Onyx Lynx

They believe companies will Do The Right Thing, even after the Massey Coal mine disaster.

(From Comrade Misfit.  Scroll down.)

of this blog.

(Lisa has coupons and has offered take the blog to Olive Garden or Red Lobster dinner if the blog can get down to Georgia.  Assuming coupons for those venues.)

In memoriam:  Margaret Tyzack.  Possibly the only actress who could have uttered Antonia's last lines to Claudius in I, Claudius without sounding silly or petulant.  Also, for good reason, a champion of older actresses.

From Shakesville:  Video and transcript of Senator Bernie Sanders speaking sense to power.  Transcript at Sen. Sanders' own website.

Brief excerpt:

In my view, the President of the United States needs to stand with the vast majority of the American people and say no to the Republican leadership and make it clear that enough is enough. No, we will not balance the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable people in this country--on our children, on our seniors and the sick. No, we will not do that. Working families in this country have already sacrificed enough in terms of lost jobs, lost wages, lost homes, lost pensions. The working families of this country are hurting right now. Enough is enough.

There's a petition to sign as well.

In two days, this blog celebrates its third anniversary.

Anyone want to take it out to dinner?

Los Angeles Dodgers file for bankruptcy.

No, I'm not making that up.

McCourt said the Dodgers have tried for almost a year to get Selig to approve the Fox transaction. The deal would have provided him with $385 million up front and was vital to a binding settlement reached between him and his ex-wife and former Dodger CEO Jamie McCourt last week. McCourt now faces the potential of missing a June 30 team payroll without the TV funds and that could lead to a MLB takeover.

The McCourts have been embroiled in a contentious divorce where their lavish spending habits were detailed in court documents. The former couple took out more than $100 million in loans from Dodger-related businesses, records show.

Via supergee at Dreamwidth:   Peter Falk, Columbo.  (Although I am linking to the LA Times obit because it is pretty thorough.)  He did many other parts and has two Oscar nominations to prove it, and The Princess Bride needed his acerbic and irascible Grandpa, but Lieutenant Columbo was an icon.

(No, I do not actually trust the police, and a real-life Columbo probably would not tip those scales.)

ETA:  via james_davis_nicoll, also Dreamwidth:  Gene Colan has also died.  (In the '60s at Marvel, any art that wasn't Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko was Gene Colan.)


[crossposted]

 WOOOOO-HOOOOOOOOOOoo!!!!
New York State Senate approved same-sex marriage!

(Where's that bag of confetti I was saving for this?)

The Equal Rights Amendment has been re-introduced in Congress. (Feminist Daily News, via Shakesville)

This afternoon Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) re-introduced the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA currently has 160 co-sponsors in the House, including Congresswoman Gwen Moore (D-WI), Chair of the Congressional Women's Caucus.

Feminist Majority President Eleanor Smeal spoke at a press conference today announcing the bill's re-introduction, stating, "Women and men deserve and need full equal rights. Without constitutional equality, too many women, and thereby too many families, are cheated. Americans overwhelmingly support constitutional equality. It is time- in fact, it's long overdue- for us to move forward.

And I hope by now we are better able to combat and neutralize bathroom panics.  Yes?

From Mills River Progressive:

From The Way the Future Blogs:

Do you want to know one reason why the very, very rich can get away without paying taxes like the rest of us? Read the newspaper reports of the recent jury decision where a Wilmette, Illinois, lawyer and others, “some of the people who prepare the tax returns for some of the most well-heeled, richest investors in the world,” were convicted of tax fraud for the use of shelters that required, among other tricks, “lies, backdated transactions, false information in files prepared for the IRS” and “the coaching of clients to lie to the IRS.”

With Robert Reich video.

So, being at loose ends and loose clothes, because it's actually hot here (in the summer!  Who'da thunk?), I absentmindedly clicked on Orcinus, which has had the same thing up since December and--

There was new stuff.  From February, but I'd not seen it (it's quite possible it just got posted with the dates because someone at Netroots Nation saw Neiwert and said something like "Dude!  We miss you!" and he smacked his head and kicked the tires and got a month's worth of stuff to post.  All I'm saying is that when I last looked, the most recent article was dated December 11, 2010), and it was all coverage of the murder of Brisenia Flores and Raul Junior Flores and the trial of the murderess.  (Well, and occasional posts about O'Reilly, but they don't count.)

