SubscribeDecember 26th, 2011
Gingrich howler
Leading Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has failed to meet the requirements to be in the presidential primary election in Virginia, where he resides, the state’s Republican Party said.
That’s funny enough as it stands but the article goes on. I guess he didn’t organize his campaign well enough to meet the basic legal obligations to get himself into the primary.
After Gingrich staged two campaign events in the state last week, his campaign had been confident that he had made the ballot even as his last-minute scramble raised concerns about Gingrich’s abilities to run a national campaign.
It’s that last bit that had me howling with laughter. “Concerns about Gingrich’s abilities to run a national campaign”? How about his abilities to run a frakking country?
Still sniggering.
December 15th, 2011
Mitt Romney supports a return of legal ban on interracial marriages citing the Constitution as his source.
Well, not exactly, but…
time/1:55_”I think at the time of the Constitution was written it was pretty clear that marriage was between a man and a woman and I don’t believe the Supreme Court has changed that.”
Really? You’re going with that Mitt? Really? So you’ll be OK with it if the Supreme Court rules that a ban on marriage between two persons of the same gender/sex is unconstitutional?
The Constitution was adopted in 1787. The Bill of Rights came into effect as Constitutional Amendments in 1791. These “rights” excluded African American persons and all women. There was a long history of the framers’ of the constitution having limited ideas about human rights. The fist law criminalizing marriage between white persons and indentured or enslaved mulatto or black persons came into effect in 1664 (Maryland). Virginia has the distinction of broadening that ban to include marriage between free blacks and whites (1691). The Supreme Court didn’t rule that garbage as unconstitutional until 1967.
What I’d like to know is if the Supreme Court hadn’t made that declaration in 1967 would Mr Romney be unable to see that such a ban on interracial marriage is unjust? In that circumstance, would he support a clause in the marriage act that defines marriage as between a man and a woman of the same race?
Because that’s what his logic would lead me to believe.
And if not, then all he really objects to with the idea of a marriage between two persons of the same sex is that the Supreme Court hasn’t yet spoken up and said that it’s OK? Well that’s easy – we just need the gay case equivalent of Loving v. Virginia! He’ll stand behind that right?
December 9th, 2011
oh I so hope this is true
Visit Generation WE and see what you think.
Also known as the millenials, this generation will inherit what we’ve done here. Just as I inherited what my parents did. Bleh.
Still, that is what is. What I would love to know is how the linking possibilities of the internet will change the perceptions of those that will start controlling things in the very near future. TV and broadcast media more or less established the mind set of my generation. TV, ads, movies – all the concentration on war, disaster, false images of love and piety, that’s what was aimed at my mind. But today it’s youtube, reddit, politics through humour tv, online education is blooming. So we now get all kinds of different things aimed at our heads – and unlike previous media, we have far, far more control and are the producers of those images and text – and we only watch the ads we want to 
It’s that control, the channel-less structure of the net, the peer-to-peer knowledge sharing methodologies – that’s going to translate to life/political/economic ways of doing things – just like the cold war translated to political standoffs in the current ruling parties in the US and other places.
In some really important ways, art doesn’t imitate life, it becomes life.
December 8th, 2011
want to push mad-hatter presidential candidates even further out into right-field?
send a little bit of money ($6) to one of the Dem candidates running for the Senate or Congress. Elizabeth Warren would be a good choice to show your displeasure of unregulated Wall Street sanctioned thieves.
December 4th, 2011
vanity and skill
About Cain’s run and then withdrawal:
The answer is simple: his astonishing narcissism. Now, all politicians are arrogant to one degree or another. And to seek the presidency, you pretty much have to be. Newt Gingrich is a megalomaniac who truly thinks on some level that he is Lincoln and Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt rolled into one—and America is doomed unless it elects him. Mitt Romney walks with the casual superiority of a man who’s made a quarter of a billion dollars. Rick Perry has that Texas swagger (and not much else). And it certainly took some stones for a certain senator with just two years in office under his belt to decide in 2006 that he was ready to be president.
Vanity can be all right—for this job, it’s a requirement. But the crucial point is that it has to be matched with something else. Credible and successful candidates for president are those who are able to marry their hyperinflated images of themselves to a vision of what the country needs. Putting aside how well or poorly he’s performed since taking office, Obama got this exactly right in 2008: a clear majority of voters agreed that he was the best person to lead the country in a very different direction. They liked the story he told about himself; they liked even more the story he told about America.
