1/ The Democrats seem to be relying on 2016 to bail them out of the difficulties they are in right now, with the Senate and House firmly in Republican hands, but it's an illusion. Even though the Presidential election draws more voters than the midterms, the Republicans are trying to steal some of the traditional lines used by the Democratic party and blur the party differences. Let's face it - the majority of Americans are either too busy, indifferent to politics or stupid to think about the very real issues facing the country, and vote with their gut.
You may not like what Republicans stand for, but they're consistent, loud and stay on message......voters are attracted to strong sounding candidates, even though to an informed observer they are idiots - e.g. George W.
Dems have to change....
Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Jacquelyn Martin/Photo montage by Salon)
In the run-up to the 2016 election, Republicans are trying to position themselves as the party of the middle class. In a recent essay, Thomas Edsall writes, “The Republican appropriation of leftist populist rhetoric (and even policies) poses a significant threat to liberal prospects in 2016.” It may well work, but not because Republicans are in fact reformist, but rather because voters and pundits eschew data and instead focus on rhetoric. When it comes to actual empirical evidence, the answer is indisputable: Democrats preside over far more income growth for the middle class than Republicans.
Princeton University’s Larry Bartels has two studies on politics and income distribution, and together they encompass almost a century. His finding: under Republicans, the poor and middle class see almost no income growth, while under Democrats, they see dramatic growth (see charts). As he notes elsewhere, even after numerous controls, these partisan differences remain. “Every Republican president in the past 60 years has presided over increasing income inequality, including Dwight Eisenhower in the midst of the ‘Great Compression’ of the post-war decades,” Bartels writes. “And every Democratic president except one (Jimmy Carter) has presided over decreasing or stable inequality.”
2/ Nostalgic clip from SNL's 40th Anniversary show.....a compilation of their political humour over 40 years, introduced by Jack Nicholson. Five minutes of past presidents and candidates......remember Dukakis?
(Credit: YouTube, Saturday Night Live)
A quick scan of Sunday’s “SNL 40″ red carpet — from Sarah Palin (who interviewedalongside faux-nemesis Alec Baldwin) to Rudy Giuliani — makes abundantly clear that the show has meant just as much to the politicians being parodied as it has to the fledgling comics parodying them.
Jack Nicholson took the stage on Sunday and brought us back to the birth of “Saturday Night Live’s” satirical voice in 1975.
3/ One of the better Bill Maher "New Rules", with the back story behind the Brian Williams firing.....it's that the concept of "news" on our corporate media TV is complete bullshit.....five excellent minutes....
If you are one of the 20 million or so people who still watch the nightly news on any channel, watch this before you tune in tonight and then see if Maher hasn't nailed it yet again. He has.....
And if you want real news, watch Al Jazeera English....
Bill Maher doesn’t really care that much about Brian Williams‘ series of misstatements. No, the real reason Williams should “go away,” according to Maher, is that “NBC Nightly News sucks.” (But to be fair, he also thinks CBS Evening News and ABC World News Tonight suck too.)
See, what “destroyed” Brian Williams’ credibility in Maher’s eyes was “ten years of wasting precious news time with bullshit stories.” It really bothers him that national nightly newscasts shirk their “sacred responsibility” to report the news in favor of viral YouTube videos, cutesy human interest stories, and lots and lots of weather coverage.
He called it “journalistic malpractice” for Williams to spend so little time reporting on climate change and instead covering east coast blizzards “like white Godzilla is on the way.”
4/ Excellent column from Paul Krugman on how Republicans are fixated on economic policies that aren't just wrong, but have been proven to be wrong......BUT they benefit the 1%.....
Monetary policy probably won’t be a major issue in the 2016 campaign, but it should be. It is, after all, extremely important, and the Republican base and many leading politicians have strong views about the Federal Reserve and its conduct. And the eventual presidential nominee will surely have to endorse the party line.
So it matters that the emerging G.O.P. consensus on money is crazy — full-on conspiracy-theory crazy.
