The Republican’s Magical Mystery Tour (Starting Next Week)

This from Robert Reich.  Please follow link to original.
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http://robertreich.org/

According to reports, one of the first acts of the Republican congress will be to fire Doug Elmendorf, current director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, because he won’t use “dynamic scoring” for his economic projections.
Dynamic scoring is the magical-mystery math Republicans have been pushing since they came up with supply-side “trickle-down” economics.
It’s based on the belief that cutting taxes unleashes economic growth and thereby produces additional government revenue. Supposedly the added revenue more than makes up for what’s lost when Congress hands out the tax cuts.
Dynamic scoring would make it easier to enact tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, because the tax cuts wouldn’t look as if they increased the budget deficit.
Incoming House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) calls it “reality-based scoring,” but it’s actually magical scoring – which is why Elmendorf, as well as all previous CBO directors have rejected it.
Few economic theories have been as thoroughly tested in the real world as supply-side economics, and so notoriously failed.
Ronald Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent and ended up nearly doubling the national debt. His first budget director, David Stockman, later confessed he dealt with embarrassing questions about future deficits with “magic asterisks” in the budgets submitted to Congress. The Congressional Budget Office didn’t buy them.
George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus from Bill Clinton but then slashed taxes, mostly on the rich. The CBO found that the Bush tax cuts reduced revenues by $3 trillion.
Yet Republicans don’t want to admit supply-side economics is hokum. As a result, they’ve never had much love for the truth-tellers at the Congressional Budget Office.
In 2011, when briefly leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich called the CBO “a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that has not been internally generated.”
The CBO has continued to be a truth-telling thorn in the Republican’s side.
The budget plan Paul Ryan came up with in 2012 – likely to be a harbinger of what’s to come from the Republican congress – slashed Medicaid, cut taxes on the rich and on corporations, and replaced Medicare with a less well-funded voucher plan.
Ryan claimed these measures would reduce the deficit. The Congressional Budget Office disagreed.
Ryan persevered. His 2013 and 2014 budget proposals were similarly filled with magic asterisks. The CBO still wasn’t impressed.
Yet it’s one thing to cling to magical-mystery thinking when you have only one house of Congress. It’s another when you’re running the whole shebang.
Now that Elmendorf is on the way out, presumably to be replaced by someone willing to tell Ryan and other Republicans what they’d like to hear, the way has been cleared for all the magic they can muster.
In this as in other domains of public policy, Republicans have not shown a particular affinity for facts.
Climate change? It’s not happening, they say. And even if it is happening, humans aren’t responsible. (Almost all scientists studying the issue find it’s occurring and humans are the major cause.)
Widening inequality? Not occurring, they say. Even though the data show otherwise, they claim the measurements are wrong.
Voting fraud? Happening all over the country, they say, which is why voter IDs and other limits on voting are necessary. Even though there’s no evidence to back up their claim (the best evidence shows no more than 31 credible incidents of fraud out of a billion ballots cast), they continue to assert it.
Evolution? Just a theory, they say. Even though all reputable scientists support it, many Republicans at the state level say it shouldn’t be taught without also presenting the view found in the Bible.
Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? America’s use of torture? The George W. Bush administration and its allies in Congress weren’t overly interested in the facts.
The pattern seems to be: if you don’t like the facts, make them up.
Or have your benefactors finance “think tanks” filled with hired guns who will tell the public what you and your patrons want them to say.
If all else fails, fire your own experts who tell the truth, and replace them with people who will pronounce falsehoods.
There’s one big problem with this strategy, though. Legislation based on lies often causes the public to be harmed.
Not even “truthiness,” as Stephen Colbert once called it, is an adequate substitute for the whole truth.

YEA!! We're #36

Here are a couple of interesting items from "Some Assembly Required".  Follow link to original.
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http://ckm3.blogspot.com/

Dear Santa: In terms of child poverty, the United States ranks 36th out of the 41 wealthiest nations. There are 2.5 million homeless children in the US, an all-time high. 65% of US children live in a home that receives aid from the federal government. 45% of US children belong to low income families. 45% of African-American children in the US live in “areas of concentrated poverty” (slums). The average American is 40% poorer today than before the recession, and 20% of US households will be able to eat Christmas dinner thanks to food stamps, about that many more courtesy of various food banks and charities. 
Enjoy yours.


The Fundamentals: A seasonal history lesson: According to the book of Matthew, Jesus was born in 4 BC. Luke holds out for 6 AD. John doesn't adhere to any of the timelines described by Matthew, Mark or Luke in tracing the Messiah's life. To add to the confusion, the genealogies of the Christ child as portrayed by Matthew and Luke are completely different.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all.  Perhaps the "Kristians" of today will take Christ's teachings to heart.  It would make for a very different world.  Please remember Ayn Rand was an atheist.  All the supposed "Christians" who follow her insane fantasies are actually the exact opposite of Christian.  So is the totally insane "prosperity gospel"

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

Winter Wonderland - The Roches

Here's a reminder of home  --  my original home.  Found this on Dr. Krugman's blog  --  "A Christmas Carol In The Vernacular" by The Roches.  Enjoy.

update

I've had, and still have, the flu since last week.  Fever, weak, yucky, foul, weak, raspy, etc., etc., etc. 

Nothing new until I , once again, fell at least semi-human.  Wish this on no one.

Dr. John - Didn't He Ramble ; Closer Walk With Thee

It don't mean a thing - Dr. John

Professor Longhair - Red Beans

Rolling Stones - Sweet Virginia (Stripped Version)

Gene Ammons - Richard "Groove" Holmes Trio Live 1961 ~ Exactly Like You

Gene Ammons - Tenor Sax
Richard "Groove" Holmes - Hammond B3 Organ
Gene Edwards - Guitar
Leroy Henderson - Drums

Plas Johnson - Georgia On My Mind

Harlem Nocturne By Sam "The Man" Taylor

Whooping Cough Back With A vengence In California

Here's a little story about vaccinations  --  especially those who don't have them.

I never had any of the current vaccines.  I was born before their development.  As a result I had whooping cough, chicken pox, measles, mumps, and every other damn thing children can get  --  except for polio.  In any event, I nearly died, missed an entire six months of school, and developed a reputation for being "sickly"  --  even though I was just recovering from a barrage of childhood diseases.  My kids all had their vaccinations.  I could not bear to subject them to all the crap I had  --  and the aftereffects.

I believe the benefits have been proven, while the supposed downside is, at best, conjecture.  The folks who do not have their kids vaccinated were vaccinated as kids and never had to go through all the childhood diseases themselves.  They have no idea how dangerous they are.  Nor are they aware of potential side effects.

