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Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Thom: Harold Camping tells us Friday is our last day.

Herman Cain jokes all the way to Worst Person in the World.

Obama Ends the Iraq War:

Pap: GOP ready to steal 2012 election.

Occupied:

Thom: The Good, the Bad, and the Very, Very Ugly.

ONN: Week in review.

Ann Telnaes: Sen. Graham—Give me your oil….

Liberal Viewer: FAUX News bias on health law constitutionality?.

Lawrence O’Donnell: VP Joe Biden schools Republicans on math.

Sam Seder: Marco Rubio’s fictional biography.

The Teabaggers boycott Aladdin Episode 2.

Pap: How anti-science Republicans are destroying America.

The GOP Primary Asylum:

Glenn Beck conspires his way to Worst Person in the World.

The Tea Party Nation Engages in Blatant Sabotage Against America:

Pap and Ed: Republicans now claim to be concerned about income gap.

Alyona: Poverty spreading across the states..

White House: West Wing Week.

Gaddafi is Gone:

Sen. Cantwell (D-WA) on the threat of Salmon anemia:

Obama on The American Jobs act.

Thom: ALEC is targeting your sick leave.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Comments

  2. 2

    @1
    The homeless fellow, Walter, who sells Real Change in front of my grocery store, noted yesterday that I was still here – I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said the “nut job” predicted the Rapture again for Friday! Who knew?!

    Apocalyptic Christian cults – too much fun!

  4. 4

    Three Approved GMOs Linked to Organ Damage

    “…The data “clearly underlines adverse impacts on kidneys and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, as well as different levels of damages to heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system,” reported Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen…”

    “…The researchers conclude that the raw data from all three GMO studies reveal novel pesticide residues will be present in food and feed and may pose grave health risks to those consuming them…”

  5. 5

    From the link @3: “Stock prices aren’t opinions, they’re facts. Only price pays, as a trader will tell you. Everything else is BS.”

    I love it! Wingers can (and do) b.s. about everything else, but they can’t lie about what shares of General Motors, Citibank, or AIG sold for yesterday — no matter how hard they try. Anyone can look it up.

  6. 6

    @3 That article opened my eyes. I didn’t think it was possible, even for a rightwing crank, to argue that excessive government regulation of banks caused the 2008 financial crisis. Now I know better. No overreach is too great for those guys. It’s akin to a physics crank arguing that lightspeed is merely a neutrino’s first gear.

  11. 11

    @9 Try reading the article before jerking your knee, idiot, and maybe you won’t look quite so stupid.

  12. 12

    It’s obvious the numbskull @9 didn’t even click on the link to see what’s there, because if he had, he’d have seen a big headline in bold black large-font type saying

    Climate study confirms what skeptics scoffed at: global warming is real

    even if he didn’t bother to skim the article below it.

  14. 14

    “Obama Ends the Iraq War:”

    Good. Now we need to get out of Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East. Then Europe and Asia. The empire is no longer sustainable, and we’ve been up to our eyebrows in the shit for decades and decades.

    Let the rest of the world take care of the rest of the world, for a change!

  17. 17

    @8
    See this post from earlier on a different thread, and posts below.
    The study to which you refer was by a physicist ‘skeptic’ motivated mostly, it seems, by a conviction that he was smarter than the other climate scientists.
    He went and got funding – including from the Koch brothers! – to try to disprove the very large bulk of existing climate science observations. However, being an honest scientist – he is now saying that his study fully supports the vast bulk of climate science showing accelerating warming in recent years.

    Predictably, now the knuckledraggers and apologists for fossil fuel are saying, of course the earth is warming – it’s just not because of human behavior.

  18. 18

    The Montana “friendo” has been quiet lately.. I suppose he readied for the Camping rapture and is now blubbering in sorrow that he was “left behind”..

    Oh well we’ll be back to FastNFurious and Solyndra within the week I’m sure…

  20. 20

    Yesterday, in the 10/21 open thread @100, I posted that Saudi’s crown prince had died — and wondered what significance that has for the U.S. Here’s a partial answer:

    “‘Nayef [the likely successor] is more religious, and is closer to the Saudi groups who are very critical of the king’s decisions regarding women and other steps he’s taken to balance out the rigid religious practices in society,’ said Ali Fakhro, a political analyst and commentator in Bahrain.