Right now, the most obvious manifestation of money madness is Senator Rand Paul’s “Audit the Fed” campaign. Mr. Paul likes to warn that the Fed’s efforts to bolster the economy may lead to hyperinflation; he loves talking about the wheelbarrows of cash that people carted around in Weimar Germany. But he’s been saying that since 2009, and it keeps not happening. So now he has a new line: The Fed is an overleveraged bank, just as Lehman Brothers was, and could experience a disastrous collapse of confidence any day now.
5/ Another excellent bit of comedic reporting from John Oliver, on tobacco companies and their global marketing and legal attacks on countries that dare try to cut down smoking....
He's very funny, and you will also learn something.....16 minutes.....
How does Big Tobacco still make so much money? While you were watching “SNL 40,” John Oliver explained it all.
6/ A 30 second gun safety ad with a bite.....amusingly done and well acted, and it gets the message across! Ladies will find this funny....
7/ Whatever monopoly cable company you have, you will relate to this story.....I have had similar experiences with Comcast over and over.....
Your cable company hates you: Why Comcast abuses its customers
That customer service call wasn't an isolated incident. It's just part of a depressingly effective business model
(Credit: Associated Press)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
When it comes to popularity, cable companies rank down there with members of Congress, root canals and Nickelback. Current and former customers agree; they hate the high cost and poor service, and they especially hate the runaround they get from call centers.
Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the two largest cable television providers in the U.S., are consistently at the bottom of consumer satisfaction surveys and are among the least trusted corporations in the nation. Now these two monolithic companies are on the brink of a mega-merger.
The merged company — which will be named Comcast — would control more than two-thirds of all cable television subscriptions in the country, and some 40% of the home Internet market. The $45.2 billion merger, proposed a year ago, is awaiting approval from the feds, and there are unfortunate signs the merger will be approved.
Survey after survey shows that Americans wholeheartedly oppose the proposed merger. The latest survey, by Consumer Reports, finds nearly three-quarters of Americans believe it will result in higher cable and Internet rates, while two-thirds say it will likely have a negative impact on customer service and that Comcast would have no incentive to improve.
So, knowing that most of their customers hate their guts, you would think that Comcast and Time Warner would do some corporate soul searching and perhaps polish their respective images. Maybe some acts of goodwill like rolling back prices, making a true commitment to net neutrality or providing better customer service would do the trick. But that hasn’t been the case. As regional monopolies, these companies know that when they are awarded a local franchise, they can pretty much do as they please without fear of consequences.
8/ Larry Wilmore has taken over Colbert's spot, and is doing well....amusing, topical and different.....but this show is most unusual as he assembled four black men to discuss fatherhood......very, very interesting......two seven minute segments.....
The Nightly Show, Larry Wilmore’s new Daily Show follower that’s about to end its second week on-air, has thus far been a funny, loose, and slightly edgy comedy show, tackling everything from Bill Cosby rape allegations to Tom Brady’s balls with the extra grit you’d expect from a cable version of the major nightly franchises.
What it hasn’t been is new, which its predecessor The Colbert Report undoubtedly was from the moment it aired.
That changed Wednesday night, as Wilmore skipped his reliable-but-rarely-essential monologue segment in favor of an extended panel discussion on black fatherhood. Wilmore has featured free-flowing panel segments on each of his shows, but last night the entire episode was devoted to a sustained examination of a single statistic, that 72% of black children are born to unwed mothers, a subject more often wielded in the political discourse as a cudgel than approached as an experiential reality.
The panelist selection was key to the show’s success, a smart blend of the intellectual (New York Timescolumnist Charles Blow, author of a recent James Baldwin-esque memoir), cultural (Common), political (Joe Jones of the Center for Urban Families) and comedic (Nightly Show regular Mike Yard). Each of the men told personal tales of growing up with fathers who either impressed lessons upon them or acted as cautions through drug abuse, and how they took or converted those lessons with their own children.
