1/ Thomas Frank with an excellent article on how the Democrats have sold out their principles by moving to the center, and how it has evolved over the years, culminating in the disaster of two weeks ago.
If you are a Democrat, you should read this......if a Republican, read it so you know why you are winning!
Sean Hannity, Karl Rove (Credit: Fox News)
Thirty-four years ago, after a different disaster for Democrats, the pundit form known as the electoral postmortem reached an important milestone. It happened on the “MacNeil/Lehrer Report,” a then-influential PBS news program, on the day in 1980 following Jimmy Carter’s landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan. Morton Kondracke, on his way to becoming one of TV’s most respected bombastinators, was part of a panel sifting through the results. The traditional Democrat among the group was in despair; the Republican was jubilant. Then, like a ray of light through the darkness, came the words of the rising pundit princeling: “It seems to me,” Kondracke announced, “that what the Democratic Party has to do is adopt some sort of a — what might be called a neo-liberal ideology.”
The author from whom I derive this account of that shifting-of-the-tectonic-
2/ One of the techniques of right wing media is to establish themes to frighten and anger the base of old white people, and one "scandal" that's been around for the last two years has been the "Benghazi" conspiracy.....this Friday the Republican House Intelligence Committee released a report saying, in essence, "no scandal here". Fox News gave this report exactly 30 seconds of air time, after two years of relentlessly hammering Obama and Hillary at every opportunity about the "Benghazi coverup" etc etc........
The latest drumbeat of fear has been about Ebola......"Messicans and ISIS children deliberately infected with Ebola coming across the border" and other such nonsense.....and look how that faded, quite quickly wasn't it?
Rachel Maddow with a two minute report on the Committee findings.....
Rachel Maddow exposed Republican hypocrisy on the supposedly Benghazi conspiracy. Who can forget their hyperventilation on the manufactured Benghazi scandal they have been trying to sell for over a year.
Shortly after the Benghazi terrorist attack where Ambassador Christopher Stevens was murdered, Fox News and the Republican Party have been hyping and politicizing the event. Early on, author of “The Generals”,Thomas Rick said that much in a Fox News Interview where he called out the network. Fox News simply cut the interview short and continued with the uncorroborated hyping of the Benghazi massacre.Most networks put the Benghazi story in perspective for some time. Fox News’ persistence seemed to have paid off recently when ABC’s Jonathan Karl claimed to have an exclusive that made it seem the State Department was more instrumental than it was in altering the Benghazi talking points.
Rachel Maddow did not allow the GOP to get away with it. She reported that Republicans released a report that absolved all those that were ‘rumored’ to be covering up or were negligent on the Benghazi terrorist attack in the video above.
3/ If you believe you were in danger of getting Ebola, or were outraged by Benghazi, you were completely duped by the boys at Fox News.
The Fox frenzy of this week has been the remarks of a Jonathan Gruber, where he called the American people stupid. Bill Maher, alone in the media, completely agrees with Gruber - the American people ARE stupid!
And if you are outraged by Maher's beliefs, consider this as well as his examples:
About 45% of Americans believe the earth is 7000 years old.
Over 55% don't believe climate change has been caused by us.....
Almost 80% cannot identify Iraq on a map......
Anyway, a very good five minute segment, and whatever you may say about Bill Maher he is consistent. Look at his clips over many years.....
Bill Maher tonight tackled Jonathan Gruber‘s comments about the stupidity of American votersby agreeing 100 percent with what he said. Maher played a montage of him saying in past interviews that Americans are, in fact, stupid.
Maher jokingly called himself Gruber’s “soulmate” and couldn’t fathom how this was controversial. He cited studies showing how few Americans can name the three branches of government and how people dislike Obamacare but like individual parts of it.
Canadian MP Chrystia Freeland defended Americans a bit, arguing that it’s not their fault if they don’t know all the intricacies of health care reform. She and Maher fought a bit, and Maher said, “Gruber was right, he just said what people don’t want to hear.”
4/ John Oliver on Ferguson which aired in August a week after the riots in that city.....I didn't see this at the time, but since Ferguson will be getting back in the news this coming week after the Grand Jury verdict is announced, it's very interesting so see Olivers comedic reporting of this incident....a brilliant fifteen minutes......
And after the Missouri Governor Nixon declared war on protestors, you may have missed the fact that 100 FBI agents are going to Ferguson for the jury verdict this week.....
