Frank Rich with his conclusions on the Republican debate.....in my opinion a fair and accurate analysis......and his comments on Jeb! are nice to see because I hated that bastard when he was our corrupt Governor, although he looks like Winston Churchill next to Voldemort who we have now......
Anyway.....see if you agree with Rich.....
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: the third GOP debate.
There were ten candidates onstage in the CNBC prime-time Republican debate, not to mention the other four candidates who appeared earlier in the kiddie-table debate. Did last night winnow the field?
For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been treated to a steady barrage of articles and opinion columns in virtually every major publication touting Marco Rubio as the most talented, the most likely, the most obvious survivor in this overcrowded field — the sole Establishment candidate who can survive the onslaught of the Trump-Carson crazies and walk away with the prize.
For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been treated to a steady barrage of articles and opinion columns in virtually every major publication touting Marco Rubio as the most talented, the most likely, the most obvious survivor in this overcrowded field — the sole Establishment candidate who can survive the onslaught of the Trump-Carson crazies and walk away with the prize.
Miss the show last night? Here is the debate in 2 minutes.....
One of the better detailed analyses of the debate is this one from Salon's Sean Illing......with his conclusions about each of them and their future seat in the clown car.....
The inane spectacle of the GOP debate: Cruz the showboating creep, Rubio the slick operator & Bush the desperate flop
(Credit: Reuters/Evan Semon)
Last night’s Republican presidential debate was interesting for all the wrong reasons. We learned little. The candidates evaded the toughest questions. Moderators failed to challenge fact-free answers. And the dynamics didn’t change.
What happened was less a debate among contenders and more a showdown between the candidates and the moderators. Everyone attacked the moderators when they heard a question they didn’t like, and then made a show of their rebelliousness – this was great for anti-media conservatives, but a distraction for everyone else. The moderators had their moments, but they were mostly awful. Frivolous questions about Rubio’s absenteeism or Trump’s “moral character” or fantasy football gave the candidates just enough fodder to avoid answering the hard questions whenever they were asked. The result of all this was two and a half hours of political gas.
Here’s a candidate-by-candidate breakdown.
And speaking of debates, here is "Bad Lip Reading" with the first Democratic debate....five hilarious minutes.....
The first Democratic Party debate on CNN was okay. Sure, it had Bernie Sanders‘ outburst about Hillary Clinton‘s emails and Jim Webb‘s non-joke about killing a guy in Vietnam, but it never really got good until Saturday Night Live lampooned it. In fact, satire is probably the only thing that would make such a fiasco watchable in the first place.
Hence YouTube’s Bad Lip Reading crew, which took on the first GOP debate back in August. They did a pretty good job of rendering Fox News’ highly-rated hours-long farce into a few minutes of watchable television, and now they’ve done it again with the CNN Democratic debate.
Great commercial, "Trouble on the Moon"......45 seconds.......
I think I am a little more informed than most, but even so I didn't answer the question below they asked about CEO pay correctly and I'll bet you don't either.....an eye opening story....
(Credit: AP/Reuters/Dennis Van Tine/Richard Drew/Shannon Stapleton)
The following is an excerpt from Runaway Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice, by Les Leopold (Chelsea Green, 2015).
Please take a moment to write down the answers to two basic questions:
- How much do you think the CEO of a large corporation makes in a year, on average?
- How much do you think an entry-level factory worker earns in a year, on average?
Your answers allow for the construction of an important statistic about inequality – the wage-gap ratio.
For example, let’s say your answer is that the typical CEO makes about $500,000 per year, while the factory worker earns about $25,000 per year. That gives us a wage-gap ratio of 20 to 1 – that is, for every one dollar earned by the worker, the CEO earns $20 (500,000/25,000 = 20/1).
If you said $1 million for the CEO and $25,000 for the factory worker, then the ratio jumps to 40 to 1.
What ratio did you come up with?
Just another doom and gloom story from the liberal media about the myth of climate change - a very interesting piece from the Times about scientists trying to determine what is happening in Greenland with the melting ice sheets. Needless to say the Republicans have slashed the budget for this analysis, so we might never know how bad the melting is.....till it drowns New York.
Really interesting article, with cool graphics, a video and a clear message that no one wants to hear.....
ON THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET — The midnight sun still gleamed at 1 a.m. across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept toward the edge of a river that rushed downstream toward an enormous sinkhole.
If he fell in, “the death rate is 100 percent,” said Mr. Overstreet’s friend and fellow researcher, Lincoln Pitcher.
But Mr. Overstreet’s task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet.
I found this story from the Times to be incredibly depressing, as a man is about to be crucified - yes, crucified - in Saudi Arabia for the crime of protesting. It's not like the Roman Empire days when men were crucified and left to die on a cross - the Saudis hack his head off first with a sword so I guess that's progress of a sort, but it's 2015 - this medieval shit's not supposed to happen any more.....
But since they have oil, the Saudis can do anything they want without a peep from the West......including 9/11.....
Any day now, our Saudi Arabian allies may behead and crucify a young man named Ali al-Nimr.
His appeals following his court sentence for this grisly execution have been exhausted, so guards may lead Nimr to a public square and hack off his head with a sword as onlookers jeer. Then, following Saudi protocol for crucifixion, they would hang his body as a warning to others.
Nimr’s offense? He was arrested at age 17 for participating in anti-government protests. The government has said he attacked police officers and rioted, but the only known evidence is a confession apparently extracted under torture that left him a bloody mess.
“When I visited my son for the first time I didn’t recognize him,” his mother, Nusra al-Ahmed, told The Guardian. “I didn’t know whether this really was my son Ali or not.”
Todays classic video - have another look at the Jimmy Fallon/Emma Stone LipSync contest......still a wow......
Todays little Johnny joke
A teacher asks the kids in her 3rd grade class: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
Little Johnny says: "I wanna start out as a Fighter Pilot, then be a billionaire, go to the most expensive clubs, find me the finest whore, give her a Ferrari worth over a million bucks, an apartment in Copacabana, a mansion in Paris, a jet to travel throughout Europe, an Infinite Visa Card, and all the while banging her like a loose screen door in a hurricane."
The teacher, shocked, and not knowing what to do with this horrible response from little Johnny,
decides not to acknowledge what he said and simply tries to continue with the lesson.
decides not to acknowledge what he said and simply tries to continue with the lesson.
"And how about you, Sarah?"
"I wanna be Johnny ’s whore.
Hillary Clinton faced an 11-hour Beghazi hearing Thursday. 