Now we are faced with crap like this:

"Whooping Cough Back With a Vengeance in California"

Chris Hedges - A Society of Captives

Here is an essay by Chris Hedges from "Truthdig"  --  please read.  Follow link to original for this, and much more.
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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_society_of_captives_20141207

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to launch a pilot program in New York City to place body cameras on police officers and conduct training seminars to help them reduce their adrenaline rushes and abusive language, along with the establishment of a less stringent marijuana policy, are merely cosmetic reforms. The killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island was, after all, captured on video. These proposed reforms, like those out of Washington, D.C., fail to address the underlying cause of poverty, state-sponsored murder and the obscene explosion of mass incarceration—the rise of the corporate state and the death of our democracy. Mass acts of civil disobedience, now being carried out across the country, are the only mechanism left that offers hope for systematic legal and judicial reform. We must defy the corporate state, not work with it.

The legal system no longer functions to protect ordinary Americans. It serves our oligarchic, corporate elites. These elites have committed $26 billion in financial fraud. They loot the U.S. Treasury, escape taxation, drive down wages, break unions, pillage pension funds, gut regulation and oversight, destroy public institutions including public schools and social assistance programs, wage endless and illegal wars to swell the profits of arms merchants, and—yes—authorize police to murder unarmed black men.

Police and national intelligence and security agencies, which carry out wholesale surveillance against the population and serve as the corporate elite’s brutal enforcers, are omnipotent by intention. They are designed to impart fear, even terror, to keep the population under control. And until the courts and the legislative bodies give us back our rights—which they have no intention of doing—things will only get worse for the poor and the rest of us. We live in a post-constitutional era.

Corporations have captured every major institution, including the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government, and deformed them to exclusively serve the demands of the market. They have, in the process, demolished civil society. Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” warned that without heavy government regulation and oversight, unfettered and unregulated capitalism degenerates into a Mafia capitalism and a Mafia political system. A self-regulating market, Polanyi writes, turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities. This ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. The ecosystem and human beings become objects whose worth is determined solely by the market. They are exploited until exhaustion or collapse occurs. A society that no longer recognizes that the natural world and life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves. This is what we are undergoing. Literally.

As in every totalitarian state, the first victims are the vulnerable, and in the United States this means poor people of color. In the name of the “war on drugs” or the necessity of enforcing immigration laws, those trapped in our urban internal colonies are effectively stripped of their rights. Police, who arrest some 13 million people a year—1.6 million of them on drug charges and half of those on marijuana counts—were empowered by the “war on drugs” to carry out random searches and sweeps with no probable cause. They take DNA samples from many whom they arrest to build a nationwide database that includes both the guilty and the innocent. And they charge each of the sampled arrestees $50 for DNA processing. They confiscate cash, cars, homes and other possessions based on allegations of illegal drug activity and use the proceeds to swell police budgets. They impose fines in poor neighborhoods for absurd offenses—riding a bicycle on a sidewalk or not having an ID—to fleece the poor or, if they cannot pay, toss them into jail. And before deporting undocumented workers the state levels fines, often in the thousands of dollars, on those being held by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in order to empty their pockets before they are shipped out. Prisoners locked in cages often spend decades attempting to pay off thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands, in court fines from the paltry $28 a month they earn in prison jobs; the government, to make sure it gets its money, automatically deducts a percentage each month from their prison paychecks. It is a vast extortion racket run against the poor by the corporate state, which also makes sure that the interest rates of mortgages, car loans, student loans and credit card loans are set at predatory levels.

Since 1980 the United States has constructed the world’s largest prison system, populated with 2.3 million inmates, 25 percent of the world’s prison population. Police, to keep the system filled with bodies, have had most legal constraints on their behavior removed. They serve as judge and jury on the streets of American cities. Such expansion of police powers is “a long step down the totalitarian path,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas warned in 1968. The police, who are often little more than predatory, armed gangs in inner-city neighborhoods, arbitrarily decide who lives, who dies and who spends years in prison. They rarely fight crime or protect the citizen. They round up human beings like cattle to meet arrest quotas, the prerequisite for receiving federal cash in the “drug war.” Because many crimes carry long mandatory sentences it is easy to intimidate defendants into “pleading out” on lesser offenses. The arrested are acutely aware they have no chance—97 percent of all federal cases and 94 percent of all state cases are resolved by guilty pleas rather than trials. An editorial in The New York Times said that the pressure employed by state and federal prosecutors to make defendants accept guilty pleas—an action that often includes waiving the right to appeal to a higher court—is “closer to coercion” than to bargaining. There are always police informants who, to reduce their own sentences, will tell a court anything demanded of them by the police. And, as we saw after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and after the killing of Garner, the word of police officers and prosecutors, whose loyalty is to the police, is law.

A Department of Defense program known as 1033, which was begun in the 1990s and which the National Defense Authorization Act allowed along with federal homeland security grants to the states, has provided $4.3 billion in military equipment to local police forces, either free or on permanent loan, the website ProPublica reported. The militarization of the police, which includes outfitting departments with heavy machine guns, ammunition magazines, night vision equipment, aircraft and armored vehicles, has effectively turned urban police, and increasingly rural police as well, into quasi-military forces of occupation. “Police conduct up to 80,000 SWAT raids a year in the US, up from 3,000 a year in the early ’80s,” reporter Hanqing Chen wrote in ProPublica. The American Civil Liberties Union, in Chen’s words, found that “almost 80 percent of SWAT team raids are linked to search warrants to investigate potential criminal suspects, not for high-stakes ‘hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.’ He went on to say, “The ACLU also noted that SWAT tactics are used disproportionately against people of color.”

The bodies of the incarcerated poor fuel our system of neo-slavery. In prisons across the country, including the one in which I teach, private corporations profit from captive prison labor. The incarcerated work eight-hour days for as little as a dollar a day. Phone companies, food companies, private prisons and a host of other corporations feed like jackals off those we hold behind bars. And the lack of employment and the collapse of education and vocational training in communities across the United States are part of the design. This design—with its built-in allure from the illegal economy, the only way for many of the poor to make a living—ensures rates of recidivism of over 60 percent. There are millions of poor people for whom this country is little more than a vast penal colony.

Lawyer Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” identifies what she calls a criminal “caste system.” This caste system controls the lives of not only the 2.3 million people who are incarcerated but also the 4.8 million people on probation or parole. Millions more people are forced into “permanent second-class citizenship” by their criminal records, which make employment, higher education and public assistance difficult or impossible, Alexander says.

Totalitarian systems accrue to themselves omnipotent power by first targeting and demonizing a defenseless minority. Poor African-Americans, like Muslims, have been stigmatized by elites and the mass media. The state, promising to combat the “lawlessness” of the demonized minority, demands that authorities be emancipated from the constraints of the law. Arguments like this one were used to justify the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror.” But once any segment of the population is stripped of equality before the law, as poor people of color and Muslims have been, once police are permitted under the law to become omnipotent, brutal and systematically oppressive tactics are invariably employed against the wider society. The corporate state has no intention of carrying out legal reforms to curb the omnipotence of its organs of internal security. They were made omnipotent on purpose.

