The year is young but I’ve already had more lessons in impermanence than normal. Late last night, I got the news that David Bowie–icon of my youth and as I’m learning the icon of nearly everyone around my age and younger–died after 18 months of living with cancer. I’ve been listening to Bowie’s new album with its haunting images and melodies. The accompanying videos aren’t easy to process. Blackstar felt like it was bringing many things full circle to me. Now I realize that’s what Bowie was about especially after reading a press release from his producer. I woke this morning to find that Bowie’s final body of work was labelled a “gift to fans”. Bowie was the consummate artist and public intellectual. I feel blessed to live in a time when I could see him unfold and that he could provide nuance, context, and soundtracks to my life and loves.
David Bowie’s last release, Lazarus, was ‘parting gift’ for fans in carefully planned finale
The producer of Blackstar confirms David Bowie had planned his poignant final message, and videos and lyrics show how he approached his death.
Like most kids my age, I heard Bowie’s Space Oddity from a small am radio and found it odd but compelling. It wasn’t until my freshman year in college I found myself in love with some one quite obsessed with the newly released Diamond Dogs and the older Ziggy Stardust music. I loved the Movie “Man who Fell to Earth”. I saw it several times because it was so fascinating. My favorite album will always be Changes. So, early Bowie will always be my Bowie. To my daughters, Bowie is the Goblin King.
Bowie threaded together lots of interests of mine. He had an amazing sense of fashion and the theatric along with with his gift for composing and arranging music. He didn’t have a great voice but it was expressive and worked well with what he tackled. He also managed to lace things with social commentary and a vision for a freer society as well as a love of science fiction. Every project of Bowie’s was intelligent and visually arresting. He kept my attention with each one over my entire romance with his body of work of over 40 years.
The singer-songwriter and producer excelled at glam rock, art rock, soul, hard rock, dance pop, punk and electronica during an eclectic 40-plus-year career.
David Bowie died Sunday after a battle with cancer, his rep confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. He was 69.
“David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer. While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family’s privacy during their time of grief,” read a statement posted on the artist’s official social media accounts.
The influential singer-songwriter and producer excelled at glam rock, art rock, soul, hard rock, dance pop, punk and electronica during his eclectic 40-plus-year career. He just released his 25th album, Blackstar, Jan. 8, which was his birthday.
Bowie’s artistic breakthrough came with 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and theSpiders From Mars, an album that fostered the notion of rock star as space alien. Fusing British mod with Japanese kabuki styles and rock with theater, Bowie created the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust.
The BBC has a great tab full of all things Bowie including interviews. You can find many things because Bowie was and did many things. Will Gompertz, BBC Arts editor had this to say about the artist. (I have to let you know that Merce Cunningham–one of his influences–was my brother-in-law’s Uncle.) Bowie did continue the avant-garde tradition of the early 20th century and carried it into a future yet to be realized.
David Bowie was the Picasso of pop. He was an innovative, visionary, restless artist: the ultimate ever-changing postmodernist.
Along with the Beatles, Stones and Elvis Presley, Bowie defined what pop music could and should be. He brought art to the pop party, infusing his music and performances with the avant-garde ideas of Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Andy Warhol.
He turned pop in a new direction in 1972 with the introduction of his alter ego Ziggy Stardust. Glam rock was the starting point, but Ziggy was much more than an eyeliner-wearing maverick: he was a truly theatrical character that at once harked backed to pre-War European theatre while anticipating 1980s androgyny and today’s discussions around a transgender spectrum.
He was a great singer, songwriter, performer, actor, producer and collaborator. But beyond all that, at the very heart of the matter, David Bowie was quite simply – quite extraordinarily – cool.
I still like to think of him as more than an artist because of his sense of social justice. He was an important figure in bringing GLBT culture into the mainstream as well as bringing the sexual revolution into every one’s face. He also had a political side. Bowie was all about freedom of expression in all forms.
In June 1987, David Bowie returned to the divided city of Berlin for a concert that some Germans, rightly or wrongly, still view as having helped change history.
Bowie knew West Berlin well. He’d lived there for three years in the late 1970s, sharing an apartment in the Schöneberg neighborhood with Iggy Pop, escaping from the drugs and over-the-top glam of his early career into the city’s expressionism and art pop. It was there that Bowie recorded three of the albums for which, upon his death today from cancer at the age of 69, he is still remembered and cherished.
