1/ Are you a Democrat? OK OK, have you ever voted for candidates with a [D] after their name?
Then you should read this wonderful article from Thomas Frank on the "liberal" media, the President's apologists, the future of the Democratic Party and the general state of our politics. It's so rare to find journalism of this quality, which looks at the real issues and the causes.......
It should come as no surprise that DDD has a progressive tilt, so if you are of the same ilk read this - it may change you. One of the best political stories for some time....
It’s not just Fox News: How liberal apologists torpedoed change, helped make the Democrats safe for Wall Street
Center-left pundits have carried water for the president for six years. Their predictable excuses all ring hollow
THOMAS FRANK
(Credit: xavierarnau via iStoc
As the Obama administration enters its seventh year, let us examine one of the era’s greatest peculiarities: That one of the most cherished rallying points of the president’s supporters is the idea of the president’s powerlessness.
Today, of course, the Democrats have completely lost control of Congress and it’s easy to make the case for the weakness of the White House. For example, when Frank Brunisighed last Wednesday that presidents are merely “buoys on the tides of history,” not “mighty frigates parting the waters,” he scarcely made a ripple.
But the pundit fixation on Obama’s powerlessness goes back many years. Where it has always found its strongest expression is among a satisfied stratum of centrist commentators—people who are well pleased with the president’s record and who are determined to slap down liberals who find fault in Obama’s leadership. The purveyors of this fascinating species of political disgust always depict the dispute in the same way, with hard-headed men of science (i.e., themselves) facing off against dizzy idealists who cluelessly rallied to Obama’s talk of hope and change back in 2008.
It is, in other words, a classic apologetic. The pundit, a clear-thinking, reality-based fellow (and yes, they are almost always fellows), knows that if you paid attention back in 2008 you understood that Obama wasn’t promising anything great. Plus, the president has delivered all kinds of subtle but awesome stuff that his soft-headed fans overlook. Besides, there are those awful racist Republicans. Good Christ! Would we rather have one of them in the Oval Office?
2/ On the same theme, where will the soul of the Democratic party be in two years for the Presidential run? Will it be a more populist theme, or will the Dems keep in the center of the road and continue losing? Whether you know it or not there is a struggle for power within the Democratic Party.......
A most interesting story........for you political junkies......
“Americans don’t want angry, defensive figures running for president,” Democratic operative Will Marshall told McClatchy’s David Lightman this week. But who, precisely, is angry and defensive?
As the pushback to Wall Street’s influence on government grows stronger, it is the banking industry’s supporters who sound enraged. And as economic populism gains traction in Democratic circles, it is corporate Democrats like Marshall who find themselves increasingly on the defensive.
Marshall and his organization (the misleadingly named “Progressive Policy Institute”) are part of a corporate-financed movement that has tacked the Democratic Party sharply rightward in recent decades. Marshall was a member of the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,” which pushed hard for the invasion of that country in 2002, and signed a letter from the Project for a New American Century promoting that cause. On the domestic front, Marshall’s organization can be counted on to support such moves as last week’s deregulatory gift to Wall Street (see here for more).
Why are right-leaning Democrats like Marshall so worried? The answer may lie in the shifting internal dynamics of the Democratic Party itself. The financial crisis of 2008, the long-term economic issues that continue to plague the nation, and a growing public awareness of wealth inequality have all contributed to the consolidation of public opinion along economically populist lines.
Populism Rising
President Obama and other “centrists”1 largely managed to contain his party’s populist wing throughout his first term. But the rise of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and her allies has emboldened what is now sometimes called the party’s “Warren wing,” as more and more Democrats sign on to the progressive populist agenda.
4/ I think it was a quote from Chris Rock - "if the poor ever knew how the rich really lived, there'd be a revolution".......which is the point behind this article about how most of the rich go out of their way to hide their lavish homes and wealth......
(Credit: romakoma via Shutters
The southernmost road from Miami Beach to Miami is called the MacArthur Causeway. In good weather, it’s a blissful drive. Biscayne Bay is so near and bright that you can almost imagine you’re at the wheel of a boat instead of a car. The mainland greets the highway with a crowded comb of skyscrapers, a fine and sharp introduction to the city of Miami.
Perhaps the most remarkable sight, though, is of the three pill-shaped islands just north of the causeway. Dredged to life in the 1920s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, these tiny isles boast some of America’s most extravagant houses. On Star Island, the westernmost of the three, a vacant lot sold for $10 million this summer. Homes command two to three times that much; neighbors include Sean Combs and Rosie O’Donnell.
What’s unusual about Star Island, though, isn’t the concentration of luxury, but its proximity to a busy highway. The alabaster colonnades and turquoise pools are there for the gawking, just 200 yards across the bay.