Matt Taibbi in his book, “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,” brilliantly illustrates how poverty, in essence, has become a crime. He spent time in courts where wealthy people who had committed documented fraud amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars never had to stand trial and in city courts where the poor were called to answer for crimes that, until I read his book, I did not know existed. Standing in front of your home, he shows in one case, can be an arrestable offense.

“That’s what nobody gets, that the two approaches to justice may individually make a kind of sense, but side by side they’re a dystopia, where common city courts become factories for turning poor people into prisoners, while federal prosecutors on the white-collar beat turn into overpriced garbage men, who behind closed doors quietly dispose of the sins of the rich for a fee,” Taibbi writes. “And it’s evolved this way over time and for a thousand reasons, so that almost nobody is aware of the whole picture, the two worlds so separate that they’re barely visible to each other. The usual political descriptors like ‘unfairness’ and ‘injustice’ don’t really apply. It’s more like a breakdown into madness.”

Hannah Arendt warned that once any segment of the population is denied rights, the rule of law is destroyed. When laws do not apply equally to all they are treated as “rights and privileges.” When the state is faced with growing instability or unrest, these “privileges” are revoked. Elites who feel increasingly threatened by the wider population do not “resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police,” Arendt writes.

This is what is taking place now. The corporate state and its organs of internal security are illegitimate. We are a society of captives.

Surviving Whole Foods

Here is something very funny from "Huffington Post" - please follow link to original.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-maclean/surviving-whole-foods_b_3895583.html

Whole Foods is like Vegas. You go there to feel good but you leave broke, disoriented, and with the newfound knowledge that you have a vaginal disease.
Unlike Vegas, Whole Foods' clientele are all about mindfulness and compassion... until they get to the parking lot. Then it's war. As I pull up this morning, I see a pregnant lady on the crosswalk holding a baby and groceries. This driver swerves around her and honks. As he speeds off I catch his bumper sticker, which says 'NAMASTE'. Poor lady didn't even hear him approaching because he was driving a Prius. He crept up on her like a panther.
As the great, sliding glass doors part I am immediately smacked in the face by a wall of cool, moist air that smells of strawberries and orchids. I leave behind the concrete jungle and enter a cornucopia of organic bliss; the land of hemp milk and honey. Seriously, think about Heaven and then think about Whole Foods; they're basically the same.
The first thing I see is the great wall of kombucha -- 42 different kinds of rotten tea. Fun fact: the word kombucha is Japanese for 'I gizzed in your tea.' Anyone who's ever swallowed the glob of mucus at the end of the bottle knows exactly what I'm talking about. I believe this thing is called "The Mother," which makes it that much creepier.
Next I see the gluten-free section filled with crackers and bread made from various wheat-substitutes such as cardboard and sawdust. I skip this aisle because I'm not rich enough to have dietary restrictions. Ever notice that you don't meet poor people with special diet needs? A gluten intolerant house cleaner? A cab driver with Candida? Candida is what I call a rich, white person problem. You know you've really made it in this world when you get Candida. My personal theory is that Candida is something you get from too much hot yoga. All I'm saying is if I were a yeast, I would want to live in your yoga pants.
Next I approach the beauty aisle. There is a scary looking machine there that you put your face inside of and it tells you exactly how ugly you are. They calculate your wrinkles, sun spots, the size of your pores, etc. and compare it to other women your age. I think of myself attractive but as it turns out, I am 78 percent ugly, meaning less pretty than 78 percent of women in the world. On the popular 1-10 hotness scale used by males the world over, that makes me a 3 (if you round up, which I hope you will.) A glance at the extremely close-up picture they took of my face, in which I somehow have a glorious, blond porn mustache, tells me that 3 is about right. Especially because the left side of my face is apparently 20 percent more aged than the right. Fantastic. After contemplating ending it all here and now, I decide instead to buy their product. One bottle of delicious smelling, silky feeling creme that is maybe going to raise me from a 3 to a 4 for only $108 which is a pretty good deal when you think about it.
I grab a handful of peanut butter pretzels on my way out of this stupid aisle. I don't feel bad about pilfering these bites because of the umpteen times that I've overpaid at the salad bar and been tricked into buying $108 beauty creams. The pretzels are very fattening but I'm already in the seventieth percentile of ugly so who cares.
Next I come to the vitamin aisle which is a danger zone for any broke hypochondriac. Warning: Whole Foods keeps their best people in this section. Although you think she's a homeless person at first, that vitamin clerk is an ex-pharmaceuticals sales rep. Today she talks me into buying estrogen for my mystery mustache and Women's Acidophilus because apparently I DO have Candida after all.
I move on to the next aisle and ask the nearest Whole Foods clerk for help. He's wearing a visor inside and as if that weren't douchey enough, it has one word on it in all caps. Yup, NAMASTE. I ask him where I can find whole wheat bread. He chuckles at me "Oh, we keep the poison in aisle 7." Based solely on the attitudes of people sporting namaste paraphernalia today, I'd think it was Sanskrit for "go fuck yourself."
I pass the table where the guy invites me to join a group cleanse he's leading. For $179.99 I can not-eat not-alone... not-gonna-happen. They're doing the cleanse where you consume nothing but lemon juice, cayenne pepper and fiber pills for 10 days, what's that one called again? Oh, yeah...anorexia. I went on a cleanse once; it was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I detoxified, I purified, I lost weight. On the other hand, I fell asleep on the highway, fantasized about eating a pigeon, and crapped my pants. I think I'll stick with the whole eating thing.
I grab a couple of loaves of poison, and head to checkout. The fact that I'm at Whole Foods on a Sunday finally sinks in when I join the end of the line...halfway down the dog food aisle. I suddenly realize that I'm dying to get out of this store. Maybe it's the lonely feeling of being a carnivore in a sea of vegans, or the newfound knowledge that some people's dogs eat better than I do, but mostly I think it's the fact that Yanni has been playing literally this entire time. Like sensory deprivation, listening to Yanni seems harmless at first, enjoyable even. But two hours in, you'll chew your own ear off to make it stop.
A thousand minutes later, I get to the cashier. She is 95 percent beautiful. "Have you brought your reusable bags?" Fuck. No, they are at home with their 2 dozen once-used friends. She rings up my meat, alcohol, gluten and a wrapper from the chocolate bar I ate in line, with thinly veiled alarm. She scans my ladies acidophilus, gives me a pitying frown and whispers, "Ya know, if you wanna get rid of your Candida, you should stop feeding it." She rings me up for $313. I resist the urge to unwrap and swallow whole another $6 truffle in protest. Barely. Instead, I reach for my wallet, flash her a quiet smile and say, "Namaste."

Recovery at Last?

This is the latest from Dr. Krugman  --  please follow link to original.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/opinion/paul-krugman-recovery-at-last.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fpaul-krugman

Last week we got an actually good employment report — arguably the first truly good report in a long time. The U.S. economy added well over 300,000 jobs; wages, which have been stagnant for far too long, picked up a bit. Other indicators, like the rate at which workers are quitting (a sign that they expect to find new jobs), continue to improve. We’re still nowhere near full employment, but getting there no longer seems like an impossible dream.

