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10/28/09
10/27/09
Harry Reid’s Government-Run Public Obstacle
Just when you thought you wouldn’t die in the streets and be thrown in a ditch with other plague victims, the government run public option may not be a done deal. Democratic moderates are telling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, not so fast on that whole healthcare for everyone thing. "What is this? Switzerland? Chocolate is just like penicillin. Put that on your tuberculosis!"
Democratic moderates balked at Reid’s plan Tuesday, citing differences on setting fees for doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers, as well as abortion services, and a favorite shouting point for Joe Wilson, healthcare for immigrants. Reid is still expected to receive all 60 Democratic votes, but not without some opposition from a select few who are remaining mum on where they stand, and others who plan to seek changes on the Senate floor.
Republicans of course are still resolved to kill the bill like so much horse meat in a defunct dog food cannery, and are already planning to run "flip flopper" ads for any Democrat who so much as questions the bill now who may end up voting for it, and running again for their seats. Surprisingly, they’re not discussing Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, the only Republican who has supported the Democrats in committee this year, but who has apparently decided the bill Reid drafted is a bunch of liberal hooowee, much to President Obama’s displeasure, who would like to have some bipartisan support for the healthcare bill.
All the infighting does make an easy out for Reid who can always say to liberals that he was just unable to attain a government insurance option in the Senate, his preference, despite arduous efforts and tireless campaigning. Kinda like saying dying from a diseased tooth abscess from lack of health insurance, like it was 1863, could have been avoided by watching House and doing it yourself.
#openmicnights
10/26/09
Remember the giant Indonesian baby that terrorized ladyparts around the world? His parents don't want him to forget what he did and have thus named him Akbar - "the Great".
And are sending him off to the Japanese to dissect and turn into a reality show. Neighbors are concerned. Probably because of footage like the one attached.
#openmicnights
10/26/09
#openmicnights
10/27/09
#openmicnights
10/26/09
White Texan John Howard Griffin smuggled Jewish children to safety as a teenager in Paris, fought in the Second World War, lost his sight, started writing and that's not even half of the stuff he did. After regaining his sight, for example, he decided to find out what it meant to be a black man in 1950s Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.
So Griffin drank a ton of vitiligo medicine and roasted under an ultra-violet sun lamp to get an authentic shade of brown (Al Jolson: amateur!), and spent six weeks on the road as a black man. He learned a number of lessons, most of which could be explained thus: Old Dixie had a serious case of racism. He wrote a book about it called Black Like Me.
You know who this pissed off? Those decent Southern men he'd practically forced into misbehaving with him with his fancy tan.
When he toured the South lecturing to white audiences about his experiences as a black man, he was threatened, intimidated and, on at least one occasion, seriously beaten.
Well, duh.
Anyway, so all this happened once upon a time and then Laurence Olivier played Othello and Vogue published a bunch of photos with models in blackface and thus... Obama? It appears so.
[BBC: Exposing the Color of Prejudice]
#openmicnights
10/26/09
"When he toured the South lecturing to white audiences about his experiences as a black man, he was threatened, intimidated and, on at least one occasion, seriously beaten."
-- Am "Incidental Plagiarist" desi.
#openmicnights
10/26/09
Jeffrey Picower, Prime Madoff Beneficiary, Is Dead
Another in a string of questionable deaths, or just a heart attack? Picower, CPA, Lawyer, and tax magician, was found in his pool yesterday. Cause of death is not yet known.
Picower is reputed to have received billions from the Madoff schemes. He was apparently a generous philanthropist:
In 1991, Picower and Anthony Cerami (, graduate of Rockefeller University, established a charity, the Picower Institute for Medical Research, at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York with an initial endowment of $10 million.
#openmicnights
10/26/09
#openmicnights
10/26/09
Mafia News Roundup
Good morning, English speakers. Here's what's been happening in the world of crime families, organized or otherwise, around the world.
Principessa!
The oldest criminal organization in Italy is the Camorra. Centered around Napoli, "...this sprawling network of Camorra clans now dwarfs the Sicilian Mafia, the 'Ndrangheta and southern Italy's other organised gangs, in numbers, in economic power and in ruthless violence."
The men, of course, are too busy pinching bottoms and watching calcio -- football italiano -- so, the Camorristas are apparently taking care of business:
"For decades, women have occupied a full range of roles within the Neapolitan crime syndicate, from bodyguard to boss, authorities say. In Naples, women are traditionally responsible for the finances within the household. They run the accounts and, according to anti-mafia investigators, have taken a major part in money laundering, cutting up drug deliveries for distribution and running numbers.