In 1977, the year Bowie recorded Heroes, the second of his three Berlin albums, East German border guards shot and killed 18-year-old Dietmar Schwietzer as he tried to flee west across the wall; a few months later, 22-year-old Henri Weise drowned trying to cross the Spree River. Heroes was haunted by the Cold War themes of fear and isolation that hung over the city. Its still-famous title track tells a story of two lovers who meet at the wall and try, hopelessly, to find a way to be together.A decade later, when, in 1987, Bowie returned for the Concert for Berlin, a three-day open-air show in front of the Reichstag, he chose “Heroes” for his performance. By then the city’s Soviet-dominated East had become safer, but it had not become more free. Rock music was treated as a destabilizing threat.
But the wall couldn’t keep out radio waves; the West German–operated, US-run radio station Radio in the American Sector was popular in the East, and had secured rare permission from the performing acts to broadcast the show in its entirety. (Record labels typically opposed this in the 1980s, knowing listeners would record the broadcasts, undercutting album sales.) The concert was held near enough to the border that many East Berliners crowded along the wall to listen to the forbidden American and British music wafting across the city, allowing these two halves of the city to hear the same show, divided but together.
I do not believe it is a wild exaggeration to say that there are on this earth today many people who would not be here without David Bowie — either because their parents procreated to his music or because (and this is I believe the more important group) he gave them a reason to stay alive when perhaps they did not want to. He was the patron saint of all my favorite fellow travelers: the freaks, the fags, the dykes, the queers, the weirdos of all stripes, and that most dangerous creature of all: the artist. He was the crown prince(ss) of the unusual. He was so marvelously, spectacularly weird, and he gave so many oddballs, including this one, hope.
So, 2016 is resplendent in lessons for me on surfing Samasara as I’ve mentioned before. While the world processes the news over David Bowie with awe and grief, Louisiana celebrates being a rid of “Governor” Bobby Jindal. We are officially out of his clutches but not out of the huge mess the man leaves all around us. Our new Governor was sworn in today and has promised to at least stabilize the budget.
Saying he won’t be a “business-as-usual” leader, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards took his oath of office Monday, promising to stabilize the budget and end cycles of financial crises that threaten public health services and colleges.
As he placed his hand on the family Bible for the swearing-in ceremony, Edwards became the only Democratic governor in the Deep South after an improbable victory.
He follows term-limited Republican Bobby Jindal, inheriting a budget mess that will require him to work with a majority GOP Legislature. Edwards pledged bipartisanship in his approach, which he said needed to end Louisiana’s use of stopgap, short-term financial maneuvers that create new budget troubles annually.
“We can no longer afford to lurch from year to year, cobbling together temporary fixes and expecting to realize permanent sustainability. If we don’t fix the structural budget deficit, we can’t fix any of our other problems,” the new governor said at the inaugural ceremony held on the steps of the Louisiana Capitol.
The Edwards administration estimates Louisiana faces a shortfall of up to $750 million in the state’s $25 billion budget for the remaining six months of the current fiscal year and a gap more than twice that amount for next year.
While he talked of working across party lines, however, Edwards also outlined a decidedly Democratic agenda.
He said he will ask lawmakers to increase the minimum wage, pass a new equal pay law and work to make college more affordable, to combat poverty in Louisiana. And he said he’ll start the process for expanding Medicaid on Tuesday, as allowed under the federal health care law.
“Your tax dollars should not be going to one of the 30 other states that have expanded Medicaid when we are one of the states that expansion will help the most,” he said.
But the governor called addressing the financial mess his top priority, saying he’ll seek to make budget cuts and “rework the failed system of tax incentives, credits and rebates, which bleed the state’s revenue and too often leave little to show for the spending.”
I’m not sure all our idiot Republicans are going to go along with this but hopefully, enough will that we can start digging out.
So, I’m really late today and I’m anxiously awaiting how you’re processing the world without David Bowie.
I’m releasing it all to the Greater Ethos for the moment.
Be well and love yourself and others. We really don’t have as much time as we think.
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There’s quite a bit of news today for a weekend, I have a cold, and I’m very late; so this is going to be a link dump post. There’s so much to talk about, I hardly know where to begin.
Even though national polls are essentially meaningless at this point, this one is still disturbing.
So if Donald Trump proved the political universe wrong and won the Republican presidential nomination, he would be creamed by Hillary Clinton, correct?
A new survey of likely voters might at least raise momentary dyspepsia for Democrats since it suggests why it wouldn’t be a cakewalk.
The survey by Washington-based Mercury Analytics is a combination online questionnaire and “dial-test” of Trump’s first big campaign ad among 916 self-proclaimed “likely voters” (this video shows the ad and the dial test results). It took place primarily Wednesday and Thursday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.
Nearly 20 percent of likely Democratic voters say they’d cross sides and vote for Trump, while a small number, or 14 percent, of Republicans claim they’d vote for Clinton. When those groups were further broken down, a far higher percentage of the crossover Democrats contend they are “100 percent sure” of switching than the Republicans.