And there are some important lessons from this belated good news. It doesn’t vindicate policies that permitted seven years and counting of depressed incomes and employment. But it does put the lie to some of the nonsense you hear about why the economy has lagged.

Let’s talk first about reasons not to celebrate.

Things are finally looking better for American workers, but this improvement comes after years of suffering, with long-term unemployment in particular lingering at levels not seen since the 1930s. Millions of families lost their homes, their savings, or both. Many young Americans graduated into a labor market that didn’t want their skills, and will never get back onto the career tracks they should have had.

And the long slump hasn’t just scarred families; it has done immense damage to our long-run prospects. Estimates of the economy’s potential — the amount it can produce if and when it finally reaches full employment — have been steadily marked down in recent years, and many researchers now believe that the slump itself damaged future potential.

So it has been a terrible seven years, and even a string of good job reports won’t undo the damage. Why was it so bad?

You often hear claims, sometimes from pundits who should know better, that nobody predicted a sluggish recovery, and that this proves that mainstream macroeconomics is all wrong. The truth is that many economists, myself included, predicted a slow recovery from the very beginning. Why?

The answer, in brief, is that there are recessions and then there are recessions. Some recessions are deliberately engineered to cool off an overheated, inflating economy. For example, the Fed caused the 1981-82 recession with tight-money policies that temporarily sent interest rates to almost 20 percent. And ending that recession was easy: Once the Fed decided that we had suffered enough, it relented, interest rates tumbled, and it was morning in America.

But “postmodern” recessions, like the downturns of 2001 and 2007-9, reflect bursting bubbles rather than tight money, and they’re hard to end; even if the Fed cuts interest rates all the way to zero, it may find itself pushing on a string, unable to have much of a positive effect. As a result, you don’t expect to see V-shaped recoveries like 1982-84 — and sure enough, we didn’t.

This doesn’t mean that we were fated to experience a seven-year slump. We could have had a much faster recovery if the U.S. government had ramped up public investment and put more money in the hands of families likely to spend it. But the Obama stimulus was much too small and short-lived — as many of us warned, in advance, it would be — and since 2010 what we have actually seen, thanks to scorched-earth Republican opposition on all fronts, are unprecedented cutbacks in government spending, especially investment, and in government employment.

Continue reading the main story

O.K., at this point I’m sure many readers are thinking that they’ve been hearing a very different story about what went wrong — the conservative story that attributes the sluggish recovery to the terrible, horrible, no-good attitude of the Obama administration. The president, we’re told, scared businesspeople by talking about “fat cats” on Wall Street and generally looking at them funny. Also, Obamacare has killed jobs, right?

Which is where the new job numbers come in. At this point we have enough data points to compare the job recovery under President Obama with the job recovery under former President George W. Bush, who also presided over a postmodern recession but certainly never insulted fat cats. And by any measure you might choose — but especially if you compare rates of job creation in the private sector — the Obama recovery has been stronger and faster. Oh, and its pace has picked up over the past year, as health reform has gone fully into effect.

Just to be clear, I’m not calling the Obama-era economy a success story. We needed faster job growth this time around than under Mr. Bush, because the recession was deeper, and unemployment stayed far too high for far too long. But we can now say with confidence that the recovery’s weakness had nothing to do with Mr. Obama’s (falsely) alleged anti-business slant. What it reflected, instead, was the damage done by government paralysis — paralysis that has, alas, richly rewarded the very politicians who caused it.

I actually have had a thought!

I just left the blog of a long time activist who recently was pleading for help from friends and readers.  It seems she had lost her home, had no income, no place to live, no prospects.  Of course many folks joined together to help.

Today I read that she just returned from a conference in New York.

Now, I'm not an activist.  I am in dire straits financially.  Recently my partner asked folks she knows for help.  People responded.  Given our situation I do not see how I could possibly go anywhere for a conference.  Currently, using up precious resources in that way seems obscene to me.  If I can afford to do that, my situation really isn't that bad.  But, I am not quite that entitled. 

I could not afford to help that person.  Now, I'm happy I didn't.  If I had, I would now feel I'd been "had".

I guess I've not yet come to really understand how "activism" has become a "career choice".  Both left and right wing "activists" seem to see their job of "saving the world" as a "career"  --  it's now a vocation, as opposed to an avocation done to enlighten folks, or at least sway them to your way of thinking   ----   in many cases, doing their thinking for them.

This is very different from the post of "public intellectual", or "public conscience"  --  they usually have a day job.  These folks stake out a position, publicize it, and hope the coin rolls in.  They can be anti something. or pro something, but it seems they do it mostly for money, like the patent medicine hawkers of old.  Then again we still have our Dr. Oz.

No matter the position, the field, the stance, it seems to be all about the money.

In truth, we have no shame. 

You Are Too Beautiful - John Coltrane with Johnny Hartman

John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman - My One And Only Love 1963

My Favorite Things - John Coltrane [FULL VERSION] HQ

Lester Young and Teddy Wilson - Love me or Leave me

Count Basie - Booty's Blues

Jumpin Jive - Cab Calloway and the Nicholas Brothers

Count Basie - Sweet Georgia Brown

Jack Teagarden & Louis Armstrong - Old Rockin' Chair

Pee Wee Russell - The Very Thought Of You

I Can't Get Started - Ruby Braff, Pee Wee Russell

Count Basie Al Grey, Need's to be Bee'd With

Blossom Dearie - Our Day Will Come

Blossom Dearie - Tea For Two

DO YOU MISS NEW YORK - DAVE FRISHBERG

40 Miles of Bad Road -- Duane Eddy

RAUNCHY by Duane Eddy

"BLUE SUEDE SHOES" CARL PERKINS SUN 45-234 P.1955 USA

Little Richard - Slippin' and Slidin'

Little Richard - Long Tall Sally

The Real Ritchie Valens - La Bamba

WHITE LIGHTNING The Big Bopper 1959 (Originalversion of the famous George Jones song !) Rockabilly

Roy Orbison and Teen Kings - "Ooby Dooby"

JERRY LEE LEWIS - WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN - SUN RECORDS

Jerry Lee Lewis ~ Mean Woman Blues / I'm Feelin' Sorry - SUN EPA 107 - Original 45rpm EP 1957

"Jerry Lee Lewis Great Balls of Fire" - Original Pressing SUN 281 45rpm 1957

Elvis Presley - Don't Be Cruel

Elvis Presley - Heartbreak Hotel

When this first came out  --  it was revolutionary.  Not doo-wop, not R&B, not even the usual rock and roll, or the Blues  --  it was a new sound from Elvis.  I will always love these early songs, even after he became a parody of himself.

Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps feat. Cliff Gallup LIVE be-bop-a-lula 1956

Addams Family Thanksgiving Turkey day song full scene

A post Thanksgiving reminder:

Islamic State militants stone two 'gay men' to death in Syria

More from "The Religion of Peace"  --  the same one that has been attacking Israel since 1948, the same one that wants "peace"   ---   but, refuses to accept Israel as a nation.  Ths "Religion of Peace" preaches death to Jews  --  all Jews.  Kills gay folks, folks who refuse to convert, and truly HATES women.  ALL women.

