Lake County FL Election Coverage
Some of our alert readers have noted I analyzed the Republican primaries only on Sunday the 14th.
True.
Most of the [D] races are unopposed, with a few contested......but the facts are in Lake County Florida historically the countywide offices are decided at the Republican primary level, because in the general the Republican will get 60%, the Democrat 40%.....the Dems could run Jesus or Mother Theresa for a county office and they would still get 40%.....so that's why this summary is for the Republican primary only.
If we have to elect a Republican, let's get the least bad candidate in office.
Anyway, the wonderful world of our politics continues.....
1/ Matt Taibbi with an insightful look at how this Presidential race has corrupted the media....a most interesting piece, well worth reading....
"Trump is considered so dangerous that many journalists are beginning to be concerned that admitting the truth of negative reports of any kind about the Democrats might make them complicit in the election of the American Hitler.
Years ago, when I was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, a Russian friend explained how he got his news.
"For news about Russia, Radio Liberty," he said. "For news about America, Soviet newspapers." He smiled. "Countries lie about themselves, tell truth about others."
American media consumers are fast approaching the same absurd binary reality. We now have one set of news outlets that gives us the bad news about Democrats, and another set of news outlets bravely dedicated to reporting the whole truth about Republicans.
Like the old adage about quarterbacks – if you think you have two good ones, you probably have none – this basically means we have no credible news media left. Apart from a few brave islands of resistance, virtually all the major news organizations are now fully in the tank for one side or the other.
The last month or so of Trump-Hillary coverage may have been the worst stretch of pure journo-shilling we've seen since the run-up to the Iraq war. In terms of political media, there’s basically nothing left on the air except Trump-bashing or Hillary-bashing.
2/ And here is a concrete example of what Taibbi is saying - the incredible floods in Louisiana have got minimal coverage in the corporate media....
I was watching cable news last night [cutting away from the interminable Olympics commercials] and Rachel Maddow gave this disaster about 90 seconds.
A young girl silently looks back at her family after being rescued from floodwaters that overtook Comite Drive and the surrounding neighborhoods in Central on Saturday. (Credit: The Advocate/Caroline Ourso)
Louisiana is underwater.
If you don’t live in or around Louisiana, you may not know that. And it’s not your fault. Cable news has mostly ignored it. Sure, there’s been coverage, but not as much you’d expect given the scale of the suffering. As Rod Dreher noted on his blog, a screenshot of CNN’s home page over the weekend was conspicuously silent on this story. Among other stupidities, Adele’s admission that she can’t dance was deemed more newsworthy than a drowning American state.
To recap, parts of Southern and Central Louisiana absorbed two feet of rain in less than three days last week (For perspective, that’s basically a Seattle rainy season’s worth of rain). This was an unprecedented weather event. Areas with no history of flooding were deluged, leaving many without the protections of flood insurance. Baton Rouge, a major city in the region, was utterly devastated. Motorists were stranded on interstates. Whole neighborhoods were washed away. Parents were separated from children. Tens of thousands of people were rendered homeless. Major roads and highways were destroyed. In Denham Springs, an adjacent town, 90 percent of homes were decimated by flood waters. The figures are scarcely better in the surrounding parishes.
The aerial footage is apocalyptic.
And if you've checked your weather app today [Wednesday PM], you will see another huge storm aiming to pound Louisiana again.....
3/ John Oliver with a wonderful three minute rant on Trump's assertion our President was the founder of ISIS......
On Sunday's Last Week Tonight, John Oliver called out Donald Trump for his "douchebag's apology" to President Obama for calling him the "founder of ISIS."
The Republican presidential nominee stated in a campaign speech that Obama was responsible for the terrorist organization. Then in a subsequent rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump said that his comments were meant sarcastically. "So I said 'the founder of ISIS.' Obviously I'm being sarcastic … but not that sarcastic, to be honest with you," Trump said.
