Wall Street Journal's Defiant Defense Of News Corp

Wall Street Journal defends News Corp



what a silly article title



Murdoch Seizes Wall St. Journal In $5 Billion Coup

By Frank Ahrens

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, August 1, 2007



http://tin­yurl.com/3­esodz5
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Why Is the Most Wasteful Government Agency Not Part of the Deficit Discussion?

Why Is the Most Wasteful Government Agency Not Part of the Deficit Discussion?


Any serious battle plan to reduce the deficit must take on the
Pentagon.
by David Morris
July 12, 2011
In all the talk about the federal deficit, why is the single largest culprit left out of the conversation? Why is the one part of government that best epitomizes everything conservatives say they hate about government—- waste, incompetence, and corruption—all but exempt from conservative criticism?

I read the article. In a word - useless, but the graphs and pie charts are pretty. Here is what I think the problem is:

Pg 306 Web of Debt by Ellen Brown

"Critics charge that warfare, terorism, and natural disaster on an unprecedented scale are are being used to justify massive federal borrowing, while diverting attention from the fact that the economy is drowning in a sea of governmental and consumer debt. And that may be true; but policymakers are only doing what they have to do under the current monetary scheme. In an upside-down world in which debt is money and money is debt, somebody has to go into debt just to keep money in the system so the economy won't collapse..."

pg 307"....4. Engaging in a war as a pretext for borrowing , preferably a war that will drag on. People are willing in times of emergency to allow the government to engage heavily in deficit spending to defend the homeland...."

still reading this book

Courthouse auctions: bros with bids

Karla Peterson Test Driving San Diego
Courthouse auctions: bros with bids
By Karla Peterson
6:31 a.m., July 17, 2011

"...Hey bro, wanna buy a house?: It may sound like something out of Ye Olde West (Wenches, anyone?), but the mood of the front-step auctions is totally California Casual. It is mostly professional-buyer dudes in shorts and polo shirts bidding against other professional-buyer dudes in shorts and polo shirts..."

Hmm. First time in a long time that I was mildly amused (or even bothered to read) by an article in the SDUT, that right-wing, suck-up-to-anything -that smells -like-money, piece of shit local paper.

Happy Pride 2011

I don't know if the kid is going to bring back pics or not, but I hope they have a good time.

LGBT Gay Pride Parade Route Map Schedule and History
Active military & Margaret Cho highlight 27th annual event
By Melissa Rauch • Sat, Jul 16th, 2011

Barack Obama to Nominate Consumer Protection Bureau Chief Next Week

"The administra­tion is not expected to nominate Elizabeth Warren,"



Ahh, what!? This informatio­n from this one WSJ article is all over the place and:



"Dow Jones & Co. Chief Executive Les Hinton resigned late Friday, as the top executive at News Corp.'s financial publishing unit sought to contain the damage from the company's British tabloid scandal, which began while he oversaw the company's U.K. newspaper operations­."



http://onl­ine.wsj.co­m/article/­SB10001424­0527023042­0330457644­8291349364­376.html
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

State Health Exchanges Tilting Toward Insurers

"It's hard to believe that in all of Colorado, he couldn't find qualified candidates who understand commercial health insurance to balance industry executives with obvious conflicts of interest."



Thank you Mr. Potter :)
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Watching an asinine bankster tool grill Warren

Elizabeth Warren Discussses Consumer Protection Bureau (VIDEO)


This is why

New 'Abusive' Standard in Dodd-Frank Has Bankers Nervous

Naaahhhh, Really?

Congress Increasingly Staffed By Former Lobbyists
The number of former lobbyists working as key congressional staffers has more than doubled since the Republican Party took control of the House, a new report finds.

How much money is enough?