Follow link to original.
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http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/islamic-state-militants-stone-two-gay-men-to-death-in-syria/ar-BBfO9zE?ocid=LENDHP


The Islamic State group stoned two men to death in Syria Tuesday after claiming they were gay, a monitor said, in the jihadist organisation's first executions for alleged homosexuality.
"The IS today stoned to death a man that it said was gay," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding that the victim was around 20 years old.
He was killed in Mayadeen in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, near the border with Iraq.
The Britain-based Observatory said IS claimed it found videos on his mobile phone showing him "practising indecent acts with males".
In a separate incident on Tuesday, an 18-year-old was also stoned to death in Deir Ezzor city after the group said he was gay, the Observatory said.
Activists on social media said that the dead men were opponents of IS and that the group had used the allegation as a pretext to kill them.
The United Nations said this month the IS had carried out several executions by stoning of women in Syria it accused of adultery.
The jihadists proclaimed a "caliphate" in June after seizing swathes of Iraq and Syria.
Activists say IS carries out regular public executions -- often beheadings -- in areas it controls.

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It really does not matter if those stoned were actually "gay"  --  that it can be used as a "legitimate" excuse is the horrible thing.  All "progressives" wholove Islam and oppose Jews are nothing more than traditional anti-Semites.

LOU DONALDSON, Blues Walk

LEE MORGAN, Midtown Blues (McLean)

Lee Morgan (trumpet); Jackie McClean (alto saxophone); Bobby Timmons (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Art Blakey (drums).

It Ain't Necessarily So - Grant Green w/Sonny Clark

Miles Davis & John Coltrane - So What - Live Jazz (1959)

Wes Montgomery - Bumpin' On Sunset

Russell Malone Live - There Will Never Be Another You

Gabor Szabo - Gypsy Queen

Gabor Szabo - Guitar
Ron Carter - Bass
Chico Hamilton - Drums
Victor Pantoja, Willie Bobo - Percussion

Lee Ritenour - 2005 - Overtime - 08 - Papa Was a Rolling Stone

Chris Botti - Trumpet
Kenya Hathaway - Vocals
Grady Harrell - Vocals
Oscar Seaton - Drums
Melvin Davis - Electric Bass
Barnaby Finch - Keyboards
Lee Ritenour - Electric Guitar

Not feeling well today  --  will try to be up and about tmorrow

And Now the Richest .01 Percent

The latest from Robert Reich.  Please follow link to original.
------------------------------------------------
http://robertreich.org/

The richest Americans hold more of the nation’s wealth than they have in almost a century. What do they spend it on? As you might expect, personal jets, giant yachts, works of art, and luxury penthouses.
And also on politics. In fact, their political spending has been growing faster than their spending on anything else. It’s been growing even faster than their wealth.
According to new research by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics, the richest one-hundredth of one percent of Americans now hold over 11 percent of the nation’s total wealth. That’s a higher share than the top .01 percent held in 1929, before the Great Crash.
We’re talking about 16,000 people, each worth at least $110 million.
One way to get your mind around this is to compare their wealth to that of the average family. In 1978, the typical wealth holder in the top .01 percent was 220 times richer than the average American. By 2012, he or she was 1,120 times richer.
It’s hard to spend this kind of money.
The uber rich are lining up for the new Aerion AS2 private jet, priced at $100 million, that seats eleven and includes a deluxe dining room and shower facilities, and will be able to cross the Atlantic in just four hours.
And for duplexes high in the air. The one atop Manhattan’s newest “needle” tower, the 90-story One57, just went for $90 million.
Why should we care?
Because this explosion of wealth at the top has been accompanied by an erosion of the wealth of the middle class and the poor. In the mid-1980s, the bottom 90 percent of Americans together held 36 percent of the nation’s wealth. Now, they hold less than 23 percent.
Despite larger pensions and homes, the debts of the bottom 90 percent – mortgage, consumer credit, and student loan – have grown even faster.
Some might think the bottom 90 percent should pull in their belts and stop living beyond their means. After all, capitalism is a tough sport. If those at the top are winning big while the bottom 90 percent is losing, too bad. That’s the way the game is played.
But the top .01 percent have also been investing their money in politics. And these investments have been changing the game.
In the 2012 election cycle (the last for which we have good data) donations from the top .01 accounted for over 40 percent of all campaign contributions, according to a study by Professors Adam Bonica, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal.
This is a huge increase from 1980, when the top .01 accounted for ten percent of total campaign contributions.
In 2012, as you may recall, two largest donors were Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, who gave $56.8 million and $46.6 million, respectively.
But the Adelsons were only the tip of an iceberg of contributions from the uber wealthy. Of the other members of the Forbes list of 400 richest Americans, fully 388 made political contributions. They accounted for forty of the 155 contributions of $1 million or more.
Of the 4,493 board members and CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations, more than four out of five contributed (many of the non-contributors were foreign nationals who were prohibited from giving).
All this money has flowed to Democrats as well as Republicans.
In fact, Democrats have increasingly relied on it. In the 2012 election cycle, the top .01 percent’s donations to Democrats were more than four times larger than all labor union donations to Democrats put together.
The richest .01 percent haven’t been donating out of the goodness of their hearts. They’ve donated out of goodness to their wallets.
Their political investments have paid off in the form of lower taxes on themselves and their businesses, subsidies for their corporations, government bailouts, federal prosecutions that end in settlements where companies don’t affirm or deny the facts and where executives don’t go to jail, watered-down regulations, and non-enforcement of antitrust laws.
Since the top .01 began investing big time in politics, corporate profits and the stock market have risen to record levels. That’s enlarged the wealth of the richest .01 percent by an average of 7.8 percent a year since the mid-1980s.
But the bottom 90 percent don’t own many shares of stock. They rely on wages, which have been trending downward. And for some reason, politicians don’t seem particularly intent on reversing this trend.
If you want to know what’s happened to the American economy, follow the money. That will lead you to the richest .01 percent.
And if you want to know what’s happened to our democracy, follow the richest .01 percent. They’ll lead you to the politicians who have been selling our democracy.

When Government Succeeds

The latest column from Dr. Krugman:  (follow link to original)
------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/opinion/paul-krugman-when-government-succeeds.html

The great American Ebola freakout of 2014 seems to be over. The disease is still ravaging Africa, and as with any epidemic, there’s always a risk of a renewed outbreak. But there haven’t been any new U.S. cases for a while, and popular anxiety is fading fast.

Before we move on, however, let’s try to learn something from the panic.

