What If The Republicans Win?

[vt]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

Foreign Government Gifts To Clinto Foundation Raise Ethical Questions:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-...ise-1424223031

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

Ever since Citizen's United created unlimited, untraceable, and undisclosed donations, I have worried about foreign nations meddling in our elections.
Russia. China. Iran. All of them now can channel unlimited amounts of money into our elections.
The candidates and direct lobbyists might be genuinely unaware of why a certain PAC promotes a particular policy.

[don]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

Ever since Citizen's United created unlimited, untraceable, and undisclosed donations, I have worried about foreign nations meddling in our elections.
Russia. China. Iran. All of them now can channel unlimited amounts of money into our elections.
The candidates and direct lobbyists might be genuinely unaware of why a certain PAC promotes a particular policy.

Sounds like the State Department's playbook.

What color will be chosen next . . . .

[Woodsman]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

Interesting piece. I note this is precisely the way the game was introduced to me all those years ago. But the model is not limited to political entrepreneurs. The basic outline was cribbed from religious entrepreneurs and they remain its most skilled practitioners.

A dear friend who traded in his conscience for the ability to remain a working news guy is ostensibly a business editor at a conservative news site, but spends the better part of his days writing newsletters hawking investments and wonder cures during the off season. During the crazy season, he takes those skills and sells "conservatism." He's doing quite well for himself and recently started a conservative PR firm. With the most expensive political campaign in human history just around the corner, he tells me he's just looking to catch the crumbs and maybe finally buy that South American vineyard he's been droning on about for years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...g-them-richer/

[don]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

With my grandson on my knee, in the shade of the vineyard, I explained that Grandpa's existence was to the bone a ruse, but look about you my boy, at its munificence.

can I get an Amen!

[lektrode]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

....can I get an Amen!

how about a 'WHOOO HAH!' ?

Foreign Government Gifts To Clinto Foundation Raise Ethical Questions:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-...ise-1424223031

ETHICAL...
and clinton in the same sentence?

uh huh...



and considering all of her 'home state' support ?

its already looking like a done-deal -

Glenn Greenwald Bashes “Neocon” Hillary Clinton, “Americans love to mock the idea of monarchy, and yet we have our own de facto monarchy.”

Ms. Clinton will likely be the next president despite being a hugely corporate sponsored candidate with a long history of integrity issues. (To say the least.) People will celebrate her candidacy and her election as yet more “progress” for America. Oh happy day, a new face – and gender – is put on the same system of citizen disenfranchisement. But she’s a woman.

Sadly it will reflect anything but real progress if she wins. Hillary represents an aristocracy which has emerged, a sick almost 3rd World like dynasty, which has gripped the highest office.

Meanwhile the GOP establishment has begun Operation Get Jeb Elected toojust to make sure that the spectrum of choice in the upcoming presidential race is basically nil. That way the cronies can rest early in the election. The Bush families and the Clinton families are good friends and they also tend to share other friends. Everyone can stay nice and comfy.

This is what America has become and it saddens me. Why is it that candidates from only 2 parties are considered viable for the highest office? How can that be? No one else in a country of 310,000,000 people? Why? Because the media and the Republicans and the Democrats say that no one outside of their club is a legitimate candidate? We are just supposed to be cool with this?

Does the political class just think we are suckers?

(SAVE IT, woody... ;)

Sadly the answer to the last question is – yes, they do.

I would love to see the GOP and Dems freak out over a widespread call from Tea Partiers, and libertarians, and greens, and most importantly middle of the road people who are just fed up, to include the candidates of other parties in the presidential debates in 2016. That would make things interesting and might actually do some good for the country. Could you imagine candidates and the media having to explore real, honest to God, issues? It’d be like opening the curtains on a sunny day.

(From Mediaite.com)
“Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she’s been around forever, the Clinton circle. She’s a f******* hawk and like a neocon, practically. She’s surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But she’s going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy.Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It’s going to be this completely symbolic messaging that’s going to overshadow the fact that she’ll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power. They’ll probably have a gay person after Hillary who’s just going to do the same thing.”

and maybe its 'time for a new national anthem' ?

A modest proposal for a new national anthem.

By Ron Rosenbaum

It's rare for me to devote an entire column to a single song—although I once did so for Joni Mitchell's "Amelia" —but in this case it's a song by a singer whose name is not very well-known and whose name I want to make known.

His name is James McMurtry, and that—his name—initially presented an obstacle to my appreciating his work. I've been intrigued by McMurtry ever since my girlfriend came back from a trip to the far reaches of inner America. She'd heard this song—and other great McMurtry cuts—while driving long stretches of West Texas and Oklahoma. When she played me McMurtry's masterpiece "Choctaw Bingo," I couldn't stop thinking about it.

