They claim 17% of US has had affairs. Sounds low. 58% of Turks have. Wow.
Love is a battlefield.
Saturday, December 04, 2010
Bernie Sanders Is A Man
Senator Bernie Sanders is a man!
Powerful speech. The greed of American billionaires knows no end and the Middle Class is engaged in a war it is losing.
Elephants in the Room
there’s an MSM take on Republicans that strengthens the GOP: namely, that no matter what the party does, it’s a legitimate party interested in governance. It’s one of our major political institutions — it can’t ever be talked about as if it’s gone off the rails, as if it’s thuggish and deliberately acting in opposition to the national interest. Major political parties just don’t do that with malice aforethought.
Think about laundry detergents — all those well-established brands made for years by well-established companies. Now imagine that there was a change of formula that meant one of them — Tide or All or Wisk or Cheer or Gain or Fresh Start or whatever — was suddenly made with illegally massive doses of carcinogens. Imagine that this wasn’t a secret — it was openly available information — but it was never reported, simply because, well, Procter & Gamble and Sun Products and Unilever and the rest are fine, upstanding, well-established companies, so it’s just unthinkable that one of them would be selling dangerous products in the supermarket, blatantly and unashamedly.
That’s where we are with the GOP. The MSM simply can’t adjust its image of this venerable party. This venerable party can’t have become a radical cult.
-Steve M at no more mister nice blog
(Source: tennroof)
It’s all about the MSM propagating false equivalences. Republican ignorance does not equal Democrat pragmatism.
Friday, December 03, 2010
Louis C.K. Had Some Alcohol, Went On A Sarah Palin-Based Twitter Rant
What happens when you take a funny person, give ‘em a little bit of alcohol and a platform to say some things to adoring fans? You get Louis C.K. and his sheer awesomeness.
Yesterday started off normal enough, then we decided to start reading Louis’ updates on his Twitter he confessed he might have been on a plane, and he might have been a bit intoxicated. C.K. then went on a rant about how he doesn’t hold much compassion for Sarah Palin, even going as far as questioning whether or not she knows or ever met a minority. Thanks to the power of the internet, he asked his fans to confirm his very scientific theory that Palin might never have met a black person.
The hilarity went down this way.
Louis CK v Palin. Can't wait to hear Dennis Miller chime in from 1992.
On Fox Tonigh: "The Resentment News"
On Fox, the news exists in order to generate controversy. And controversy exists in order to generate resentment. And the resentment is what generates ratings. So this is my most concise idea about Fox: we should consider it “resentment news.” I think that’s the genre in which it trades…Jay Rosen, “Resentment News (and More Blondes Per Square Foot): Explaining What Fox News Channel Is”
Predetermined narratives for the willfully ignorant.
Beck v. Assange, or Fiction over Fact
Glenn Beck and Julian Assange represent two options for the American state of mind. Beck is a charlatan who preaches an alternate reality that affirms the untested, ahistorical and prejudicial assumptions and feelings of millions of Americans.
These are voting citizens who know little of what lies beyond their neighborhoods, but know absolutely how they feel. Beck tells them that their feelings really do correspond to the state of the world and so they avidly, loyally, listen to him.
We all like to be told that we are right. That makes Glenn Beck a source of ego re-enforcement for a significant segment of the population.
Julian Assange is a real truth-teller who shatters assumptions, calls into question feelings, and would force us all to look at the historically objective information that best represents how things are. What Assange is doing makes no one comfortable and reinforces nobody’s ego. He stands up and speaks truth to power but, as Noam Chomsky once pointed out, power already knows the truth.
If power bothers about the truth at all, it is to keep it largely secret. To do so it seeks the real truth-teller’s destruction while leaving the charlatan free to play the Pied Piper with impunity.
This does not bode well for the future of America and perhaps the West at large. Too many Americans, and their leaders as well, haven’t got an accurate sense of the real world. In part, that is why the U.S. government regularly formulates domestic and foreign policies that answer the demands of interest groups while harming the rest of us.Such policies fail in the long run. In doing so they open political space for both charlatans and truth-tellers. And here they are in the persons of Glenn Beck and Julian Assange. Now America can choose.
via azspot.net
I know who I'm choosing.
Thursday, December 02, 2010
The Full Flop
Politifact notes John McCain's total reversal from his previous, oft-stated position on DADT. How much bitter can be compressed into one soul before it implodes?
Republicans can do exactly the opposite of what they say. Their base has been "identity politic'd" to the point of dementia.
Witness the GOP Deficit Hawks pushing to add $700 billion to the deficit.