How Dracula Hedge Funds Are Sucking Us Dry
What notion of economics or ethics justifies the fact that it would take the average family more than 35,000 years to earn as much as the top hedge fund managers earn in one year?
July 9, 2011 |

The Highest Income Celebrities, CEO and Hedge Fund Managers (2010)
The Top Ten	Average Yearly Income	Number of years if would take for the average American family to earn as much.
Hedge Fund managers	$1,753,000,000	35,217 years
Movie directors/producers	$126,000,000	2,531
Top celebrities from all fields	$119,800,000	2,407
Pop musicians	$87,200,000	1,752
Non-financial CEOs	$47,100,000	946
Athletes	$44,600,000	896
Movie stars	$42,600,000	856
Authors	$26,900,000	402
Lawyers	$20,000,000	402
Bank/Insurance CEOs	$16,600,000	333
Median Family Income (2009)	$49,777

War on Drugs continues

Federal Government Rules Marijuana Has No Accepted Medical Purpose

Updated: 7/9/11 06:06 PM ET

Deeeeeees-custed here.


The “War On Drugs” Is A $2.5 Trillion Racket: How Big Banks, Private Military Companies And The Prison Industry Cash In
July 9th, 2011

Al Gore: Climate of Denial

Can science and the truth withstand the merchants of poison?
Rolling Stone
JUNE 22, 2011

I hate RepugnantThuglicans

The Tea Party and Goldman Sachs: A Love Story
Robert Scheer
July 6, 2011

"...Congressional Republicans are cutting funding for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as if those already underfunded agencies are centers of anti-business radicalism. The CFTC is run by former Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler, who, back when..."

Republicans:
1. Defund and infiltrate regulatory agencies with corporate tools
2. Complain that big gubmint don't work
3. Rinse and repeat

S&P Raises California Credit Rating To Stable From Negative

California Slashes Services For Poor, Elderly, Disabled

http://www­.huffingto­npost.com/­2011/07/04­/californi­a-budget-p­oor-elderl­y_n_889029­.html
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Tomgram: Chase Madar, A Medal for Bradley Manning?

Bradley Manning, American Hero
Four Reasons Why Pfc. Bradley Manning Deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Not a Prison Cell
Posted by Chase Madar
at 9:50am, July 7, 2011.


"...1: At great personal cost, Bradley Manning has given our foreign policy elite the public supervision it so badly needs.
Bradley Manning is only the latest in a long line of whistleblowers in and out of uniform who have risked everything to put our country back on the right path...

...Take Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, a Pentagon-commissioned secret history of the Vietnam War and the official lies and distortions that the government used to sell it...

...And Ellsberg is hardly alone. Ask Lt. Colonel (ret.) Darrel Vandeveld. Or Tom Drake, formerly of the National Security Agency....

Tomgram: Andy Kroll, The 60-Year Unemployment Scandal

at 10:17am, July 5, 2011.
"Americans care about them more than any other issue, so every poll tells us. The presidential candidates are already crafting their stump speeches and talking points around them. President Obama has seen the writing on the wall and regularly tailors his message to emphasize how many of them he has created. I'm talking, of course, about jobs."

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Jobs
How Racism, Global Economics, and the New Jim Crow Fuel Black America's Crippling Jobs Crisis
By Andy Kroll

Exxon spill Yellowstone river

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Ghulam Nabi Azad, India Health Minister, Calls Homosexuality A 'Disease' From The West

"India health minister calls homosexula­ity a disease"
Hey Azad,

so is the caste system, but that aint stopped its spread
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Happy July 4th 2011

Yeah, I stole the pic. The article on Discovery News is a couple of years old, but interesing:

Eco-Friendly Fireworks Offer Safer Pyrotechnics
Emily Sohn, Discovery News
July 2, 2009
"While particle-filled smoke may be the most obvious concern, it's not the only issue -- or even the worst one...

...Animal studies have linked perchlorates, such as potassium perchlorate and ammonium perchlorate, to thyroid problems. Repeated pyrotechnic displays, especially ones that occur every day at theme parks, can take their toll."

Hmm, reminds me of this. Somebody over at the Huffpo made some crack on a fireworks article that cracked me up, but also caused me to sharply inhale, and then it made me very, very sad. Pretty great comment to make me do all that in one sentence.

