Category: People I Do Not Want to Piss Off

Katie Porter and Her White Board

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Representative Katie Porter, (D-CA) does her homework, and she knows her numbers, and when she whips out her white board, someone is in for a can of whup ass.

In this case, it was the Richard Gonzalez, the CEO of AbbVie, which is gouging patients for its Humira Arthritis drug.

She showed that the money for R&D is dwarfed by advertising, and executive compensation, particularly that compensation which is driven by stock buybacks:

Or, as Porter observed: “You lie to patients when you charge them twice as much for an unimproved drug, when you tell us that R&D justifies those price increases. The Big Pharma fairy tale is one of groundbreaking R&D that justifies astronomical prices. But the pharma reality is that you spend most of that money making money for yourself and your shareholders.”

Roll the tape, it’s beautiful: (It’s also not that difficult if you aren’t spending 8 hours a day dialing for dollars for your DCCC dues)

I’m Really Enjoying Trevor Noah on The Daily Show

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Case in point, his latest skewering of police whingeing about the fact that they might be recorded when the break the law and violate the constitution:

The police are just trying to make a basic point: People are treating them unfairly just because of who they are and how they look. People keep following them around with cameras, watching everything they do, suspicious that they’re always about to break the law, leaving police afraid to even get out of their cars for fear that someone might whip out a phone and brutally film them. Who can imagine how that must feel? And if you listen carefully, all the police are saying is “phones down, don’t shoot.”

It is a brutal take-down of police complaints about the fact that law enforcement agents might now be held accountable for breaking the law.

What people like New York Police Union president Patrick Lynch and FBI director James Comey are suggesting is that we must structure our society so that police are able to operate with impunity, and without accountability, all while operating in secrecy.

This is quite literally the definition of a police state.

Can We Please Give Texas Back to Mexico?

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Don’t Make Larry Wilmore Angry, You Wouldn’t Like It When He’s Angry

In Texas, it appears that if you are Muslim, and you bring a project to show your engineering teacher, they will cuff you and haul you off to jail:

Ahmed Mohamed’s homemade alarm clock got him suspended from his suburban Dallas high school and detained and handcuffed by police officers on Monday after school officials accused him of making a fake bomb. By Wednesday, it had brought him an invitation to the White House, support from Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg, and a moment of head-spinning attention as questions arose whether he had been targeted because of his name and his religion.

As a result, a 14-year-old freshman at MacArthur High School in Irving, Tex., who is partial to tinkering, technology and NASA T-shirts and wants to go to M.I.T., found himself in a social media whirlwind that reflected the nation’s charged debates on Islam, immigration and ethnicity.

“Cool clock, Ahmed,” President Obama said on Twitter. “Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.” Mr. Obama’s staff invited Ahmed to the White House for Astronomy Night on Oct. 19, an event bringing together scientists, engineers, astronauts, teachers and students to spend a night stargazing from the South Lawn.

The president’s spokesman said the episode was a case study in unreasoned prejudice in an era when the country is fighting Islamic terrorism at home and in the Middle East.

“This episode is a good illustration of how pernicious stereotypes can prevent even good-hearted people who have dedicated their lives to educating young people from doing the good work that they set out to do,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary.

These are not good-hearted people, and Irving is not a good-hearted place.

Their mayor, Beth Van Duyne, has successfully run on a platform of religious bigotry for years now, and I do not expect anything resembling an apology from her.

Of course, now it’s blown up into a major sh%$ storm with POTUS got into the game on Twitter:

Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.

— President Obama (@POTUS) September 16, 2015

I really hope that Irving will spend the next few years as the butt of “dumb hick” jokes on the late night shows.

I always knew that Irving was a center of evil, it was the Dallas Cowboys home field until 2008,* but this takes to a whole new (low) level.

If we cannot give all of Texas back to Mexico, can we give Irving back?

Please?

*They now play in Arlington, TX, the largest city in the US without a mass transit system.