Read about the survey at the link. Fortunately, that isn’t how we elect presidents. We do it state by state, and you have to actually leave the house and vote at your local polling place.
For some rational discussion of the Trump phenomenon, here’s Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight: Three Theories Of Donald Trump’s Rise. The three possible explanations are:
Theory 1: Trump’s support reflects a Republican populist revolt.In a nutshell: Trump is extremely popular among Republican voters, who are attracted to his combination of populism, nativism and anti-elite resentment….
Theory 2: Trump’s support reflects a Republican Party power vacuum. In a nutshell: Party elites and insiders usually have a tremendous amount of influence on the identity of the nominee, with Republican voters eventually falling in line behind one of their preferred choices. The fact that Trump is leading now reflects a lack of consensus among those party elites. However, these elites will rally behind whichever establishment-approved choice performs best in Iowa and New Hampshire, elevating that candidate to the frontrunner’s position….
Theory 3: Trump’s support reflects a media bubble. In a nutshell: Trump’s standing in the polls substantially reflects the disproportionate amount of media coverage he’s receiving; it’s not that remarkable for a candidate to poll at 35 percent when he’s recently been getting 70 percent of the media coverage of the Republican race. That makes Trump’s position vulnerable if media coverage eventually evens out, or as the election approaches in each state as voters learn more about the candidates on their own and less through the lens of the national media.
Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium is convinced that Trump can win the Republican nomination, based on the current state of Republican polls.
Since actual election results will deviate from current polls by many points, parametric approaches (i.e. calculating means, medians, standard deviations, regressions, and so on) may be of limited use. Let me take a look at the data to ask a simpler question: what does current polling rank predict about the nominee?
Although Donald Trump’s support might be higher or lower than the numbers indicate, nobody seriously questions the observation that he is in first place nationally. But what does that predict for the nomination?
Wang looks at past election cycles and shows that by this time the man who became the GOP nominee was in first or second place in most polls. Read more at the link.
Ted Cruz is also in the news–for the latest birther controversy and an incredibly stupid remark about his children and Hillary Clinton.
For years, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) has been dogged by a backburner controversy about whether he is eligible to serve as President since he was born in Calgary, Alberta Canada in 1970. But since Cruz’s mother was an American citizen, the place of his birth actually is irrelevant to his eligibility.
Yet Cruz’s mother’s name appears on a Canadian government document, obtained by TPM in 2013, that lists Canadian citizens eligible to vote in 1974.
TPM shared an electronic copy of the document with Sen. Cruz’s office when it originally obtained the document in 2013. Cruz’s then-communications director, Sean Rushton, emphasized that the document is not a record of people who actually voted in any election. He further pointed out that the document itself provides notice that “applications for corrections,” “deletions from,” and “additions to” the list may have been necessary.
“At least one other error is evident on its face: the name of Sen. Cruz’s father is misspelled,” Rushton told TPM in his 2013 statement. “Regardless, Mrs. Cruz has never been a Canadian citizen, and she has never voted in any Canadian election.”
TPM eventually decided not to publish an article based on the document at the time, in part because Cruz was not yet a candidate for president. TPM decided to revisit the story earlier this week as rival Donald Trump renewed his skepticism about Cruz’s eligibility, moving the story to the center of the campaign, and was prepared to publish this evening….
Jason Johnson, Cruz’s chief campaign strategist, said in the statement that candidate’s mother “was never a citizen of Canada.” He added that she could not have been a Canadian citizen at the time her son was born because of residency requirements. Eleanor Cruz was born in Delaware, while her ex-husband, Rafael Cruz, was born in Cuba, obtained Canadian citizenship while living in Calgary and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in the mid-2000s.
The document in question is a voter list of individuals who lived in the southern district of the city of Calgary, were over the age of 18 and were Canadian citizens, thus eligible to vote.
It still sounds like a non-issue to me, but read much more about it at TPM if you’re interested.
Now for Cruz’s creepy remark about Hillary Clinton.
Ted Cruz suggested on Friday that Hillary Clinton should be given a “spanking” by voters to hold her accountable for the Benghazi attack in 2011 when she served as secretary of state.
Cruz compared it to how he punishes one of his daughters for lying.
“In my house, if my daughter, Catherine, the 5-year-old, says something that she knows to be false, she gets a spanking,” Cruz told the attendees at a crowded coffee shop here.
He continued, “Well, in America, the voters have a way of administering a spanking.”
A supporter in the crowd prompted Cruz’s response after asking how, as president, he would hold individuals accountable for the attack that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.
