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Agree completely, and will add the Supreme Court to the rout necessary to begin bringing the federal government back into the hands of the people. Not "persons", which the Court has redefined to include corporations, but actual people - the 'government by, for, and of' kind of people who used to be the ones who got to decide elections. If you can spare a half-hour or so, watch the recent Bill Moyers segment on 'The 1% Court' and/or read the article of the same name in The Nation. If Moyers' opening lines don't concern us, the war may already be lost: When five conservative members of the Supreme Court handed corporations and the super-rich the right to overwhelm our elections with tsunamis of cash, they moved America further from representative government toward outright plutocracy, where political power derived from wealth is devoted to protecting wealth. We saw it first in the mid-term elections of 2010, and we’re seeing it in spades in this year’s elections – organized money, much of it dark money, given secretly So it can’t be traced, enveloping the campaign for president, Congressional campaigns, and state legislative and judicial races. There’s never been anything like it in our history – not on this scale, and not this sinister.

Sometimes I cannot believe what I am reading. It is hard for me to assemble my outrage at what is being attempted by the some very wealthy Republican contributors. I keep on waiting for the newest polling numbers to be released. This op-ed by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine kind of summarizes the May R Money tape Something in here, paraphrasing Forrest Gump, about evil is as evil says: Presidential campaigns wallow so tediously in pseudo-events and manufactured outrage that our senses can be numbed to the appearance of something genuinely momentous. Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded comments at a fund-raiser are such an event — they reveal something vital about Romney, and they disqualify his claim to the presidency. To think of Romney’s leaked discourse as a “gaffe” grossly misdescribes its importance. Indeed the comments’ direct impact on the outcome of the election will probably be small. Romney repeated the wildly misleading but increasingly popular conservative talking point that 47 percent of Americans pay no income taxes. The federal income tax is, by design, one of the most progressive elements of the American tax system, but well over 80 percent of non-retired adults pay federal taxes. But most people hear “income taxes” and think “taxes,” which is why the trick of using one phrase to make audiences think of the other is a standard GOP trick when discussing taxes. For that very reason, it won’t strike many voters as an insult: Most people who don’t pay income taxes do pay other taxes, and fail to distinguish between them, and thus don’t consider themselves among the 47 percent scorned by Romney. Instead the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party. He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”) It is possible to cling to some version of this dogma and still believe, or to convince yourself, that cutting taxes for the rich or reducing benefits for the poor will eventually help the latter, by teaching them personal responsibility or freeing up Job Creators to favor them with opportunity. Instead Romney regards them as something akin to a permanent enemy class — “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” Romney explained to reporters tonight that his remarks were not "elegantly stated," but did not repudiate them as his true beliefs. In fact, it was quite eloquently stated. The Romney speaking to fund-raisers was not the halting, smarmy figure so frequently on public display but an eloquent and passionate orator. He had no reason to believe his donors needed to hear him denounce the poor — they would have been perfectly satisfied with a bromide about how cutting taxes on the rich will create opportunity for one and all. Instead he put himself forward as the hopeful president of the top half of America against the bottom. Some pundits have likened Romney’s comments to Barack Obama’s 2008 monologue, also secretly recorded at a fund-raiser, about his difficulties with white working class voters in rural Pennsylvania. But the spirit of Obama’s remarks was precisely the opposite of Romney’s. While Obama couched his beliefs in condescending sociological analysis about how poor small town residents vote on the basis of guns and religion rather than economics, the thrust of Obama’s argument was that he believed his policies would help them, and to urge his supporters to make common cause with them: But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background — there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing. Obama was aspiring to become president of all of America, even that part most hostile to him, in the belief that what they shared mattered more than what divided them. Romney genuinely seems to conceive of the lowest-earning half of the population as implacably hostile parasites. The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he’d come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick, and vulnerable. It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney’s embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.

OK, one of my faves from the '90's, Barry Watson. And he doesn't look too shabby today either. . . .