But wives and mothers have also been among the perpetrators of some of the worst violence in Naples, with the emancipation of women in Neapolitan society over recent decades mirrored inside the secretive world of the Camorra."
Golf in Quebec is Fabulous, Darling
Taxes aren't high enough in Canada? They need to pay an extra 37% to build things, apparently, because, you know, people are smoking less, and gambling less, and what's a mobster to do??
"Mafia controls 80 per cent of Montreal roadwork"
The Fabulous 14, a group of mob-controlled construction companies monopolize the govt. contracts by gaming the bid system with secret golf code:
"We'll start on the fourth hole, we'll be a party of nine,'' an instruction would go. The code meant the contractor pretending to set up the game would submit the winning bid, just below $4.9 million."
Officials may be playing golf, but they are certainly not accepting invitations to float around on yachts owned by construction "entrepeneurs."
More Fabulous -- The Gay Mafia
Meanwhile in New York, we arrive at the true story of Gambino soldier Robert Mormando, who was, allegedly, the basis for Vito Spatafore, protagonist of the gay mobster Soprano's episode.
Yaponchik
Vyacheslav Ivankov, aka Yaponchik, was walking out of a Thai restaurant in Moscow a few weeks ago when a sniper shot him twice. Reputed to be a boss of bosses, he was thrown a £500,000 funeral and showered with loving words:
" "He lived his life with dignity," said the Orthodox priest who led the service in which mourners draped his coffin with the Russian flag. One newspaper praised Ivankov’s support of the arts and described him as "a man who helped many".
#openmicnights
10/25/09
Adorable Hollywood Moppets’ Thieving Ways Underscore the Irony That is Lindsay Lohan’s Life and All Our Lives
Who can forget that cold January in 2008 when news broke across the national newswires of Lindsay Lohan’s having left the New York City 1 Oak nightclub wearing someone else’s $12,000 fur jacket? After some pretty damming video surveillance footage surfaced of Lohan walking into the club wearing something that was not the missing fur coat and leaving the club wearing something that was the missing fur coat, the jacket was later returned under very mysterious circumstances.
Now in an ironic twist, the tables have been turned. Lohan has fallen victim to a collection of adorable little teenage moppets accused of a Hollywood crime spree aimed at Hollywood stars. According to < a href="[www.insideedition.com]Inside Edition, the group -- all Calaba CA teenagers, Rachel Lee 19, Diana Tamayo 19, Alexis Neiers, 18, and Nicholas Prugo, 18 -- broke into stars’ homes using Hollywood tourist maps and filming schedules available on the internet. One, Mr. Purgo, has been formally charged with entering Lohan’s house uninvited, carrying nothing and leaving with something not his.
There is a touch of universal irony in this story as well. As if through some divine plan, one member of the group, Neiers, is the subject, along with her Playboy model sister, of a reality-TV series in the works for E!
The reality-TV angle makes it feel as if America has had a little piece of its collective fur coat stolen by this ironic tragedy.
#openmicnights
10/26/09
#openmicnights
10/25/09
Fort Collins, CO, Parents Prove They Missed the Most Important Lesson of Balloon Boy
As the beloved Balloon Boy fades from center stage and the nation’s hearts, the Fort Collins Coloradoan asked local parents what they learned from the Heenes, their hoax-perpetrating neighbors.
And what did they learn?
Without exception, each and every one of them managed to learn something or other about how telling the truth is important. Some of them were even proactive enough to point out that not lying in the first place was a better lesson.
But none of them seemed to have thought of or even stumbled upon the real lesson from Balloon Boy, which is that if you going to lie, do it right. Look, it’s hard to swing a dead cat in this country without hitting some form of fame and fortune bestowed by reality television and Youtube upon average slobs. So why shouldn’t average slobs (and in many case well below-average slobs) aspire to grab for the brass ring?
It’s better to fly first class from New York to Singapore than it is to wait in line for forty-five minutes in a McDonald’s drive-through line while sitting in a 1998 Ford Taurus with three kids in the back, even if you have nothing to do in Singapore.
After two appearances on Wife Swap, the world had not beaten a path to the Heenes’ reality door. So they turned it up a notch. They assessed the problem and applied Octomom’s razor to it, which is understanding that there should be no level of personal degradation low enough to which one should refuse to stoop to achieve recognition and its commensurate perks. Even if that stooping requires not just the exertion of the individual, but of the family unit.
The Heenes were rational in their actions. Sure, why not say your kid might be lost in a UFO-style scientific balloon, why not call the 911, why not invite the media into your home.