I wonder if Cruz would suggest “spanking” a man running for the presidency? So now we know that Ted Cruz is a virulent sexist (not really a surprise) and that he believes in spanking very young children. In my opinion, that is child abuse.
Carson reportedly asked a group of fifth graders at a campaign rally Thursday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to identify the laggard among them. “Who’s the worst student?” he asked, according to The Des Moines Register. The kids, of course, being kids and not knowing better than say, someone gunning to be the leader of the free world, quickly pointed to one student….
Carson’s question wasn’t intended to humiliate and scar a child for life (though he now has someone to write about for his college-admissions essay). The onetime G.O.P. front-runner was simply trying to make a point about how he himself was a “horrible student” who would easily have been the one chosen as the worst in the class if some political candidate had the horrible idea to single him out in public. It was meant to be an inspirational story, that even 10-year-olds thought of as the dumbest in class can rise to be a renowned neurosurgeon and public figure who could then embarrass and put down children.
He tried to make good backstage, according to the Register, patting the boy on the back and forcing a copy of his book on him. Surely, that made up for it.
Barack Obama’s op-ed in the New York Times: Guns Are Our Shared Responsibility. (Interesting note: Obama writes that he will not support any candidate who votes to exempt gun owners from being sued (i.e. Bernie Sanders).
A deep dive on why people vote Republican and specifically why they like Donald Trump from the NYT: Purity, Disgust, and Donald Trump, by Thomas B. Edsall.
I’m rather late getting this written today. It’s due to stuff I like to refer to as samsara surfing activities. It’s the entire basic Buddhist thing on the nature of this existence. My washing machine overflowed last night in the laundry closet which has created a huge mess. Thankfully, I seemed to have fixed the machines issues for the moment but the floor is just inundated with water. Also, a friend of mine of over 35 years had a stroke on New Year’s Eve and passed on Wednesday. She was only 65 and had just retired about six months ago. Both of these items come under the heading of I’m not surprised, not shocked, expected it to happen sooner than it should but I’m still asking why now? Why now when I can least afford fixing up stuff and when I had put off talking to her because my voice was shot from the flu. Timing is everything still, I guess and mine sucks atm.
Also, I still need to mention the timing of the font bill for the blog. It’s in two days and I need to beg for donations. I don’t need anything huge but a little from some of you would get it off my plate and then we have the blog free and clear again until October.
So, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to write a very cohesive post today but I will share what’s been attracting my attention even as distracted as I am. My artwork today is the Tibetan Buddhist Wheel of Life or Wheel of Samsara. It reminds us that nothing lasts for ever. Everything changes and eventually reformats.
By Samsara (bhavachakra) we are talking of all existences that are conditioned by: ignorance, suffering and the unexplainable flow of time, often represented by Yama holding the wheel of life. Nirvana, on the other hand, represents the world unaffected by negative emotions, which by definition is the nature of true happiness.
The notion of a rotation or cycle, is explained by the fact that humans or beings, as I will call them for the remainder of this article, do not occupy a stable place within Samsara, but depending on their Karma will pass from one type of existence to another.
I’m pretty comfortable in the idea that we all reformat constantly. I’m even fairly resigned to being okay with reformatting to just energy and dust. But damn, it’s always difficult to live the idea that time rolls over us. Things we love never last long enough. Things we want to go away seem to stick around for ever. So, we just have to surf along knowing that’s the case.
Humans are altering the planet, including long-term global geologic processes, at an increasing rate. Any formal recognition of an Anthropocene epoch in the geological time scale hinges on whether humans have changed the Earth system sufficiently to produce a stratigraphic signature in sediments and ice that is distinct from that of the Holocene epoch. Proposals for marking the start of the Anthropocene include an “early Anthropocene” beginning with the spread of agriculture and deforestation; the Columbian Exchange of Old World and New World species; the Industrial Revolution at ~1800 CE; and the mid-20th century “Great Acceleration” of population growth and industrialization.
There is now compelling evidence to show that humanity’s impact on the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and wildlife has pushed the world into a new geological epoch, according to a group of scientists.
The question of whether humans’ combined environmental impact has tipped the planet into an “Anthropocene” – ending the current Holocene which began around 12,000 years ago – will be put to the geological body that formally approves such time divisions later this year.
The new study provides one of the strongest cases yet that from the amount of concrete mankind uses in building to the amount of plastic rubbish dumped in the oceans, Earth has entered a new geological epoch.
“We could be looking here at a stepchange from one world to another that justifies being called an epoch,” said Dr Colin Waters, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey and an author on the study published in Science on Thursday.
“What this paper does is to say the changes are as big as those that happened at the end of the last ice age . This is a big deal.”