    “But it remains doubtful that Nayef — if ever made king — would outright annul Abdullah’s reforms …. More likely, Nayef would put any further changes on hold, said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political affairs professor at Emirates University. ‘It’s not good news for Saudis or for the region,’ he said. ‘(Nayef) is the security guy. He is the mukhabarat (secret police) guy. He is the internal affairs guy.'”

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44....._n_africa/

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: So, it appears the new situation is more or less equivalent to when Andropov, the KGB guy, succeeded Brezhnev in the USSR. In addition, Nayef has been more outspokenly hostile to Israel than was Aziz. Overall, Aziz’s death and Nayef’s potential accession aren’t very positive developments for the U.S.

    The Saudi leadership is an enfeebled gerontocracy. King Abdullah, 87, is ailing. Crown Prince Aziz, nominally the defense minister but unable to function in anything but ceremonial roles, was 80 and reportedly suffering from dementia. His potential successor, Prince Nayef, at 78 is no spring chicken nor a picture of health (he reportedly suffers from diabetes and osteoporisis), but exercises real power in his present role.

    Saudi Arabia is the world’s most prominent remaining absolute monarchy. But the distribution and exercise of actual power within the 20,000-member royal family is complicated. So is royal succession, which is not strictly hereditary. The king can appoint and crown princes. Upon the king’s death, the crown prince is only a transitional leader until named as king, and isn’t entitled to become king; someone else can be selected. The king, however, is chosen by a narrow circle of high-ranking royals. There is no doubt that the top ranks of the royal family hold actual and absolute power in Saudi Arabia, but the varying influence of the members of that group — and their attitudes toward the U.S. and on key policy issues — are crucial questions for American, Israeli, and other interests.

    http://www.globalsecurity.org/.....leader.htm

  21. 21

    @13 I can’t make you do anything, and even if I could, you’re not worth the trouble. It was just a suggestion.

  22. 22

    @20
    Time to take a trillion dollars and build massive wind power infrastructure in this country.
    Take half a trillion and start the electric car charging infrastructure.

    Then tell Saudi Arabia, “Nice knowing you.” Or, label them criminals for feeding our addiction to their products, and confiscate all the ill-gotten wealth. Or invade and topple them (much easier than Iraq, I think) and put a woman in charge.

  23. 23

    Rough night for the huskies.. Young UW team vs. a once in a generation squad from Stanford..

    Next year should be a little more interesting..

  25. 25

    Louisiana’s popular GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal easily coasted to re-election tonight. He attracted no serious challengers, and Democrats didn’t field a candidate against him.

  26. 26

    Papantonio (at this link: http://tinyurl.com/3r92zg4) thinks 2012 will be an Obama-Perry race. I’ve felt all along, and continue to think, Romney will be the GOP nominee; but that’s only an educated guess and I could be wrong.

    Disclaimer: This comment contains forward-looking statements. Past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Read the prospectus before putting your money on a betting pool.

  27. 27

    FBI corruption probe of Gov. Scott Walker

    A Wisconsin grand jury is looking into Scott Walker’s activities when he was a county executive. FBI agents with search warrants searched homes and vehicles, and seized computers, of top Walker aides. Media sources characterize the probe as a “corruption investigation.” This is a criminal probe. Walker has lawyered up, hiring a former Bush-appointed U.S. attorney to “represent his interests.”

    http://abclocal.go.com/wls/sto.....id=8354543

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm.....ott-walker

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....78770.html

    http://www.thenation.com/blog/.....or-program

    http://www.jsonline.com/news/s.....01878.html

    http://www.politicususa.com/en.....rs-top-aid

  28. 28

    @27 I’m not making this up. Being a Democratic party hack and liberal propagandist is so easy it’s ridiculous! If I were still a Republican (I used to be one), I’d have to lie, fabricate, fictionalize, photoshop, etc. But all a liberal propagandist has to do is throw darts at a newspaper page and, I swear to the Great Mother Rabbit Spirit, there’s so goddamned much Republican corruption you don’t have time or space to post it all! That’s how bad Republicans are.