The personal was balanced by the analytic: Blow brought sociopolitical context to the statistic, while Common complicated its surface. “Unwed,” Common reminded everybody, “doesn’t mean absent,” opening up a dialogue on the nuances elided by the stats quoted about the African American community by hectoring figures like Bill O’Reilly. All this was intercut with a man-on-the-street interview montage, which for once was conducted with the purpose of soliciting input rather than exposing ignorance.
Two stories that qualify for the George Carlin award - "nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care"....
9/ From the Times - Sao Paolo, Brazil, a city of over 20 million people is on the brink of running out of water.....think about it - a major city in a pretty affluent country is on the brink of a disaster - no water. Imagine if you turned on your taps and there was nothing....now imagine you were poor, and had very limited options and minimal money.....
This is serious shit....
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Endowed with the Amazon and other mighty rivers, an array of huge dams and one-eighth of the world’s fresh water, Brazil is sometimes called the “Saudi Arabia of water,” so rich in the coveted resource that some liken it to living above a sea of oil.
But in Brazil’s largest and wealthiest city, a more dystopian situation is unfolding: The taps are starting to run dry.
As southeast Brazil grapples with its worst drought in nearly a century, a problem worsened by polluted rivers, deforestation and population growth, the largest reservoir system serving São Paulo is near depletion. Many residents are already enduring sporadic water cutoffs, some going days without it. Officials say that drastic rationing may be needed, with water service provided only two days a week.
Behind closed doors, the views are grimmer. In a meeting recorded secretly and leaked to the local news media, Paulo Massato, a senior official at São Paulo’s water utility, said that residents might have to be warned to fleebecause “there’s not enough water, there won’t be water to bathe, to clean” homes.
10/ It's not just California that's in for a severe drought - almost the whole of North America will be prone to long term dry weather. This report is from NASA, who have real scientists not funded by the energy oligarchs.....
California is in the midst of its worst drought in over 1,200 years, exacerbated by record hot temperatures. A new study led by Benjamin Cook at Nasa GISS examines how drought intensity in North America will change in a hotter world, and finds that things will only get worse.
Global warming intensifies drought in several ways. In increases evaporation from soil and reservoirs. In increases water demand. It makes precipitation fall more as rain and less as snow, which is problematic for regions like California that rely on snowpack melt to refill reservoirs throughout the year. It also makes the snowpack melt earlier in the year. The record heat has intensified the current California drought by about 36%, and the planet will only continue to get hotter.
11/ A very unusual video - music by Hozier [Take Me To Church], the Russian ballet dancer Polunin and the amazing film director David LaChappelle. The 3 minute clip has a surreal look, astonishing dancing, incredible cinematography....
Guys - don't watch this, it will make you feel inadequate.....
Ladies - enjoy the artistry of his tattoos and washboard abs..........
What happens when you combine the talents of Russian ballet bad boy Sergei Polunin, Irish gospel luminary Hozier and photography pop wizard David LaChapelle? Apparently, a whole lot of angsty, sexy, beautiful dancing ensues.
12/ Now this is interesting, and new to me.....vitamin enriched food. We are used to seeing foods that are "enriched" with vitamins, but the real question is why does this food need to be supplemented with artificial vitamins? The answer is in order to make it last longer on the shelves, they strip the food of all nutrients and need to add them back in.
And - are the BIg Ag products as good for you as natural foods? The answer is, of course, no.
My mother used to tell me "if you eat properly you don't need vitamins", and she was right......the best advice out there is not to eat anything your grandparents wouldn't recognise.
THERE is much concern these days about what’s in our dietary supplements. Are they actually filled with the ingredients that the labels promise?
Maybe, maybe not. Quality control issues in the estimated 85,000 dietary supplement products available in America should give every consumer pause. But even vitamins themselves — the 13 dietary chemicals necessary to prevent deficiency diseases like scurvy and rickets — pose hidden hazards of their own.
We believe so strongly that vitamins are always good for us, and that the more we get the better, that we fail to notice that food marketers use synthetic vitamins to sell unhealthful products. Not only have we become dependent on these synthetic vitamins to keep ourselves safe from deficiencies, but the eating habits they encourage are having disastrous consequences on our health.