Rational actions, but sloppy execution. Teach your kids to lie convincingly. No one would argue that survival in society is possible without lying. If it’s a life skill, do it well. If they refuse or can’t do it, adopt kids who will. So, parents, dream your crazy dreams, drag your spouse and kids into them, but understand lying will be a necessary component in achieving those dreams, so you’d better make lying, well, a family priority.
#openmicnights
10/26/09
I'm wrapping myself in the ecstasy of "Octomom's Razor" for a few minutes.
#openmicnights
10/25/09
Don't worry though... Love Never Dies.
CNN: Composer Lloyd Webber Has Prostate Cancer.
#openmicnights
10/24/09
The season of the addictive layered treat is upon us. Have you seen the joyously bright yellow boxes yet this year?
[en.wikipedia.org]
#openmicnights
10/24/09
So, whether you've been paying attention or not, youngs, there's a lot more going on in the world than Iraq (yawn, passé), Afghanistan and Pak.
And Somalia has much deeper problems than avast-ye-swab pirates, which has been portrayed with a cartoon flare by the television-news media ... print's been getting it right, we thinks.
Anyway, the Shabaab is now threatening Uganda and Burundi. They've been threatening Ethiopia and Kenya for a while now.
They are some of the most savage rebel insurgents on the planet, outside of Pakistan. Although, as we've noted previously in another post from an AFP story out of a broken-down southern Somali port city a few days ago, Somalia and Pakistan are in direct competition with each other for most boondoggle-dangerous places on Earth.
Check out the AJE-YouTube video, hardcores, cause you don't have a clue what hardcore is, you big-rope-wearing posers!
Story: 'Somali Islamists call for terror attacks on Uganda and Burundi' [via telegraph.co.uk]
[www.telegraph.co.uk]
#openmicnights
10/25/09
Someone on the BBC was saying that al Qaeda now turns its nose up at the lowly Afghan turmoil, when northern Africa gives them such lovely access to Europe. What fun times we have in store for us!
#openmicnights
10/24/09
Something Good Might Have Happened in Pakistan
The Pakistani army appear to have taken the region of Kotkai, the South Waziristan stronghold of the Taliban faction headed by Hakimullah Mehsud. Details continue to be sketchy because reporters are not yet allowed in the area but early word has it that "days of bombardment" left three soldiers and four Taliban dead while approximately 100, 000 civilians have been displaced.
As the attached map shows, however, capturing the town, while significant, might just have been the easy part. Now the fight moves into the mountains where the army is at an inherent disadvantage against the locals.
In recent days, Mehsud's faction has not only been vocal about their desire to attack the Pakistani state (and any civilians that might get in the way) but have suited actions to words. The series of terror strikes that have rocked Pakistan this year have been particularly brutal and bold, perhaps a reflection of Mehsud's style which apparently includes tricks with Toyota pick up trucks, and have left Pakistanis reeling.
Fatima Bhutto, whose aunt Benazir was allegedly killed upon the orders of Hakimullah's clansman and then-commander Baitullah Mehsud, writes in The Daily Beast: "We’ve been made into scavengers, hungry for signs of who may be targeted next."
If the Pakistani army fails in its mission or chooses to strike a deal with the Taliban as it has in the past, then we might all get to know that feeling.
#openmicnights
10/24/09
Rich People Must Have: An Election Campaign
You've got the estate in the Hamptons, the custom-made one-of-a-kind super yacht, the Met wants you to loan them art, and Don Draper is your flunky. What can a sad old billionaire do to make himself feel better?
Get yourself elected.
Or at least have fun spending mad amounts of your money while you try, secure in the knowledge that those upstart Russian billionaires might be doing their daily business on a gold throne but you might just get to do yours on an entire city... or even a country!
[Pic Source]
#openmicnights
10/24/09
The Economist Still Hunting "Europygmies"
Tony Blair, feels The Economist, is the only perv big enough to handle this "Europe", which is full of tiny frog-and-weiner eaters and their lazy wives as every good British person doth know.
Amazingly, this view has not won them any fans in Europe.
Pygmies might have been offended but were too busy being eaten, hunted, and enslaved to respond.
#openmicnights
10/24/09
#openmicnights
10/24/09
[www.coloradoan.com]
Mom spilled the beans. No news on who's going to jail for how long on what charges, if any.
"Mayumi Heene told a Larimer County sheriff's investigator that she and her husband lied to authorities last week when they reported that their 6-year-old son was aboard a balloon released from the family's backyard."
"Mayumi Heene said she and her husband knew all along that Falcon was hiding in the residence. The motive for the fabricated story was to make the Heene family more marketable for future media interest."
Link to the affidavit: [www.mynocodata.com]
#openmicnights