It’s rare to come face to face with such heights of personal wealth in this country. The grandest homes are squired away, Biltmore-style, on large estates. The next class of mansions hides behind walls, gates or dense horticulture. Most wealthy Americans simply live in the suburbs, in the subtle but no less certain privacy of the periphery.
This is a relative peculiarity of the American city, whose gradual abandonment by the rich has little equivalent elsewhere in the world.
5/ Keeping in mind the invisibility of the rich, have a look at the new Taylor Swift video "Blank Space", and note the setting - an oligarch's estate on Long Island, New York. This is a real place that you can rent for your wedding for a few hundred grand.....
The song is OK, but the video is lavish and shot by a real film director.....of course, it's Taylor Swift!
The majority of Crazy Taylor’s estate is Oheka Castle, the second largest house in the United States. (It’s also a wedding venue if you’re engaged and loaded.) The production also shot at the Woolworth Mansion.
6/ Bill Maher is back this week, so last week he did the rounds of the talk shows to promote the return and was on the Jimmy Kimmel show. This 11 minute interview is interesting, because for the first half Maher is passionate, forceful and outrageous about the murders in Paris by Muslim terrorists.....the serious side. Note the audience wasn't too enthusiastic about some of his statements.
For the second part he is his usual witty self, which is always amusing......
Quite good......
America got a preview of what we can expect from the 13th season premiere of HBO’s Real Time this Friday night when Bill Maher joinedJimmy Kimmel and unleashed his anger on Muslims who “applaud” an attack like the one that killed 12 people at Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices and declared that politically correct liberals have turned this country into “Pussy Nation.”
“This was big shit,” Maher said of the attack on people who make jokes for a living. “And we to not avoid who did this.” When Kimmel started saying, “we presume” Maher cut him off. “No it’s not a ‘presume.’ No, no, it’s Muslim terrorists. This happens way too frequently. It’s like Groundhog Day if the groundhog kept getting his head cut off.”
“These guys had the balls of the Eiffel Tower,” Maher said of the cartoonists, reaching for a properly French metaphor. “I’m the liberal in this debate. I’m for free speech. To be a liberal, you have to stand up for liberal principles. It’s not my fault that the part of the world that is most against liberal principles is the Muslim part of the world.”
After running down some of the worst atrocities committed on behalf of Islam in Muslim countries and the hesitation to condemn the religion as a whole, Maher said two words: “Pussy Nation.”
“We have to stop saying, when something like this that happened in Paris today, we have to stop saying, ‘Well, we cannot insult a great religion,’” Maher continued. “First of all, there are no great religions, they’re all stupid and dangerous. And we should insult them. You should be able to insult whatever you want. That is what free speech is like.”
7/ There was a 150 car and truck pileup in northern Michigan last week on an icy Interstate in a snowstorm.......an amazing 2 minute video shot by someone at the side of the road.....you can hear the cars and trucks crashing into the pile.
Apparently there was only one death.....
8/ The criminals at our largest banks own the Republicans in Congress, both chambers, and so the new right wing majority is jumping to do their bidding. The mission is to gut the Dodd-Frank legislation, which at least introduced some controls on these financial monsters. But any restrictions on making fast easy money is apparently intolerable for the likes of Jaime Dimon etc.....
The corruption is clear and obvious, and the losers in the end will be us, the middle class, who will yet again bail out these bastards when they inevitably screw it up.
The only person standing in the way of this process in Elizabeth Warren, so we had better hope she stands firm......
The Republican Strategy To Repeal Dodd-Frank
By Simon Johnson
On January 7, 2015, Day 2 of the new Congress, the House Republicans put their cards on the table with regard to the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reforms. The Republicans will chip away along all possible dimensions, using a combination of legislation and pressure on regulators – with the ultimate goal of relaxing the restrictions that have been placed on the activities of very large banks (such as Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase).
The initial target is the Volcker Rule, which limits the ability of megabanks to place very large proprietary bets – and their ability to incur massive losses, with big negative consequences for the rest of us. But we should expect the House Republican strategy to be applied more broadly, including all kinds of measures that will reduce capital requirements (i.e., make it easier for the largest banks to fund themselves with relatively more debt and less equity, taking more risk while remaining Too Big To Fail and thus benefiting from larger implicit government subsidies.)
The repeal of Dodd-Frank will not come in one fell swoop. Rather House Republicans are moving in several stages to reduce the scope of the Volcker Rule and to gut its effectiveness.
9/ The Golden Globes were Sunday night and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler opened the show.....here is their very witty 10 minute schtick......lots of celebs, and a wonderful Bill Cosby routine.....