When the freakout was at its peak, Ebola wasn’t just a disease — it was a political metaphor. It was, specifically, held up by America’s right wing as a symbol of government failure. The usual suspects claimed that the Obama administration was falling down on the job, but more than that, they insisted that conventional policy was incapable of dealing with the situation. Leading Republicans suggested ignoring everything we know about disease control and resorting to extreme measures like travel bans, while mocking claims that health officials knew what they were doing.

Guess what: Those officials actually did know what they were doing. The real lesson of the Ebola story is that sometimes public policy is succeeding even while partisans are screaming about failure. And it’s not the only recent story along those lines.

Here’s another: Remember Solyndra? It was a renewable-energy firm that borrowed money using Department of Energy guarantees, then went bust, costing the Treasury $528 million. And conservatives have pounded on that loss relentlessly, turning it into a symbol of what they claim is rampant crony capitalism and a huge waste of taxpayer money.

Defenders of the energy program tried in vain to point out that anyone who makes a lot of investments, whether it’s the government or a private venture capitalist, is going to see some of those investments go bad. For example, Warren Buffett is an investing legend, with good reason — but even he has had his share of lemons, like the $873 million loss he announced earlier this year on his investment in a Texas energy company. Yes, that’s half again as big as the federal loss on Solyndra.

The question is not whether the Department of Energy has made some bad loans — if it hasn’t, it’s not taking enough risks. It’s whether it has a pattern of bad loans. And the answer, it turns out, is no. Last week the department revealed that the program that included Solyndra is, in fact, on track to return profits of $5 billion or more.

Then there’s health reform. As usual, much of the national dialogue over the Affordable Care Act is being dominated by fake scandals drummed up by the enemies of reform. But if you look at the actual results so far, they’re remarkably good. The number of Americans without health insurance has dropped sharply, with around 10 million of the previously uninsured now covered; the program’s costs remain below expectations, with average premium rises for next year well below historical rates of increase; and a new Gallup survey finds that the newly insured are very satisfied with their coverage. By any normal standards, this is a dramatic example of policy success, verging on policy triumph.

Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

Continue reading the main story

One last item: Remember all the mockery of Obama administration assertions that budget deficits, which soared during the financial crisis, would come down as the economy recovered? Surely the exploding costs of Obamacare, combined with a stimulus program that would become a perpetual boondoggle, would lead to vast amounts of red ink, right? Well, no — the deficit has indeed come down rapidly, and as a share of G.D.P. it’s back down to pre-crisis levels.

The moral of these stories is not that the government is always right and always succeeds. Of course there are bad decisions and bad programs. But modern American political discourse is dominated by cheap cynicism about public policy, a free-floating contempt for any and all efforts to improve our lives. And this cheap cynicism is completely unjustified. It’s true that government-hating politicians can sometimes turn their predictions of failure into self-fulfilling prophecies, but when leaders want to make government work, they can.

And let’s be clear: The government policies we’re talking about here are hugely important. We need serious public health policy, not fear-mongering, to contain infectious disease. We need government action to promote renewable energy and fight climate change. Government programs are the only realistic answer for tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise be denied essential health care.

Conservatives want you to believe that while the goals of public programs on health, energy and more may be laudable, experience shows that such programs are doomed to failure. Don’t believe them. Yes, sometimes government officials, being human, get things wrong. But we’re actually surrounded by examples of government success, which they don’t want you to notice.

Audacious Oligarchy

This from "Jesse's Cafe Americain" - follow link to original.
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http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2014/11/gold-daily-and-silver-weekly-charts_10.html

"The problem of the last three decades is not the 'vicissitudes of the marketplace,' but rather deliberate actions by the government to redistribute income from the rest of us to the one percent. This pattern of government action shows up in all areas of government policy."

Dean Baker

"Most of them became wealthy by being well connected and crooked.  And they are creating a society in which they can commit hugely damaging economic crimes with impunity, and in which only children of the wealthy have the opportunity to become successful. That’s what I have a problem with. And I think most people agree with me."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation

"No lie can live forever."

Thomas Carlyle

There is a currency war ongoing.  It's objective is the subjugation of whole peoples, including the domestic public.  In a very real sense it is nationless.

There is an 'audacious oligarchy' of self-defined rulers who move freely between private industry and government, whose primary objective is preserving and furthering their own power and self-interest.

Sheldon Wolin called this 'inverted totalitarianism.' Economist Robert Johnson has called it an 'audacious oligarchy.'  And so have many other responsible economists from Simon Johnson to Jeffrey Sachs.

I do not think that warnings or lessons from history will be sufficient to provoke change. Hubris makes people deaf and blind to consequences.  They will not learn, nor be informed by anything outside their own small circles.

This implies that there will be another financial crisis,  a 'hard stop' in the Western markets. How and when that will occur I do not yet know.

Have a pleasant evening.

BILL MOYERS: And you say that these this oligarchy consists of six megabanks. What are the six banks?

JAMES KWAK: They are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo.

BILL MOYERS: And you write that they control 60 percent of our gross national product?

JAMES KWAK: They have assets equivalent to 60 percent of our gross national product. And to put this in perspective, in the mid-1990s, these six banks or their predecessors, since there have been a lot of mergers, had less than 20 percent. Their assets were less than 20 percent of the gross national product.

BILL MOYERS: And what's the threat from an oligarchy of this size and scale?

SIMON JOHNSON: They can distort the system, Bill. They can change the rules of the game to favor themselves. And unfortunately, the way it works in modern finance is when the rules favor you, you go out and you take a lot of risk. And you blow up from time to time, because it's not your problem. When it blows up, it's the taxpayer and it's the government that has to sort it out.

BILL MOYERS: So, you're not kidding when you say it's an oligarchy?

JAMES KWAK: Exactly. I think that in particular, we can see how the oligarchy has actually become more powerful in the last since the financial crisis. If we look at the way they've behaved in Washington. For example, they've been spending more than $1 million per day lobbying Congress and fighting financial reform. I think that's for some time, the financial sector got its way in Washington through the power of ideology, through the power of persuasion. And in the last year and a half, we've seen the gloves come off. They are fighting as hard as they can to stop reform.

