November 5, 2010 archive

UPDATE! HE’S BACK !!! BREAKING NEWS! Keith Olbermann has been suspended indefinitely by MSNBC!

(Note new comments at bottom!)

This is INCREDIBLE, Olbermann has just been suspended for having made three individual donations (Grijalva, Senate hopeful Conway and Arizona Reps. Giffords and Grijalva), in the maximum amount of $2,400.

“I became aware of Keith’s political contributions late last night,” MSNBC President Phil Griffin said in a statement. “Mindful of NBC News policy and standards, I have suspended him indefinitely without pay.”

Olbermann, in a statement to Politico, said that he “did not privately or publicly encourage anyone else to donate to these campaigns nor to any others in this election or any previous ones.” Also, Olbermann said he had not “previously donated to any political campaign at any level.”

But the revelation raised clear ethical issues.

. . . .It’s ironic that Olbermann gave to political candidates after criticizing Fox News because its owner, Rupert Murdoch, gave $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association. “Fox News has put its money where its mouth is,” Olbermann said in an August segment that questioned the network’s impartiality.

In October, Olbermann again raised the issue of Murdoch’s donations, during an interview with Democratic Rep. James Clyburn. Olbermann asked whether there was “a legislative response to the idea that there is a national cable news outlet that goes beyond having a point of view and actually starts to shill for partisan causes and actually starts to donate to partisan groups of one party.”  

In the land of the ABSURD!!!!

Bold Progressives has a Petition to get Keith back on the air pronto!! Let’s get him back on the air!



                              (click on logo)

 

Back to Square One

Now we can clearly see why “Later” is not a viable strategy when it comes to people gaining equal rights.

When a segment of society, no matter how small, doesn’t have equal rights, there is never going to be a “better time” to work towards their equality.  Justice delayed is justice denied.

This is not rocket science.  It is a matter of ethics and morality.

And it certainly doesn’t demand being called a “selfish prig”, as I was yesterday, for wanting those equal rights.

I have to ask which of the rights enumerated after the break you would be willing to surrender so as to not also be a selfish prig.

“Open” Enrollment Time

So I was drafted by virtual of my business degree to decipher the encrypted crap which is my son’s WalMart medical benefit “selection” options.  Wonderful shit like for a mere 13.80 per bi-weekly pay period the company will put an expensive administration between you and your doctor bills.

Oh, how pissa.  I can use “pre-tax” dollars to “save” for that massive sum of $500 with and “HSA” or an “HRA”.  Note the Orwellianspeak here, Health Savings Account/Health Reimbursement Account.  Putting an expensive administration between you and your doctor.  More important here is the building of Satanic “infrastructures” not even remotely addressed by the now unheard of massive health care reform bill.

Do employers discriminate based on your refusal to answer the race questions on the affirmative action questionaire?  Inquiring minds want to know.

I do recall open enrollment featuring five HMOs complete with books the size of small community telephone directories listing doctors, hospitals and coverages.  Not no more.  If you happen to still have a job you get a two page copy of who to bitch to once the bills start showing up.

The Mid-Term Morons of Daily Kos

You fucking morons!

First it was Obama, the Progressive Hero!

Then it was Obama, the 13-Dimensional Chess-Politician!

And month after month after month you were nothing but brain-dead cheerleaders for that stinking con-man.

On the basis of what?

On the basis of nothing but ridiculous blather that anybody with the brains of a flea could see through in one second.

Weren’t you supposed to be “the reality-based community?”

But you were nothing but a mob of TV-intoxicated morons.

“Behold the charisma of Barack Obama!”

So you shit-eating thugs ganged up and banned anybody who didn’t drink the fucking Koolaid, and erased every comment that questioned your shit-head Messiah.

And now what?

We can all look forward to year after year of paralysis, while thousands species are wiped off the face of the earth and millions of Americans lose their jobs and houses and sink into total destitution, and Obama’s goddamned surge in Afghanistan destroys the lives of thousands of Afghan civilians and makes us hundreds of thousands of new blood-enemies, and citizens of every nation in Southwest Asia are tortured at Bagram, while Obama sucks ass for the banks.