Phil Gibbard, the University of Cambridge geologist who set up the working group initially, told the Guardian the Anthropocene epoch might be more effective as a cultural concept than a scientific fact.
“We fully recognize the points [in the new study’s research]: the data and science is there,” Mr. Gibbard told the Guardian. “What we question is the philosophy, and usefulness.”
Popularity for an idea that the Holocene “entirely recent” epoch is giving way to a new epoch ruled by humans has grown since the Nobel laureate atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen used it in 2000. In 2013 alone, the word appeared in 200 peer-reviewed articles, Joseph Stromberg reported for Smithsonian Magazine.
Popularity alone does not change geologic fact, however, and some of the scientists who specialize in rock layers have said the Anthropocene epoch has more pop-culture appeal than scientific validity. Agriculture made its mark on Europe’s rock layers as long ago as 900 AD, Whitney Autin, a stratigrapher at the SUNY College of Brockport told Smithsonian Magazine, so the Anthropocene epoch, “provides eye-catching jargon, but from the geologic side, I need the bare bones facts that fit the code.”
President Obama will pay tribute to victims of gun violence by leaving one seat empty in the first lady’s guest box at Tuesday’s State of the Union address.
Obama told supporters Friday that the gesture is meant to send a message of Congress that they must act to make it harder for guns to fall into the wrong hands.
“We want them to be seen and understood; that their absence means something to this country,” he said on a conference call with Organizing for Action.
“We want to tell their stories, we want to honor their memory and we want to support Americans whose lives have been forever changed by gun violence and remind every single one of our representatives that it’s their responsibility to do something.”
The announcement is another indication of how the president will address the contentious debate over gun control in his final State of the Union.
President Obama on Friday vetoed legislation that would repeal much of ObamaCare, the first such measure to reach his desk since it became law in 2010.
Obama used his veto pen without fanfare on a legislative package rolling back his signature healthcare law and stripping federal funding from Planned Parenthood.
In a lengthy message to Congress, Obama said repealing the law would reverse improvements made in the nation’s healthcare system.
“Because of the harm this bill would cause to the health and financial security of millions of Americans, it has earned my veto,” the president wrote.
Obama noted that congressional Republicans have attempted to roll back the law more than 50 times, to no avail.
“Rather than refighting old political battles by once again voting to repeal basic protections that provide security for the middle class, members of Congress should be working together to grow the economy, strengthen middle-class families, and create new jobs,” he wrote.
The veto was the eighth of Obama’s presidency and the sixth since last year, when Republicans took over both chambers of Congress.
Even though Obama long threatened to veto the measure, Republicans touted the vote as an important step toward reversing the Affordable Care Act if the party wins the White House in November.
Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Friday pledged that Congress would vote to override Obama’s veto. The party lacks the two-thirds majority necessary to achieve that, however.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu should explain why anti-abortion banners festoon the St. Charles Avenue neutral ground, since he has decided to be the arbiter of what symbols are so offensive that they must be removed from public property, City Councilwoman Stacy Head said at a recent meeting.
Head didn’t mention the monuments specifically, as she spoke at a committee meeting Wednesday (Jan. 6), but her comments were a clear reference to Landrieu’s push to have Confederate-related statues declared nuisances and removed from public property.
As a woman, Head said, she feels like the banners are a nuisance since they “negatively influence the perception of my civil liberties as a woman. I believe I’m being discriminated against.”
Head asked the administration to explain in writing the process by which the city decides what banners are allowed, and how much money they generate.
The mayor should explain at least that much since, “We are looking to the admin to decide which objects and symbols are appropriate for the city on city property. Which ones offend us. Which ones are negative,” Head said. As a woman, it offends her to have to drive by them and be reminded of the oppression, she said. Does that give her standing to call for their removal?
Head called the banners “political signage for a particular position that I perceive as a nuisance. I perceive it as offensive. I do not see it is a promoting awareness.”
A city spokesman said the city allows “community awareness banners” on city streetlights provided they are not commercial in nature and do not endorse any specific candidate or another political campaign up for a vote. The St. Charles banners did not appear to violate that standard when the application to hang them was submitted, he said.
The banners are the usual fetus porn used by the group.
So, I hope everything is going okay with you. Let us know what’s on your reading and blogging list today.
Remember, along with the SOTU, we will be live blogging both of the upcoming primary debates. The next Republican debate will be: Thursday, January 14, 2016. The next Democratic debate is scheduled for Sunday, January 17, 2016.
The first caucuses and primaries are in February and are being held in Iowa and New Hampshire respectively.
Hopefully, the Republicans will be tossing a few of their clowns to the curb and we’ll have a better look at their “best” and “brightest”.