Oliver lampooned Trump's grandstanding. "He's like the guy drowning but waving off a lifeboat saying, 'Get out of here, I'm very buoyant. I'm the most buoyant. Everybody talks about my buoyancy. I'm a tremendous floater.'" Oliver also called the nominee an "imploding star" with "resting rich face."
http:///tv/news/watch-john-oli
4/ You may or may not recognize the name Zephyr Teachout, but watch her evicerate an oligarch who has just purchased her opponent in the election. She has more balls than 90% of Democrats....it's a two minute video, and everyone should watch it - wonderful!
On Monday, Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham Law professor running for Congress in New York’s 19th Congressional District as a Democrat, is looking past her Republican rival John Faso to the men backing him: the secretive Republican financiers Paul Singer and Robert Mercer.
Teachout mounted a primary challenge against Governor Andrew Cuomo in the last New York gubernatorial election, establishing her progressive bonafides with a rigorous critique focused on corporate corruption and campaign finance reform, of a type with Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
In a campaign ad uploaded to Facebook, Teachout challenged Singer to a debate. Recently, Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management, netted $2.4 billion from Argentina’s debt crisis. He also endorsed and supported Senator Marco Rubio in the presidential primary. Mercer, meanwhile, dropped $11 million trying to get Senator Ted Cruz elected—or, failing that, gather as much voter data as possible.
“The voters deserve to hear directly from the billionaires backing John Faso about what they expect to get from him in Congress,” Teachout said in a statement. (She is also fundraising off the challenge.) “When someone writes a $500,000 check they don’t do it out of the goodness of their heart. These are people probably trying to buy power, and voters should know who they are and what they stand for. I’m challenging Paul Singer and Robert Mercer to put your mouth where your money is and debate me directly, not through your mouthpiece.”
5/ Thomas Frank with a challenging article on how a Clinton victory in November will mean business as usual for the elites because if she trounces Trump, it'll be back to the center for her.
Whether you agree with him or not, he is one of our best political writers.....
And so ends the great populist uprising of our time, fizzling out pathetically in the mud and the bigotry stirred up by a third-rate would-be caudillo named Donald J Trump. So closes an era of populist outrage that began back in 2008, when the Davos dream of a world run by benevolent bankers first started to crack. The unrest has taken many forms in these eight years – from idealistic to cynical, from Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party – but they all failed to change much of anything.
And now the last, ugliest, most fraudulent manifestation is failing so spectacularly that it may discredit populism itself for years to come.
6/ John Oliver with his comedic reporting hat on, and he laments the state of print journalism particularly as it pertains to local political news. Having just done a summary of our local races, I can echo his excellent 16 minute report - we have very few resources covering local news and in Lake County we're just grateful for Lauren Ritchie in the Orlando Sentinel.....
Very good indeed! One of his best......
(Credit: HBO)
John Oliver’s strength at taking tedious or complicated subjects and making them accessible, even hilarious, is one of the wonders of television in the 21st century. This talent was in full force Sunday night, when he spoke about the struggle of newspapers and the price we all pay for declining local news coverage. For journalists and those who follow the media, his 19-minute rant on “Last Week Tonight” — well, a rant plus a hilarious parody of the movie “Spotlight” — brought some much-needed attention to a story that the general public doesn’t understand in much detail.
“We know that we do something hugely important,” Washington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan told me via email, “and we’ve watched it being not-so-slowly destroyed by forces beyond our control — the biggest one of which is the precipitous decline in print advertising which paid the bills for so long.”
For members of a profession that’s seen tens of thousands of jobs lost, or readers who’ve seen their local paper wither over the last decade or so, the episode probably did not add a huge amount of new information. But Oliver’s genius at being “witty, profane, and at the same time dead serious,” as Rick Edmonds of the media site Poynter put it, was valuable nonetheless. Even people who rarely defend the mainstream media — conservative talk-show host John Ziegler, for example — praised the work of the left-leaning “Last Week Tonight.”
7/ Maureen Dowd with a Times column you have to read.....imagining the unimaginable.....one of her best for a while.....
WASHINGTON — IT is Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2017.
Donald Trump searches his drawer for a note from Barack Obama, something on heavy cream stationery with the White House insignia, maybe reiterating the Obama doctrine, “Don’t do stupid stuff.”
But there is nothing there.
That puts Trump in a huff. How dare Obama depart without leaving the customary handwritten good-luck missive?
