Open Thread: Joe Biden falls asleep during Obama’s deficit speech

Posted: April 13, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, just because, open thread, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , | 24 Comments

Salon says that

Most politicos watched with rapt attention this afternoon as President Obama delivered a seminal speech on the national debt. But what of Joe Biden? The half-hour address was apparently a little too much for the vice president, who was caught on camera getting some shut-eye.

I don’t know about “rapt attention.” Timmy Geitner doesn’t look all that alert to me, and the woman sitting kitty-corner behind Biden looks sleepy too.

Late Night: Stupid Republican Tricks

Posted: April 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because, right wing hate grouups, Surreality, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Tea party leader and all around wacko Michelle Bachmann wants Congress to limit the powers of federal judges to rule on equal protection under the Constitution.

Republicans treat the Constitution like a toy that they can manipulate however they choose. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) claims that all federal education programs — including Pell Grants and student loan assistance — are unconstitutional. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) says that they are constitutional problems with the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) suggested that child labor laws, FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, Medicaid, income assistance for the poor, and even Medicare and Social Security violate the Constitution. And when the Ninth Circuit held that yes, the Constitution does have a First Amendment, Newt Gingrich’s political advocacy group called for that court to be abolished.

With so many Republicans claiming that the Constitution can mean whatever they want it to mean, it should be no surprise that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) wants a piece of this action. Yesterday, Bachmann told a gathering of social conservatives in Iowa that if the courts insist on applying the Constitution’s requirement that no state may “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” to gay people, then Congress should strip federal judges of their power to hear marriage equality cases.

Transcript:

“Something else that we can do to reinforce our pro-marriage, pro-life, pro-family agenda is to limit the subject-matter jurisdiction of the courts,” Bachmann said during a Monday speech in Pella, Iowa.

“At the federal level with what are called Article III courts, Article III of the United States Constitution, we can limit the subject matter that justices can rule on. We have it within our authority to decide what judges can rule on and what they can’t.”

Why Obama and his Banker Bosses Want a Depression

Posted: April 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Catfood Commission, income inequality, just because, poverty, Psychopaths in charge, Surreality, Team Obama, The Bonus Class, The Great Recession, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd, worker rights | Tags: , , , , , | 49 Comments

Via Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerilla, Economist and historian Michael Hudson explains why U.S. elites are trying to bring about a full-fledged depression (December 16, 2010).

From the transcript:

JAY: So President Obama’s deficit commission has reported. The press, the media, and most of the political punditry all seem far more worried about government debt than depression. Why?

HUDSON: Because they’re essentially appointed by the banking interest. When the government runs into debt, it has to borrow from the banks. They want to scale down government debt in order to scale down government taxes. So it’s part of a one-to punch against the economy, basically. To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem. That’s what they’re trying to bring about, because you need a depression if you’re going to lower wages by 20 percent.

JAY: And why do they want to do that?

HUDSON: Because they have the illusion that if you pay labor less, somehow you’re going to make the economy more competitive, and the economy can earn its way out of debts–meaning their employers, the banks and the companies–and make more profits and pay more bonuses and stock options, and somehow their constituency, Wall Street and the corporate economy, will become richer if they can only impoverish the economy.

So essentially you can think of it as between a parasite and the host economy. A smart parasite in nature actually is in a symbiosis with the host and tries to steer to new food. It wants the host to find new food, doesn’t want it to get bigger; the parasite wants itself to get bigger. But to do that, it has to take over the host’s brain and make the brain think that the parasite, in this case the host, is the industrial economy, the real economy, production and consumption.

The parasite is basically the financial sector. That’s the deficit commission. That’s the largest financier of the Obama administration. Obama appointed Wall Street lobbyists for the deficit commission, and basically their mind is a one-track mind: reduce labor’s wages. So what we have here is a dumb parasite, not a parasite. That’s the problem that’s facing the American economy today. The problem is that the parasite’s not only taken over the brain of the economy, which was supposed to be the government, but it’s taken over its own brain in the process. And it actually imagines that corporations can make larger profits and the industrial–the financial system can survive if they just bring on a depression. In fact, it’ll be the exact opposite.

Hudson predicted the housing crash in a cover story in Harpers’ Magazine in 2006: The New Road to Serfdom.

Another article he wrote for Harpers’ in 2005 was influential in killing Bush’s push for privatization of Social Security: The $4.7 Trillion Pyramid: Why Social Security won’t be enough to save Wall Street

It looks like the elites are already succeeding in turning the U.S. into a third world country. According to the LA Times, Swedish giant Ikea opened a plant in Virginia in order to take advantage of the U.S.’s slave wages and hostile atmosphere for union organizing.
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Steve Benen says that isn’t supposed to happen here in the “land of opportunity,” but according to Professor Hudson, that’s exactly what our government and the top 1% want.

Poor little Barack … He sooo wishes he could be anonymous.

Posted: April 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: A My Pet Goat Moment, just because, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, voodoo economics, We are so F'd, WE TOLD THEM SO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 30 Comments

Poor Barack. His high-powered job has made him so famous and powerful that he can’t go anywhere to unwind anymore except the golf course. That’s why he golfs so much. He really wishes he could be “anonymous” so he could go the car wash or the grocery store. At least that’s what he told the editors and publishers of Hearst Magazines.

“I just miss — I miss being anonymous,” he said at the meeting in the White House State Dining Room. “I miss Saturday morning, rolling out of bed, not shaving, getting into my car with my girls, driving to the supermarket, squeezing the fruit, getting my car washed, taking walks. I can’t take a walk.”