A lot of this not-very-well-known Texas-based singer-songwriter's work is great (start off with Best of the Sugar Hill Years; his latest is Just Us Kids). And I'd call "Lights of Cheyenne" one of the most beautiful visionary romantic ballads I know. But "Choctaw Bingo," released in 2002, is genius. It's more than just genius; it's prophetic genius. New-national-anthem-level genius.

Seriously. It's time to retire ol' Francis Scott Key's "The Star-Spangled Banner" and go with a song that more truly represents the America of today: post-crash, pre-apocalypse, meth- and money-addicted, heading down the highway to self-destruction.

To return to the "problem" of McMurtry's name. It's not surprising, of course, that McMurtry can write: He's the son of Larry McMurtry, the author of classics such as Lonesome Dove. (And his mother was an English professor, a complex burden we share.)

But being a devotee of truck-stop rock, I found myself wondering whether James McMurtry—the bard of what he calls "the North Texas-Southern Oklahoma crystal methamphetamine industry" country, the man who seems to capture its hard-bitten, sin-ridden nuances so faithfully—could really be the real thing. Yes, his father is Texas-born, it's true, but he also published often in the New York Review of Books, and I had a notion this would somehow disqualify his son from raw, unadulterated Texas-Oklahoma authenticity.

You can see, though, with just one twist of the DNA, how the son can bring the father's literary talent to the outlaw country/redneck rock genre; he writes songs with the kind of offhanded quick wit and painfully bitter, cut-to-the-bone romantic remorse with which geniuses like John Hiatt, Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earl, Robert Earl Keen, and Rodney Crowell made their names. Rosanne Cash and Emmylou Harris sometimes hit that note of highway melancholy, too.

Hangover wisdom, truck-stop soul, stolen-car drive tunes: It's hard to give the genre a name. It's not pure country, and it's not pure rock (though it totally rocks). Anyway, McMurtry's best songs stand up to the best of his cohort. He's a kind of cult- and critics' fave who hasn't yet broken out of the "Americana" box.

But he's got the talent for it. And he's a prophet, too. He was writing songs about subprime mortgages and meth-crazed good ol' boys back in 2002, when he released "Choctaw Bingo," the best of these. The song is my candidate for new American anthem, a national anthem for the crash, because it captures a culture where addiction to meth and addiction to money are indistinguishable in their frenzy and their ruination. Vice versa and vice worser. If you don't hear it the first time you hear "Choctaw Bingo," you've spent too much time on the coasts and not enough in the off-the-grid, flown-over locales.

How shall I describe "Choctaw Bingo"? It's about a family reunion in heavy meth country convened by mean old "Uncle Slayton," who's a kind of malignant Uncle Sam figure for the assembled family members.

Here's Uncle Slayton's making a transition from selling moonshine to cooking meth:

Sells his hardwood timber to the chipping mill
Cooks that crystal meth because the shine don't sell
He chooks that crystal meth because the shine don't sell
You know he likes his money, he don't mind the smell.

"Likes his money, he don't mind the smell": Any difference here between Uncle Slayton and the white-shoe investment bankers who knew the stench of the toxic derivatives they were cooking up but were only too happy to keep the addled customers satisfied?

And Choctaw bingo itself is one of a number of Indian reservation enterprises, tax-free reservation-land smoke shops and the like, that inhabit the song. These phrases, the song's setting, call to mind a land that still bears evidence of its stolenness, the reservation culture and naming practices that still evoke the tragic history of the tribes. The song reminds me of Robert Lowell's "Children of Light," that insidiously malevolent poem about the Pilgrims' original theft from the "Redmen."

First, we hear from one of the pilgrims to the family reunion. (Yeah, there's a "Canterbury Tales" shadow structure going on here.) This is a guy named Roscoe who:

... stopped and bought a couple of cartons of cigarettes
At that Indian Smoke Shop with the big neon smoke rings
In the Cherokee Nation hit Muskogee late that night
Somebody ran a stoplight at the Shawnee Bypass
Roscoe tried to miss 'em but he didn't quite. ...

Whoa, careless slaughter on the Shawnee Bypass! The lyrics lope over it, but the blood and guts spilled on the concrete make this reunion a bloodstained occasion from the get-go. Great line: "Tried to miss 'em but he didn't quite": The vast carelessness of the roadkill in Gatsby almost finds an echo in the offhandedness of "didn't quite" here.