The Financial Oligarcy in the US - Bill Moyer's Journal

Chet Baker - I get along without you very well

Les Brown - Sentimental Journey

Someday My Prince Will Come/Bill Evans Trio

Art Pepper－You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To

Art Pepper (alto saxophone) , with Red Garland (piano) Paul Chambers (bass) and Philly Joe Jones(drums)

Nina Simone Here Comes The Sun

Duke Ellington - Take the a train

Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong: Dream A Little Dream Of Me

Miles Davis - Freddie Freeloader

Bireli Lagrene & Jaco Pastorius - The Chicken

The Andrews Sisters - Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree

(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover - Jimmy Dorsey and His Orchestra

Judy Garland - Embraceable You (Girl Crazy, 1943)

Vera Lynn- we'll meet again with lyrics (british world war II song)

I'LL NEVER SMILE AGAIN ~ Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra 1940

Glenn Miller and his Orchestra - String Of Pearls (1942)

The Andrews Sisters - Rum and Coca Cola

The Andrews Sisters - Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy Of Company B

Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Harry James, Lionel Hampton - Sing, Sing, Sing

Glen Miller .... In The Mood

Baffled Canadian Writes To U.S. Voters After Midterm: ‘You Don’t Know How Good You Have It With Obama’

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/11/09/baffled-canadian-writes-to-u-s-voters-after-midterm-you-dont-know-how-good-you-have-it-with-obama/


As an American, I’ve found myself dizzied by the hypocrisy of the midterm election: a majority of people reported that the economy was their number one concern, and yet they overwhelmingly voted against the president who has been bringing the economy back on track and instead gave the reins back to a political party which was almost entirely responsible for derailing it in the first place. So if I was confused, imagine how it must look to the outside observer. Americans must look nuts.
To get a sense of just how baffled the rest of the world is at how Americans voted this year, we find a Letter to the Editor of a Detroit newspaper, written by a Canadian who just doesn’t get it. First noticed by Rick Strandlof who tweeted a picture of it, the piece, published by the Detroit Free Press, is devastating. Titled “You Americans have no idea just how good you have it with Obama,” the author, Victoria, British Columbia resident Richard Brunt, goes on to list an impressive array of accomplishments under Obama – none of which the American voter seemed the least bit interested in.

The letter reads:
Many of us Canadians are confused by the U.S. midterm elections. Consider, right now in America, corporate profits are at record highs, the country’s adding 200,000 jobs per month, unemployment is below 6%, U.S. gross national product growth is the best of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The dollar is at its strongest levels in years, the stock market is near record highs, gasoline prices are falling, there’s no inflation, interest rates are the lowest in 30 years, U.S. oil imports are declining, U.S. oil production is rapidly increasing, the deficit is rapidly declining, and the wealthy are still making astonishing amounts of money.
America is leading the world once again and respected internationally — in sharp contrast to the Bush years. Obama brought soldiers home from Iraq and killed Osama bin Laden.
So, Americans vote for the party that got you into the mess that Obama just dug you out of? This defies reason.
When you are done with Obama, could you send him our way?
The letter is on point in a number of ways, but for my money the most salient point is when it mentions the repaired image Obama has given to the United States after Bush killed the country’s credibility over the last decade. It may not be expressed often from within the right-wing echo chamber that dominates the American news media, but Obama is viewed very favorably on the international stage and his presidency has been a soothing touch to a very bad reputation. In one of Dick Cheney’s monthly “criticize the president” national tours, he remarked that he thought America’s image around the world was “increasingly negative.” The Atlantic decided to fact check that idea and found… well… you’ll see:

For more than a decade, the Pew Research Center has been asking people around the world about their opinion of the United States. The upshot: In every region of the globe except the Middle East (where the United States was wildly unpopular under George W. Bush and remains so), America’s favorability is way up since Obama took office. In Spain, approval of the United States is 29 percentage points higher than when Bush left office. In Italy, it’s up 23 points. In Germany and France, it’s 22. With the exception of China, where the numbers have remained flat, the trend is the same in Asia. The U.S. is 19 points more popular in Japan, 24 points more popular in Indonesia, and 28 points more popular in Malaysia.

So given that popularity (especially compared to Republicans, which the world still equates with George W. Bush), it’s easy to see why other countries scratch their heads when America makes bashing Obama the major platform of the Republican Party and Democrats are seen actively trying to avoid him so as to not taint their campaigns. Richard Brunt clearly thinks that we are nuts. And, frankly, it’s hard to disagree with him.

A visit to "Some Assembly Required"

Time for a visit to "Some Assembly Required"  --  follow link, etc., etc., etc.
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http://ckm3.blogspot.com/

Scrap Goats: The Democrats have suffered “another electoral drubbing at the hands of the most cartoonishly evil, corrupt, inept gang of thugs politics has served up since” the last time the same bunch beat them about the head and shoulders. And they are shocked, shocked that the electorate – which is overwhelmingly liberal on most issues – rejected them, just because they no longer remember what they stand for. The reasons the Democrats were crushed and the lessons they'll draw from their defeats are not the same things. They're not even distantly related. “It's a basic truth in life that when everybody you meet is an asshole, it's time to look in the mirror.” The people need a party.

Good Neighbor Policy: The Canadian Mounties are planning a $92 million 700 kilometer fence along the US/Canadian border. To keep out the undesirables. They claim it has nothing to do with the outcome of the our elections.

Tidbit: Did you know that annulments in the Catholic church are sold? For thousands of dollars? The Pope, anti-capitalist Jesus lover that he is, wants to offer no-cost (and sin free?) annulments.

The Price of Oil: Europe’s bond yields are the lowest they've been since the15th century because of deflation in the EU. The EU itself has cut its Eurozone GDP forecast and Goldman Sacs flat calls it a recession. And the price of oil collapses due to overproduction...
 ------------------------------------------

There's a lot more  --  go there.   

This from "Some Assembly Required"

let's watch

The election is over.  I suspect the Fox News Ebola Threat is also over.  Now, it's time for the Republicans to GOVERN.  I think it will be fun to watch   ---   don't you?

"My Baby Just Cares For Me" Nina Simone

"Tippin'" John Coltrane

Alone Together - Australian Jazz Quintet

The Australian Jazz Quartet was modeled on the Modern Jazz Quartet. The quartet featured Bryce Rohde (pianist), Dick Healy (saxphonist/flautist/bassist), Errol Buddle (bassoonist/saxophonist), and Jack Brokensha (vibraphonist).

Red Mitchell Quintet - Ornithology

Personnel: Conte Candoli (trumpet), Joe Maini (alto sax), Hampton Hawes (piano), Red Mitchell (bass), Chuck Thompson (drums)

Conte Candoli Quartet - On the Alamo

Personnel: Conte Candoli (trumpet), Claude Williamson (piano), Max Bennett (bass), Stan Levey (drums)

Howard McGhee Septet - Dusty Blue

Personnel: Howard McGhee (trumpet), Bennie Green (trombone), Roland Alexander (tenor sax, flute), Pepper Adams (baritone sax), Tommy Flanagan (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Walter Bolden (drums)

Mel Torme "The Lady Is A Tramp"

Betty Roché - September In The Rain

This from "Tickld"
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Sam Harris: It’s not about politics — ‘Islam was spread by the sword for 1,000 years’

This from "Raw Story"  --  follow link to original.  It's about time someone spoke the obvious truth, something every student of history knows.
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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/11/sam-harris-its-not-about-politics-islam-was-spread-by-the-sword-for-1000-years/


On Sunday, Fareed Zakaria spoke to Sam Harris, the CEO of Project Reason, about recent claims of his concerning Islam.
“On Bill Maher’s HBO show,” Zakaria began, Harris said that “‘Islam at the moment is the mother lode of bad ideas.’ He went on to say that more than 20 percent of Muslims are either jihadists or Islamists who want to foist their religion on the rest of humanity,” which amounts to approximately 300 million people.
What struck Zakaria about that number is that Harris “sort of pulled [it] out of a hat.”