Discovered barely a century ago, vitamins were a breakthrough in nutritional science, providing cures and preventions for some terrifying diseases. It wasn’t long, though, before vitamins spread from the labs of scientists to the offices of food marketers, and began to take on a life of their own.
13/ We live in a state [Floriduh] where the corruption surrounding Rick Scott goes unnoticed, whereas in other states would mean impeachment.....here it's just business as usual. This lying, disgusting weasel that YOU elected is going to skate on this one too......
Rick Scott (Credit: AP/Chris O'meara)
Withholding evidence. Government business carried out in secret. Potential criminal investigations.
I’m not talking about the allegations surrounding former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, who resigned on Friday. In Florida, a similar cloud has formed around Gov. Rick Scott, who faces three separate lawsuits alleging violations of a number of state laws.
In any normal political environment, the charges would lead to calls for resignation or impeachment proceedings. But Scott appears insulated by the very expectation of his corruption. In idealistic Oregon, Democrats controlled every level of government, and forced out a member of their own party. In Florida, the governor is supposed to be a scoundrel. But even if Scott survives, Republicans seeking the White House in 2016 might have a problem associating themselves with the leader of the biggest swing state, especially if more of his Nixonian tactics are revealed.
“This governor has completely evaded all public records on everything,” said Matt Weidner, a St. Petersburg attorney who filed one of the three lawsuits against Scott. His complaint involves the sudden firing of Gerald Bailey, former executive director of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) and a respected public official.
Scott initially argued that Bailey simply resigned. But Bailey has since spoken publicly, accusing the governor of lying about his ouster (an email from Scott’s general counsel demanded that Bailey “retire or resign”) and attempting to politicize the independent FDLE. According to Bailey, Scott’s office pressured him to hire political cronies and forced FLDE officers to chauffeur Scott campaign staffers.
14/ Todays guy video - stunt driver Ken Block drives through the streets of LA doing incredible things with a noisy Camero.....it's called Gymkhana Seven.....12 minutes, and the first five or so are entertaining but it gets a little repetitive.....
Stunt driver and viral YouTube sensation Ken Block has taken his “Gymkhana” online short series of action videos to Paris, San Francisco and the backlot of a movie studio.
Now, for “Gymkhana 7,” he’s destroying the streets of Los Angeles.
Block, the lifestyle apparel wunderkind, was born in Long Beach, and raised in San Diego. He made a fortune with the DC shoes franchise before turning his attention to rally-cross racing and the drifting-style school of driving known as “gymkhana.”
He and his Gymkhana crew, which included director Ben Conrad, of Logan, and longtime associate Brian Scotto, had for years been trying to find a creative way to shoot one of their signature shorts in Los Angeles.
15/ Are you in the 9% of adults over 65 that take benzodiazepine [Valium etc.]? Mainly women?
You should read this story from the Times.....it's not good news.....
The word “benzodiazepines” and the phrase “widely prescribed for anxiety and insomnia” appear together so frequently that they may remind you of the apparently unbreakable connection between “powerful” and “House Ways and Means Committee.”
But now we have a better sense of just how widely prescribed these medications are. A studyin this month’s JAMA Psychiatry reports that among 65- to 80-year-old Americans, close to 9 percent use one of these sedative-hypnotics, drugs like Valium, Xanax, Ativan and Klonopin. Among older women, nearly 11 percent take them.
“That’s an extraordinarily high rate of use for any class of medications,” said Michael Schoenbaum, a senior adviser at the National Institutes of Mental Health and a co-author of the new report. “It seemed particularly striking given the identified clinical concerns associated with benzodiazepine use in anybody, but especially in older adults.”
Todays video - don't tease the frog! 30 seconds....
Todays blonde joke
She desperately wanted a pair of beautiful alligator shoes.
After becoming very frustrated with the attitude of one of the shopkeepers, the young blonde
declared, 'Well, then, maybe I'll just go out and catch my own alligator and get
a pair of alligator shoes for free!'