Ralph Nader Is Tired of Running for President
Posted on Jul 4, 2011
By Chris Hedges
The most important moral and intellectual voices within a disintegrating society are slowly discredited when their nonviolent protests and calls for justice cannot alter intransigent and corrupt systems of power. The repeated acts of peaceful civil disobedience, efforts at electoral and political reform and the fight to protect the rule of law are dismissed as useless by an embittered, dispossessed and betrayed public. The demagogues and hatemongers, the purveyors of violence, easily seduce enraged and bewildered masses in the final stages of collapse with false promises of vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. And in the spiral downward the good among us are reviled as naive and ineffectual fools...

Fox News Twitter feed says Obama dead in apparent hack

By Richard Allen Greene, CNN
July 4, 2011 -- Updated 1509 GMT (2309 HKT) | Filed under: Social Media

(CNN) -- Hackers apparently broke into the FoxNews.com's Twitter feed for political news early Monday and used it to announce -- falsely -- that President Barack Obama had been assassinated.
Obama was "shot twice at a Ross' restaurant in Iowa while campaigning. RIP Obama, best regards to the Obama family," read one of several Twitter messages posted on @FoxNewsPolitics early Monday.

Apparently Hacked, a Fox News Twitter Account Sent Out Alarming Posts
By LIZ ROBBINS and BRIAN STELTER
Published: July 4, 2011

“Hackers sent out several malicious and false Tweets claiming that President Obama had been assassinated. Those reports are incorrect, of course, and the president is spending the July 4 holiday with his family. The hacking is being investigated, and FoxNews.com regrets any distress the false tweets may have created.”


I'm watching a BBC and PBS special called Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State (C) 2005. The mind boggles.

HA

What Does it Cost to Change the World? from WikiLeaks on Vimeo.

Donate to wikileaks.

Idaho Lawmaker Who Drunkenly Stole Car Gets Off With Misdemeanor

Aaron Wiener | July 1, 2011, 11:38AM
After he stole a Ford Excursion and drove it with a .15 blood alcohol content -- almost twice the legal limit -...

My husband is funny sometimes

The following is a little exchange that I found humorus.

Me- "Oh my gosh, honey, we can't afford for her to continue going to school, the CA budget was passed and because the tuition is probably going up 23% and that's not chump change, we only have blah blah blah in the savngs account. If Granpa wants her to get her Masters he's going to have to help more than he has been."

Him- "Well, it's a good thing we didn't have three thousand of them, huh?"

Me - "I got my tubes tied for a reason."

Him - "Good job."

2 articles on the healthcare business

Nonprofit Insurers: Reaping Profits at the Expense of the Consumer
Posted: 06/27/11 10:09 AM ET
Wendell Potter
Analyst, Center for Public Integrity; Former insurance company executive; Author

"... Kaiser alone has spent $700,000 so far this year lobbying lawmakers in Sacramento...

...According to public filings, Kaiser has made a whopping $5 billion in profits since 2009..."


A Depressing Story You need to Read.
Robert KuttnerCo-founder and co-editor, The American Prospect
Posted: 06/26/11 09:05 PM ET

"If President Obama's health reform, the Affordable Care Act, backfires politically, one reason will be the staggering political power of the drug industry.."

Better hope you know exactly how your loved one died

Because most places aint like the CSI you see on TV.
Frontline: Post Mortem


I can't beieve this lizard-like creature has been re-elected 10 times and working in Nawlins for 40 years. No, seriously look at this guy, watch him speak on the Frontline show and then pray to God that you don't die in custody in New Orleans.

Or many other places in the US for that matter. And oh, wait, re-elected? I did not know that coroners were elected, and didn't have to have anything other than a high school diploma in some places.
Huh?
RuEffinKidding me?

My country is so sad now

Report: Private Prisons Love Mass Incarceration, And Want Politicians To Love It Too
Ryan J. Reilly | June 24, 2011, 5:45AM
TPMMuckraker

"...The private prison population has grown 353.7 percent in the past 15 years, according to a study by the Justice Policy Institute."

Michelle Bachmann, frightening to me

Michelle Bachmann is a zealot, and she knows how to talk to her possible voters, the Evangelicals.