And then there's Choctaw bingo itself, which evil Uncle Sleyton "plays every Friday night." Here's an ad for Choctaw bingo that heads the Google search list, probably a sponsored link:

Experience the thrilling and rewarding fun of Indian bingo at Choctaw Casinos! Choctaw Bingo has been one of the premiere high stakes bingo halls since 1987. Choctaw Bingo features 750 seats, giant video projection screens, and a non-smoking section. Choctaw Bingo hosts monthly High Stakes Bingo Games for that bingo player who likes the Big Money. Our friendly staff is always willing to help any customer. So, whether you're a beginner or a seasoned veteran, Choctaw Bingo is the place where winners play.

Overnight packages available on weekends. For reservation information call 1-800-788-BINGO.

Sounds classy, right? No doubt "winners" play there all the time.

Now, I have a thing about Indian casinos. I'm totally in favor of them. I think they're a disguised form of reparations for the theft of Indian land. I'm glad the tribes are making billions taking the foolish white man's money. They deserve it. No tribe more than the Choctaw because it was their removal from their homeland that gave birth to the phrase "trail of tears."

Yes, it was the Choctaws who signed a treaty in 1831, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek (no joke), which led to a forced march, a death march, really, in thousands of cases. From Mississippi (which, in their absence, became the meanest, most repulsively racist state in the nation) to the drylands of Oklahoma, where they scratched out a living until casinos were legalized.

Now, the Choctaws get their revenue from meth-and-moonshine-addled fools who play Choctaw bingo, which somehow, despite the 750-seat auditorium and "giant video projection screens," doesn't seem a sure route to financial stability. (But just as sure and stable, it turns out, as collateralized mortgage obligations.) The more you look at the history of the Choctaw nation and how the "trail of tears" led to Choctaw bingo, the more a kind of allegory the song becomes, an eloquent distillation of the tragic history of the American empire, which was based on the theft of land the nation was founded on, the murder and the enslavement of the tragic remnant of the original inhabitants, and their sly, delayed revenge (Choctaw bingo). The more you know about the Choctaw "trail of tears," the more you suspect it's no accident that McMurtry chose Choctaw bingo as his emblematic game.

Here's where this song is so amazingly prophetic. Looking at it now, through the lens of the crash, you can see how it envisions the American economy as nothing more than an elaborate Choctaw bingo enterprise, with lots of flashing lights to lure in the unwary and the unlucky, a system that, for all its fancy formulas and talk of risk assignment, is nothing more than a sucker's game. And later in the song, McMurtry explicitly names the scam at the heart of it: subprime mortgages.

'Cause here's Uncle Slayton running the subprime scam:

Uncle Slayton's got his Texan pride
Back in the thickets with his Asian bride
He's cut that corner pasture into acre lots
He sells 'em owner financed
Strictly to them that's got no kind of credit
'Cause he knows they're slackers
When they miss that payment
Then he takes it back.

It's the subprime mortgage crisis bubbling away as far back in 2002, because Uncle Slayton's bad-credit-no-credit mortgages are probably still "bundled" inside the inside of the inside of some bad bank's lowest tranche of toxic derivatives.

How'd he do it, McMurtry, paint that vision of hell with the money and methamphetamine, mixed in with highway mayhem and the mortgage crisis and the whole "family reunion" heading for a violent crash? No accident all the talk of guns in the song, either:

Bob and Mae come up from a little town
Way down by Lake Texoma where he coaches football
They were two-A champions now for two years running
But he says they won't be this year, no they won't be this year
And he stopped off in Tushka at that "Pop's Knife and Gun" place
Bought a SKS rifle and a couple a full cases of that steel core ammo
With the berdan primers from some East bloc nation that no longer needs 'em
And a Desert Eagle that's one great big ol' pistol
I mean .50 caliber made by badass Hebrews
And some surplus tracers for that old BAR of Slayton's
Soon as it gets dark we're gonna have us a time
We're gonna have us a time.

Note the football amidt the gun slang. But this is no Friday Night Lights. There's no tender Texas sophistication here. This is a meth-fueled arms-dealing collection of troublemakers heading for a shootout with a not-accidental evocation of Serbia and Palestine giving it world-historical weight.

It reminds you of what a blazing shootout our original national anthem was, with all that rockets'-red-glare.

Only we've got a new one now, my choice for a new national anthem, and McMurtry's is better than Francis Scott Key's tortured jingoism, if you ask me. No, I can't see people standing up at a ballpark, hands over hearts, hymning their joy at Uncle Slayton's subprime meth dealing. (This is a "modest proposal," people: Jonathan Swift wasn't really advocating the starving Irish eat their babies, OK?)

But when I first heard that song in my girlfriend's car, I thought to myself, "Wow! This guy has really caught America in the Thelma and Louise moment before it goes off the cliff." And it's even got the equivalent of "The Star-Spangled Banner's" emblematic flag.

