Brilliant at Breakfast: Where no one cashes in on unpaid writers

"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde

"The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25

"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007
"Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention." -- Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

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Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Short cuts

Posted by Jill | 5:29 AM

A lot going on today....

Living well is the best revenge. I may have been wrong about Barack Obama selling out the middle class one iota less than Hillary Clinton would have, but when the book is written, instead of Vince Foster conspiracies and Hillary nutcracker dolls, Mrs. Clinton will be known for speeches like this:

And speaking of Obama, if he can find the nuts to actually follow through on this (NYT link), we might be able to find some enthusiasm to re-elect him: "But in the long term, we have to rethink our tax system more fundamentally. We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education, and research, and high-tech manufacturing? Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country? Because we can’t afford to do both. That’s not politics. That’s just math." Of course Republicans don't believe in things like math and science, so that's going to fall on deaf ears.

And speaking of science, if you thought Jon Huntsman was the sane Republican because he refused to join the Flat Earth Society and deny that climate change was real, guess again: “The scientific community owes us more in terms of a better description of explanation about what might lie beneath all of this. But there’s not information right now to formulate policies in terms of addressing it over all, primarily because it’s a global issue.” So let's keep burning them fossil fuels in perpetuity, shall we? After all, Jesus is coming and only them goddamn heathen commie homosexual Jews will have to deal with it, right? And by the way, it's snowed in New Mexico and Texas already.

Closers won't matter if you don't score any runs. Furthering speculation that Sandy Alderson has been charged by Bud Selig with making the Mets so bad that the Wilpons will have to sell, yesterday Alderson signed two aging relief pitchers and jettisoned the team's best overall player not named "José Reyes". One of the relievers is 6'11" hothead reliever Jon Rauch, best known for going all Incredible Hulk on an umpire. Alderson also traded Angel Pagan to the Giants for another reliever and an outfielder with a sizzling .221 average, after talking about Pagan yesterday as possibly the Mets' new leadoff hitter. All this after refusing to trade José Reyes and actually GETTING something for him, then refusing to even tender an offer. Head, desk, etc.

I'm SHOCKED that Halliburton is accused of destroying evidence in the BP oil spill disaster. Maybe BP and Halliburton can go all Mutually Assured Destruction on each other and kill each other off.

And finally...

There go Alec Baldwin's mayoral aspirations. Look, Dude...I play Words with Friends too, but when you hold up hundreds of other people because you're trying to make a word containing both "J" and "X", it's time to put down the iPhone and seek help. Seriously. I mean it.

Labels: News You Can Use

3 comments

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

What's So Awful About the 99%?

Posted by jurassicpork | 11:59 AM

A couple of days ago, Bradley Schiller, "a professor of economics at the University of Nevada-Reno", wrote an op-ed piece for the LA Times that has to be read to be believed. The title, "What's So Awful About the 1%?" pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the eventual intent of the article. It begins on pretty firm ground by reiterating concerns with which virtually everyone in the 99% can agree:

In the rhetoric of this war, we are fighting the 1% because they possess most of the nation's wealth, bankroll their handpicked political candidates, control the banks and get million-dollar paychecks and billion-dollar bailouts; yet they don't pay enough taxes or invest their wealth in creating American jobs. They're the "millionaires and billionaires" President Obama has called out as needing to pony up more for progressive reforms of our healthcare, banking, tax and political systems. They are the enemy of "us" — the 99% who toil at low-wage jobs, hold underwater mortgages, face foreclosures, suffer recurrent and protracted job layoffs and plant closings, and yet pay our fair share of taxes.

But, apparently, that was set up as a fake straw man argument that the Schiller for Wall Street then imagines he effortlessly deconstructs by continuing,

But there's a flaw in this strategy. The Occupy Wall Street movement envisions the 1% as a monolithic cadre of entrenched billionaires who have a firm and self-serving grip on all the levers of the economy. But a closer look at that elite group reveals how untrue that perspective is.

He then lists Forbes 400 people such as the co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, by saying, "The late Steve Jobs was in that elite club this year. In his earlier days, Jobs would have been camped out with the OWS crowd, probably passing around a joint."

Uh huh. So Jobs, the avaricious version of Skeletor, a guy who in 1974 fucked his own partner out of money and had no problem whatsoever installing tracking software into his iPhones that outright fractured the 4th amendment and outsourced thousands of US jobs overseas to Chinese sweatshops in which suicides are rampant, didn't belong in the "bad" 1% and, instead, ought to continue being exempted in our ongoing collective hagiography by being kindly reinserted in the "good" 1% (I guess that would be overseas job creators who are more interested in making another several billion dollars that can't possibly be spent in one's lifetime.).