" Minnesota politician s who have squared off against Bachmann all speak with a kind of horrified reverence for her martial indomitability, her brilliantly fortifying lack of self-doubt , even the fact that she hasn't appeared to physically age at all in 10 years. "She will not stop," says Cecconi... "

"...Bachmann didn't talk a lot about her religion. She didn't have to—she knows how to signal it in ways that go right over secular heads. In criticizing Obama's Libya policy, for example, she said, "We are the head and not the tail." The phrase comes from Deuteronomy 28:13: "The Lord will make you the head and not the tail." As Rachel Tabachnick has reported, it's often used in theocratic circles to explain why Christians have an obligation to rule...

Republicans do not have the power to block an Elizabeth Warren recess appointment

Here's the rule

Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

That’s Article I, section 5, clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution. You have to hand it to the House Republicans. They read the Constitution.

But they may not have read the whole thing. A little bit later—in the very same Constitution—is this passage on presidential powers:

[The President] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

That’s Article II, section 3, clause 3 (the emphasis is mine, not the founders’). Yes, you read it correctly. If the Senate wants to adjourn and the House won’t permit it, the President can adjourn both houses of Congress. That would be a fitting end to the House meddling in nominations—a power the Constitution expressly assigns to the President and the Senate, not the House.

Read the whole post here.

SDG&E and solar = epic fail

Me visiting a photovoltaic array ↑ many years ago. Granted, photovoltaic collectors as a source of electricity were notoriously inefficient at that time, but hot water systems were efficient, and that was my training. And that didn't turn out so well:
People ask me why I'm so angry all the time?

"...I trained 23 28 years ago to install solar powered domestic hot water systems. I never worked in the field because the bottom fell out of the market when Reagan yanked the tax breaks on solar powered systems. I live in a country run by fucking idiots, anybody who's paying attention is pissed, I don't know why people ask me why I'm pissed...."

I knew the Sunrise Powerlink was not the pretty picture that SDG&E painted because of my very limited experience with photovolatics and my suspicion of SDG&E's PR campaign. I tried to ask the guy manning the Del Mar Fair booth in 2005 if he knew specifics about the green energy PR that was splashed about the booth and dude didn't have a fucking clue. I knew more from the trip to the photovoltaic array in 1983.

SDG&E's Big Solar Failure

And believe me, SDG&E wants nothing to do with the efficiency of the new cells because they can't make money on them. You could save money investing in them now, and tell the Kochs to fuck off and die, even though they don't have anything to do with my local power company, they still have to fuck around in my state's politics, and probably yours too.

JUNE 20, 2011 6:58 AM PDT
Alta Devices lifts curtain on high-efficiency solar cell
by Martin LaMonica

Semantics

Us killing each other; 4 is a "massacre" in a robbery gone haywire.

New York Shooting: Four Dead In Pharmacy Massacre
By FRANK ELTMAN 06/19/11 11:30 PM ET


Us killing them in a drone attack; 19 not a massacre, just "dead."

19 dead in US drone strikes
Published: June 16, 2011New

Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, How to End the War on Terror

Posted by Karen J. Greenberg at 5:21pm, June 19, 2011.

Every time we get a peek inside Washington’s war on terror, it just couldn’t be uglier. Last week, three little home-grown nightmares from that “war” caught my attention. One you could hardly miss. On the front page of the New York Times, Glenn Carle, a former CIA official, claimed that the Bush administration had wanted “to get” Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment blog devastatingly critiqued the invasion and occupation of Iraq (and who writes regularly for TomDispatch). Not only that, administration officials called on the CIA to dig up the dirt on him.

*sigh*

Quinceañera

Quinceañera (2006)

90 min - Drama - 5 July 2006 (France)

IMDB

I loved this little indie flick. I was raised in southern California and I raised my daughter here so I know what a Quinceañera is and in fact my daughter attended one, altlhough she was not part of the ceremony. Her friend was half Indian, so my kid was in heaven, Oh my gosh, Indian AND Mexican food?

The movie was filmed in 3 weeks on a low budget and the writers explain what an LA Quinceañera is from an outsiders view because they are from England. I thought they did a great job and so did Sundance . It's in Spanglish, which I am used to hearing, but there are subtitle options.