I had many opportunities to comment (Echo.  Ugh.) which I did not take, but I hit a random link at the side and somehow got to "Progressives Can't Afford to Exclude the Working Class" which had this as the first paragraph:

Contemporary liberalism runs the risk of becoming isolated. But this threat does not solely come from the likes of Michele Bachmann or Glenn Beck. It also comes from some self-described liberals whose behavior feeds into the right’s caricature of who we are. We risk becoming a group that restricts membership to a certain kind of liberal, one that is educated, not merely nonreligious but anti-religious, and one that is simultaneously smug and self-righteous.

[...]

What these public figures could be doing instead is rebutting the conservative mantra that Reagan’s tax cuts drastically increased revenue (they didn’t). Better yet, how about pulling the rug out from under the GOP myth that big government doesn’t do anything right? Projects put forth by economic liberals have led to generations of local wealth creation, such as the TVA or the Lower Colorado River Authority. They brought electrical power — and production — to whole sections of the South, areas “the invisible hand” of laissez-faire didn’t want to touch. More importantly, such a discussion would be a very powerful tool in explaining how an activist government does indeed create private sector jobs.

There's more to be said, though.

But I'm going out to enjoy some music.

I think I have changed the settings so that this can be read on a mobile/smart phone.  If this is true, just let me know.

The Tulsa race riot was 90 years ago.  The survivors still haven't been compensated.

Republic of T goes after those imaginary savings from Medicaid cuts.

The CBO estimates that the Republican budget’s $771 billion in Medicaid cuts over ten years amounts to a 35% cut in Medicaid funding to states. The transformation of Medicaid into a block grant program, ensures that funding will decline because the Republican budget increases these grants annually at the rate of inflation, adjusted for population growth — not the rate of inflation for health care, which is far above the general inflation rate.

In other words, it’s build into the budget that states won’t be able to keep up with the costs of the program under the Republican budget, because the Republican budget doesn’t take the rate of growth in health care costs into consideration. So, states cut back on the very Medicaid services that the elderly and disabled, and their families, rely upon.

That's probably an intended feature, not a bug.

There's more.

Arthur Silber on seeing the existing political situation from the outside:

[M]y work here, and in my thinking generally, is to escape the effects of the Stockholm Syndrome. In many ways, it is an arduous task; among other things, it requires a willingness to challenge one's own ideas anew every day and to take nothing at all for granted. But I also find the rewards incalculable. As I discussed in the Wright article, it is a perspective of youth, using that term in its best sense. A willingness to perform this very hard work grants one the blessed sense of being young again. I would cherish that feeling under any circumstances; since I feel terrible physically so much of the time, it has come to represent a gem of inestimable worth to me. Given the political circumstances in which we now find ourselves, I do not exaggerate when I say that I will continue to guard it with my life.

Clarence Clemons, saxophonist, E Street Band.

The angels are lining up for lessons.

[ETA:  Got the heads'-up from skippy and confirmed at the NYTimes.]

[EFTA:  The AP obit.]

[EEFTA: Caryn Rose at backstreets.com (currently last article on page, "The King of the Universe, the Big Kahuna"...).]

Happy birthday to Paul McCartney.

• Maybe I was the only person to think it funny (in that the similarities are many) that Mötley Crüe and Die Walküre were playing a block from each other on the same night.  Although I would doubt that Mark Delavan had a bus parked out back.  (Nikki Sixx did, but I didn't get a picture.)
• What's really getting cut with Medicaid budget cuts is care.  Republic of T is on the case.

  None of these numbers look like a death sentence. But when it comes to Medicaid, and beneficiaries who will likely have nowhere else to turn if their benefits are lost, it comes down to a choice between providing care and not providing care.

• The news not covered because the jokes just tell themselves:

  Sandbags and berms -- and a wing and a prayer. That is a nuclear plant right here at home. Oh, and by the way, you haven't heard a peep about the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, lately, have you? After all, what is a nuclear plant meltdown in terms of newsworthiness compared to a Congressman's salacious tweets?

  From Brilliant at Breakfast.
  
• Techno Confront!  (Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I)

I am not a Syrian lesbian.

Bankruptcy court rules DoMA invalid. (Well, "a violation of the Constitution's equal protection guarantee.")

The decision signed by 20 judges of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California is the first bankruptcy court to address the constitutionality of the law passed by Congress 15 years ago which prohibits federal government recognition of same-sex marriage. The decision came in a case in which a legally married gay couple was seeking to jointly file for bankruptcy.

Via John Scalzi.

1. Leading off: Arthur Silber on being fully human, with an observation on the Weiner case.
2. Scott Horton on the collapse of the case against the whistleblower at the National Security Agency.  That is, there was a plea bargain for a lesser charge but no jail time.
   

