Elaine Breaks Bad

It's Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, and Aaron Paul -- bitch!

Auburn v. Alabama - Crazy U.S. College Sports

Auburn Tigers v. Alabama Crimson Tide: The Iron Bowl, one of the most passionate rivalries in college football. The name comes from the fact that the game used to be played annually in Birmingham, Alabama, with its strong connections to the steel industry. Now the game, played on Thanksgiving weekend, alternates between Auburn and Tuscaloosa (home of the Crimson Tide). The two teams first played each other in 1893; they met sporadically in following years until the game became an annual fixture starting in 1948. In 2014, Alabama leads the series, 42-35-1.

Alabama is a major force on the national college football scene, having won the South East Conference title 23 times. But Auburn, a much smaller school, is no slouch; it has won 8 SEC titles over the years. Auburn claims two national titles, in 1957 and 2011, while The Tide claim 15. (The word "claim" is used because there is no actual playoff to determine a collegiate national champion; the teams are ranked and voted on by sports writers, so sometimes a "title" can be disputed or controversial.

The video clip is of a British visitor's experience of the game. (He seems to find the flyover a bit of a surprise.)

ISIS? Take Care Of It Locally

Click here for an article by kos, at Daily Kos, entitled "Islamic State is a threat, so let the neighbors deal with it," Turkey, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have military forces that are bristling with U.S.-supplied aircraft and armaments.

Hey, guys -- time to step up in your own defense.

Mitch McConnell Caught On Tape

Here's the entirety of an article from the editors of the New York Times entitled "No Comment Necessary: The Gosh Darn Minimum Wage."

The Nation magazine obtained an audio tape of Senator Mitch McConnell discussing strategy with wealthy donors at a conference convened by the Koch brothers. He said he would seek to shrink the federal government “across the board” and explained what the Senate would look like if he were to become majority leader.

Via The Nation

And we’re not going to be debating all these gosh darn proposals. That’s all we do in the Senate is vote on things like raising the minimum wage (inaudible)—cost the country 500,000 new jobs; extending unemployment—that’s a great message for retirees; uh, the student loan package the other day, that’s just going to make things worse, uh. These people believe in all the wrong things.

He also shared his opinion on money in politics:

So all Citizens United did was to level the playing field for corporate speech….We now have, I think, the most free and open system we’ve had in modern times. The Supreme Court allowed all of you to participate in the process in a variety of different ways. You can give to the candidate of your choice. You can give to Americans for Prosperity, or something else, a variety of different ways to push back against the party of government.

Click here for the article, which also includes an audio clip.

UPDATE: Here's Daily Kos's take on McConnell's comments made to wealthy donors, not realizing he's being recorded, by Joan McCarter, in a post entitled "Mitch McConnell exposes Kochs' extremist agenda, and just how committed to it he is":

The audio leak from this summer's Koch brothers secret confab has provided a treasure trove of information about just how deeply Republican Senate candidates are embedded in the Koch brothers' pocket. Iowa's Joni Ernst credits the Kochs with her political life. Arkansan's Tom Cotton votes Koch rather than Arkansas. And Colorado's Cory Gardner was blatant in his begging to have his race bankrolled by the Koch cabal.

But it's Mitch McConnell that takes the cake, and who demonstrates as clear as can be the really extreme agenda Republicans are buying into. After declaring that "in the House and Senate, we own the budget," McConnell describes how he can shut the government down.

"We can pass the spending bill, and I assure you that in the spending bill, we will be pushing back against this bureaucracy by doing what’s called placing riders in the bill: No money can be spent to do this or to do that. We’re going to go after them on healthcare, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board.

"And we’re not going to be debating all these gosh darn proposals. That’s all we do in the Senate is vote on things like raising the minimum wage—cost the country 500,000 new jobs; extending unemployment—that’s a great message for retirees; the student loan package the other day; that’s going to make things worse. These people believe in all the wrong things."

That means defunding Obamacare, cutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which has saved Americans nearly $13 billion annually just in lower fees and interest charges for credit cards), and slashing the budget of the oil-baron Kochs' nemesis, the EPA. It means being willing to shut down the government for that agenda. It means going against the political will of the nation—74 percent support raising the minimum wage, 69 percent support extending unemployment benefits—to do the Kochs' bidding.