#OWS also smokes pot like Jobs would've if he'd been, like, young and alive again and still, you know, smoking pot and had been at Occupy Wall Street. Just ignore the countless hypotheticals this scenario requires and squint harder, Goddamnit!

Schiller also lists for conscientious omission Facebook founder Mark "Zuckerman", another thief by whom Steve Jobs would've been proud to be boned up his bony ass, someone who not only has made his tens of billions by similarly violating the privacy of his website's followers by selling their private information to Wall Street companies but even earlier this year crawled into bed with Goldman Sachs. He did that 500,000,000 times so it could continue to avoid scrutiny by federal auditors. Yes, that Goldman Sachs, one of the biggest targets of Occupy Wall Street. (Sidebar: Not only did Zuckerberg fuck over his best friend just as Steve Jobs did in the 70's, even the name "facebook" isn't original, as Harvard alumni will attest.)

Predictably, Schiller the shill then dives more deeply into his rabbit hole and comes up with the names of the founders of Google, whose own phone, the Android, has also been charged with violating privacy. Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt were, until recently, complicit with the Red Chinese in their vicious, ongoing censorship of over a billion people, has a mysterious, top secret data storage facility in Oregon and recently agreed to spend $200,000,000 building three more data storage facilities in the Far East.

Considering Google's generous cooperation with the Red Chinese and American governments (94% of the time, in fact), there's really nothing to worry about, is there? Throw in sundry and assorted other charges such as "possible misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of others' intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy, possible censorship of search results and content, and the energy consumption of its servers as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as antitrust, monopoly, and restraint of trade," and we're supposed to believe that Google is staying true to its promise to "not be evil?"

Schiller goes on to say,

Not every member of the Forbes 400 is a high-tech folk hero. There is a lot of inherited wealth on that list too (the Mars, Walton, Cargill and Ford dynasties). But 70% of the Forbes elite are self-made billionaires. Those entrepreneurial successes include not just the names behind Facebook, Google, Apple and Starbucks but also EBay (Meg Whitman, Pierre Omidyar), Yahoo (Jerry Yang), Nike (Phil Knight), AOL (Steve Case), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), Subway sandwiches (Peter Buck, Fred DeLuca), "Star Wars" (George Lucas) and even Beanie Babies (Ty Warner). Does anyone doubt that these members of the reviled 1% have enriched the country in significant ways?

Steve Case (who said earlier this year on Twitter, "@SteveCase They say dream big,I say do it big. they say money is the root of all evil/I say the lack of it is the root of all evil.")? THE Steve Case now working for the White House to head a program designed to bring together the fraternal orders of corporations?? Meg Whitman??? Really, Brad??? These people aren't the enemy and don't deserve to be lumped in with the reviled 1%?

Shill is obviously cherry-picking who shouldn't be lumped in with the "bad" 1% (Making a distinction between the good and bad 1% harkens back to when doctors were making distinctions between "good" and "bad" lipids) while painting the entire Occupy Wall Street movement as a bunch of latte-sipping, pot-smoking pseudo-intellectual elitists.

But fear not, for Bradley has pinpointed as only a pinhead can do who the REAL bad guy is:

Our frustrations are more the product of Washington than Wall Street. We have been promised a lot and received little. Obama (who made millions in book royalties the last few years) sowed the seeds of disillusionment when he overpromised what his February 2009 stimulus package could deliver. A series of policy failures and political deadlocks has left people feeling disenfranchised and forgotten. Calling out millionaires and billionaires as the culprits in this economic saga is disingenuous and ultimately self-defeating. Those 1 percenters are not an avaricious "them" but in reality the most entrepreneurial of "us." If we had more of them and fewer grandstanding politicians, we would all be better off.

Gee, and here all this time I thought that Obama's stimulus package wasn't watered down at all by a hostile Congress and that it was the product of failed imagination on Obama's part (although I almost hate to point out to his right wing detractors that the President's stimulus bill still created about 3,300,000 jobs, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Oh, by the way, Brad: Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld all also made millions in book royalties and advances this year. Did any of them create 3.3 million jobs like the President? Didn't think so.)