A visibly pissed John Oliver spent time last night focusing on the grand clusterfuck of the response to the death of Michael Brown: the racial tension, the incompetency of the leadership, the overt militarization of the police, everything.
“As a general rule, no one should ever be allowed to say ‘There is no history of racial tension here,’ because that sentence has never been true anywhere on Earth,” he scoffed, astonished that Ferguson’s mayor was totally oblivious to racial tension in the city.
And it only got worse with Missouri governor Jay Nixon‘s idea of placing a curfew on the city: “So you took a community tired of being treated like criminals, and then imprisoned them in their own houses, and in the process of doing so, took on the tone of a pissed-off vice principle trying to restore order at a school assembly…That is profoundly patronizing!”
“I know the police love their ridiculous, unnecessary military equipment,” he continued. “So here’s another patronizing test: let’s take it all away from them, and if they can make it a whole month without killing an unarmed black man, only then can they get their fucking toys back.”
5/ Guy video of the week - the October fail collection from TwisterNederland......looking at this 14 minutes of mayhem, I am guessing a few people died in some of these accidents, starting with the first one.....definitely some hospital visits.....
6/ Great Brian McFadden cartoon from the Times - "The Adventures of LameDuckMan".......guess who that is.....
7/ An interesting and scary analysis of the drumbeat for war against ISIS last month, where our media fell hook, line and sinker for the ISIS marketing campaign which used video, social media and twitter to try to get the President to make the worst mistake he could make, which is to put the American Army boots back into this cesspool - John McCain and Lindsey Graham leading the charge.....
Try to recall the debate about about intervening in the Middle East to attack the militant group Islamic State (IS). The details may seem hazy. This isn't due to the passage of time — it's been less than two months — but because there wasn't a debate in the first place.
A new study conducted by the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found that in the lead-up to the first airstrikes against IS, mainstream television news systematically excluded virtually any voices that cautioned against military intervention.
FAIR's analysis found a near-total absence of antiwar perspectives in interviews and discussion segments on major Sunday talk shows, PBS NewsHour and a sample of cable news shows on Fox, MSNBC and CNN in the time period from the release of IS video beheadings of American journalists through President Obama's Sept. 10 primetime pledge to "degrade and destroy" IS and up to the first airstrikes on Syria.
Out of hundreds of speakers across all segments, 61% spoke in favor of war and only 3% spoke against war. The remaining percentage didn't articulate a clear stance.
On the Sunday talk shows, which represent the center of Washington's policy debate, only 1 of 89 guests was antiwar. Democrats outnumbered Republicans on the shows.
8/ John Oliver having fun with a "salmon cannon", a very funny four minutes......no politics, just jokes and celebs......the soap scene is the best.....
Oliver opens the bit by giving a definition of "salmon": "cat food for people, tuna's understudy that you hope never has to go on and that stupid fish that doesn't know how rivers work." The host then cites a recent TV news report demonstrating the Salmon Cannon, a device that assists the fish in spawning by launching them upstream through a massive tube. "In your darkest moments of despair," Oliver says, "when you see a world torn apart by war, I want you to remember that video and think, 'We can do great things.'" And said video is incredible.
Unsatisfied with simply watching the Salmon Cannon, Oliver unveils his own knock-off version in a supercut video, which features an array of high-profile celebrities taking a fish in the face. First up is Oliver's old Daily Show pal Jon Stewart, followed by Jimmy Fallon and a cheesy scene from The Young and the Restless; there are also appearances from Dwight Howard, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Rachael Ray, Anderson Cooper, Tom Hanks, David Letterman, Wayne Brady and J.J. Abrams (directing R2-D2 on the set of the new Star Wars). The bit even takes an animated twist, with Homer Simpson subjected to pile after pile of salmon.
9/ A new ad from Poo-Pourri, with the same beautiful, articulate British girl waxing on the advantages of Poo Pourri. They have some new lines too, for men.
By the way, this stuff really works, and it's very useful when you have to share bathrooms......
Last year, Poo Pourri took over YouTube with a hilarious commercial about its product, an odor-masking spray that hides the scent of your business, once you've used the loo. Initially marketed at women, the ad starred a petite English woman extolling the ladylike virtues of hiding the scent of your poo.
She returns in this follow up video, which markets Poo Pourri products for men, although still targeted towards women who want to hide the "smell of man manure." This version of the spray comes in three bottles, ingeniously named Trap A Crap, Royal Flush and of course, Poo-Tonium. The ad is scripted once again by Joel Ackerman, the writer behind the viral ads for Orabrush and the first Poo Pourri video.
