Author's posts
Oct 01 2010
Hat Tip To Jeralyn Merritt
for the quote of the new century…
Rahm Emanuel Leaving White House Friday
TalkLeft, September 30, 2010
Tomorrow is Rahm Emanuel’s last day at the White House. He’s returning to Chicago to run for Mayor. Too bad for Chicago.
Sep 30 2010
R.I.P. Tony Curtis
Actor Tony Curtis dies at Las Vegas-area home
AP, September 30, 2010
The Oscar-nominated actor died Wednesday evening of cardiac arrest at home in the Las Vegas-area city of Henderson, Clark County Coroner Mike Murphy said Thursday. He was 85.
“He died peacefully here, surrounded by those who love him and have been caring for him,” his wife, Jill Curtis, told The Associated Press outside their home. “All Tony ever wanted to be was a movie star. He didn’t want to be the most dramatic actor. He wanted to be a movie star, ever since he was a little kid.”
Sep 29 2010
Sport Shooting
AssociatedPress | 28 September 2010 – Five U.S. soldiers are facing murder charges, describing a plot to randomly kill civilians for sport while on patrol in Afghanistan. If the case proceeds to a court martial and there are convictions, the soldiers may face the death penalty.
Sep 28 2010
People Need To Buck Up
The biggest mistake I see many make when trying to sell the Democrats is to call the prospects stupid, and tell them buying the product is the only way they can stop being stupid, apparently thinking the prospects will immediately reach for their wallets and say “where do I sign”?
Of course, that result only happens in salespeople’s dreams – and is the reason 90 percent of people who go into sales never make any money at the job.
There is also a (real life) tried and true technique in sales and marketing that the democrats could try: the top sales producers in any industry constantly critique themselves and ask themselves “If I’m not getting the results I want to get, what am I doing to get the results I am getting?”
Instead of asking themselves what they are doing to produce the results they are getting (dropping support) – and they are producing those results whether they want to or not – Democrats and their supporters are taking the easy route of blaming the voters (their prospects) and treating the voters as if they are stupid.
Sep 25 2010
Desperation Politics
They went for the idgit vote in 2008. It looks like they’re going for the idgit vote again in the 2010 midterms.
Sep 24 2010
GOTV, Mr. Obama
There is a enormous and powerful difference between millions of people not voting for a particular party, and millions of people saying loud and clear to that party: “we guarantee we will give you millions of votes, more than enough to tip the scale…… once you have done a or b or c or d or any combination of those things, and as soon as we see that you’ve done that you can relax in the confidence that you have won even before election day arrives, otherwise you’ve already lost and you might as well tell your corporate donors now that their money has been pissed away for absolutely nothing and that you were an utter and pathetic waste of their time, and quit campaigning”.
It takes planning, and it takes a determination to make decisions not out of fear but out of the power and leverage you know you have, but have only if you use it.
The best that can happen with this approach is beyond your wildest dreams, and the worst that can happen with this is that if nobody else does it while you do you won’t be defending yourself after the fact for having voted for people who could have done their jobs but wouldn’t.
Make it a credible threat. Not a bluff.
Sep 22 2010
A Simple Reality: US Troops Are Coming Home
One and a Half Cheers for American Decline: The Future’s Not Ours – and That’s Good News
by Tom Engelhardt, September 21, 2010
Here’s a simple reality: the U.S. is an imperial power in decline — and not just the sort of decline which is going to affect your children or grandchildren someday. We’re talking about massive unemployment that’s going nowhere and an economy which shows no sign of ever returning good jobs to this country on a significant scale, even if “good times” do come back sooner or later. We’re talking about an aging, fraying infrastructure — with its collapsing bridges and exploding gas pipelines — that a little cosmetic surgery isn’t going to help.
And whatever the underlying historical trends, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and company accelerated this process immeasurably. You can thank their two mad wars, their all-planet-all-the-time Global War on Terror, their dumping of almost unlimited taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon and war planning for the distant future, and their scheme to privatize the military and mind-meld it with a small group of crony capitalist privateers, not to speak of ramping up an already impressively over-muscled national security state into a national state of fear, while leaving the financial community to turn the country into a giant, mortgaged Ponzi scheme. It was the equivalent of driving a car in need of a major tune-up directly off the nearest cliff — and the rest, including the economic meltdown of 2008, is, as they say, history, which we’re all now experiencing in real time. Then, thank the Obama administration for not having the nerve to reverse course while it might still have mattered.