There's a passage in the song about two hot chicks who arrive for the reunion:

Ruth Ann and Lynn come down from Baxter Springs
That's one hell-raisin' town way up in Southeastern Kansas
Got a biker bar next to the lingerie store
That's got them Rolling Stones lips up there in bright pink neon
And they're right down town where everyone can see 'em
And they burn all night
You know they burn all night
You know they burn all night.

Yes, McMurtry's "Choctaw Bingo" is an anthem for the crash, because we may be going down in flames. But those bright pink neon lips burning all night are like the rockets' red glare: "proof through the night that our flag is still there." Those neon lips still wave o'er the land of the brave and the home of the biker bar (lingerie store attached).

maybe he's onto something ? (sez this small-r, fellow devotee of truck-stop rock...)



and if that one doesnt quite fit, this one sure does:



(come to think of it, this one oughta be...
the 'national anthem'.. for that place i'm.. OH so familiar with.. out there.. in the.. midpacific...)

[lektrode]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

system-generated ditto deleted...

see the orig

and its only taking about a minute or so tween cliks today (response time = still SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW)

and its just now occurred to me that maybe the 'tulip is... like.... uhhh....

under attack... by... saboteurs?

since whats gong on seems suspiciously like a 'denial of service' attack

FRED!!!??

[lektrode]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

another sys-gen'd ditto delete

again - my obs is that when theres a delay tween clik'g the post button and the server response,
a double post happens

the slow response time also seems like a 'denial of service attack'

either that or the server (3rd party) is being over-utilized or the vendor has oversold their bandwidth?

inquiring minds are wondren (and getting impatient)

[lektrode]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

seen today over at yaaaaa-HOOEY:

Why CEOs make over 300 times more than workers

there's a lot more to this, but here's the best/salient part:

Income inequality will be a central theme for Democrat and Republican candidates as we head into the election cycle. Both sides of the aisle know what’s at stake and the importance of positioning their policies as a cure for what some call a cancer sweeping the nation. Last week, the President used his economic speech to weigh in hoping to shape the debate in the final 2 years of his presidency.

along with this 'little tidit'....

Is CEO Pay to High?

The above may prove to be the wrong question. What we should be asking is; how did it get this high? While the causes are complex, all the evidence seems to point to former President Bill Clinton and the IRS as the principal catalyst driving up CEO compensation over 1700% since 1994.

Early in his presidency, Bill Clinton decided CEO’s were making too much money and concluded government should play a role in leveling the playing field. His solution was using IRS tax code 162 (m) which limits the deduction of CEO Pay as an expense to $1 Million. On its own that might have forced boards to reconsider high compensation as the lack of a write off would start to cut into profits and eventually share prices. However, the code permits expensing of “performance” based pay above the stated $1 Million if certain goals are met.

• Compensation must be based on written, pre-established performance goals…
• The goals must be objective…
• Attainment of the goal must be substantially uncertain at the time the goal is established.
• The plan and performance measures must be subject to shareholder approval…
• Prior to payment, the Compensation Committee must certify that the goals were attained.

Clinton’s law soon became an inside joke in boardrooms across America. Performance based compensation much of which came in the form of stock options and restricted stock exploded in the 90’s during the run up into and bursting of the internet bubble. The recession that followed along with the financial crisis weighed on compensation but the last 5 years has seen a return to trend with C suite pay rising far faster than the rest of the workforce.
After 20 years I think it’s safe to say the policy is a failure. Performance based pay became so attractive that there are countless examples of CEO’s willing to accept just $1 in salary. Stock based compensation in all its forms became the preferred currency. Today, CEO’s have no better friend than the IRS.

the rest at:

http://davidnelsoncfa.tumblr.com/pos...e-than-workers

and the banksters-besty after 1999... 'is' ?
(depending of course, on what ones definition of the word is, is)

any questions?

[don]

Crossing Over

and in an unprecedented move, Senator McCain will be the VP running mate of both candidates

(at least in spirit)

Sha

[lektrode]

Re: Crossing Over

whoooo HAH!!

whats even funnier than that?

THIS: http://www.cbs.com/shows/madam-secretary/video/

tell me how this isnt IN YER FACE PROPAGANDA?
(designed to put a 'fresher faced' spin on the ole goat...)

and in an unprecedented move, Senator McCain will be the VP running mate of both candidates

(at least in spirit)

Sha

[Master Shake]

Re: What If The Republicans Win?

What if the Pubs win? They still won't have the balls to use their Constitutional authority over the budget to rein in an imperial President.

[vt]

Re: Crossing Over

Actual pic from today:

[lektrode]

Re: Crossing Over

actual screenshot from 'the show' on cbs:

what i mean by a 'fresher face' (or more lipstick on the...) by the propaganda/spin machine

Actual pic from today:

[vt]

Re: Crossing Over

How about a real Secretary of State with brains and relevant experience: