Town Hall Meeting

18 Jan 2021

How to Respond to BS Patriotism

Filed under: — Al @ 3:17 pm

Need another reason to love Kris Kristofferson? Try this…

Trump put a Medal of Freedom around the thick neck of Toby Keith today, for, presumably, his big “hit” calling for the US to bomb its enemies back to the Stone Age. A few years ago Ethan Hawke described in Rolling Stone an encounter between Keith (who he calls, simply The Star) and Kris Kristofferson at Willie Nelson’s 70th birthday concert, which went something like this.

The Star passes Willie and Kris in the hallway backstage, says “Happy Birthday, Willie” and then turns to Kristofferson and blurts, “None of that lefty shit out there tonight, Kris.”

“What the fuck did you just say to me?” KK replies, moving towards Keith.

“Oh no,” Willie sighs. “Don’t get Kris all riled up.”

“You heard me,” Keith snaps, walking away.

“Don’t turn your back on me, boy.”

Keith spins around, nervously. “I don’t want any problems, Kris. I just want you to tone it down.”

“Tone it down? Have you ever worn your country’s uniform?”

“What?”

“Don’t ‘what’ me, boy! You just don’t like the answer. I asked, ‘Have you ever served your country?’ The answer is, No, you have not. Have you ever killed another man? Have you ever taken another man’s life and then cashed the check your government gave you for doing it? No. So shut the fuck up.”

Keith mutters, “Whatever.” And flees toward the safety of his dressing room….

KK turns to Willie and Hawke and shakes his finger: “Don’t say a word, Willie.” Then grins and says, “You remember what Waylon used to say about guys like him? They’re doing to country music what pantyhose did to finger-fucking.”

10 Jan 2021

Trumps Term Ends Badly, Like All His Ventures

Filed under: — Al @ 8:42 pm

Brutal

How It Started, How It Ended

19 Aug 2017

Sassy Trump: Fire and Fury

Filed under: — Al @ 7:48 am

This takes the fear of nuclear war down one notch, which I need at the moment.

Here is the original:

24 May 2017

In the Good News Department…

Filed under: — Al @ 12:30 pm

Democrats Just Flipped Seats In 2 Districts That Voted For Donald Trump | HuffPost

Two districts that voted for Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election selected Democrats for state legislature seats in New York and New Hampshire on Tuesday night.

In a Long Island, New York district that Trump won by 23 percent, Democrat Christine Pellegrino defeated Republican Thomas Gargiulo in the race for a seat in the New York State Assembly. Pellegrino served as a delegate for Bernie Sanders at the Democratic National Convention last year, the local Patch reported.

The seat Pellegrino won on Tuesday had been held by Republican Joseph Saladino, who resigned earlier this year after being appointed to a local office. He had defeated his Democratic opponent in 2016 by 37 points. Prior to 2016, however, that same district voted twice for President Barack Obama, per Ballotpedia.

Democrats are also celebrating an upset in a New Hampshire district that Trump won by 7 points in November.

READ MORE HERE

-Thanks Topy for the link!

26 Apr 2017

House GOP Want Obamacare for Themselves

Filed under: — Al @ 3:34 pm

House GOP exempt themselves from their latest health care proposal. Similar to the rest of their policies, Republicans want to keep the good stuff for themselves and leave everyone else with nothing. Can we all just agree that health care shouldn’t be for profit?

Single Payer is Cheaper

-Thanks Topy for the link!

12 Feb 2017

Comic Book Super Villain President

Filed under: — Al @ 1:30 pm

Check out Mark Hamill’s reading of a real Trump tweet as his Joker voice.

Here is the original:

Now hear it read as the Joker, and the bizarre statement starts to make sense.

Thanks Rachel for the links!

22 Jul 2016

Trump RNC Speech – Scare You Then Protect You

Filed under: — Al @ 8:35 am

donald-trump-rnc-acceptance-speech-humble
Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

Check out this article from the Intercept titled “Donald Trump’s Convention Speech Rings Terrifying Historical Alarm Bells.” The author notes the alarming theme of his speech, which is that everyone should be very afraid and that only he can make you safe. It’s a great trick that works quite often, used by religious zealots, cult leaders, and famous tyrants throughout history. PLEASE DON’T FALL FOR THAT GARBAGE!

Sadly the Democrats chose a corporate sellout so the alternative to Trump is poor. Leaves us with a a lesser of two evils situation again. Unless you want to vote for the Green candidate Jill Stein, who is a courageous leader. I’m not a big fan of voting for 3rd party candidates in Presidential elections, there is a difference between Trump and Clinton, and no matter how much I don’t want to vote for Clinton, and how depressing it is to say this, she will be better than Trump.