Watch the video below, as Scottish actress Bethany Woodruff returns to her star-making role (many people are calling her the next Old Spice Guy). It's worth watching it just to hear a pretty girl utter the phrase "freshly churned colon-sausage" in a refined English accent.
10/ A pretty wonky but persuasive article [with charts] correlating the rise of 22 diseases including many cancers with the introduction of GMO crops 20 years ago. Coincidence? I certainly don't think so, but the US Gub'ment and all of Big Ag want you to think everything is fine. This story has the same pattern as the gluten one last week....which was gluten intolerance has only been a syndrome in the last 20 years.....and Europe doesn't have a gluten problem [no GMO's].
In the end only you can protect yourself, but to do that you have to acknowledge there is a problem. So we here at DDD keep finding these stories of how GMO crops are damaging your health, and I'm sure most of you are ignoring it saying "they" wouldn't let this happen, would they? Yeah right.....
Millions of people have marched against Monsanto and the national consensus is in favor of labeling. Why hasn't the U.S. government responded
Glyphosate was introduced to the marketplace in 1974 but data on its use is only available since 1990. Monsanto has genetically modified foods so that they are resistant to glyphosate, a herbicide Monsanto sells, resulting in a dramatic increase in the use of glyphosate. The study points out that research has shown that “glyphosate disrupts the ability of animals, including humans, to detoxify xenobiotics. This means that exposures to the numerous chemicals in food and the environment, such as endocrine disrupting chemicals and carcinogens, could be causing levels of damage that would not occur if the body were able to detoxify them.”
Correlation is not proof of causation. But the authors point out “we have data for 22 diseases, all with a high degree of correlation and very high significance. It seems highly unlikely that all of these can be random coincidence.” They point out that according to “the American Academy of Environmental Medicine’s position paper on genetically modified (GM) foods: ‘[S]everal animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food consumption including infertility, immune dysregulation, accelerated aging, dysregulation of genes associated with cholesterol synthesis, insulin regulation, cell signaling, and protein formation, and changes in the liver, kidney, spleen and gastrointestinal system.’”
The conclusions of the study are:
“These data show very strong and highly significant correlations between the increasing use of glyphosate, GE crop growth and the increase in a multitude of diseases. Many of the graphs show sudden increases in the rates of diseases in the mid-1990s that coincide with the commercial production of GE crops. The large increase in glyphosate use in the US is mostly due to the increase in glyphosate-resistant GE crops.
11/ Lewis Black and his faux anger act isn't for everyone, but I love his humour....here he rails at the Black Friday labour practices of some stores.....four minutes.....
Comedian Lewis Black appeared on “The Daily Show” on Wednesday for his segment “Back in Black.” There he railed against Black Friday and America’s unbridled consumerism.
Specifically, Black highlighted that as Black Friday spills into the rest of the week, workers face longer hours and some have to work on Thanksgiving.
Fox News and one of its viewers appear to have little sympathy for the laborers who cannot spend this holiday with their families. However, there is concern for others whose holidays might be cramped by Black Friday.
12/ The President signed a historic deal with China for cutting emissions from their coal fired power plants, and this was the best news for the climate change movement for a while, in a world where we seem to be hellbent in going over the irrevocable cliff.....but there's an eentsy little problem - India. The #3 emitter of CO2 is gearing up to go to #1.....
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
DHANBAD, India — Decades of strip mining have left this town in the heart ofIndia’s coal fields a fiery moonscape, with mountains of black slag, sulfurous air and sickened residents.
But rather than reclaim these hills or rethink their exploitation, the government is digging deeper in a coal rush that could push the world into irreversible climate change and make India’s cities, already among the world’s most polluted, even more unlivable, scientists say.
“If India goes deeper and deeper into coal, we’re all doomed,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, director of the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and one of the world’s top climate scientists. “And no place will suffer more than India.”
13/ The St. Johns Water Management District has been the target of our wrath in the past, after they granted Niagara Bottling the rights to use 500,000 gallons of our aquifer water a day free of charge, and increased it this year.....the agency is corrupt, bought and sold by lobbyists. But one assumes they at least know their business [water management], they are just being politically correct in Rick Scott's Florida which is to sell our commons to the boys...