Laura Clawson pointed out earlier that McConnell's public justification for blocking all action on anything the American public wants is because of Harry Reid's totalitarian control over the Senate. Clearly, that's hooey. This has nothing to do with principle, and everything to do with representing the interests of Charles and David Koch and friends.

Blacks Are Inferior, Says Black Preacher - h/t Ted Nugent

Click here for a racist rant by black preacher James David Manning, a clip which gets the comment "“TRUER LOVE THERE HAS NEVER BEEN" from racemonger Ted Nugent. It's from a clip entitled "Ted Nugent Loves Insane Pastor James David Manning's Racist Rant" by Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch:

“You niggas are crazy,” Manning says about black voters who supported Obama in the sermon posted by Nugent. “We’re not going to ever get anywhere until we get in the mind of a black man. He doesn’t think correctly. He can be doctor, he can be an astrophysicist; the nigga ain’t got no sense.”

“The worst thing that ever happened to South Africa was when they gave it to Nelson Mandela and black folk,” he added. “Black folk don’t know how to run no nation.”

There's a whole lot more; Manning's "sermon" is six and a half minutes of self-loathing and hatred. How can these charlatans sleep at night? It's like the question "How can you shoot women and children who are running for their lives," asked of a Vietnam War-era helicopter gunner: "Easy. You just don't lead 'em so much."

Pat Robertson Finds His Nurse Too Intrusive, Calls For Revolution

Click here for a post on Right Wing Watch, Pat Robertson demanding revolution because his nurse asks him too many questions.

ROBERTSON: (A nurse is asking him too many questions) We need a revolution in this country to change this stuff ... A doctor working for $12 an hour and his wife working for a couple of dollars an hour --

BIMBO: Socialism.

ROBERTSON: it isn't right.

Ladies and gentlemen, we need a revolution to stop these so-called progressives from destroying this country any more, but they're getting pretty close to the tipping point. It is not a pleasant scenario. And -- I didn't vote for him, and maybe you didn't vote for him, but the American people voted him into office twice, and this is the result. We -- we -- you know, get what we -- you know, reap what we sow.

Paul Krugman: Mea Culpa

Click here for a Paul Krugman article dated September 1, 2010, in which he confesses to mistakes he has made (two, that he considers to be of significance).

Will this force me to resile from my former position that Paul Krugman is God?

Not yet. I'll get back to you.

I'm reminded of the joke: Have you ever made any mistakes?

Yes. Once I thought I had made a mistake.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Political Figure

Click here for an article in Time entitled "The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race," by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (ne Lew Alcindor).

First, some information about Kareem. Time's blurb says:

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a six-time National Basketball Association champion and league Most Valuable Player. He is also a celebrated author, filmmaker and education ambassador.

Wikipedia goes into a little more detail. Here's a section on his basketball career:

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, Jr.; April 16, 1947) is a retired American professional basketball player who played 20 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers. During his career as a center, Abdul-Jabbar was a record six-time NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP), a record 19-time NBA All-Star, a 15-time All-NBA selection, and an 11-time NBA All-Defensive Team member. A member of six NBA championship teams as a player and two as an assistant coach, Abdul-Jabbar twice was voted NBA Finals MVP. In 1996, he was honored as one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History. NBA coach Pat Riley and players Isiah Thomas and Julius Erving have called him the greatest basketball player of all time.

I was aware that he was more than just possibly the best basketball player ever; I was even aware that he was a pretty good writer. He's also been expressing his political views for a long time, as Wikipedia says:

Alcindor boycotted the 1968 Summer Olympics by deciding not to join the United States Men's Olympic Basketball team that year, protesting the unequal treatment of African-Americans in the United States.

I first noticed his writing during the notorious L.A. Clippers/Donald Sterling controversy. Here's an entry from an ABC News blog at the time:

Basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said today that Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s derogatory remarks about blacks are more evidence that racism is still part of American culture, but “things have to change.”