He grabs his phone and tweets: “SAD!! No note from my predecessor. No Class Obama.”
8/ Trevor Noah feels sorry for Trump surrogates.....quite good, about 5 minutes.....
Trevor Noah mocked Donald Trump‘s cable news surrogates tonight, singling out Katrina Pierson in particular for her now-infamous statement that President Obama brought the U.S. into Afghanistan.
But he honestly feels bad for Trump surrogates because of how much they have to frantically spin, including on his declaration that “Obama is the founder of ISIS.”
And then, after a day of them defending him, Noah said that’s the point when Trump pivots and “royally fucks them” (i.e. saying it was sarcasm).
And with surrogates arguing he was being both sarcastic AND serious, Noah said it’s troubling that “the people who are hired as communications specialists are now basically the shrugging emoji.”
9/ Excellent article from Andrew O'Hehir in Salon about the true meaning of why Trump is so attractive to so many people - he's a symptom of a deep sickness in our society. A very, very good story.....
Donald Trump; Rubble. (Credit: AP/Rick Wilking/nouskrabs via Shutters
Amid the unfolding national catastrophe of the Donald Trump campaign, we are once again hearing the theory that Trump doesn’t really want to win the election, or to be president. In defiance of all real-world evidence about Trump’s aspirations and intentions, journalists keep on speculating that he picked a fight with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a United States Army captain killed in Afghanistan, in a last-ditch effort to do something so universally offensive as to destroy his candidacy. (All previous efforts having accomplished precisely the opposite.) Barely two weeks after the final collapse of backroom plots to nominate someone else at the Republican convention in Cleveland, we’re told that GOP power brokers are now holding secret meetings about how to nominate someone else if Trump withdraws from the race.
Any such scenario would be entirely without precedent, but what else is new?
And peruse these lines too......
No doubt the Democrats presented a much more inclusive and dynamic vision of America at their convention than the Trumpified Republicans did at theirs, and no doubt it’s better for my children and yours if Hillary Clinton wins the election. But Democratic cluelessness troubles me greatly. I’m not sure the Clinton-Obama-Clinton leadership of the Democratic Party has the slightest understanding of the physical and psychological dislocation of so much of America, the loneliness and desperation that has found its voice, for the moment, in Donald Trump.
10/ Some strange, some amusing pictures.....I think I got the point of most of them.....
To "get" this one look in the glasses....
11/ An informally written article about our zombie economy.....it's a good read because Chris Kanthan runs us through why everyone who isn't in the professional class is angry, disillusioned and frightened......in the words of the Orange One, it's rigged.
Informally means if you liked Hunter S. Thompson, you'll like this story.
A great recap of why you're pissed off.....
“The income and wealth inequality is the worst since the Great Depression. In 2015, the Top 1% earned 22% of all income earned in the U.S.”
Imagine the reaction you would get if you walked into an off-the-hook fraternity party and shouted, “Stop this party! There are too many drunk people and some of you are going to get hurt.” That’s the same reaction you get when you try to warn people about an economic bubble. It doesn’t matter if people were burned before because it is different this time. However, we have a zombie economy that is artificially kept alive through financial engineering and there is a living, growing bubble that is ripe for a big burst.
Of course, one might retort, “We are the wealthiest nation in the world, the stock market is at record highs, housing is booming, inflation is low, and unemployment is reasonable. What are you talking about?”
Let’s take a look at the economy first.
How Bad is Inequality?
When 45 million Americans are on food stamps, 72 million are on Medicaid, and 81% of households are worse off today than they were in 2005 … you know that there is something amiss.
If you look at the overall nominal GDP, yes, the U.S. is still #1. And even under the GDP per Capita, the U.S. is ranked 6th or so in the world, depending on the metrics. Not bad. However, such “average” statistics can be misleading. If I have $999 and you have $1, thenon the average, we have $500 each, but that fact is not going to help you buy a coffee at Starbucks.
This inequality has only grown more rapidly since the crash of 2008. To understand what is happening, imagine $1000 being distributed to 1000 people. In a socialist world, everyone will get $1. In the current crapitalist system, this is what is happening:
1 guy gets $600, 9 other people get $39 each, and the remaining 990 peasants get 5 cents each.