Untitled
Dick Cheney’s "Death Pool" odds just skyrocketed.
Have you seen this recent picture? Looking more and more like his moral twin, Monty Burns.
The Free Markets Sucked: Let's End This Spin That They Work
Under orders from Congress, the Fed on Wednesday released details of more than 21,000 transactions under the array of emergency lending programs and other arrangements it conjured up in response to the crisis.
The disclosures, which the Fed had resisted, offer the most detailed portrait of a panicky period in which the Fed lent money to banks, brokers, businesses and investors to keep the financial system functioning.
The documents show that some of the biggest names in American business were either coming to the Fed in need of a bailout, or trying to make money at a time when the Fed was trying to entice investors back into the markets. Among the latter were prominent investors and entrepreneurs like John A. Paulson and Michael S. Dell, and the pension funds of the Philadelphia Teamsters and Omaha’s teachers, who were betting they could profit if the rescue worked.
via nytimes.com
"At its peak at the end of 2008, the Fed had about $1.5 trillion in outstanding credit on its books. The central bank, in essence, pumped liquidity, the lifeblood of credit markets, into the circulatory system of an economy that was experiencing a potentially fatal heart attack." - NYT
Sen. Bernie Sanders [I-VT] concluded: “After years of stonewalling by the Fed, the American people are finally learning the incredible and jaw-dropping details of the Fed’s multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and corporate America,” he said. “Perhaps most surprising is the huge sum that went to bail out foreign private banks and corporations.”
Top Ten Middle East Wikileaks Revelations so Far
1. The British government’s official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government’s pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of it.
2. Afghan President Hamid Karzai routinely pardons drug dealers and corrupt officials.
3. Karzai’s brother, Ahmad Wali, is called a corrupt drug dealer. He is chief of the provincial council of Qandahar and said to be more powerful than the province’s governor. A US official wrote, “While we must deal with AWK as the head of the Provincial Council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker. End Note.”
4. The Boston Globe reports of Senator John Kerry that he urged the return of the Golan Heights to Syria in return for peace: “In the meeting last February with the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Kerry said Syria should be involved simultaneously in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, saying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “needs to compromise and work the return of the Golan Heights into a formula for peace,’’ according to the summary of Kerry’s remarks.”
5. Israeli General admits that Israel’s narrow focus on its qualitative military edge often conflicts with the global interests of the United States.
6. Former US-appointed interim prime minister of Iraq in 2004-early 2005, Iyad Allawi, is Alleged to have urged a US attack on Iran. He denies the report.
7. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told the US to forget about democracy in Iraq and instead install a dictator (“the Iraqis are too tough.”) He also warned the US to stay in Iraq militarily, asserting that otherwise the Iranians would take over the country. Mubarak had vigorously opposed the US march to war against Iraq in 2002-2003.
8.The Israelis wanted military dictator Pervez Musharraf to remain in power.
9. Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the current Pakistani chief of staff, allegedly considered making a coup in spring, 2009, when Nawaz Sharif was leading a popular movement in the streets to demand the reinstatement of the dismissed supreme court chief justice. Kayani considered moving against President Asaf Ali Zardari in case his weakness might allow Nawaz to return to power.
10. Aside from that occasion, Kayani, is said to have learned from dictator Gen. Musharraf not to try to rule directly. He is adept at staying behind the scenes but using other institutions to protect the interests of the military. He succeeded in foiling an American plan to put civilian politicians in control of the military. (Obviously, this French assessment of Kayani was made before, or in ignorance of, his having toyed with a coup in spring 2009).
via juancole.com
Is #1 really a revelation?
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Trending Demographics vs The Southern Strategy
"The Civil War was scarcely more than 150 years ago. It’s yesterday. Race in American hasn’t been sorted out. This used to be a country that was run exclusively by white guys in suits. It’s not going to be a country that’s run exclusively by white guys in suits, and that doesn’t have anything to do with politics, it’s just demographics. That makes some people very uncomfortable.
The tea party is like the GOP’s Southern strategy coming back to exact the real cost of that strategy."
William GibsonSource: AZspot
Watch how all these GOP deficit hawks push to expand the deficit. Business as usual. They repeat the same economic mistakes, year after year. The only thing that keeps these failures in office is melanin. Or lack there of.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
White Collar Indifference
America has a rage problem. We focus on the little guy as the big guy steals the shop bare.
Monday, November 29, 2010
The Men Who Stole the World
In 1999 a Northeastern University freshman named Shawn Fanning wrote Napster, thereby pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing and a new paradigm for consuming media without the intermediary of a big studio or retailer. TIME put him on its cover, as did FORTUNE. He was 19 years old.