   The Drake prosecution is one of five cases in which a U.S. government has invoked the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers. The Nixon Administration set the precedent when it went after Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo in 1971, an effort that failed when the courts concluded that the federal government had engaged in seriously abusive conduct, including numerous criminal acts, in pursuing the case. A more recent prosecution, the Bush Administration’s efforts against two former AIPAC employees, fell apart in the face of a federal judge who was skeptical about the use of the Espionage Act in such circumstances. In the Drake case, Judge Richard D. Bennett similarly ruled that the prosecution would have to share evidence concerning the supposedly classified programs with the defense and the jury, which led the prosecution to drop the charges.
   
   [...]
   
   [...] Sometimes leaks are politically motivated—coming from disloyal civil servants who want to see the administration wounded or compromised politically. But at least as frequently, leaks are motivated by concerns about lawless conduct, abuse, fraud and waste. The leaker understands that internal complaints regularly fall on deaf ears and that congressional oversight is often weak or politically undermined. He likely feels that only the public attention that follows exposure in the media will yield results.

3. Oh, is that where the money went? (Via Brilliant at Breakfast.  Who got it from the LA Times.)
4. Shark-fu on budgets, blindfolds, and machetes.
5. Southern Beale imagines Wall Street without the smaller investors.
6. Clarence Clemons has suffered a stroke.
7. In memoriam:  Carl Gardner, original lead singer of the Coasters.

Via Southern Beale, an op-ed from the Sacramento Bee written by a black Republican who's leaving the party.  Also, the situation in Tennessee has people moving elsewhere.

Noli Irritare Leones compares and contrasts Salam Pax and Amina Arraf.

Some call it "idiocracy."

Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler on the unspoken and not-named political culture as received from the media, with a citation of Betty Friedan.  (More here, with reference to press reaction to David Vitter.  Because I know you hate paging up.)

Orwell wins again.

And they needed a range of 200+ years to get nine.

I'll have my staff schedule the test for next week. No, I'm sorry. It's now 4:00 on a lovely Friday afternoon. Your insurance company requires an MRI request to be approved by a panel of dart-throwing chimpanzees before agreeing to pay for one. All of their offices are in another time zone, and have closed by now on this lovely Friday afternoon.

• Tennessee defunds Planned Parenthood; Southern Beale waxes wroth.

  I also find this attack on poor women very odd. I find it very telling that the so-called “pro-life” movement is spending its money on a message war with racist billboards instead of helping women get healthcare. Sorry if we’re a little jaded over here but it’s not like you people gave a damn about minorities before, except to treat them like criminals.
  
  [...]
  
  Look, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we need some nationwide Lysistrata action. If the men of this country are going to run around crowing about how great it is that women have less access to reproductive health services, then maybe no nookie, okay? Sex leads to babies and STDs and the need for birth control and a good number of services that Planned Parenthood provides so maybe we just won’t put out until you stop taking away our access to these services.

• Comrade Misfit (Just An Earth-Bound Misfit, I) and Cookie Jill (skippy the bush kangaroo) on Scott Walker's move to throttle small craft beer brewers.  I do not like beer at all, but even I know that Large-Corporate-Made beer is unflavored swill, and that large corporations Do Not Like Competition.
• Imagining gender reversal in the Weiner case.

  ... It was plain old lousy, dumb, nerdy, unmerited, creepy vanity that made him take pictures of what he thought was his handsome virile self and send those pictures to women he didn’t know personally in order to feed his sense of unparallelled perfection.
  
  That’s not somebody we need on our side. He’s on nobody’s side but his own.

• The oral history of The National Sports Daily, which came out for a year just before the Internet would have made it viable, maybe (and which I used to pick up at Penn Station on my way either to or from work almost every day).

• Southern Beale on the lies about the Canadian health system, with graphic.
  

  Robert Stein had a really good post up yesterday about this tendency for Republicans to just make shit up, be it making Paul Revere’s famed ride about gun rights and bell-ringing or making specious claims about Canada’s excellent healthcare system. It’s part of a general tendency towards dumbing down American politics, he says. Mainlining stupidity is a two-pronged process, he observes: first Republicans demonize knowledge and expertise or those with knowledge and expertise, then they replace it with misinformation. And then suddenly Republicans have one set of facts, Democrats have another, and nothing ever gets done because we can’t even agree on the problems let alone find solutions.