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Donald Trump has succeeded in making an issue out of Ted Cruz’s Canadian birth, and it only took him a about a week. Another Republican are now questioning whether Cruz is eligible to be POTUS. Ironically, that Republican is John McCain who was also born outside the U.S. He was born on a U.S. military base in the Panama Canal Zone.
In an interview Wednesday on Phoenix radio station 550 KFYI’s Chris Merill Show, McCain said he “doesn’t know” whether Cruz’s birth in Canada makes him eligible to be president. Cruz, whose father was born in Cuba, asserts that he is a U.S. citizen because his mother was an American.
“I know that came up in my race because I was born in Panama, but I was born in the Canal Zone which is a territory. Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona when it was territory when he ran in 1964,” McCain said.
McCain added that he was born on a U.S. military base, which he said is not the same as being born in Canada.
“That’s different from being born on foreign soil. I think there is a question. I’m not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s worth looking into. I don’t think it’s illegitimate to look into it.”
Asked if the Supreme Court might have to weigh in on the “natural born citizen” issue, McCain said, “It may be, that may be the case.”
Donald Trump wants Ted Cruz to go before a judge to “immediately, like tomorrow” to determine whether or not he is a “natural born citizen” and therefore eligible to run for president.
Trump made the request for Cruz to seek a declaratory judgment from federal court on the issue during an interview with CNN on Wednesday.
Trump cast such a move as “for the good of Ted.”
“You go in seeking the decision of the court without a court case. You go right in. You go before a judge, you do it quickly. Declaratory judgment. It’s very good,” Trump told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “So when there’s a doubt — because there’s a doubt. You want the court to rule.”
LOWELL, MA – JANUARY 4: Republican candidate for President Donald Trump speaks to thousands of spectators at a rally in Lowell, Massachusetts on Monday evening January 4, 2016. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Donald Trump held a rally in Lowell, Massachusetts on Monday. Lowell is a 15 minute drive from the New Hampshire border. Anyway Charlie Pierce was in attendance at the rally. Here’s his report: My Monday Night in Massachusetts with He, Trump. Pierce begins by noting the irony of Trump appearing in the building named after the late Senator Paul Tsongas.
The late Senator Paul Tsongas was a brilliant, mild man of substance and ideas. I didn’t agree with all of the latter; Tsongas was an early neoliberal deficit hawk, about which we amiably argued for a number of years. As a political person, he was as far from He, Trump as a chamber quartet is from an industrial shop floor. The greatest monument to his dogged, determined approach is the city of Lowell itself. The Lowell National Historical Site, a monument to the city’s legacy as an industrial center, was Tsongas’s dream. He worked night and day to make it a reality and it revitalized the city, which is why the arena in which He, Trump brought his monkey show was named after him.
Former U.S. Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, D-Mass., who rebounded from cancer to briefly become the Democratic frontrunner for president in 1992, died Saturday, Jan. 18, 1997, of pneumonia at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He was 55. Tsongas is shown in this Feb. 2, 1992 photo when he spoke at a town meeting in Nasua, N.H. (AP Photo/Greg Gibson)
A little more:
The primary policy prescription is to elect He, Trump, because he knows everything, including enough smart, top guys who will help him in the unlikely event that he comes up against a problem about which he doesn’t know everything. (He once again cites Carl Icahn and the rest of his proposed junk-bond Cabinet.) I would analyze the ideas presented to the loving audience, but the only idea presented was electing He, Trump, who knows everything. For example, he proposes that, to defeat ISIS, we should “take the oil.” Taking the oil is the beginning and the end of the policy, the alpha and the omega of the idea.“We should be unpredictable,”he says, and I don’t really know what that means, but everyone cheered….
He does not deliver speeches. He delivers remarks. He recites his poll numbers. He explains his long fight against the odds that has resulted in said poll numbers. He mocks Jeb Bush and he sucks up to Tom Brady. He cracks that Hillary Clinton “has the biggest teleprompters,” and everybody laughs a laugh straight out of a frathouse smoker, and he’s rambling on to another topic, usually involving He, Trump.
Pierce doesn’t get the appeal of this narcissistic display, and neither do I. Nevertheless there are apparently quite a few Americans who lap it up, and that is truly scary. Please go read the rest at the link above.
Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio and One Direction bandmember Harry Styles have something in common. Well, two things, actually: anappreciation for the 1D song “What Makes You Beautiful,”and a love of heeled booties.
At a campaign stop in New Hampshire on Monday, Rubio appeared wearing incredibly fashionable, incredibly well-heeled black leather ankle boots that are sure to feed thoserumorsabout his extravagant spending habits. The boots — which we think are eitherthese Giorgio Brutini bootsorthese Margiela ones — look a lot like a pair favoredby Styles, albeit with slightly less pilgrim flair.
