWorld simply go out of business. Either way, it is a landmark moment for animal rights activists, who have protested the use of animals in entertainment, including theme parks like SeaWorld, for years, as well as a teachable moment for filmmakers who wish to effect change.
13/ For all you movie buffs, here are 30 noteworthy movies coming this fall, with trailers......a few look really good - "Dear White People" looks amusing, and of course "Interstellar".....
Note - this takes a while to load, even with high speed wifi! It's putting 30 trailers on the screen!
After all the fighting turtles and intergalactic superhero fare of the summer blockbuster months, we will soon settle into fall, when the plots are darker, the movies more memorable and the jostling for award nominations is palpable.
To get you ready for these packed movie-viewing months, we've curated a list of the most exciting and talked-about new releases on the docket.
Many of these movies will be the season's biggest award-winners, and some of them will probably live on as future classics. However it all works out, start marking your calendar. These are the films that will have everyone talking.
14/ The Emmys are tomorrow night, and as this article says you won't be seeing any awards for these six shows......Mary and I can recommend two of them - "Orphan Black", and "The Americans"......both excellent! And I of course like the "Walking Dead".....zombies galore, and an interesting plot.....and zombies!
The 66th Primetime Emmy Awards air Monday (8 p.m. on NBC) and, as usual, we've got a bone to pick with some of the shows nominated. More specifically, we're concerned with a few shows conspicuously absent from the list of nominees.
While the Emmys crew have tapped a number of impressive and deserving shows — we can't argue thatTrue Detective, Orange is the New Black, Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad are worthy of the title of "Outstanding" for a number of categories — we thought we'd pay tribute to six excellent shows that got the snub. None of these dramas, comedies or thrillers will be bringing home any big awards Monday night, nor will their excellent leads, but they're shows you should be watching. We are.
Todays video - Jimmy Kimmel and the Tug Toner.......better than the Shakeweight and the Forceflex......
Todays comic insults
Alfred Hitchcock responding to actress Mary Anderson who asked him “What is my best side,” while filming “Lifeboat.”
“You’re sitting on it, my dear.”
Bette Midler on Princess Anne:
“She loves nature, in spite of what it did to her.”
Elizabeth Taylor:
“Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses.”
Frank Sinatra on Robert Redford:
“Well at least he has found his true love – what a pity he can’t marry himself.”
Mahatma Gandhi asked by a reporter in a crowd “What do you think of Western civilization?”
“I think it would be a good idea.”
Pierre Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, responding to hearing that President Richard Nixon had called him an “asshole.”
“I’ve been called worse things by better people”
Pope John XXIII, when asked “How many people work at the Vatican,” by a journalist:
“About half.”
Valentino Liberace to a critic:
“Thank you for your very amusing review. After reading it I laughed all the way to the bank.”
Winston Churchill and Bessie Braddock:
Bessie Braddock: “Winston, you are drunk, and what’s more you are disgustingly drunk.”
Winston Churchill: “Bessie, my dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.”
Frank Zappa and TV talk show host Joe Pyne, a decorated WWII hero who lost one of his legs in combat:
Joe Pyne: “So I guess your long hair makes you a woman.”
Frank Zappa: “So I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.”
BONUS INSULT:
Winston Churchill and Lady Nancy Astor:
Lady Nancy Astor: “Winston, if you were my husband, I’d put poison in your coffee.”
Winston Churchill: “Nancy, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”
Todays mailman joke
One Monday morning the mailman was driving through the neighborhood on his usual route, delivering the mail. As he approached one of the homes he noticed that both cars were still in the driveway.
His wonder was cut short by David, the homeowner, coming out with a load of empty beer, wine, and spirit bottles for the recycling bin.“'WOW, David, looks like you guys had one hell of a party last night,” the mailman commented.
David, in obvious pain, replied, 'Actually we had it Saturday night. This is the first time I have felt like moving since 4:00 o'clock Sundaymorning. We had about 15 couples from the neighborhood over for a party and it got a bit wild. We all got so drunk that around midnight we started playing WHO AM I?'
The Mailman thought for a moment and said, 'How do you play WHO AM I?'
'Well, all the guys go in the bedroom and come out one at a time covered with a sheet with only the 'family jewels' showing through a hole in the sheet. Then the women try to guess who it is.'
The mailman laughed and said, 'Sounds like fun, I'm sorry I missed it.'
'Probably a good thing you did,' David responded, 'your name came up seven times.'
Todays wine jokes
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