  29. 29

    It’s OK to be competitive. In a general sense, I mean. For example, there’s nothing wrong with USC trying to beat Notre Dame on the gridiron (which they did tonight). Play your best game and thrill the spectators, that’s what it’s all about! But Republicans seem to be trying to out-compete the Nazis for moral depravity, and I dunno about that one, I think competition should be constructive, and I don’t see how out-Naziing the Nazis is useful in any way. They’re not there yet — they haven’t killed 50 million people yet — but they’re thinking about it.*

    * I’m a Democratic party hack and liberal propagandist. If you don’t lke it, fuck you.

  30. 30

    @29 I’m a Democratic party hack and liberal propagandist. If you don’t like it, fuck you. Better yet, fuck yourself. Wingnuts (and the fools who vote for them) are good at that.

  31. 31

    @24

    Spectators, coaches and players told police that everything was fine and they should let the men perform, Jessica Rasmussen said, but officers asked them to make room and started using pepper spray.

    Rasmussen said she and other bystanders also got spray in their eyes, ears and mouths.

    Union fan Jason Kelly said the way police reacted was an embarrassment to the community of Roosevelt.
    “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Kelly said. “It was totally unprovoked.”

    That’s not a case for more training, that’s a case for firing the cops.

  32. 32

    @31

    they were Polynesian – read “brown”

    dancing – read “doin’ sumthin weird, like”

    at a football game – read “OUR game”

    didn’t immediately disperse – read “didn’t do what them were told to do, like”

    An impromptu dance – at a football game – without a permit, no less – I surprised they didn’t get the TAZERS out.
    Cops need to learn to DE-escalate, not create a situation where they feel they have no choice but to use weapons.
    I’ve always felt that there were too many police officers drawn to that line of work by the mere fact that they get to wield weapons and tell others what to do.

  34. 34

    they were Polynesian – read “brown”

    dancing – read “doin’ sumthin weird, like”

    at a football game – read “OUR game”

    didn’t immediately disperse – read “didn’t do what them were told to do, like”

    Yep! And that sort of thing ought to get you fired.

  35. 35

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....via=blog_1

    Sun Oct 23, 2011 at 08:00 AM PDT.

    First they came for your pensions…+*by Mark SumnerFollow
    for Daily Kos.
    Share1168 91permalink 120 Comments / 120 New

    Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across. — Sun Tzu
    Sun Tzu breaks The Art of War into 13 chapters. There are sections on maneuvering an army in hostile terrain, advice on maintaining supply lines, and instructions on using incendiary weapons against massed forces. However, if you pick up the text expecting to find nothing but battles, you’ll be disappointed. Most of the Art of War is actually concerned with defeating your opponent without firing a shot. It’s exactly that property that has made the book so attractive to readers and applicable to many disciplines over the last 14 centuries.
    For Sun Tzu, real victory comes when you defeat your enemies without risking your own resources in battle. Best of all, it comes when you destroy your opposition without even letting them realize they’ve been defeated. Such a victory may seem unlikely, but there’s one example that most of us lived through, a massive defeat that many Americans still don’t want to acknowledge.

    Three decades ago, most workers in corporations could look forward to retiring under the terms of a defined benefit pension plan—a plan that guaranteed these workers a steady and secure payment in retirement. The money that most workers got in retirement was not great, often around half of what they had made toward the end of their working years, but it was sufficient that most workers could look forward to a life after the workplace without fear of losing what they had built for themselves and their families. Even when the amount wasn’t enough to live a life of luxury, it was a known quantity at a known date, allowing workers to plan for how they would get by.

    However, starting in mid-1980s, corporations presented their workers with another option. Individual Retirement Accounts were touted not as a way to get to a frugal retirement with a small nest-egg, but a way to become genuinely wealthy. Workers were given literature, charts, and lectures showing that while pensions would leave them with barely enough to get by, retirement accounts would make them millionaires. The promise was that workers, especially those then in their 20s and 30s, would build up so much wealth that their pension would become an afterthought. Companies would even help this along by contributing significant matching funds to the accounts.