“So there were 10,000 terrorist events last year,” Zakaria said. “Let’s assume that 100 people — let’s assume all of those were Muslim. Let’s assume each event was planned by 100 people…That comes to about a million people who are jihadists. So that still leaves us with 299 million missing Muslim terrorists.”
“Right,” Harris replied, ” there are a few distinctions, I think, we have to make. One is there’s a difference between a jihadist and an Islamist. And there I was talking about Islamists and jihadists together. And so Islamists are people who want to foist their interpretation of Islam on the rest of society and sometimes they have a revolutionary bent, sometimes they have more of a normal political bent.”
“But the fact that somebody may believe that, for example, Sharia should obtain and women’s testimony should be worth half a man’s in court,” Zakaria responded, “doesn’t mean that they want to kill people. Being conservative and religious…is different from wanting to kill people.”
“I believe,” Harris said, “nudging that up to something around 20 percent is still a conservative estimate of the percentage of Muslims worldwide who have values relating to human rights and free speech that are really in zero sum contest with our own. And I just think we have to speak honestly about that.”
Zakaria noted that Islam was once a vanguard of modernity, preserving the works of Aristotle and making advancements in mathematics and science. “In other words,” he said, “that would suggest that it is the social and political conditions within Muslim societies or — you know, the people — in other words clearly Islam has been compatible with peace and progress and it is compatible with violence I would argue just like all religions.”
“Up to a point,” Harris replied. “I would say that specific ideas have specific consequences, and the idea of jihad is not a new one. It’s not an invention of the 20th century…Islam has been spread by the sword for over 1,000 years, and there’s been an intensification for obvious political reasons of intolerance in the 20th century, but the idea that life for Christians and Jews as Dhimmi under Muslim rulers for 1,000 years was good doesn’t make any sense.”
The two then clashed about the definition of “jihad,” about which Harris insisted that the West must “convince the Muslim world or get the Muslim world to convince itself that jihad really just means an inner spiritual struggle. But that is the end game for civilization but the reality is an honest reading of the text and an honest reading of Muslim history makes jihad look very much like holy wars.”
By calling Islam “the mother lode of bad ideas,” Zakaria said, “do you think you’re helping [Muslims] or making it [easier] for them to adopt the Osama bin Laden interpretation [of jihad]?”
“I’ll tell you who’s making it harder for them. Liberals who deny the problem,” Harris replied.

Cannonball Adderley Quintet - "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" (1966)

Cannonball Adderley Quintet: Cannonball Adderley (alto saxophone); Nat Adderley (cornet); Joe Zawinul (acoustic & electric pianos); Victor Gaskin (bass); Roy McCurdy (drums).

Cannonball Adderley and Milt Jackson - Things Are Getting Better

Cannonball Adderley -- alto saxophone
Milt Jackson -- vibes
Wynton Kelly -- piano
Percy Heath -- bass
Art Blakey -- drums

Woody Shaw - What Is This Thing Called Love

Woody Shaw - tp
Gary Bartz -as
Steve Turre - tb
Mulgrew Miller - p
Stafford James -b
Tony Reedus - ds

There Will Never Be Another You - Woody Shaw - leader and trumpet

Kenny Garret
Kenny Barron
Victor Jones
Peter Leitch
Neil Swainson

Passion Dance

Jackie McLean + McCoy Tyner + Jack DeJohnette + Cecil McBee + Woodie Shaw. "Passion Dance"

Norah Jones & Marian McPartland - I Can't Get Started (With You)

I've Got the World on a String - Marian McPartland

A Foggy Day - Marian McPartland

In A Mellow Tone by Marian McPartland & Dizzy Gillespie

There Will Never Be Another You - Marian McPartland

Texas teen lured to skate park for gay-bashing, then insulted by cops: activists

It seems we are not only raising a bunch of morons (or "morans"), but a bunch of EVIL morons.  Please follow link to orignal.
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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/texas-teen-lured-to-skate-park-for-gay-bashing-then-insulted-by-cops-activists/

Civil rights activists say police in Texas have not properly investigated the brutal gay-bashing of a teenager, and they’re asking the FBI to file hate crime charges in the case.
Dylan Beard bit through his tongue and suffered chipped teeth, a broken nose, a black eye, and other injuries when he was beaten by two friends and a 17-year-old girl, reported the Houston Chronicle.
The teen said he was invited to join some friends Oct. 12 at a Baytown skate park when the group attacked him, punching and kicking him as they called him a “f*ggot” and “booty lover.”

The assailants then bragged about the attack on social media, the teen’s supporters said.
Activists said Baytown police have ignored some witnesses to the attack and openly insulted Beard because he is gay.
A spokesman for the department said police “are taking steps (and) reaching out” to Beard, saying the teen was invited to speak to detectives and internal affairs investigators.
The spokesman said a police report was filed and the girl was cited for misdemeanor assault.
He was unaware of allegations that officers used homophobic slurs to describe Beard or whether the teens had bragged about the attack on social media.
Beard, who is homeschooled, said he knew his assailants, but not very well, and they had never attacked or insulted him before.

‘Religious zealot’ nearly beheads teen ‘witch’ after watching Christian videos: police

This from "Raw Story" - follow link to original. 

Fundamentalist preachers ALL have blood on their hands.
--------------------------------------------------
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/religious-zealot-nearly-beheads-teen-witch-after-watching-christian-videos-police/

A “religious zealot” in Oklahoma nearly beheaded an acquaintance in a brutal slaying after watching Christian videos, police said.
Isaiah Marin was playing cards Wednesday afternoon with his brother and the victim, 19-year-old Jacob Crockett, at an apartment in Stillwater.
Police said the 21-year-old Marin was watching online videos “related to his Christian beliefs and the Book of Matthew” before he picked up a sword and began swinging it around.

His brother told him to be careful, and then he told police that Marin stabbed Crockett in the chest.
Marin’s brother said the suspect had argued with Crockett in the past because the victim and his brother, Jesse, “were practicing witchcraft and Isaiah had strong Christian beliefs.”
Samuel Marin fled from the apartment, police said, and his brother ran after him and promised to explain why he had killed the teen in letters from jail.
Police said Isaiah Marin called 911 and confessed that he had “murdered someone,” before rambling about magic and sacrifices.
“I hacked them to death with a machete,” Marin told dispatchers.
Police found Marin walking along a state highway, covered in blood and carrying a long knife.
Marin said he had fantasized about killing four or five people, including Crockett, police said.
Investigators said Crockett, who was the son of an Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer, had been nearly decapitated in the attack.
Jesse Crockett, the victim’s brother, said Marin was a “heavy drug user” and “religious zealot.”
Police said the case had no religious implications and was not related to recent beheadings by Islamic extremists — including an attack by a Muslim convert at an Oklahoma food plant.
Marin, a student at Northern Oklahoma College who intended to transfer to Oklahoma State University, was charged with first-degree murder and remains held without bail.