Jon Stewart Just Hurt Me

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You can see the many hairstyles of Bernie at Buzzfeed

He is, of course, in reruns now, but he was doing his monologue, and I had had not heard it before.

And then he said:

Sure, Bernie Sanders is drawing crowds in the thousands, but for some reason the ‘media’ has decided you can’t be a serious candidate if your hair looks like your dick got caught in an electrical socket.

I started laughing, and I just had to share this with Sharon.*

So, laughing hysterically, I started up the stairs, but I could not catch my breath I was laughing so hard, and ended up falling down the stairs.

Thankfully, nothing but some bruising minor bruising, and a majorly freaked out wife.

Actually, it freaked out my cats too.

As I lay at the bottom of the stairs, giggling, Destructo was staring at me with obvious concern.

I’m OK, just a bruise on my left radius and wrist.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

I Never Thought That I Would Her to My List of, “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.”

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But Taylor Swift has earned her entry into the most noble order of the “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off“.

Taylor: 1 — Apple: 0:

Tech oligarchs aren’t supposed to say sorry. And no, Apple hasn’t formally apologized to the music community for demanding that it works for Apple for free, Apple still comes out of it with plenty of credit.

Ten days ago, the contracts for Apple’s new Spotify-ish streaming service leaked out, and they contained an unprecedented request. Apple said artists and rights owners would not be paid for music streamed during the service’s first three months. During that time, the service will be offered for free to people, and then rise to something like ten bucks a month.

Typically, streaming pays almost nothing today – fractions of a penny. The segment numbers tens of millions of paying subscribers, and hasn’t achieved scale. But this, from Apple, was genuinely nothing: a big, fat zero. The story flew onto the business pages. Only bottom-feeding pirate websites used artists’ work without paying them, and it looked like Apple was diving into the cesspit of file-sharers.

………

Within hours of the world’s biggest pop star weighing in on the side of the indies, Apple caved in. Taylor Swift livened up Sunday with a devastating open letter to Apple, explaining her music wouldn’t be on Apple Music.

By the evening, Apple’s content chief Eddy Cue was tweeting, and phoning reporters, to tell say the no-royalties period was scrapped. Artist will believe it when they see the new contracts arrive: the trial-period royalty may be lower than the regular royalty. But that’s still an epic turnaround – and Apple emerges looking better than anyone expected last week.

Apple clearly wants Apple Music to succeed – and many artists and rights owners want it to succeed, too. This is surprising on the face of it, given that Apple pays barely more than streaming services. (Again, we’ll wait for the first royalty statements before seeing whether this is true.)

 Well played, Ms. Swift.

The Only Donald Worse than Trump

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Larry Wilmore, who I had neglected to put on my list of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off, (Since corrected) was rather put out by Donald Rumsfeld’s rewriting history on Iraq and claiming that he never suggested that he was bringing a stable democracy to Iraq.

Rumsfeld, 2003:

From the very beginning, we were convinced that we would succeed, and that means that that regime would end. And we were convinced that as we went from the end of that regime to something other than that regime, there would be a period of transition. And, you cannot do everything instantaneously; it’s never been done, everything instantaneously. We did, however, recognize that there was at least a chance of catastrophic success, if you will, to reverse the phrase, that you could in a given place or places have a victory that occurred well before reasonable people might have expected it, and that we needed to be ready for that; we needed to be ready with medicine, with food, with water. And, we have been.

Rumsfeld, 2015:

Over a decade after presiding over the invasion of Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld admitted that the country may not have been ready for a democracy.

In an interview with British newspaper the Times, the former Secretary of Defense reflected on America’s role in shaping the Middle East, and suggested expecting Iraq to seamlessly transition to a democracy was “unrealistic.”

“I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories,” Rumsfeld told the Times. “The idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic. I was concerned about it when I first heard those words.”

Larry Wilmore rightly said the Rumsfeld is, “The only Donald worse than Trump.”

And I am saying that Larry Willmore is a part of the sacred and hermetic order of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.