But....they have made a mistake in their calculations which could mean major water problems for Central Florida which they won't even acknowledge, let alone fix.....watch this investigation by Channel 9.....about three minutes, and if you live in the Orlando area you should see this.....
ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. —
Florida may be running out of fresh water faster than previously thought.
9 Investigates has been reviewing depositions of senior staff members with the St. Johns River Water Management District as a result of a hearing before Judge E. Gary Early with the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings. According to statements made by staff members, the water models used by staff at the St. Johns district may have had a fundamental flaw that caused the water management district to miscalculate how fast water is coming out of the Floridan Aquifer versus how fast the aquifer is recharging.
According to the deposition of
9 Investigates has been reviewing depositions of senior staff members with the St. Johns River Water Management District as a result of a hearing before Judge E. Gary Early with the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings. According to statements made by staff members, the water models used by staff at the St. Johns district may have had a fundamental flaw that caused the water management district to miscalculate how fast water is coming out of the Floridan Aquifer versus how fast the aquifer is recharging.
According to the deposition of
14/ A different music video this week - Danny Cudd and Markus Johansson with "Once Again".....this duo are playing hang drums, and yes you have never seen this instrument before......
Give it a chance.....I found it strangely hypnotic....
15/ Remember the story on Jennifer Sullivan, our State representative for Mount Dora [district 31] who is a Christian, extreme Conservative, home schooled, Liberty University graduate, daughter of a Tea Party leader?
Well it gets worse - our area also has one of the craziest of the crazy as our State Senator - Alan Hays ["I hate buses"]. He is term limited in 2016, but in the meantime he wants every student in Florida to be forced to watch a really bad right wing movie, panned by every critic as a disaster - "America - Imagine the World Without Her".....
We are truly blessed here in Lake County with some of the worst representation of any county in Florida. Senator Hays is a genuine nut case, with an evil temper and complete disdain for the poor - an Optometrist from Yelaha who thinks he is a medical expert.
Great column from Scott Maxwell in the Orlando Sentinel.....
If you could cash in on crazy, Florida would be the richest state in America.
In this week's make-everyone-else-laugh-at-us news, we have a state senator trying to force every public-school student in the state to watch an Obama-bashing "documentary" … twice.
Once in eighth grade. And then again in 11th to make sure it sinks in.
Lake County Republican Alan Hays filed the bill Monday. It would force districts to repeatedly screen "America: Imagine the World Without Her" — one of the worst-reviewed movies of 2014.
The only way students could avoid watching would be with signed notes from their parents.
Hays calls it "An act relating to patriotic film screening."
I call it "An act to make people flee Florida like bats out of hell."
In fact, when I first heard about the idea, I thought it was a joke. Maybe Hays was just trying to get attention.
"No," he responded. He was going to work hard to make this law pass.
But senator, I said, you often rant about the immorality of top-down government forcing local communities to follow "big government" edicts.
"That's right," he said.
Well, this is a top-down, big-government edict.
"But this one happens to be one I like," he responded.
16/ Big movie out this week is "Hunger Games 3", and the review is pretty good.......
There’s a clever bit in the latest “Hunger Games” in which Katniss Everdeen, the boundary-smashing butch goddess of dystopian cinema, acts in a propaganda video. The idea is for Katniss, who’s both the spark of a revolution and its flinty strength, to rouse the masses with a heroic scene. Slicked up in lipstick and a Joan of Arc breastplate, she delivers her lines — “with energy,” the video director hopefully instructs her — but the scene needs tweaks. Eventually, they get it right, and the video ends with a call to “join the fight,” an exhortation that’s clearly addressed to more than one audience. It’s a funny, self-aware moment, given how extreme the stakes have become in this fascinating and strange pop epic.
Each “Hunger Games” movie makes so much noise — it’s where the deafening clamor of commerce meets the roar of true fan love — that it’s a wonder you can detect the human heartbeat under the tumult. But it’s there, thumping and sometimes racing in a franchise that, more than most industrial movies and even putative indies, speaks to both its audience and its time. There’s heart in the vague yet stirring liberation story that comes to the fore in this chapter and that’s echoed in real-life struggles around the world. And it’s there, of course, in Katniss, the backwoods savior who, as played with guileless appeal by Jennifer Lawrence, is mounting an attack on the forces of oppression.