    Part One.

  36. 36

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....via=blog_1

    Which was a good thing, since within a few years the retirement funds became less and less optional. Complaining that defined benefit pensions were a huge and unsustainable burden, one corporation after another phased out their pension plans. A third of them were gone by 2000. Another third in the last decade. If that had happened with no option, there might have been some serious debate over the truth behind the corporate statements. There might even have been some serious unrest. But companies didn’t march into their workers and say “hey, you get nothing.” Instead they pointed at the retirement accounts, IRAs and 401(k) plans, as a bridge to a golden retirement.

    As it turns out, companies might as well have been selling the Brooklyn Bridge. Many workers were given literature that told them to expect rates of return of 8% or more, and were invited to plan their retirements around the resulting values, but the long-term prospect for small investors in the stock market has never reached those levels. It wasn’t just a matter of buying into a stock-based system right before a market collapse. Even in good times, small investors haven’t come close to the promises that were made in many plans.

    Instead of magically growing piles of cash, workers were exposed to funds that took large bites from their investments in the form of loads and fees. Retiring workers found that weren’t able to wait for recovery when the market was down, but had to take their money when it was needed. Workers who lost their jobs found that fines and taxes made those retirement accounts very shaky bridges to cross periods of unemployment, and that eating into the account at age 40 or 50 or 60 left them unable to reach reasonable levels in their account no matter what their contribution rate. The paucity of regulations around those matching funds promised by companies, allowed the percentage that corporations kicked in to move steadily downward after workers had been transitioned away from pensions, often with little notification and no information on how this change would affect workers’ long-term results.

    Retirement funds greatly shifted the funding burden of plans away from corporations and onto the shoulders of workers. In essence, being moved to a 401(k) plan wasn’t just a change in your retirement outlook, it was a fat cut in pay. Even when workers invested as they were told, the resulting funds didn’t come close providing the promised bounty. Workers who are now beginning to retire into lives defined by retirement accounts are finding that they have only around a quarter of what they need—and less than half of what they might have made under defined benefit plans. A total of 60% of American households are now dependent for their retirement on 401(k) plans, and many of those households are looking toward the kind of impoverished retirements that were rare in America for the last half century.

    Part two of three.

  37. 37

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....via=blog_1

    When Americans today say that they don’t think their children will face the kind of prospects they’ve enjoyed, it’s not just because they can see so many people in their 20s currently out of work; it’s because they know they won’t be able to help. As much talk as there has been about the “sandwich generation,” many baby boomers have been cushioned by parents who had pensions and retiree health care plans. Those young workers now struggling to get their start in America are doing so at the same time their parents are facing retirement without enough money to fend for themselves, much less give a leg up to their kids.

    As Ellen Schultz documents in her excellent though infuriating book Retirement Heist, this didn’t have to happen. What put the pension funds in trouble wasn’t an “overly generous” model or competitive pressure. Companies weren’t going broke because of promises made to unions. They weren’t weighed down by obligations to retirees who were living longer. It was the corporations who poisoned the pension system, and they did it on purpose.

    By absolutely no coincidence, just as retirement accounts were becoming available, many large corporations stopped making the necessary payments to keep retirement funds solvent. Others didn’t stop there, but also loaded up the funds with enormous promised pensions to executives. When corporations began to report shortfalls in funds and to present staggering numbers to show that they could never meet the demands of their plans, it wasn’t because of bad calculations or the business environment. It was simply sabotage. They weighted the plans with deliberate debt, then they told American workers that if they kept following the same path toward the retirement they expected, it would lead to disaster. However, if you would only turn around and cross this bridge…

    Separating the American worker from defined benefit plans and forcing them to directly participate in the markets not only allowed the corporations to raid the pension plans for executive bonuses and to mark down their future payments to workers. It forced every worker to become a stock market gambler. It forced factory workers to compete with professional investors. It set the stage for deregulation of the market, for destruction of Glass-Steagall, for creation of weakly regulated derivative markets, all of which could be defended as offering the flexibility the market needed to make money for those those would had not choice but trust that market for their future.