This is F%$#ing Brutal

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Part 1


Part 2

Jon Stewart interviewed Judith Miller, one of the most egregious propagandists in American journalism, and he took her apart.

You need to watch the whole thing, but Stewart’s statement to towards the end of the interview gives one a sense of how Stewart gave Miller a bad time:

We’re obviously never going to see eye-to-eye on itI appreciate you coming on the program. These discussions always make me incredibly sad because they point to institutional failure at the highest levels and no one will take responsibility for it, and they pass the buck to every individual but themselves. It’s sad.

Miller came off as pathetic and evasive, which pretty much matches her career as a “Journalist”.

I Now Understand Why Jon Stewart is Leaving The Daily Show

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After many years of commenting on cable TV wankitude, he can no longer handle watching Fox News anymore:

………

My biggest objection to Fox News, I say, is not the scaremongering, it’s the way it’s reshaped the Republican party. It will misrepresent social and economic issues, and promote the more extreme elements of the party, politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, in a way that is hugely detrimental to American politics. (For the record, Rupert Murdoch disagrees, and last year claimed that Fox News “absolutely saved” the Republican party.) “Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing,” says Stewart. “I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don’t get turd lung disease.”

Now that he is leaving The Daily Show, is there any circumstance in which he would watch Fox News again? He takes a few seconds to ponder the question. “Umm… All right, let’s say that it’s a nuclear winter, and I have been wandering, and there appears to be a flickering light through what appears to be a radioactive cloud and I think that light might be a food source that could help my family. I might glance at it for a moment until I realize, that’s Fox News, and then I shut it off. That’s the circumstance.”

OK, I get it now.

If I had to watch Fox News for a living, I’d be ……… I’d be ………

Hell, I need a full fifth of Jack and a bong full of Maui Wowie to even consider it.

I Think that Jon Stewart just Accused Dick Cheney of Being an Iranian Agent

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Stewart actually makes a remarkably cogent argument for the case that Dick Cheney has been giving more aid and comfort to the Mullahs in Iran than any other American official:

He goes through Cheney’s history, including his disastrous tenure as the CEO of Halliburton (Dresser Industries acquisition and asbestos), and shows how almost every action and statement that Cheney has made in any official capacity with regard to Iran has provided aid and comfort to that theocracy.

Man, this is f%$#ing brutal.

I Haz a Sad

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Jon Stewart is leaving The Daily Show later this year:

Jon Stewart, who turned Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” into a sharp-edged commentary on current events, delivering the news in layers of silliness and mockery, said on Tuesday that he would step down after more than 16 years as its anchor.

Mr. Stewart disclosed his plans during a taping of the program on Tuesday. Comedy Central said he would “remain at the helm of ‘The Daily Show’ until later this year” but did not elaborate on Mr. Stewart’s next steps or the future of the show.

In becoming the nation’s satirist in chief, Mr. Stewart imbued the program with a personal sense of justice, even indignation. For a segment of the audience that had lost its faith in broadcast and print news outlets or never regarded them as sacrosanct in the first place, Mr. Stewart emerged a figure as trusted as Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow.

Bummer.

I understand where he is coming from, he’s been doing this for nearly 17 years, and his directorial debut, Rosewater, was very well received, and I really don’t think that he can take his role as the “Most trusted man on cable news” any further.

Being a comedian is like being a shark: If you don’t stop moving, you die, and Jon Stewart has no where to go as presenter on his show.

Quote of the Day

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Good Point

It’s funny, I just made this movie about a guy who triumphs over the inhuman conditions in his imprisonment in an authoritarian country, and I don’t think they did half that sh%$ to him.

— Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart is rightly appalled.

He just did a movie about torture, and the elements of the state security apparatus in Iran were more humane, and less brutal, than those of the United States.

Our torture, and the support for it, both tacit and explicit, exhibited by both Barack Obama and George W. Bush, are going to bear bitter fruit for the us for decades.