The shoes got a surprising amount of attention from the media and other GOP presidential candidates.
It is January of a presidential year. Voting begins in a few weeks. It is time that voters stop dabbling with silly clowns like Donald Trump and his childish insults and consider serious candidates. Political leaders, like Jeb Bush, who will soberly discuss complex issues of great import including trade, budgeting, diplomacy, war …
… and Sen. Marco Rubio’s girly little girl boots.
The Republican side this week is consumed with chatter about Marco Rubio’s choice of footwear during a recent visit to New Hampshire. The problem, in short, is that Rubio’s may well befancy,made of the choicest leathers and featuring a disconcerting rise in the heel region. To the naked eye, they look suspiciously Eye-talian. In this country, the common, conservative man is expected to wear a bunch of greasy McDonald’s wrappers on his feet, tied together by the intestines of a freshly murdered grizzly bear.
But what about those high heeled cowboy boots lots of conservative guys wear? How is that any different? Oh well, I just don’t get Republican thinking period. A few more links on this:
On the Democratic side, the Clinton scandal-mongers are at it again. I’m not going to link to a lot of stories, but you can find some on Memeorandum.com. Here’s Karen Tumulty at the Washington Post:
The ghosts of the 1990s have returned to confront Hillary Clinton, released from the vault by Donald Trump and revved up by a 21st-century version of the scandal machine that almost destroyed her husband’s presidency.
This is a moment that her campaign has long expected. What remains to be seen is whether a reminder of allegations of sexual impropriety against Bill Clinton — which were deemed to have varying levels of credibility when they were first aired — can gain new traction in a different context.
The fresher case being made is that Hillary Clinton has been, at a minimum, hypocritical about her husband’s treatment of women, and possibly even complicit in discrediting his accusers.
And it is being pressed at a time when there is a new sensitivity toward victims of unwanted sexual contact, and when one of the biggest news stories is the prosecution of once-beloved comedian Bill Cosby on charges that he drugged and assaulted a woman 12 years ago — one of dozens who have accused him of similar behavior.
I’m not aware that Bill Clinton has been accused on drugging women, but I suppose Hillary is going to have to deal with this somehow.
President Obama has announced executive actions he will take in an effort to “reduce gun violence.” The previous link will take you to the White House website where you can read the details. The goals are to increase the efficiency of background checks, encourage effective enforcement of gun laws, invest in mental health treatment and facilitate reporting of people who are prohibited from having guns, encourage the use of gun safety technology as well as funding research on “improving gun safety.”
The president approved a series of long-awaited executive steps aimed at curbing gun violence despite opposition in Congress to new gun laws.
The Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives will issue updated guidance that says the government can consider someone a gun dealer regardless of where the guns are sold. The guidance aims to narrow the loophole that exempts weapons sold at gun shows, online, and other informal settings from required background checks. Under the previous rules, only federally licensed gun dealers must conduct checks on buyers.
The White House said the FBI will hire 230 more examiners to process background checks. It is an attempt to speed up the process so buyers don’t neglect the requirement….
‘‘This is not going to solve every violent crime in this country,’’ Obama said, tempering expectations for gun control advocates calling for far-reaching executive action. ‘‘It’s not going to prevent every mass shooting; it’s not going to keep every gun out of the hands of a criminal. It will potentially save lives and spare families the pain of these extraordinary losses.’
New federal data shows 2015 was a record-smashing year for the American firearms industry,with gun sales appearing to hit the highest level on record. Background checks for gun purchases and permits jumped 10 percent last year to 23.1 million, the largest number since the federal background check system began operating in 1998.
Black Friday 2015 was the single biggest gun-purchasing day ever, with more than 185,000 checks processed, according tobackground check figuresfrom the FBI. December saw the highest number of background checks processed in any month. The last five weeks of the year all ranked amongthe 10 biggest weeks ever for firearm background checks.
The year-end surge happened partly in response tothe mass shooting in San Bernardino, followed by calls by President Obama for more restrictions on gun sales. On Monday, Obama unveiled a package of executive actions that seek to curb gun violence, including conducting more background checks.
1. Dave Ward, sheriff of Harney County, where the militants have set up shop,asked them to go home.
“You said you were here to help the citizens of Harney County,” Ward said in a message aimed at the occupiers. “That help ended when a peaceful protest became an armed and unlawful protest.”
2. There is not likely to be an aggressive showdown between federal law enforcement agents and the militants. Experts say federal officials have learned from sieges at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho. They expect federal officialswill take a wait-them-out approach.