These forces include anyone who has ever doubted the appeal of female-driven stories, which, considering that 85 percent of the top-grossing movies from 2013 have male leads, means most of the people making films. But there’s more here than gender equality. Last year, the second installment, “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” topped the year’s box office. It’s easy to see why. “Mockingjay Part 1” returns to the series backdrop: a totalitarian country — Panem, a stand-in for any number of nations — that rose from the ashes of a postapocalyptic North America. Katniss has surmounted her station as a slave by emerging victorious from the annual gladiatorial games that pit (usually child) combatants against one another. Her very survival has made her an existential threat to Panem.
Frankly, a pretty dull trailer, but you get the idea.....
Todays videos - two classic very funny ads.....
John West salmon......
Miller beer.....fox hat.
Todays Irish joke
MY FIRST DRINK WITH MY SON
I was reading an article last night about fathers and sons, and memories came flooding back of the time I took my son out for his first pint. Off we went to our local pub which is only two blocks from the house.I got him a Guinness. He didn't like it, so I drank it. Then I got him a Stroh‘s, he didn't like that either, so I drank it. It was the same with the Molson's and the Labatt's.
I thought maybe he'd like whiskey better than beer so we tried a few of those. He didn't.
By the time I decided he just didn't like to drink, I could hardly push the stroller back home.
Todays lawyer joke
An old farmer named Clyde had a car accident. In court, the trucking company’s fancy lawyer was questioning Clyde.
“Didn’t you say at the scene of the accident, ‘I’m fine,’?” asked the lawyer.
Clyde responded, “Well, I’ll tell you what happened. I had just loaded my favorite mule, Bessie, into the……”
“I didn’t ask for any details,” the lawyer interrupted. “Just answer the question. Did you not say, at the scene of the accident, “I’m fine!’?”
Clyde said, “Well, I had just got Bessie into the trailer and was driving down the road….”
The lawyer interrupted again and said, “Judge, I am trying to establish the fact that at the scene of the accident, this man told the Highway Patrolman on the scene that he was just fine. Now several weeks after the accident he is trying to sue my client. I believe he is a fraud. Please tell him to simply answer the question.”
By this time, the Judge was fairly interested in Clyde’s answer and said to the lawyer, “I’d like to hear what he has to say about his favorite mule, Bessie.”
Clyde thanked the Judge and proceeded, “Well… as I was sayin’, I had just loaded Bessie, my favorite mule, into the trailer and was drivin’ her down the highway when this huge semi ran the stop sign and smacked my truck right in the side. I was thrown into one ditch and Bessie was thrown into the other. I was hurtin’ real bad and didn’t want to move. However, I could hear ole Bessie moanin’ and groanin’. I knew she was in terrible shape just by her groans.
Real soon a Highway Patrolman came on the scene. He could hear Bessie moanin’ and groanin’, too. So, he went over to her. After he looked at her, he took out his gun and shot her between the eyes. Then the Patrolman came across the road, gun in hand, looked at me, and said, ‘How are YOU feeling?’
Now what the hell would you say?”
Todays gay cowboy joke
A successful rancher died and left everything to his devoted
wife. She was a very good-looking woman and determined to keep the
ranch, but knew very little about ranching, so she decided to place
an ad in the newspaper for a ranch hand.
Two cowboys applied for the job. One was gay and the other drunk.
She thought long and hard about it, and when no one else applied she
decided to hire the gay guy, figuring it would be safer to have him around the house
than the drunk.
He proved to be a hard worker who put in long hours every
day and knew a lot about ranching.
For weeks, the two of them worked, and the ranch was
doing very well.
Then one day, the rancher's widow said to the hired hand, "You have
done a really good job, and the ranch looks great. You should go into town and
kickup your heels."
The hired hand readily agreed and went into town one Saturday night.
One o'clock came, however, and he didn't return.
Two o'clock and no hired hand.
Finally he returned around two-thirty, and upon entering the room, he
found the rancher's widow sitting by the fireplace with a glass of wine, waiting
for him.
She quietly called him over to her.
"Unbutton my blouse and take it off," she said.
Trembling, he did as she directed. "Now take off my boots."
He did as she asked, ever so slowly.
"Now take off my socks."
He removed each gently and placed them neatly by her boots.
"Now take off my skirt."
He slowly unbuttoned it, constantly watching her eyes in the fire
light.
"Now take off my bra."Again, with trembling hands, he did
as he was told and dropped it to the floor.
Then she looked at him and said, "If you ever wearmy clothes into town again, you're fired."