So thanks for everything, you ass-sucking thugs and morons!

Open Julep

Photobucket

SCOTUS hears cases that may kill Establishment Clause lawsuits and make way for theocracy

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday on two cases that have the potential to further ease the way for theocracy in the United States.

At stake is whether or not citizens can sue when tax credits are used to fund religious education and whether or not taxpayers have the right to sue to stop it. “The Obama administration says taxpayers have no right to sue if a state uses tax funds for parochial school tuitions,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

The ‘ability to sue over church-state claims at stake‘, The Associated Baptist Press reports. A 5-4 conservative Roberts Court decision “has the potential to change the way the law handles cases dealing with government endorsement of religion.”

If the court sides with the state, one consequence could be a significant reduction in taxpayers’ ability to sue governments over violations of the First Amendment clause that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

SCOTUS hears cases that may kill Establishment Clause lawsuits

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday on two cases that have the potential to further ease the way for theocracy in the United States.

At stake is whether or not citizens can sue when tax credits are used to fund religious education and whether or not taxpayers can the right to sue to stop it. “The Obama administration says taxpayers have no right to sue if a state uses tax funds for parochial school tuitions,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

The ‘ability to sue over church-state claims at stake‘, The Associated Baptist Press reports. A 5-4 conservative Roberts Court decision “has the potential to change the way the law handles cases dealing with government endorsement of religion.”

If the court sides with the state, one consequence could be a significant reduction in taxpayers’ ability to sue governments over violations of the First Amendment clause that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

SCOTUS may kill Establishment Clause lawsuits and make way for theocracy

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday on two cases that have the potential to further ease the way for theocracy in the United States.

At stake is whether or not citizens can sue when tax credits are used to fund religious education and whether or not taxpayers can the right to sue to stop it. “The Obama administration says taxpayers have no right to sue if a state uses tax funds for parochial school tuitions,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

The ‘ability to sue over church-state claims at stake‘, The Associated Baptist Press reports. A 5-4 conservative Roberts Court decision “has the potential to change the way the law handles cases dealing with government endorsement of religion.”

If the court sides with the state, one consequence could be a significant reduction in taxpayers’ ability to sue governments over violations of the First Amendment clause that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

SCOTUS hears cases that may kill Establishment Clause lawsuits and make way for theocracy

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday on two cases that have the potential to further ease the way for theocracy in the United States.

At stake is whether or not citizens can sue when tax credits are used to fund religious education and whether or not taxpayers can the right to sue to stop it. “The Obama administration says taxpayers have no right to sue if a state uses tax funds for parochial school tuitions,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

The ‘ability to sue over church-state claims at stake‘, The Associated Baptist Press reports. A 5-4 conservative Roberts Court decision “has the potential to change the way the law handles cases dealing with government endorsement of religion.”

If the court sides with the state, one consequence could be a significant reduction in taxpayers’ ability to sue governments over violations of the First Amendment clause that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Jobs Report for October, 2010

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has issued its monthly jobs report for October, and payrolls increased by 151,000 jobs while the main unemployment index was unchanged at 9.6%.

The index of unemployment remained the same while payrolls increased because the population of the United States also increased, and about the same number of new faces appeared in the labor market as the increase in payrolls.

Jobs

So the “civilian non-institutional population” increased (in thousands) by 208,000 from 238,322 to 238,530, about what was expected, but…

The “civilian labor force” declined by 254,000 from 154,158 to 153,904, and that isn’t quite as easy to understand.

Likewise the “participation rate” of civilians in the civilian labor force has declined from 64.9% to 64.5% in the last year, from October 2009 to October 2010, and that four tenths of one percent decline on a base of about 238 million people means that about a million Americans are essentially nowhere in the usual measures of unemployment, neither employed or unemployed.

But they exist, and they don’t have jobs.  