“This is a problem. I did a little bit of research, more whites believe in ghosts than believe in racism… That’s why we have shows like ‘Ghostbusters’ and don’t have shows like ‘Racistbusters,’” Abdul-Jabbar said today in an interview with George Stephanopoulos. “It’s something that’s still part of our culture and people hold on to some of these ideas and practices just out of habit and saying that, ‘Well, that’s the way it always was.’ But things have to change.”

In the linked article, Kareem says the roots of the present class conflict can be found in May of 1970. Everyone knows about the killing of four student protesters at Kent State, Ohio, on May 4, 1970; who knows about the events ten days later, on May 14, at Jackson State University, Mississippi? Kareem:

On May 14th, 10 days after Kent State ignited the nation, at the predominantly black Jackson State University in Mississippi, police killed two black students (one a high school senior, the other the father of an 18-month-old baby) with shotguns and wounded twelve others.

There was no national outcry. The nation was not mobilized to do anything. That heartless leviathan we call History swallowed that event whole, erasing it from the national memory.

Past Wingnuttery

Click here for "A Brief History of Wingnuts in America; From George Washington to Woodstock," an article at Daily Beast by John Avlon, part of the latest update of his book, "Wingnuts: Extremism in the Age of Obama." Even the presidents considered by historians to be the best -- Washington, Lincoln, FDR -- had their over-the-top detractors. Avlon says:

American political history has been marked by periodic eruptions of the “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” that Richard Hofstadter famously characterized as “the paranoid style in American politics.” Wingnuts have masqueraded under different names and causes at different times, but they have always been committed to an “us against them” framing of domestic debates while inflaming group hatred in the name of politics and alleged principle. They prey on fear and ignorance.

Survey Wingnut rhetoric through the ages and the usual suspects keep surfacing: appeals to religious suspicion; ethnic and racial divisions; foreign subversion of sovereignty; and perhaps the oldest conspiracy theory of them all—accusing the president of the United States of being a tyrant and a dictator bent on destroying the Constitution.

Deliberate Destruction Of Congress's Effectiveness

Click here for an article at Washington Monthly entitled "The Big Lobotomy: How Republicans Made Congress Stupid," by Paul Glastris and Haley Sweetland Edwards. It's a long one, but well worth the read.

It describes how, since Newt Gingrich's congressional revolution, congressional staff have been experiencing "brain drain": Conservatives under Gingrich and in the years since have drastically cut funding for, and numbers of, congressional staffers who accomplish the day-to-day work done in Washington.

A quick refresher: In 1995, after winning a majority in the House for the first time in forty years, one of the first things the new Republican House leadership did was gut Congress’s workforce. They cut the “professional staff” (the lawyers, economists, and investigators who work for committees rather than individual members) by a third. They reduced the “legislative support staff” (the auditors, analysts, and subject-matter experts at the Government Accountability Office [GAO], the Congressional Research Service [CRS], and so on) by a third, too, and killed off the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) entirely. And they fundamentally dismantled the old committee structure, centralizing power in the House speaker’s office and discouraging members and their staff from performing their own policy research.

And:

Today, the GAO and the CRS, which serve both House and Senate, are each operating at about 80 percent of their 1979 capacity. While Senate committee staffs have rebounded somewhat under Democratic control, every single House standing committee had fewer staffers in 2009 than in 1994. Since 2011, with a Tea Party-radicalized GOP back in control of the House, Congress has cut its budget by a whopping 20 percent, a far higher ratio than any other federal agency, leading, predictably, to staff layoffs, hiring and salary freezes, and drooping morale.

Later, the article says:

When Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House in the fall of 1994, he set about almost immediately creating “the most controversial majority leadership since 1910,” according to longtime Congress watchers and political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in their 2006 book, The Broken Branch. Under his leadership, backed up by seventy-three conservative Republican freshmen who swept to power that year, the goal was not to reform, but to destroy; not to compromise, but to advance a highly conservative agenda no matter the means. The shift in culture was palpable almost immediately, with freshman lawmakers eschewing bipartisan freshman orientations in favor of partisan ones, and the vast majority joining what’s known as the “Tuesday-Thursday Club,” flying in on Tuesday evening and out Thursday afternoon so as to reduce the likelihood of contracting “Potomac fever.” “There was a total contempt for the institution,” said Scott Lilly, who served as a high-level staffer in Congress for thirty-one years before joining the Center for American Progress in 2004. John Dingell, who will have served in the House for fifty-nine years when he retires this year, said it succinctly: “The place just got meaner.”