He says he enjoys golf but is not the fanatic that some have portrayed him to be because of the frequency of his golf outings.

“It’s the only excuse I have to get outside for four hours at a stretch,” he told the Hearst executives.

Awwww…poor guy. That’s so sad. He sounds so wistful about it too. He must get so stressed out when he has to made those “tough decisions” like selling out the American people to the Republicans so he doesn’t have to piss off any of his rich banker donors. No wonder he spends so much time playing golf.

Just imagine how hard it must be to be the first black president–and a Democrat too (supposedly)–and be *forced* to destroy the legacies of FDR, JFK, and LBJ! Imagine how hard it must be to realize that after he gets through, the Democratic Party will be well and truly dead.

He must really have to rush to play golf when he thinks about how he used the legacy of Martin Luther King to get himself elected, and now he has to hurt poor people, including a lot of African Americans, because those mean old Republicans are making him do it.

The President will probably have to spend a lot of time on the golf course after his speech on Wednesday. From what I’m hearing and reading, he is going to have to break it to the bottom 90% of Americans that they are utterly screwed, and explain why we must “sacrifice” our health care and our pittance of retirement from Social Security in order to make sure that the banksters don’t have to cut back at all. After all they are our betters, aren’t they?

It’s so sad that poor Barack will have to live with being the President who destroyed the social safety net in the U.S. What a terrible burden for him to carry! I just hope he can get enough stress relief from playing golf. Maybe he could also relieve his giant burden of stress with one of the Hearst magazines that he says he likes to read.

“If there are any magazines in the (White) House, they probably come from you guys,” he told the Hearst Magazine executives.

Hearst Magazines publishes periodicals including Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, O, The Oprah Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Redbook, Esquire and Cosmopolitan, among others.

I wonder which of those magazines he like best. Maybe we could take up a collection and get him a subscription to Cosmo or something.

Poor, poor pitiful Barack!

Saturday Night Delights

Posted: April 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , | 22 Comments

Hi!

Thought I’d put up an open thread with some interesting tidbits that I’ve seen in the news recently.  I also wanted to update you on a few tidbits about the blog too.  On  Thursday, we reached our 3 month name change (actually, it’s the permanent addie that changed) anniversary.  On the 27th, we’ll have left file cabinet status for six months now.  If you look down there at the print screen captured from Technorati earlier this week, you’ll see that we made Top 100 US Political blogs. Actually we did it twice this week and we’re still lingering at the high end.  This one was the second occurence and we were sitting squarely on number 100.  We’re the little blog that can ’cause we try harder!

So, here’s some interesting ‘stuff’.

NPR reports that Egyptians Mummies have been found with clogged arteries.  Guess there was high cholesterol around back then too.

Heart disease is supposedly a modern affliction, the result of a diet rich in animal fat and too many hours spent on the sofa. But recent discoveries suggest that strokes and heart attacks may have been bedeviling humans for millenia.

Dr. Greg Thomas is part of a team of scientists that recently discovered the earliest known case of atherosclerosis — clogged arteries — in ancient Egyptian mummies. The startling findings mean scientists may not understand heart disease as well as they think they do.

The Large Hadron Collider appears to be on the verge of finding a new particle according to Wired.  Physics has to be the neatest science on the planet right now.

Theorist Moira Gresham of the University of Michigan says many explanations for the Tevatron asymmetry predict new particles that could be seen at the LHC — even though it is now running at only half its maximum energy. She and her colleagues posted a paper on the proposed properties of several such particles at arXiv.org on March 18, one of a flurry of articles that have appeared in response to the Tevatron finding.

Among the possible particles is a heavy cousin tothe massless gluon, the particle that binds quarks together. Another idea, noted in a paper posted at arXiv.org on April 1, posits the existence of a particle called the Z’ boson, a heavier version of the Z boson, a messenger particle for the weak interaction. The Z’ boson would transforms one type of quark into another, leading to the asymmetry.

“Particle physicists know that the standard model is incomplete,” Gresham says. “We’ve been waiting a long time to get some more concrete hints.”

Okay, I’m going to share one that you’re sure to like. Here’s a list of the best chocolate bars from Real Simple magazine. They also have stuff there like the best 50 recipes using chocolate too.  Here’s one that sounds great!

Double Chocolate-Chip Cookies

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat oven to 350°F. Cream the butter and sugars in a large bowl with an electric mixer on high speed. Lower to medium speed and add the egg and vanilla. Sift together the flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. On low speed, add the dry mixture to the butter mixture. Beat until fully incorporated. Fold in the chocolate chips.
  2. Form the dough into approximately 1 1/2-inch balls. Place on parchment- or foil-lined baking sheets, 2 inches apart.
  3. Bake until the centers are just set, about 12 minutes. Let cool on sheets for 5 minutes, then transfer to wire racks.

This week’s Rolling Stone‘s asked the  question “Who is the best lead singer of all time?”.  You can go answer them or maybe you can offer up your own.  Here’s my two offerings.  Robert Plant singing a song with Queen in a tribute to Freddie Mercury.  Oh, and it’s a Led Zeppellin song before he switches to singing ‘Crazy Little thing called Love”.  Every time I’ve see Robert Plant in concert, I go weak in the knees. He did to me as a teeny bopper and he still does it to me today.  Even, if he’s traveling around with Allison Krause.

Okay. So, hopefully this puts you in a good mood and we forget the beltway madness for awhile!  Happy Saturday Night every one!  Oh, and share!!!   I want folks to top my chocolate recipes, lead singer suggestions, and discovery trivia!

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