Congressional Progressive Caucus Increases Plurality in Next Congress

As David Swanson noted on Wednesday:

You may have heard that our center-right nation got enthusiastic, formed a grassroots movement called a tea party, and overwhelmingly voted in a more rightwing party, sending hordes of nasty socialists packing as a result of their overly progressive performance, meaning gridlock between the righteous Congress and the infidel president for the next two years. There are some problems with this story, beginning with the fact that it’s completely false.

[snip]

As Karen Dolan blogged about immediately after Tuesday’s elections, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — over 80 members — lost only 3 seats. The Cut-Spending-Except-For-Killing Blue Dogs had 54 members and lost 26 of them, and those 26 were their true believers. Congress members, including one or two real progressives, didn’t lose by being progressive but by being Democrats. Alan Grayson was defeated by the largest investment of corporate money in any House race, but the obedient corporatist Democrat in the next district over lost too. And this was despite the Democratic Party funding and supporting the Blue Dogs, leaving the progressives to raise their own money.

Tea Party candidates, in contrast to progressives, did not have a successful day on Tuesday. Their nominees’ craziness cost the Republican Party control of the Senate. Yet the whole corporate-funded smoke-and-mirrors “movement” of the Tea Party pushed the Republican Party as a whole to the right, in a way that no well-funded institution has pushed the Democrats to the left or even tried to. And this is the key lesson: pushing the Democrats to the left would save them from themselves.

On Thursday Amy Goodman at Democracy Now spoke with CPC Co-Chair Raul Grijalva about the CPC not only holding it’s own with a loss of only 4 seats in the mid terms, but coming out of the elections holding the relative largest plurality of all groups in Congress.

The Democrats lost the majority in the US House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections, but what is the makeup of the new Democratic House caucus? The conservative Blue Dogs lost half their members, while the Progressive Caucus remains near eighty. We speak to its co-chair, Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who appears to have retained his seat in a close election in Arizona’s 7th Congressional District. Over the past year, Grijalva has received numerous threats, including having a suspicious package covered in swastikas sent to his office and having a bullet shot through his district office in Yuma, Arizona.



Democracy Now – November 04, 2010

about 10 minutes

..transcript follows..

Obama Visits Mumbai

I’ll take a break from lambasting President Obama to salute the fact that he’s visiting India and, in particular, my (thus far) favorite Indian city (of the very large type), Mumbai.

Over at my own, just-for-fun blog, LetsJapan.Wordpress.Com, I’ve posted a new front page piece titled “Obama Visits Mumbai,” in particular some photos, micro-vids and reminiscences from Mumbai.  I will be updating and adding to this piece — more history, more photos, more personal stories — over the next 24 hours, so I hope you’ll visit and come back several times over the next day or two.

 

  A Mu photo:  Mumbai’s Financial District, February 2007.

.

Excerpt:

Mumbai — formerly “Bombay” — is an energetic, crowded, verdant, upbeat (and sometimes odiferous)  city.  Mumbai offers its residents and visitors both modern restaurants and side street food kiosks, lingering colonial trappings and 21st Century Indian pride, bustling intersections and quiet parks, Hindu Temples, Mosques, Churches and Parsi Agiaries (fire temples for the now-dwindling population of Zoroastrians).  Situated on the Southwest coast of India, looking out on the Arabian Sea, it’s home to almost 14 million people.  Since 2006 I’ve been fortunate to have visited Mumbai four times, though I haven’t been there since 2008.  I’ve stayed at the Taj Mahal hotel.  It was built in 1903 and is the crown jewel of the extremely unique architectural style known as “Bombay Gothic,” a mixture of late-Victorian, early Edwardian, Rajastani forms, and even some Hindu Temple cues.  One story, perhaps apocryphal, goes that its builder, Jamsetji Tata, was denied entrance into “whites only” British hotels of the day, so he just up and decided to build his own, a more beautiful and luxurious “palace” than any in old Bombay….

.

 Again, updates and additions to come over the next 24 hours.

 Have you visited Mumbai, yet?  Have you visited India?  What are your impressions, but from a personal or “macro” perspective?  I’d love to read about that here.

.

 

Load more