Gingrich’s strategy, as he explained it to Mann and Ornstein, was simple: Cultivate a seething disdain for the institution of Congress itself, while simultaneously restructuring it so as to eliminate anything—powerful chairmen, contradictory facts from legislative support agencies, more moderate Republicans—that would stand in the way of his vision.

In conclusion, the article says:

Regardless of how it’s organized or what new technologies can be brought to bear, what’s clear is that members of Congress need the institutional capacity to help them make sense of it all. As the issues facing members of Congress become increasingly intertwined and technological in our complex global economy, what we need is not fewer people in government who understand the implications of, say, the international derivatives market; what we need is more. And we need them, whether they be knowledgeable committee chairs or long-serving professional staff, to be experienced, well paid, and appreciated so they want to stick around for a while.

The problem, however, is that conservatives as a rule don’t see this lack of expertise as a problem. Quite the contrary: they’ve orchestrated the brain drain precisely as a way to advance the conservative agenda. Why, when your aim is less government, would you want to add to government’s intellectual capacity?

The answer, as some conservatives are beginning to realize, is that making Congress dumber has not, in fact, made government smaller. As the conservative but independent-minded Senator Tom Coburn wrote in his 2012 report, cuts to the GAO budget and declines in Senate and House committee oversight activity have resulted in billions of dollars in unnecessary, duplicative, and wasteful government spending.

Disposable Email Address

Click here for Bob Rankin's article, "Do You Need A Disposable Email Address?"

Yes, I do, because Microsoft is doing its best to drive me away from using outlook.com by some ridiculous "verification" nonsense that forces me to jump through a series of hoops once a month or more just to access my own account.

Tea Partier Beseeches God's Help -- Against Establishment Republicans

Click here for an article at Salon by Elias Isquith entitled "Tea Party leader asks God to 'be violent against' GOP establishment in opening prayer." Mississippi Tea Party chairman Roy Nicholson delivered an opening prayer at a rally in Flowood, Mississippi, in which he asked Almighty God to "be violent against” establishment Republicans:

We ask for your blessing upon the conservatives in this state, that they might stand strong and firm. Father, we even ask for you to bless our enemies, and Lord they are truly our enemies that head the Republican Party and the whole political establishment.

We’re asking, Father, for two things. We’re asking, Father, that you would expose them, set division amongst them, set them one against another, bring confusion and fear into their camp, into their thinking, for the purpose of pulling them down, for casting them down out of their high offices and reducing them, Lord, to having no power in this state. So, Lord, that you might raise up and seek the righteous in the positions of power that this state might once more be a state that honors you in all that it does.

Father, we’re asking that in all of the tribulations were asking you to bring upon them, that it would work change in their heart — that you would use it to bring true Godly sorrow, that they might truly repent for their iniquity and their wickedness, for that they would be restored to you, that you would have honor in the state of Mississippi for the great works that you’ve done in correcting and purifying the government and rescuing and saving the worst of us.

That's his appeal for the Almighty's help in dealing with establishment Republicans -- how would he word an address referring to progressive Democrats, I wonder?

Anyway: "... expose them, set division amongst them, set them one against another, bring confusion and fear into their camp, into their thinking, for the purpose of pulling them down, for casting them down out of their high offices and reducing them, Lord, to having no power in this state." Thy will be done.

Tea Party Losing The Battle? Maybe Not ...

Click here for Digby's article at Salon entitled "Tea Party’s horrifying cousin: Here comes 'constitutional conservatism,'” subtitled "The sad club of dupes known as the Tea Party is not the real problem. This scary ideological undercurrent might be."