The income and wealth inequality is the worst since the Great Depression. In 2015, the Top 1% earned 22% of all income earned in the U.S.
12/ Time for this again - "Substitute Teacher", with Key and Peele.....one of the funniest three minutes ever......good news is it's being made into a movie....
Paramount Pictures has pre-emptively bought Substitute Teacher, a pitch to give feature film treatment to the wildly web popular skits from sibling cable channel Comedy Central’s hit sketch show Key & Peele. The viral video of the skit has gotten over 72 million YouTube hits, and focuses on an inner city substitute teacher who refuses to be messed with as he takes attendance in a class of white, suburban high school students.
Keegan-Michael Key will reprise his role as as the over-the-top substitute Mr. Garvey, and Jordan Peele will portray a rival teacher determined to be the students’ favorite. Script will be written by Rich Talarico and Alex Rubens, who are co-producers of Key & Peele, which returns for its fifth season on Comedy Central in July. Key and Peele will produce alongside 21 Laps’ Shawn Levy and Dan Levine and Principato Young Entertainment’s Peter Principato, Paul Young, and Joel Zadak. Will Rack is overseeing for 21 Laps.
13/ The Florida Senate race.....the joke of the country....
A new Blogger, "Wonkette", takes a look at the dysfunctional candidates with special attention to Alan Grayson, formerly my favorite....
A good and in parts quite amusing article....
Ah, Florida. Land of Florida Man, real estate scams, hurricanes, disappearing coastlines, and people who walk right off the sidewalk into novels by Tim Dorsey and Carl Hiaasen. And in typically chaotic Floridian fashion, it’s also home to what until late June looked like a wide-open donnybrook for an open U.S. Senate seat, until Marco Rubio decided he wasn’t quite as tired of being a senator as it seemed when he was running for president (and also the whole time he’s actually been a senator). Now Rubio is suddenly the cash-flush incumbent whose decision to seek reelection knocked several thousand (fine, five) hopefuls out of the Republican primary, while the Democratic race pretty much comes down to a fight between two sitting congressmen, centrist Patrick Murphy, who has virtually all the institutional backing, and very progressive Alan Grayson, the target of not funny at all charges by his former wife that he was an abusive bastard for two decades. Spoiler Alert: Yr Wonkette is rooting for bland but tolerable Murphy in the August 30 primary
14/ I hope beyond hope this story comes true, and that Big Sugar gets nailed at last for it's crimes against our environment.....
Big Sugar Has A Political Problem In Florida, For First Time ... by gimleteye
Big Sugar has operated as a shadow government in Florida for decades, using the heavily protected sugar subsidy in the Farm Bill to buy off incumbents and candidates for public office. The formula has worked extraordinarily well. Legislatures protect Big Sugar's domination of the water supply infrastructure in Florida in return for campaign cash and predictable employment as lobbyists or in the Big Sugar supply chain once they leave office.
For the first time, this election cycle Big Sugar oligarchs like the Fanjul family and descendants of Charles Stewart Mott, owners of US Sugar Corporation, face political uncertainty in Florida. The trigger for its Florida problem began with massive winter rains -- unprecedented -- that exposed the deep flaws in the state's flood control infrastructure supervised by political appointees of the Rick Scott administration at the state's taxing authority; the South Florida Water Management District.
In essence, the huge property tax base on Florida's east and west coasts is being held hostage to pollution caused by policies that favor a single industry: Big Sugar. Put even more simply, taxpayers, residents and visitors supporting Florida's tourism based industries, that depend on clean water, were sacrificed to keep Big Sugar's fields dry. Sugarcane would not be grown in Florida but for corporate welfare cemented into the Farm Bill ("Cronyism in its undiluted, inexcusable majesty", is how GOP leader Grover Norquist describes the sugar subsidy).
For the first time, this election cycle Big Sugar oligarchs like the Fanjul family and descendants of Charles Stewart Mott, owners of US Sugar Corporation, face political uncertainty in Florida. The trigger for its Florida problem began with massive winter rains -- unprecedented -- that exposed the deep flaws in the state's flood control infrastructure supervised by political appointees of the Rick Scott administration at the state's taxing authority; the South Florida Water Management District.