No, I don't think so. Republicans have an entire network that would gladly spend 24 hours a day even on manufactured untrue BS against Democrats / the President. Remember the asshat with the hidden camera at Acorn? The Republicans and say-anything Romney deserve every fucking minute of this, my only regret in the matter is that Dems may get overconfident and get blindsided by a long-planned dirty trick or that the feeling Obama's already won combined with evil voter suppression efforts actually endanger the outcome. Not to mention, the Republicans have made it clear they will not allow the president to get a god damned thing done as long as they control the house of even a "superminority" of senators. So a massive route is the only path to the change Americans are finally starting to demand!

I think I had a crush on about 80 of these fellas! It would have been a real kick in the nuts if the would have posted "and this is what they look like today"photos so glad they chose not to do this! http://www.buzzfeed.com/whitneyjefferson/100-forgotten-heartthrobs-of-the-80s-and-90s

Who says something like this in response to an f-up? Is this one of the first of many aftershocks as the R Money campaign implodes? His defense includes the request to view the entire tape of which Mother Jones has so far released just a few segments. Although I much prefer a delicious blowfront, I am waiting and watching for future blowback. And here is the story of the Eastwooding and Romney acceptance speeches: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81280.html

They may not be as far behind as you think. While direct corporate donations to Super PACs can be spotted through timely disclosure rules, such rules do not apply to trade associations which must identify contributions only once a year, long after their influence has been felt. The disclosure rules do apply to trade unions, however, so the trade associations enjoy a level of opacity available to few U. S. citizens or organizations. So much for free and fair elections. If you have the stomach for another article, try this one. It documents how the American Petroleum Institute scuttled any hope of passing climate legislation, even as the world endured unprecedented weather events. The API, only one of many trade groups flexing its muscle across the country, represents not only U. S. corporations but also outside interests like Saudi Arabia, whose Saudi Refining Inc. chief executive sat on the Board of the API as it was funneling money into Washington in 2010. In fact, 2010 was the first year in which spending by outside interests overshadowed spending by all political parties combined. The sources of the trade-group spending did not become apparent until well after the 2010 elections and legislative actions, just as we will not see who contributed to this year's elections and legislation until 2013. Another article in The Nation estimates that, since the Citizens United ruling, these 'trade associations' have increased their spending ten-fold and will reach nearly $800 million this year. And, as you say, these are the early days of the shift to a corporate plutocracy. What Bill Moyers characterizes as 'seeing it in spades' is not inconsistent, in my opinion, with the likelihood that we will be seeing it in steam-shovelfuls if we don't find a way to intercede.

Well ... having always been alternately laconic and an old cuss at least makes it harder for people to figure out when you're actually starting to lose it.

Not huge,,, but quite nice http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/love-is-the-devil

thank you! I cannot wait to be in Brazil!

With you that the party as a whole may get overconfident. Already some noises out of Obama HQ seem to have been cautioning against this. But one thing I don't too much fear is that Alexrod and the Chicago machine will not be spending considerable time thinking about just this danger of being blindsided, and how to outfox anything that may be thrown up. (As, in the Manhattan Project, Oppie specifically put Edward Teller in charge of the, as Richard Rhodes says, "deliciously Tellerian" task of trying to figure out if there was any way the chain reaction could run out of control and ignite the atmosphere.)

LOL, I know! You couldn't just pick one up and leaf through it w/o looking like like an old pervert. "Mmmmmm..."

LOL Loitering past them in the grocery store, trying not to look like I was ogling them.