What this year’s candidates completely lack is a story about society that’s remotely compelling to anyone outside the conservative base. Inside that base, it can be controversial even to acknowledge that something called society exists, since it implies paying for common goods. Of the lot of them, only Gingrich is really capable of thinking big thoughts, but many of his ideas about society—this recent notion that children should be janitors because child labor laws are “truly stupid”—are mad. So we’re stuck with advertisements for themselves. And off to stage left, the president, despite his wobbly approval ratings, is smiling.
I particularly like the middle paragraph. Political and economic skill, some actual (evidential) knowledge (not the mythological kind) of our shared (human and otherwise) world, a talent for getting along with those different from one’s self, the ability to compromise, some basic integrity—those would be nice as well as a politician’s ego. Could we make these entrance requirements for presidential races do you think?
December 2nd, 2011
frakking awesome – US medical care on the way to humane?
In Obama’s Affordable Care Act there is a provision called the “medical loss ratio”. Forbes Magazine published a piece recently on the first test of the MLR.
That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.
Can you imagine how distressing it might be to a for-profit insurer to actually have to spend the money we pay on us? Gawd!
Today, the Department of Health & Human Services issues the rules of what insurer expenditures will—and will not—qualify as a medical expense for purposes of meeting the requirement.
As it turns out, HHS isn’t screwing around. They actually mean to see to it that the insurance companies spend what they should taking care of their customers.
How?
HHS has, today, given them the official thumbs down, as well they should have. Selling me a health insurance policy is simply not the same as providing me with the medical care I am entitled to under the policy. Sales is clearly an overhead cost in any business and had HHS included this as a medical cost, it would have signaled that they are not at all serious about enforcing the concept of the medical loss ratio.
Cackle.
The consequence?
…we are already seeing the parent companies who own these insurance operations fleeing into other types of investments. They know what we should all know – we are now on an inescapable path to a single-payer system for most Americans and thank goodness for it.
Go Obama!
Now all he has to do is convince the police force that US citizens actually do have the right to take their pictures and not go to jail for 75 years for standing up for themselves. No prob.
November 28th, 2011
hilarious!
Instead of getting an apology, it was Republican Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas who had to apologize. Brownback said his office “overreacted” and shouldn’t have asked 18-year-old high-school student Emma Sullivan to say sorry for tweeting a disparaging comment. Last week Sullivan tweeted: “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.” She admitted that she didn’t make that comment and that the tweet was a joke. But when her principal demanded she write an apology to Brownback, she refused. She had more than 10,000 followers as of Monday afternoon (@emmakate988), more than triple that of Brownback (@govsambrownback).
She should run. Couldn’t do a worse job I expect. Maybe she can bring the Pirate Party to the US! And I wonder, does that school principal of hers ban the part of civics class that talks about freedom of speech?
November 28th, 2011
pepper spray customer reviews
I follow Lilian Nattel on twitter and this morning she tweeted “Newest on Pepper Spray meme, read the customer reviews ecop police supply on amazon”
So I did.
Oh my. I so frakkin love the internet. Made my day it did.
Accept no substitutes when casually repressing students, November 21, 2011
Product Warnng: This procuct multiplies protesters, November 22, 2011
Wholly unsuitable for eating, November 22, 2011
November 26th, 2011
civil war in the US, again?
There’s a disturbing article by Naomi Wolf over at the Guardian. In it she speaks about the OWS / police “relationship” as the beginnings of a civil war.
So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.
Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.
What are those dots? Read the article, but one of them is this:
Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on “how to suppress” Occupy protests.
If that’s true, as long as Homeland Security exists, democracy is a failure.
November 20th, 2011
hilarious OWS news
‘Occupy’ Stages 24-Hour Drum Circle
Beware of what you ask for. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted Occupy Wall Street protesters out of Zuccotti Park, so he kicked them out on Monday. But now that the movement has lost its original home, where should they go? How about right outside Bloomberg’s home on East 79th Street, bringing their drums and didgeridoos in all their head-bursting glory? A 24-hour-long drum circle will begin Sunday at 2 p.m. Let’s see how much of a music lover Bloomberg is.
Wonderful – take it to the frakkin door.