    It definitely generated an “ownership society,” only the ownership was of workers, by markets. It turned a reasonable retirement into a carrot that could always be held out of reach and provided leverage for the most outrageous fiscal maneuvering.

    The reason that the right is so intent on attacking the pension plans of government workers is not because those benefits are unreasonable, or because they represent an excessive reward for a lifetime of work. Benefits given to government workers are attacked because corporate America has already sold the nation on the idea that giving people a safe and secure retirement can’t be done. Government workers are in the way of the story. They have to be crushed to show that expecting a bare modicum of respect and fair treatment is unreasonable.

    And the reason that the right is so intent on convincing America that Social Security is in trouble is they want to sell us another bridge. They want to take the last piece of ground that’s not currently in their control. They want to make sure there is nowhere to stand, no ragged bit of safety, no shred of dignity, not theirs to control.

    Conservatives have been working themselves into a lather of mock-horror at the idea of “class warfare,” but it’s not the start of the war that concerns them; it’s the end. If we’ll only lie down just a little while longer, it’ll all be over.

    I’ve never read a more succinct synopsis of “what happened”.

    THIS is also what the 99% Movement is about.

  38. 38

    Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page between 2000 and 2011, and someone in the same period who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of the current economic crisis? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

    http://www.frumforum.com/were-our-enemies-right

  39. 39

    @38: I loved this comment:

    ExConSean // Aug 6, 2011 at 3:21 pm

    I asked myself this question when, after cheering on the invasion of Iraq from an office with a view of the AEI building, I went over there and saw what it was really like. Having followed the debate leading up to the invasion, and seen the way conservative commentators slandered Middle East experts (particularly within academia), I couldn’t help but notice that the academics had correctly predicted most of what happened in 2003-2005, while the AEI crew–including you, Frum–was almost comically off the mark. I say “almost comically” because being fundamentally wrong about every important aspect of a military action means lots and lots of needless death, a huge amount of wasted money, and second-order effects that take generations to play out. If there’s anything one shouldn’t elide the truth about, it’s the decision to go to war. That recklessness alone convinced me to expand my reading beyond the conservative echo chamber I’d been raise in.

    You’d think more people would be able to remember who told the truth, and who was shilling for someone else. But no, those Middle East experts are still “academic anti-Americans” (whose “anti-Americanism” might have saved us trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, and not shown the world how to run a “paper tiger” out of town), and Bill Kristol is still paid to tell us what he thinks about world politics, as if he weren’t the very LAST person one should trust with questions of national security.

    Point being, Krugman could have correctly predicted in 2002 how many points the Dow would fall in 2008, on what day, and which companies would need to be bailed out, and the ideologues at NR would still deride him as a “left wing loon,” “out of touch with reality,” and a “socialist/communist/fascist” for his observations. Reality means nothing to the ideologue, only loyalty.

    Russell Kirk’s definition of conservatism, “the negation of ideology,” couldn’t look more out-of-place today.

  40. 40

    @39
    Iowa’s up to 20% of their electricity coming from wind.

    Iowa gets 20% of its electricity from wind power
    By MB-BigB | August 6, 2011
    4
    tweets
    retweet
    There’s a report out from the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) that states that Iowa, as of the second quarter of 2011, gets 20% of its electricity needs from wind power. Iowa hit this milestone with the addition of a new 594 megawatt wind turbine farm from MidAmerican Energy that’s located near Adair, Iowa. The rest of the US is only averaging 3% of electricity generated from wind power, so Iowa appears to be way ahead of the overall 20% by 2030 goal that’s been set by the U.S. Department of Energy. And they’re not stopping – Iowa’s percentage should increase further this year, the Adair farm is only the first of three projects that MidAmerican has planned for this year. As of now, Iowa is in second place among the states in wind power – at 4,000 megawatts, they are still far behind Texas at 9,000 megawatts worth of wind generating power.

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