So to Occupy Wall Street: You all can go home now or move on to Washington DC so you can blame the real evil overlord, President Barack Obama, the guy who kicked off his presidency by creating 3.3 million jobs. The people who outsourced your jobs overseas to save beaucoup bucks by getting around those pesky minimum wage laws, moved their headquarters overseas beyond the jurisdiction of the IRS, the Wall Street banks who bundled your mortgages and made billions by betting against them while making sleazy, backroom deals with the Treasury and the Fed...?

Those aren't the bad guys, you pampered potheads. They're not the 1%. They're what the Great Frank Luntz now calls "entrepreneurs."

I think that if Frank was put upon, he might even rechristen Bradley Schiller as a "pro-corporate first line historian." I just call him a semen-flecked, shit-stained tool of Wall Street whose effigy should be impaled on the bull's horns and burned at both trading bells.

9 comments

Time Is On Your Side

Posted by Tata | 8:01 AM

Today's the day:

Millions of Americans have lost their homes in the Wall Street recession and one in four homeowners are currently underwater on their mortgages. The 99% is bearing the brunt of a crisis caused by Wall Street and big banks.

That's why, all across the country, Americans have begun standing up to the banks that are trying to evict them. It's already happened in Atlanta, Miami, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and cities and towns across the country. Now, it's happening in Brooklyn. Soon, it will be happening everywhere.

Wall Street and the big banks are making record profits while most Americans are struggling to stay in their homes. They break the law with impunity, but millions of us get served with eviction. They make trillions and get bailouts, while we face record unemployment and record debt.

No more! Our system has been serving Wall Street, big banks, and the one percent.

We are the 99%. We are reclaiming our democracy.
And we are reclaiming our homes.

We're all tired and frustrated and some of us may be at the ends of our ropes, but nothing changes unless we demand it. No politician can create a better future for us. This is how real change begins.

0 comments

Monday, December 05, 2011

Around the blogroll and elsewhere: It's My Own Damn Fault edition

Posted by Jill | 5:22 AM

You know, it's one thing to work all weekend because you're on a crunch deadline. It's one thing to work all weekend because you've been given a special project. It's one thing to work all weekend because you're being held to expectations no one else is. But when you work all weekend catching up on documentation that you should have been organizing all along in the first place, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Anyway, here's some stuff you should read today.

Myrddin: Everything You Wanted To Know About Republicans But Were Afraid To Ask

Republican Sen. Fred Upton may find himself kicked out of the La La La I Am Not Listening Party for this.

At Ramona's Voices: Newt to 'Really Poor Children': Buy Your Own Damn Ice Cream.

O'Hollern on CIA Christmas pParties.

Ahab on the amount of religious lobbying going on in Washington. Don't any of these so-called Christians have a problem with pay-for-legislation?

Meanwhile, back in Fukushima.....

The Wifely Person: Why the Republican cmpaign is like the Rye Delicatessen.

Memo to Karen Garcia: If you simply MUST watch Press the Meat on Sundays, at least prepare yourself for it by priming your brain with the high-fiber but slightly sweet goodness of Chris Hayes and his rotating panels of people who actually have gray matter in their brains. And if you can't get up that early, at least keep your eye on Driftglass, because he usually does a good takedown of what he calls the Mouse Circus.

The New York Crank is featuring Ron Paul's awesome attack ad against Newt Gingrich, using the Lizard King's own words. Too bad no Democrat is smart enough to do the same.

Note to Al Franken: This is all very nice, but how about some concern for the problems posted by the IP Protect Act?

And in case the wingnuts believed that Rupert Murdoch's apparent love for the Christofascist Zombie Brigade extended beyond the padded cell that is Fox News, they should look, as Southern Beale did, at his latest publishing venture.

0 comments

Sunday, December 04, 2011

Top 10 Reasons Herman Cain Suspended His Campaign

Posted by jurassicpork | 11:29 AM

Yesterday, former pizza mogul Herman Cain announced at the opening of his new campaign headquarters in Atlanta that he was "suspending" his presidential campaign. Citing "prayer and soul-searching", the major reason is obviously the distraction from his campaign created by sexual harassment and adultery allegations. But there were other reasons Mr. Cain suspended his quixotic quest for the White House. What were they?

10) Couldn't tolerate the idea of another one-on-debate with Newt Gingrch, especially one moderated by Donald Trump. Even THE Herman Cain has standards, bitches.