16 Mar 2016

(Bernie v Hillary) v Trump

Filed under: — Al @ 1:30 pm

I’m starting to think if Bernie doesn’t win and its Hillary v Trump, that Trump wins.  Anyone know good neighborhoods in Vancouver??? She’s the type that makes people stay home and not vote. I admit I am a Bernie supporter and have been for a long time. I didn’t watch the whole thing it’s too painful, just the first couple minutes and then I skipped ahead past the stupid email thing. The funny thing is I found this video looking for Bernie’s position on the 1991 Gulf War, which I recommend watching.

I also like this article on who is a more “realistic” candidate, Hillary or Bernie.

This is titled “Hillary lying for 13 mins straight”

12 Dec 2014

Sony Hack Thoughts

Filed under: — Al @ 11:35 am

–UPDATE Jan 25, 2016 —-

Seems the hack caused little damage to their stock price as it is now $21.13, over a year later.

———————–

My biggest surprise is that something this awful hasn’t happened before.  Usually hackers steal data and try not to make a big deal out of it.  Here, they seem clearly interested in taking down the company.  Sony is doing a great job helping them by having terrible security practices, having seeming racist email conversations, and having odd salary choices.  So far, the data made public has included:

1. Internal email communications
2. Full Employee Records (SSN, offer letters, salary, etc)
3. Medical information, including what treatments were being given and how much they cost
4. Intellectual Property (soon to be released movies, scripts)

Some of the more sensational things are the conversations between the chair of Sony Amy Pascal and a powerful producer Scott Rudin. Some published emails show them making very racist comments about President Obama and condescending ones about Angelina Jolie. The innocent victims are all the current and former rank and file at Sony who now how to live with very private medical data online and/or their SSN forever.

Someone obviously wants Sony to go down and go down hard. No one knows who actually did it yet or how they did it. Sadly if Sony would have kept all this data separate at least they could have minimized the damage. Why have accounting data on the same subnet as your intellectual property? Its insane. I have a feeling their security department is either non-existent or not big enough for their network size.

As of today their stock is worth $20.74 today and was $21.63 the day the hack was made public on Nov 24. A couple questions linger for me: will Pascal get fired for her clearly racist remarks and will lawsuits from employees be allowed to go through the courts and how much the damages will be?

07 Jul 2014

Mayday!

Filed under: — Al @ 9:05 am

A call for help, because our democracy is dying. Check this out and see if it doesn’t inspire you to do something…

https://mayday.us/

30 Jun 2014

Warfare Queens

Filed under: — Al @ 8:53 am

I first heard this term the other night on The Daily Show. Hilarious and true. That segment was mostly about politicians who make their career on the advice of invading any and every country who is having a problem. If people only would pay attention to the waste and fraud going on right in front of them in the “Defense” industry. Since more than half of the annual federal budget goes only to this, it is so ripe for reform it is uncanny.

02 Jun 2014

Talk About the Future

Filed under: — Al @ 12:14 pm

Check out this article about forced scarcity. It’s a thought provoking take on how companies are clinging to their old business model when technology has changed to the point where people can easily get their product for free.

“In the last few decades, thousands of babies in Third World countries have died from contaminated baby formula. What happens is the mothers mix the baby formula with contaminated water, because sanitation is poor. So why the hell do the mothers feed their infants poison formula when they can just produce milk, for free, from their own bodies? The answer is that they do it because the manufacturer of the formula, Nestle, ran lots of ads telling them to.

If you want to know what the future looks like, there it is. The future is going to hang on whether or not businesses will be able to convince you to pay money for things you can otherwise get for free.

Futurists and sci-fi writers talk about a “post-scarcity” society, meaning it’s like Star Trek, where matter replicators and fusion reactors have ended all shortages. On one hand, that now looks like a ridiculous pipe dream, but in a lot of areas of our life, we’re already there.”

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Thanks Mike for the link!

20 Jan 2014

The Wealth of Congress

Filed under: — Al @ 3:56 pm

Wealth Distribution of Congress

Me thinks this is a problem. The overall income distribution problem is laid out nicely here with all the stats you could possibly want. I have a feeling all those poor saps who are only in the 1-9% wealth bracket are the ones who immediately become a lobbyist after leaving in order to gain the money to be in the really exclusive top 1%!

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

16 Dec 2013

Federal Judge Rules on NSA Spying Program Today…

Filed under: — Al @ 1:20 pm

…shocker, it’s likely illegal! Nice to see someone with power do the right thing.