That same year, a Norwegian teenager named Jon Lech Johansen, working with two other programmers whose identities are still unknown, wrote a program that could decrypt commercial DVDs, and he became internationally infamous as "DVD Jon." He was 15.
In 1997, Justin Frankel, an 18-year-old hacker in Sedona, Ariz., wrote a free MP3 player called WinAmp, which became a fixture on Windows machines and helped mainstream the digital-music revolution. During its first 18 months in release, 15 million people downloaded it. Three years later, Frankel wrote Gnutella, a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol so decentralized that, unlike Napster, it could not be shut down. Millions of people still use it.
In 2001, Bram Cohen, then 26, wrote a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol called BitTorrent that featured an elegant new architecture optimized for handling large files. BitTorrent has become the standard for distributing big chunks of data over the Internet.
In the first half of the 2000s, TIME interviewed each of these programmers. At the time, it looked as if they were poised to dismantle the entire media-entertainment complex and bring about a digital apocalypse that would make it impossible to charge money for movies, music or TV ever again. Artists would no longer get paid for their work, and the huge entertainment conglomerates, Time Warner among them, would be bombed flat. The pirates were coming for corporate America.
"After all," we wrote in 2003, "you can't have an information economy in which all information is free." And if the apocalypse was coming, Fanning, Johansen, Frankel and Cohen were the four horsemen.
via time.com
Four men, not one of whom finished college, laid the foundations for much of the digital-media environment we currently inhabit. Then, for all intents and purposes, they vanished.
271 Picasso Paintings Discovered In Paris
via telegraph.co.uk
As a retired odd job man and electrician, Pierre Le Guennec is the unlikeliest of art collectors to be discovered with a haul of 271 unknown works by Picasso.
Mr Le Guennec claims that he was given the collection by the artist when he carried out odd jobs for him at his Côte d’Azur home 40 years ago.
However, Picasso’s son, Claude, suspects that the works were stolen.
The cache of sketches and paintings are worth £50m
Hitchens vs Blair
It was a debate on religion in Toronto. I remain in awe of Hitch's energy. A BBC summary of the debate can be listened to here. The videos continue here: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8.
And here is Hitch again on the subject of the Washington novel. In chemotherapy at 61, he has the tenacity of most healthy people in their twenties.
Republican BS
via azspot.net
The Republicans are always harkening back to the America they loved growing up. The "Real America" of the 1950s. They never seem to remember the facts about what that time was like.
They like the white privilege part, gloss over the rest.
We had strong growth in those years because we invested back into America through the taxes collected. We stressed infrastructure and education. Unions fought for the little guy.
Why can't the Republicans remember that? They are willfully dishonest and morally derelict.
Report: US Says Saudi Donors Finance al Qaeda
via rawstory.com
File under "no shit": A quick aside in a New York Times article about leaked diplomatic cables is sure to spark renewed interest about the role of the US' biggest ally in the Gulf supporting terrorism.
In their wide-ranging précis of the leaked cables, Times reporters Scott Shane and Andrew Lehren mention in passing a key detail from one of the diplomatic dispatches: "Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda."Saudi Arabia is 100% Sunni. Saudi Wahhabi extremism is exported all over the Muslim world. Saudis are fond of beheadings [Nick Berg].
All these facts were known and the US did nothing. Not saying it was all Bush, but his administration did not seem to care that Bin Laden and most of his hi-jackers were Saudis as he invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
Judicial Activism Gave Bush The Presidency
On the tenth anniversary of Bush v. Gore, Jeffrey Toobin looks at the Supreme Court case that “damaged the Court’s honor”:
“What made the decision in Bush v. Gore so startling was that it was the work of Justices who were considered, to greater or lesser extents, judicial conservatives. On many occasions, these Justices had said that they believed in the preëminence of states’ rights, in a narrow conception of the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and, above all, in judicial restraint. Bush v. Gore violated those principles. The Supreme Court stepped into the case even though the Florida Supreme Court had been interpreting Florida law; the majority found a violation of the rights of George W. Bush, a white man, to equal protection when these same Justices were becoming ever more stingy in finding violations of the rights of African-Americans; and the Court stopped the recount even before it was completed, and before the Florida courts had a chance to iron out any problems—a classic example of judicial activism, not judicial restraint, by the majority.”
Toobin will be talking with readers about the case and the Court at 3 PM ET. Join him.
For all the Right Wingers who decry judicial activism, you are the biggest perpetrators and beneficiaries of it. STFU.
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