9) Campaign was beginning to seriously cut into his texting and phone sex addiction.

8) Soul-searching turned up no results.

7) Newt Gingrich convinced him the election wasn't big enough to contain two egomaniacal serial adulterers from Georgia.

6) Mark Block announced on campaign blog he was considering quitting smoking.

5) Admitted he only wanted to show off really, really cool gold tie given to him last year for Christmas.

4) Admitted Secret Service would've cramped his smooth style.

3) After speaking with Mrs. Cain, was faced with the reality of making the transition from imaginary victim to very real one.

2) Wife wasn't too thrilled with her husband being the Charles Kuralt of the pizza business.

1) Campaign not really suspended. The head-shaking racists determined to look post-racial by supporting Cain are just seriously let down.

Labels: Herman Cain, presidential election, Sexual Harassment

1 comments

Why the right should be pointed to and laughed at -- in one sentence.

Posted by Jill | 6:03 AM

In a Pew survey last spring, 75 percent of staunch conservatives, 63 percent of libertarians, and 55 percent of so-called Main Street Republicans said there was no solid evidence of global warming.

NOW can we stop taking any of them seriously?

((source)

Labels: American Idiots, climate change, Teh Stoopid, willful ignorance

2 comments

Friday, December 02, 2011

First They Laugh at You...

Posted by jurassicpork | 10:32 AM

...then they laugh some more, then they laugh so hard they cry...

Herman Cain's unwillingness or inability to pull out of the GOP presidential race cannot be explained by mere stubbornness. The only man in the race who makes Bachmann look like legitimate presidential material by conspicuous relief, you'd think Cain's hideously elongated joke of a campaign would take the latest allegation by Ginger White as a welcome opportunity to finally call it off and get back to trying to spread his white sauce from coast to coast.

The only ones who aren't laughing at him are diehard right wing voters who look at Cain as a handy-dandy lawn jockey they desperately want to see on the south lawn of the White House by 2013. Cain is obviously the cover they need in their desperation to get the uppity black guy out of the Oval Office while not looking racist in doing so.

(As a sidebar, it'll be interesting to see how enthusiastic his temporary KKK apostates will remain if Cain decides to name another African American as his running mate, say, Michael Steele or J. Kenneth Blackwell. Hm. All black, all the time? "Git the hood an' robe from the dry cleaners, Ma! It 'pears we ain't done wit' 'em, yet!")

And, after making a show of "reassessing" his campaign, the Cain train has decided to go full steam ahead while miraculously remaining completely oblivious to the fact it's been diverted to a track leading only to a train yard populated by other political punchlines (And, yes, I'm looking in your direction, Dan Quayle.)

What's even more mystifying is that Cain still has not reached that tipping point that should've by now told even his diehard supporters (such as this mouth-breather who has remained mysteriously silent on the latest allegations and is now casting about for a new champion such as someone who's already said she's not running) that this man needs only a squeaky nose and size 52 shoes to complete the image. It brings to mind all the people who thronged to Queen concerts in the 80's and remaining completely clueless that Freddie Mercury was pleading for people to finally realize what he was even while he was wearing assless leather chaps.

It appears as if their reverse racism will not allow them to completely dismiss this man even if he proudly displays a complete and total ignorance of foreign policy ranging from fears the Red Chinese will one day have the bomb to defiantly remaining ignorant about who's leading Uzbekistan to having a brain fart about Libya to not knowing what "right of return" was, a man so steeped in his moral turpitude that the woman who'd accused him of having an affair with him for over 13 years has proved that Cain was trading text messages with her up until last month (two weeks ago, to be more exact).

It's just as hard to square this undying support for a man who had no problem keeping a mistress on the side and giving steady financial support to her while essentially promising to give no aid to other poor, desperate people who don't happen to be sleeping with him.

Just think about what these same Tea Baggers would be saying if it was found that the President was also having an affair with another woman for 13 years and that four women (even if they worked for ACORN, who no doubt would suddenly be very credible) accused Mr. Obama of sexual harassment.

I think it's fair to say it would set civil rights back to the 15th century and our 44th President would be the first Chief Executive to be lynched. It would be Clinton/Lewinsky II and the Republican Party would suddenly get very motivated while Congress was in session and be devoting 24/7 to writing articles of impeachment and badgering the Justice Department to launch a grand jury investigation. Fund raising within GOP circles would reach a fever pitch and the sale of rope and axe handles would skyrocket from coast to coast, especially in the south.