The shopkeeper replied with a sly smile, ¹Well, little lady, why don't you go give it a try?'
The blonde headed off to the swamp, determined to catch an alligator.
declared, 'Well, then, maybe I'll just go out and catch my own alligator and get
a pair of alligator shoes for free!'
The shopkeeper replied with a sly smile, ¹Well, little lady, why don't you go give it a try?'
The blonde headed off to the swamp, determined to catch an alligator.
Later in the day, the shopkeeper was driving home, and spotted the
young woman standing waist deep in the murky water, shotgun in hand.
young woman standing waist deep in the murky water, shotgun in hand.
He saw a huge 9-footgator swimming rapidly toward her. With lightning
reflexes, the blonde took aim, shot the creature and hauled it up onto the slippery
bank. Nearby were 7 more dead 'gators, all lying belly up.
The shopkeeper watched in amazement as the blond struggled with the 'gator.
reflexes, the blonde took aim, shot the creature and hauled it up onto the slippery
bank. Nearby were 7 more dead 'gators, all lying belly up.
The shopkeeper watched in amazement as the blond struggled with the 'gator.
Then, rolling her eyes, she screamed in frustration ......
"DAMN!! THIS ONE'S BAREFOOT TOO!"
"DAMN!! THIS ONE'S BAREFOOT TOO!"
Todays philosophical jokes
As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind - every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder.
When the white missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land.
They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes.
When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
America is the only country where a significant proportion of the population believes that professional wrestling is real but the moon landing was faked.
I'm not a paranoid, deranged millionaire. I'm a billionaire.
After the game, the King and the pawn go into the same box.
Men are like linoleum floors. Lay 'em right and you can walk all over them for thirty years.
The only reason they say 'Women and children first' is to test the strength of the lifeboats.
I've been married to a communist and a fascist, and neither would take out the garbage.
You know you're a redneck if your home has wheels and your car doesn't.
When a man opens a car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.
Wood burns faster when you have to cut and chop it yourself.
The best cure for Sea Sickness, is to sit under a tree.
Lawyers believe a person is innocent until proven broke.
Kill one man and you're a murderer, kill a million and you're a conqueror
Having more money doesn't make you happier. I have 50 million dollars but I'm just as happy as when I had 48 million.
We are here on earth to do good unto others. What the others are here for, I have no idea.
In hotel rooms I worry. I can't be the only guy who sits on the furniture naked
If life were fair, Elvis would still be alive today and all the impersonators would be dead.
I don't believe in astrology. I am a Sagittarius and we're very skeptical
Hollywood must be the only place on earth where you can be fired by a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap
Home cooking. Where many a man thinks his wife is.
America is so advanced that even the chairs are electric.
The first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone
If God had intended us to fly he would have made it easier to get to the airport.
I have kleptomania, but when it gets bad, I take something for it.
Todays golf joke
A golfer hits his ball into a yard next to the golf course.
As he goes to get it a man in the yard says, "Don't you see
the sign? It says, 'Private property - Stay Out!'"
The golfer says, "I'm sorry I did not see it. That is my
ball there. May I have it, please?"
The man says, "It's in my yard and so it's my ball now."
The golfer looks at the man and says, "I understand"
He then walks back to the golf cart, gets another golf ball,
then walks back and throws it into the yard.
The man says, "What is that for?"
The golfer replies,
"I consider myself a Gentleman, and I
believe every prick should have two balls."
As he goes to get it a man in the yard says, "Don't you see
the sign? It says, 'Private property - Stay Out!'"
The golfer says, "I'm sorry I did not see it. That is my
ball there. May I have it, please?"
The man says, "It's in my yard and so it's my ball now."
The golfer looks at the man and says, "I understand"
He then walks back to the golf cart, gets another golf ball,
then walks back and throws it into the yard.
The man says, "What is that for?"
The golfer replies,
"I consider myself a Gentleman, and I
believe every prick should have two balls."
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