OK, begging this dead horse's pardon (meaning this subject matter, not you, hito!)... Of course we grant that many religious precepts are not subject to scientific proof or disproof, the existence or nonexistence of the Deity being a prime example. There is a good argument that religion is at its most valuable whenever it is specifically not on grounds subject to scientific discussion -- expressing transcendent emotion, imagination, yearning, ideals (even granting these may one day fall under the understanding of psychobiology); teaching and imparting of compassion, morals and justice through parables (I confess my view of Jesus as peasant social revolutionary is showing there); etc. But the relevance of the Dalai Lama's quote, it seems, is that many other categories of belief that are held core by many believers are very much subject to disputation and discrediting by science -- for example, the manifold arguments by religionists that the existence of the Deity is necessary in order to explain the existence of the universe. A simple form of the scientific answer to that is this: Positing an unknowable entity in order to "explain" a knowable one does not really explain anything, does it? A more sublime form of the answer was the one given by Laplace: Laplace went in state to Napoleon to present a copy of his work [on the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter]... Napoleon, who was fond of putting embarrassing questions, received it with the remark, 'M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.' Laplace, who, though the most supple of politicians, was as stiff as a martyr on every point of his philosophy, drew himself up and answered bluntly, "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là." ("I had no need of that hypothesis.") http://en.wikipedia....e-Simon_Laplace (Actually this old scientific saw is further expanded on and fascinatingly corrected in the above Wiki article. But the point remains unchanged.)

"Up front about it?" Honest? Hardly. This was a closed meeting with his biggest money supporters. It was NOT meant for public consumption. Everything that Romney says in public is general, not specific, and tailored to the audience which is in front ofhim. Your idea of 'up front and honest about it' doesn't jibe with my idea of up front and honest. Just sayin'. No matter how much lip stick one puts on a pig it cannot make it something it ain't. Some sales just cannot be made.

If you think Paul Ryan's recent sabre-rattling over Iran echoes that of Cheney over Iraq, you are to be commended for your acumen. It turns out that none other than Dan Senor, the neo-conservative who advised members of the Bush II administration has been harnessed up again to guide the Republican Vice-Presidential hopeful. Senor was the advisor to Paul Bremer who was effectively the post-invasion governor of Iraq and decided it would be a good idea not only to "de-Baathify" the Iraqi government but, in one of the most boneheaded decisions of the war, to peremptorily release the million-man Iraqi army without notice and to send them into the countryside without jobs and looking for something to do. According to a recent article by Maureen Dowd, Senor is emblematic of how much trouble America blundered into in the Middle East — trillions wasted, so many lives and limbs lost — because of how little we fathom the culture and sectarian politics. We’re still stumbling in the dark. We not only don’t know who our allies and enemies are, we don’t know who our allies’ and enemies’ allies and enemies are. As the spokesman for Paul Bremer during the Iraq occupation, Senor helped perpetrate one of the biggest foreign policy bungles in American history. The clueless desert viceroys summarily disbanded the Iraqi Army, forced de-Baathification, stood frozen in denial as thugs looted ministries and museums, deluded themselves about the growing insurgency, and misled reporters with their Panglossian scenarios of progress. And this is the guy the Republicans have chosen to build up their foreign policy chops. Let's hope their economic advisors aren't also the ones who convinced Bush that a trillion-dollar war wouldn't require any new taxes and wouldn't increase the deficit.

The British government is thinking that it doesn't want Harry to resign his commission. Last time around, when they repeatedly refused to ship him to Afganistan when the rest of his classmates were going, the Prince presented his brass (and the government & his Gran) with an ultimatum: Either let him do his duty as a serving officer or they could all participate in the ancient and honorable ceremony of kissing his bare royal ass goodbye. Apparently young Harry does not find parading around in a pretty uniform to be a particularly rewarding career. Recall that his brother also flies real search and rescue chopper missions over the Irish Sea in all kinds of nasty weather, not the safest of jobs. Also recall that the Windsors are running a family business that basically amounts to the longest running and most lucrative con job in the history of the British Isles. That the boys do useful work and have the respect of their mates goes a long way toward compensating for the fecklessness of their father. Right now they've got an heir and a spare. No doubt if one of the brothers goes and gets himself killed, the other will be grounded. Until and unless, there's room to tolerate some risk and reap some rewards in the form of public approval of the monarchy.

Pics have come out of Kate topless. - - The queen is said to be beside herself!

You two need to get a room!

I'll educate you, my pretty!