But, hey, when Herman Cain does it? They're unproven allegations, smear tactics, politically motivated, gold-digging. And who cares that his 9-9-9 tax plan was derived from Sim City, that he quoted a Pokemon movie line as poetry and this man is otherwise less knowledgeable about basic abstract facts expected of a man running for the highest public office possible than a D list blogger?

As Ann Coulter said, our blacks are better than theirs and we want one of our own, someone who thinks like us, in the Oval Office to replace the uppity one, as Rush Limbaugh would say.

8 comments

Thursday, December 01, 2011

Nice priorities, Mr. Holder (and you Democratic Senators, too)

Posted by Jill | 5:40 AM

Up to a third of war veterans in this country have had their homes foreclosed on since 2008. Not one of the top figures in the financial crisis that has brought us three years of recession has been prosecuted. But don't worry, Attorney General Eric Holder is on the case...
...of people burning MP3s and quoting news articles in blogs:

On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder urged Americans to fink on their neighbors and report intellectual-property offenses like popping or hawking unapproved pharmaceuticals and downloading music and movies illegally.

The announcement at the White House came as the Justice Department kicked off a public campaign against intellectual-property theft, which like all successful wars against societal scourges, will have public-service announcements on MTV.

“Fortunately, we can all be part of the solution. Anyone who suspects an IP crime can visit cybercrime.gov, fbi.gov, or iprcenter.gov to report suspected offenses,” Holder said. “The public’s proactive attention to these issues can help us to disrupt the sale of illegal goods; to prosecute the individuals, gangs, and international criminal organizations that profit from these activities; and to stop those who would exploit the ingenuity of others for monetary gain.”

So far there’s no word on what kind of reward you’ll get for reporting your teen sister for using an app to turn a Miley Cyrus YouTube video into an MP3, but surely you’ll get at least a Scouting badge for your loyalty to Big Content and the American Way.

And it isn't just Eric Holder.

Have you ever embedded a music video that's posted on YouTube on your blog? Have you ever excerpted an article, as I just did above? For that matter, have you ever VISITED YouTube?

Your blog, this blog, even right-wing blogs, plus YouTube, and many other sites could be shut down under the sledgehammer that Congress is wielding as part of the Intellectual Property Protection Act, which is being voted on this week.

I'm disgusted to say that among the sponsors of this bill are the following Democratic Senators, ALL of whom should be receiving e-mails from everyone enlightening them as to the implications of what they are about to pass:

Charles Schumer (NY)
Dianne Feinstein (CA)
Sheldon Whitehouse (RI)
Chris Coons (DE)
Richard Blumenthal (CT)

The full name of this travesty is "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011." It sounds fine on the surface, right? The creative endeavors of others SHOULD be protected. Hell, I get plenty pissed off when I see my blog posts reposted in full on other blogs without attribution or permission. But this is a case of wielding a sledgehammer where a scalpel is required, and is reminiscent of those days when Dick Armey would talk about kids being able to hack into Pentagon computers with the V-Chip, or Ted Stevens explaining the internet as "a series of tubes" (and yes, THIS is still the best YouTube video ever made).

The bill appears on its surface to address foreign servers from delivering copyright-infringing content, but the implications that appear to have not even been considered by the bill's authors (or worse, perhaps they have been, have been identified by the Center for Democracy and Technology (see report PDF), and include:

creating a notice-and-cutoff system that allows private parties
to trget a website’s financial resources
altering DNS results in a way which, if done as required under the bill, can compromise cybersecurity
force ISPs to patrol ALL user traffic
tag many if not all social media sites as infringement facilitators
any claim of infringement, by any individual, could cause a site to be taken down. Imagine Catholic League head Bill Donohue's lawyers having a field day with this.

The IP protection has NOTHING in it about fair use. Under this bill, everything from counterfeit medications to one-minute clips from last Sunday's Family Guy to snippets of articles from newspapers would be fair game. I recognize that there is a consumer protection aspect to this as well as protecting the interests of Big Entertainment. But there are ways to protect legitimate interests without running roughshod over kids sharing the latest Rihanna video on Facebook and on blogs whose function is to entertain, inform, and comment. And shame on any Democrat (and yes, I'm also talking to YOU, Mr. Franken) who is too lazy or cowardly or craven to understand the difference.

Labels: I Am Aware of All Internet Traditions, so-called free market

0 comments