She quotes Ed Kilgore at Talking Points Memo:

Yesterday’s winner Pat Roberts, who already sported lifetime ratings of 86 percent from both the American Conservative Union and Americans for Prosperity, went far out of his way to propitiate the ideological gods of movement conservatism as he fought for reelection. He voted against an appropriations measure that included a project he had long sought for his alma mater, Kansas State University, and opposed a UN Treaty banning discrimination against people with disabilities over the objections of his revered Kansas Senate predecessors Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum.

Kilgore also pointed out in his blog at Washington Monthly on the eve of the Obama/Romney election:

Yes, years from now conservatives will sit around campfires and sing songs about the legendary internecine battles of late 2012, when father fought son and brother fought brother across a chasm of controversy as to whether 98% or 99% of abortions should be banned; whether undocumented workers should be branded and utilized as “guest workers,” loaded onto cattle cars and shipped home, or simply immiserated; whether the New Deal/Great Society programs should be abolished in order to cut upper-income taxes or abolished in order to boost Pentagon spending. There’s also a vicious, take-no-prisons fight over how quickly to return the role of the federal government in the economy to its pre-1930s role as handmaiden to industry. Blood will flow in the streets as Republicans battle over how to deal with health care after Obamacare is repealed and 50 million or people lose health insurance. Tax credits and risk pools or just “personal responsibility?”

In short, there's no cause for liberals to be jubilant at the apparent rout of the tea party crowd in the 2014 primaries; they've won by pushing Republican mainstream political thought so far to the right it cannot possibly be called moderate.

Double Dutch!

Remember the skipping game, Double Dutch, with two ropes? Have a look at this one!

Free College Textbooks (And Courses)

Click here for a post by Bob Rankin on free college textbooks; there are also links to free college courses.

Fancy Farm Picnic In Kentucky

Alison Lundergan-Grimes, the Kentucky Secretary of State who is challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for his Senate seat (which he has held for 30 years), had some red meat for the raucous Republican crowd at the annual Fancy Farm Picnic. (My favorite of her zingers: "If Mitch McConnell were a TV show, he'd be Mad Men -– treating women unfairly, stuck in 1968, and ending this season."

In the 2010 census, it was determined that Fancy Farm, Kentucky, had a population of 458. But since 1880, once a year -- and particularly in election years -- this tiny community has some political clout, as it hosts a crowd of up to 15,000 people for the annual Fancy Farm Picnic. Ever since the 1930s, the Fancy Farm Picnic has been traditionally a venue for Kentucky politicians to show up and make political speeches. It's pretty much required that candidates for political office in Kentucky show up at Fancy Farm -- when Senator Jim Bunning didn't, in 2007, he took a lot of political heat for it. Watch Lundergan-Grimes vs. McConnell, 2014:

USAID - A Chilling View

Click here for an article by Mark Ames at pando.com entitled "The murderous history of USAID, the US Government agency behind Cuba’s fake Twitter clone."

Click here for the Wikipedia entry for USAID, described as "... the United States federal government agency primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid," an organization I have always taken to be pretty benevolent, administering useful aid programs around the world. I was once involved in an arbitration concerning a USAID project in Egypt which involved the expenditure of several hundred million dollars in the development of an irrigation project. the article quotes Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research as saying:

In a number of countries, including Venezuela and Bolivia, USAID is acting more as an agency involved in covert action, like the CIA, than as an aid or development agency.

While Ames says:

It’s important to note that not everything USAID does is patently evil — in fact, there are many programs that could even be described as good.

He also says:

But USAID, as with any agency of American power, is fully capable of and will continue to be an instrument of geopolitical and corporate force.

There's some pretty ugly stuff in this article. See more after the break.

Michael Peroutka, GOP candidate for county council in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, speaking at the 2012 national conference for the League of the South, gives a speech about reinvigorating the culture with a biblical understanding of law and government, and invites the crowd to stand and join in as he plays "the national anthem" on guitar:

George Washington On Torture And Abuse Of Prisoners Of War

George Washington on the subject of the abuse and torture of prisoners captured by his army:

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.”

- George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775

Women's 600 Meters - Inspirational

Heather Dorniden, women's 600-meter race, 2008 Big 10 Indoor Track Championships. The race is three laps of a 200-meter track. She's second most of the way but takes a slight lead after the second lap. Keep your eye on number 170, in black and yellow.