• Genetically modified food crops.
• Terrance (Republic of T) on the Bush tax cuts, ten years down the road.

  GOP leadership constant tells Americans that “We’re broke” in one breath, and in the next rule out any discussion or letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire, let alone rescinding the cuts altogether. The extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy is now one of the major roadblocks in long-term budget talks.

• In memoriam:  Lilian Jackson Braun.  (The Cat Who... mysteries.)
• And it looks like Blogger might be having a problem...

So just before lunch, I saw something at the NY Times about suggestive video of poor Congressman Weiner, so I clicked it, and the usual suspects in this game came up.

Now as you've no doubt by now guessed, I am not totally gullible in these matters.  But Mr. Breitbart has lied, fabricated, selectively edited, and tried to set up people so often that frankly his credibility with me is considerably less than (uh-oh, obscure reference to 20-year-old-advertising!) Joe Isuzu, and the first thing that leaped to mind was body double.

Because, unless one uses high-definition video, those images besides being shaky are blurry, and one could (as an example) record, say, Nelson Mandela, and claim to have digital footage of Steve Jobs.  I would not recognize my own family on video.  Seriously.  Any dark-haired white male of about the right age would fit.

And I would not put it past a political operative to fake a video for a story.  Particularly not this one.  Y'know, it would require maybe the acting level in a parody sketch.

And I said to myself, "Self, it would be irresponsible not to at least float the possibility of a body double.  I mean it's whacko and off the wall, but it's just barely plausible if you're in a really bad conspiracy theory movie."  (I have seen Pirates of the Caribbean:  On Stranger Tides.  Save your money.)

But after lunch, I brought up nytimes.com, and apparently Mr. Weiner ... confessed.

I am so tired of not knowing whether I'm reading The Onion.

ETA:  Mr. Scalzi administers the codfish to Mr. Weiner.

Jump, Jive & Wail.

Comrade Misfit comes up with a two-sentence summary of many Republicans faced with the current economy:

Why anyone with three functioning neurons would trust those lunatics to operate an open-air Dairy Queen in Anchorage, Alaska in February, much less try to do anything about the economy, is beyond me. Republicans are ideologues who are as able to deal with economic facts and realities as would be a faith-healer who had to deal with a case of appendicitis.

And Jill (Brilliant at Breakfast) notes again that the talking heads (not the band.  More coffee over here, please) don't seem to understand how Medicare works and how the Republican "plan" doesn't.  Again.

Anyone getting the feeling that the staff of The Onion has been let loose in newsrooms across the country?

The lovely Paul Krugman has been putting up good numbers--see this bunt single, with graphs, about the unemployment situation, and this dribbler up the third base line, where the "smart economists" are apparently poised to repeat the error of the mid-Depression.

But Southern Beale gets the inside-the-park homer:

So basically we’re all screwed. The right wing narrative rules in our “liberal media” — the same “liberal media” following Sarah Palin around and Tweeting the family’s breakfast selections. Serious discussion never happens, we just get the same right-wing talking points repeated over and over again. How is it even possible that we had tax cuts in 2001, again in 2003, the economy still tanked, and then we renew those tax cuts and we’re basically in the same place. Yet we still keep hearing how tax cuts stimulate the economy and create jobs. Has no one noticed that in 10 years it hasn’t worked yet?

I recommend to the "professional pundits" (we pause here for the gales of laughter) that they heed the advice of Satchel Paige.

Steve Gilliard died 4 years (and 2 days) ago.  Time to link to "I'm a fighting liberal" again for that blow against national amnesia:

What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn't given us anything we didn't have and it wants to take away our freedoms.

[...]

Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed.

Republic of T on the depredations of Big Pharma.  Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill to rein this in.

So where are those promised jobs?

A brief disquisition on "conflict of interest."  ETA:  Mr. Scott has apparently turned to for-profit providers for care of the elderly.  Right now, I think slime has better character.

The world will not end if people don't know the gender of a baby.  Besides, it's none of our business.

"Enlightenment" is really about separating you from your money.  Especially weekend workshops.

Part II of Republic of T's examination of Republican attempts to kill Medicaid.  Part I linked here.

Moral, my fanny.

I'm probably not allowed to do what I just did. Heh.

Mr. Stewart tees Off on Mr. Trump. All three strikes.  [ETA:  Swiped from Comrade Misfit.]

(NB: I have eaten pizza with a fork. In California. But I usually try to pick it up first. Even now.)

Rosalyn Yalow, physicist.

Budget cuts affecting public safety.

My prayers are with Gary Carter.