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler opened the 2015 Golden Globes with a slew of jokes about the Sony Pictures hack and The Interview. Quoting producer Scott Rudin’s leaked emails aboutAngelina Jolie, Fey welcomed, “you bunch of despicable, spoiled, minimally-talented brats.”
“Tonight we celebrate all the great television shows we know and love as well as all the movies that North Korea was okay with,” she added.
“That’s right,” Poehler said. “The biggest story in Hollywood this year was when North Korea threatened an attack if Sony Pictures released The Interview, forcing us all to pretend we wanted to see it.”
The pair also played a good-natured game of “Would You Rather?” featuring Colin Firth vs. Colin Farrell and Mark Ruffalo vs. Edward Norton.
Then, there were the inevitable Bill Cosby jokes, featuring a revival of this 10-year-old bit for Saturday Night Live in which Fey and Poehler competed to see who could do the most offensive impression of the comedian.
10/ This is their last year hosting the Golden Globes, and here is a look back at the previous two years.....if you have the time, have a look - they are funny and clever......
In my opinion the 2013 awards were the best [100%], but 2014 and 2015 were still excellent [90%]......
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler during the 71st annual Golden Globe Awards, Jan. 12, 2014. (Credit: AP/Paul Drinkwater)
Already the boozy, good-time cousin of the relatively restrained Emmys and Oscars, the Golden Globes have been infintely more watchable the last couple of years thanks to hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. As they enter their third and final turn on Sunday hosting the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s champagne-fueled TV and film love-fest, prospective future hosts might find themselves a little nervous about the future. Fey and Poehler are clearly a lot to live up to.
Compared to previous host Ricky Gervais, who wasn’t invited back after a set of blistering jokes in 2011 that included mocking Robert Downey Jr.’s drug addiction, Fey and Poehler are irreverent and smart but not gratuitously mean, working the line between knowing insider and bratty peanut-gallery with just the right balance of wink and shrug.
Their Golden Globes magic pre-dates their hosting duties. In 2012, Fey’s sly photobomb of a winking Poehler, when the nominees for best actress in a television comedy or musical series were announced, went viral. As Emmys presenters in 2008, Fey played the knowing valedictorian, welcoming the audience in different languages, while Poehler played the gleeful slacker, affecting sloppy accents instead. In 2013, they performed a hilarious guest bit, defending their own hosting supremacy by heckling host Neil Patrick Harris:
11/ This weeks guy video from TwisterNederland, the usual collection of drunks, idiots, accidents and general mayhem that happens when the dumb among us are let loose with toys.....
Eleven minutes of pain......but other peoples pain......
12/ Over 55? Want to stay young?
Get moving......not the best written story I have ever seen in the Times, but the message is crystal clear - if you want to be healthy in your older years, you absolutely, positively have to exercise......
Active older people resemble much younger people physiologically, according to a new study of the effects of exercise on aging. The findings suggest that many of our expectations about the inevitability of physical decline with advancing years may be incorrect and that how we age is, to a large degree, up to us.
Aging remains a surprisingly mysterious process. A wealth of past scientific research has shown that many bodily and cellular processes change in undesirable ways as we grow older. But science has not been able to establish definitively whether such changes result primarily from the passage of time — in which case they are inevitable for anyone with birthdays — or result at least in part from lifestyle, meaning that they are mutable.
This conundrum is particularly true in terms of inactivity. Older people tend to be quite sedentary nowadays, and being sedentary affects health, making it difficult to separate the effects of not moving from those of getting older.
In the new study, which was published this week in The Journal of Physiology, scientists at King’s College London and the University of Birmingham in England decided to use a different approach.
They removed inactivity as a factor in their study of aging by looking at the health of older people who move quite a bit.
13/ An amusing little vignette, about relationships and always letting the woman speak first.......two minutes.....
14/ You may have seen the publicity machine of RCCL using press and also social media to let you know Royal Caribbean has a new ship out, the Quantum Of The Seas......it's got some cool new toys on board, and lots of new technology.
To bring the ship across the Atlantic they invited 1150 of their Diamond frequent cruisers for a six day cruise, and this is a Cruisematesreview posted by an RCCL Diamond passenger [15+ cruises], and it's not too complimentary. It's also a little unfair, because ships need fine tuning by the people who are going to operate the ship between the delivery from the shipyard and carrying passengers, but as it seems Management got a little greedy by putting paying passengers on the transatlantic when there are normally contractors doing the finishing touches maybe the review is appropriate.
There is also one other factor - to bring out a brand new ship is a big internal buzz, and the "best of the best" crew is chosen from the fleet and assigned to the new ship for the initial backbreaking work but then staying on the ship and getting the cream of RCCL passengers - lots of tips, commissions and attention.