3. Meanwhile, the two ranchers whose arson case prompted all of this, Dwight Hammond Jr. 73, and Steven Hammond, 46, quietly surrendered at a Southern California federal prison and their attorneys announced that both men will see a presidential pardon.
Ammon Bundy runs a Phoenix-based company called Valet Fleet Services LLC, which specializes in repairing and maintaining fleets of semitrucks throughout Arizona. On April 15, 2010—Tax Day, as it happens—Bundy’s business borrowed $530,000 through a Small Business Administration loan guarantee program. The available public record does not indicate what the loan was used for or whether it was repaid. The SBA website notes that this loan guarantee was issued under a program “to aid small businesses which are unable to obtain financing in the private credit marketplace.” The government estimated that this subsidy could cost taxpayers $22,419. Bundy did not respond to an email request for comment about the SBA loan.
Read more at the link.
Esquire reports on survey research they did with NBC News. The article is titled “American Rage.” You can peruse the findings at the link, but I found this notable about women:
When we take a close look at our respondents by gender, women report a greater rise in anger than men over the past year. (See question two.) One possible explanation: Although they share many of the same frustrations with respect to dashed expectations, they are more likely than men to be angry about the treatment of others. (See question 14.) That perception of unfairness has a way of rubbing people the wrong way.
Maybe, just maybe, women are angry about the way so many states are treating women like breeders with no individual rights? Nahhhhh . . . although the survey did find that 48% of women are angry about “the way they are treated. (The question of specifically why individual women are so angry doesn’t even seem to have been asked.)
Check it out at Esquire.
I suppose the Berniebots will beat up on Hillary for this. She talked about UFOs recently in response to a question. At least CNN understood she was speaking tongue in cheek: Hillary Clinton (jokingly) pledges UFO probe.
During a meeting with The Conway Daily Sun, Hillary Clinton jokingly pledged to look into UFO’s, an article from the New Hampshire paper says.
“Yes, I’m going to get to the bottom of it,” Clinton said, tongue-in-cheek, in response to a question from reporter Daymond Steer on UFOs.
This was far from the first time someone in the former secretary of state’s orbit addressed the topic of intelligent life on other planets.
Former President Bill Clinton spoke about the topic at length in a 2007 interview with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. At the time, the former president said that he had reviewed government information on Roswell and Area 51, locations at the heart of some alien conspiracies. He claimed at the time that he had seen no evidence of visitors to Earth from another planet.
“If we were visited someday, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Bill Clinton said. “I just hope that it’s not like ‘Independence Day.'”
Steer wrote that when he asked the Democratic front-runner about her husband’s comments, she claimed that aliens may have already visited our planet.
Clinton’s comments are among the rare public statements she’s made on UFOs and possible government cover-ups—a familiar subject for both Hillary and Bill Clinton. AsMother Joneshas reported, the couple’sinterest in extraterrestrial activityreaches as far back as the 1990s, when Laurence Rockefeller began lobbying the Clinton administration for the release of government documents relating to UFOs—documents that many say reveal the extent of government research into the phenomena.
Additionally, Clinton’s current campaign chairman, John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and anX-Filesfan, has long expressed interest in the topic.
But these statements are Clinton’s first remarks on the subject during this campaign. They will likely strengthen her support among voters who happen to be UFO enthusiasts and are not supporting any extraterrestrial candidates in the Republican field.
Finally, Mitt Romney emerges from the shadows again to dump on Jeb Bush. From the WaPo:
“A Bush-versus-Clinton head-to-head would be too easy for the Democrats,”he told my colleagues Dan Balz and Philip Rucker during an interview last week in Boston fora broader storyabout the political events of 2015.
The 2012 GOP nominee recalled thinking, “I like Jeb a lot, I think he’d be a great president, but felt he was unfairly butseverely burdened by the W. years— and when I say the W. years, it’s not only what happened to the economy, but the tragedy in Iraq.”
Mitt says he expressed this point to Bush’s face during a private sit-down in Utah last Jan. 22.“Jeb, to be very honest, I think it’s very hard for you to post up against Hillary Clinton and to separate yourself from the difficulty of the W. years and compare them with the Clinton years,” Romney recalls telling the former Florida governor when they met at his house in a Salt Lake City suburb. Romney says Bush responded by saying “he was going to make his campaign about the future, not about the past.”
“I didn’t say anything at that point,” Romney recalled. “But as he left, I said to myself,‘Gosh, in my opinion, it’s not going to be as easy to make that separation as I think he gives the impression it will be.’One of the few things I predicted that turned out to be true.”
Gee Golly Gosh. Good one, Mitt.
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