Judge: NSA spying ‘almost Orwellian,’ likely unconstitutional

In a stinging rebuke to President Barack Obama’s surveillance policies, a federal judge on Monday branded the National Security Agency’s mass collection of Americans’ telephone data “almost Orwellian” and likely a violation of the Constitution.

Appeals Court Judge Richard Leon invoked Founding Father James Madison and the Beatles in a frequently scathing ruling. Leon, appointed by then-President George W. Bush, ordered the government to halt bulk collection of so-called telephony metadata and destroy information already collected through that program. But he suspended his order as the case works its way through the courts.

“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval,” Leon wrote.

The judge also dealt a blow to the government’s argument that such surveillance programs — a source of controversy ever since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed their reach in a series of unauthorized disclosures — are necessary to thwarting terrorist plots.

“The Government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature,” he wrote.

Read the rest here.

21 Nov 2013

Good Ol Samantha Power

Filed under: — Al @ 4:49 pm

The 2003 version of Samantha Power excoriates the 2013 version of Samantha Power…

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/wow-2013-samantha-power-was-just-excoriated-2003-samantha-power

It’s a similar course for lots of partisan Democrats. And occasionally the reverse for partisan Republicans. It really is amazing to see Michelle Bachmann and her ilk have bipartisan agreement with President Obama and Senator Feinstein on issues like Afghanistan and NSA spying.

12 Nov 2013

From the It’s-Very-Doable-Department

Filed under: — Al @ 11:47 am

The problem is crappy private contractors, and there are tons of them, and most of them make their money in the “defense” industry (feel safer?). 3 folks in the Bay Area decided to just write their own health care exchange website using publicly available data built by the healthcare.gov folks. Try it out, it’s amazingly quick and easy.

http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/

‘We were surprised to see that it was actually fairly difficult to use HealthCare.gov to find and understand our options,’ says George Kalogeropoulos, who created the site along with Ning Liang and Michael Wasser. ‘Given that the data was publicly available, we thought that it made a lot of sense to take the data that was on there and just make it easy to search through and view available plans.’ Of course, it’s not fair to compare the creation of Health Sherpa to the rollout of the more complicated government ACA site, which even President Obama has acknowledged as a horribly botched affair. ‘It isn’t a fair apples-to-apples comparison,’ says Kalogeropoulos. ‘Unlike Healthcare.gov, our site doesn’t connect to the IRS, DHS, and various state exchanges and authorities. Furthermore, we’re using the government’s data, so our site is only possible because of the hard work that the Healthcare.gov team has done.’ “The Health Sherpa makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to compare health care plans covered under Obamacare in 34 states,” writes Connor Simpson at Atlantic Wire. “The result is a simple, beautiful, remarkably responsive website that anyone could use.'”

Read more on Slashdot.

-Al

10 Oct 2013

“The Suicide Caucus”

Filed under: — Administrator @ 8:22 am

Where the G.O.P.’s Suicide Caucus Lives

Where the Suicide Caucus Lives

“North Carolina’s Eleventh District had been gerrymandered after the 2010 census to become the most Republican district in his state….While the big story of the 2012 election was about demographics and a growing non-white population that is increasingly Democratic, that was not the story in the Meadows race. His district is eighty-seven per cent white, five per cent Latino, and three per cent black.”

Read The Full Article Here

Thanks JM for the link!

03 Oct 2013

Humanitarian Intervention

Filed under: — Al @ 2:35 pm

I say that tongue-in-cheek, I’m not a big fan of “humanitarian intervention” which is usually just an excuse for more bombing of “the others.” Check out this short article, makes some great points.

American gun use is out of control. Shouldn’t the world intervene?

“There have been fewer than 20 terror-related deaths on American soil since 9/11 and about 364,000 deaths caused by privately owned firearms.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/21/american-gun-out-control-porter

14 Aug 2013

“The Wire” Creator on “Stand Your Ground”

Filed under: — Al @ 11:18 am

“You can stand your ground if you’re white, and you can use a gun to do it. But if you stand your ground with your fists and you’re black, you’re dead.”

http://davidsimon.com/trayvon/

27 Feb 2013

Too Big to Jail

Filed under: — Al @ 3:27 pm

This article is a must read. I will give you the biggest shocker which is in the title, if you thought “Too Big to Fail” was bad, how about we can’t prosecute banks for helping drug dealers and suspected terrorists launder money because putting executives in jail could destabilize the company and therefore the economy. Oh that holy fucking economy reasoning. Taibbi is an amazing journalist and this piece is possibly his most important.

Too Big To Jail by Matt Taibbi

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