In essence, the huge property tax base on Florida's east and west coasts is being held hostage to pollution caused by policies that favor a single industry: Big Sugar. Put even more simply, taxpayers, residents and visitors supporting Florida's tourism based industries, that depend on clean water, were sacrificed to keep Big Sugar's fields dry. Sugarcane would not be grown in Florida but for corporate welfare cemented into the Farm Bill ("Cronyism in its undiluted, inexcusable majesty", is how GOP leader Grover Norquist describes the sugar subsidy).
15/ We still have some vestiges of journalism left in Florida.....a Miami Herald story on Rick Scott and the natural gas pipeline they are sneaking through our watershed.....
Our Governor is an unspeakably evil corrupt bastard....
Lawyers for a company that wants to build a natural gas pipeline in North Florida have told a judge that environmental opponents should be blocked from “presenting evidence or argument” about Gov. Rick Scott’s financial interest in the company.
“Such evidence is irrelevant and the admission of which would be unfairly prejudicial,” attorneys for Sabal Trail Transmission, LLC told Administrative Law Judge Bram D.E. Canter in last week’s filing.
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which is backing the $3 billion Sabal Trail pipeline, filed a similar argument earlier this month when it called the “allegation regarding a conflict of interest … not material to this proceeding.”
Sabal Trail is a joint venture of Spectra Energy Partners and Florida Power & Light parent NextEra Energy. Spectra Energy’s investors have included Scott.
The nonprofit WWALS Watershed Coalition filed for an administrative hearing on Sept. 3 after state regulators said they intended to award Sabal Trail both a permit and rights to drill under riverbeds in order to build the 267-mile stretch of 36-inch underground pipeline in Florida. The nonprofit has asked the judge to deny the permit.
Among the documents WWALS has asked the DEP to produce are all communications from Scott or his executive office about the Sabal Trail project since the governor took office.
16/ Movie - "Hell or High Water" - looks like a good one....
As Hollywood has expanded its global audience, one of the side effects has been a weakening of regional and cultural specificity in mass-market films. Because the biggest Hollywood productions must now play everywhere and appeal to everyone, they are limited in their ability to depict any particular place, person, or time.
But Hell or High Water serves as a welcome antidote to Hollywood’s global dislocation. A moving and elegiac crime picture set on the West Texas border after the recession, it consists almost entirely of regional and cultural specifics. It’s a portrait of economic desperation rooted in a specific place and a specific time that also happens to be a thrilling heist film.
Todays video [and music video too] - Day-O from the movie Beetlejuice.....keep an eye on the shrimp bowls!
Todays psychiatric joke
Therapist - what's the problem?
Wife - he replaces words with animal names just to annoy me.
Husband - I don't do it on porpoise!
Todays terrible Minnesota joke
Ole is a farmer in Minnesota. He needs a new milk cow and hears about one for sale over in Nordakota. (That would be North Dakota for you non-Scandahoovians out der).He drives to Nordakota, finds the farm and looks at the cow. He reaches under to see if she gives milk. When he grabs the tit and pulls...the cow farts.Ole is surprised. He looks at the farmer selling the cow, then reaches under the cow to try again. He grabs another tit, pulls, and the cow farts again.Milk does come out however, so after some discussion, Ole buys the cow and takes her home.He gets back to Minnesota, he calls over his neighbor Sven, and says, 'Sven, come look at dis ere new cow I yust bought. Pull her tit, and see vat happens.'Sven reaches under, pulls the tits - and the cow farts.Sven looks at Ole, 'You bought dis here cow in Nordakota, didn't yah?'Ole is surprised since he hadn't told Sven about his trip.Ole replies, 'Yah, dats right. But how'd yah know?'Sven says, 'My wife's from Nordakota.'
Todays slutty joke
Todays Star Wars joke
Therapist - so why do you want to end your marriage?
Wife - I hate the constant Star Wars puns.
Husband - Divorce is strong with this one.....
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