But Quantum is different - the crew will only be on there two months, and then Quantum is going to Shanghai to milk the Chinese casino gaming market as well as the emerging upper middle class over there, so almost all of the non-marine crew will be replaced by Chinese and other orientals. So how would you feel as an experienced RCCL crew member using your talents to fix the issues of the ship under extreme pressure, and then get bounced off two months later? Not too enthusiastic, I'll wager......
This is my 5th transatlantic cruise, out of 15 cruises and my second maiden transatlantic, from this route. This ship has many similarities with my maiden voyage with the NCL Epic (2-Star vessel/voyage). In short this ship is much more an NCL vessel than a ship within the RCCL fleet. This ship is a complete disgrace and not representative in any way, shape, or form; with any Royal vessel in existence.
Below is a list of key areas to consider, followed by a summary of my experience. The ship seems cheaply built inside, while costing a staggering 1.5 billion Dollars. There is no similarity in the few public rooms, with any other spaces, throughout the fleet. There is no Ben & Jerry’s (or any other) ice cream offered on the ship. There is no central meeting place, as is there is no Centrum or true Royal Promenade, as seen on other RCCL vessels. The technology aboard the ship is a complete failure, as are the many “enhancements”. |
15/ Another Royal Caribbean story, mostly unnoticed by the national media but was in the local Orlando press because of the Disney connection. A man fell off the Oasis Of the Seas into the water, and was picked up by the Disney Magic which was right behind the Oasis. The man, Frank Jade, said he was on the open deck early in the morning and a wave swept him off the deck into the water.
This sounds like complete bullshit - the Oasis is a monster ship, and a wave big enough to reach the first accessible deck would have to be 7 meters high, which would mean REALLY bad weather in which case noone in their right mind would be on the open deck, nor could the Disney ship have spotted the guy in waves that big. But the local media just accepted the tale.....
Most likely? He went out on deck in the early morning and did something really stupid.....splash.......and it certainly wouldn't surprise me if there was alcohol involved....
A passenger sailing on Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas fell overboard on Thursday morning, and it went completely unnoticed by anyone on the ship. The Disney Magic, of the Disney Cruise Line fleet, was sailing the exact same route, and was able to rescue the man after he was noticed by someone aboard that ship.
The Milenio reported an American tourist by the name of Frank Jade was on the Royal Caribbean ship and headed for Cozumel when the incident happened. The ship was approximately eight miles from the cruise ports in Cozumel, Mexico, at the time he fell overboard.
The Disney Magic was sailing the same route, and someone noticed Jade floating in the water as the Royal Caribbean continued on.
16/ Carl Hiaasen on great form, riffing on our Governor Voldemort's appeal to people from the Northern States to move to Florida.....c'mon down.....
Amusing as always.......can't give you an excerpt because I've used up my free stories, but it's witty and clever.....of course it's relatively easy to be funny when discussing our corrupt and evil Governor, pond slime that he is......
Todays video - "Do you feel lucky punk? Well do ya?"
Clint at his finest....in HD as well......
Todays blind person joke
Husband and wife are waiting at the bus stop with their nine children.
A blind man joins them after a few minutes. When the bus arrives, they find it
overloaded and only the wife and the nine kids are able to fit onto the bus.
So the husband and the blind man decide to walk.
overloaded and only the wife and the nine kids are able to fit onto the bus.
So the husband and the blind man decide to walk.
After a while, the husband gets irritated by the ticking of the stick of the
blind man as he taps it on the sidewalk, and says to him, "Why don't you put a
piece of rubber at the end of your stick? That ticking sound is driving me crazy."
The blind man replies, "If you had put a rubber at the end of YOUR
stick, we'd be riding the bus ... so shut up."
The blind man replies, "If you had put a rubber at the end of YOUR
stick, we'd be riding the bus ... so shut up."
Todays bonus joke
During my prostate exam I asked the Doctor "where should I put my pants?"
"Over there by mine" was not the answer I was expecting.
Todays dog jokes
Why Some Men Have a Dog And No Wife:
are to see you.
dog's name.
floor.
visit.
Todays art lover joke
The lawyer says to the wealthy art collector tycoon: "I have some good news and, I have some bad news”.The tycoon replies: "I've had an awful day, let's hear the good news first”.The lawyer says: “Your wife invested $5,000 in two pictures today that she figures are worth a minimum of $20 million”.The tycoon replies enthusiastically: “Well done, very good news indeed! You've just made my day; now what’s the bad news?”The lawyer answers: “The pictures are of you screwing your secretary”.
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