Category: Video

Dick Cheney Pissed off Jon Stewart………

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Daym!

Recently, Dick Cheney was interviewed, and Jon Stewart and his writers had the stomache to listen to listen to him go on and on about how Barack Obama has weakened America.

I now know what that sound I heard earlier, it was the staff of The Daily Show licking their chops.

He notes that Cheney was a sh%$#y vice president, and he was wrong on everything, and followed this by a video medley Grand Moff Cheney’s greatest hits, like, “We’ll be welcomed as liberators”, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction,” and the ever popular favorite “I think that they are in the last throes of the insurgency.”

Even if Obama wanted to take our standing in the world down a peg, he couldn’t, ’cause the Bush-Cheney administration left him with no peg room… the previous administration had left us in a bit of a cash crunch, and by ‘previous administration,’ I mean these motherf%$#ers.

Ouch.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss………

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It appears that we will get fooled again

Jack Lew, who has been nominated by Barack Obama as Timothy Geithner’s replacement as Secretary of the Treasury.

Well, if you think back to Geithner’s confirmation hearings, it turned out that he simply did not pay his Social Security taxes for a few years while working at the IMF.

Well Jack Lew does one better, he squirreled away funds in the Cayman Islands:

Jack Lew, President Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary nominee, previously held up to $100,000 in investments in an offshore hedge fund located in the Cayman Islands, according to financial disclosure forms.

Lew’s financial disclosure forms, filed in 2009 and 2011, showed that Lew had invested between $50,000 and $100,000 in a fund called Citigroup Venture Capital International Growth Partnership (Employee) II, L.P. — the very type of fund President Obama has repeatedly criticized.

The fund is an international venture capital fund for employees of Citigroup. According to his official White House biography, Lew served as managing director and chief operating officer of Citi Global Wealth Management and then Citi Alternative Investments (CAI) from 2006 to 2008.

Yeah, he is so not going to be the guy who cleans up Wall Street

H/t AmericaBlog.

5 Principals for Modern Communications Technology

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Harold Feld, Senior Vice President of Public Knowledge, telco policy wonk extraordinaire, and friend with whom I do medieval recreation with, has a must read essay on what a modern IP based telephone system should be like.

Basically, and unsurprisingly, it comes down to the same 5 principals that current switch based phone system has:

  • Universal service for all Americans. (Lifeline service for the poor)
  • Guaranteed interconnection, so that a Verizon user can make a call to a Comcast user.
  • Meaningful consumer protections. (i.e. “truth in billing”, which is lacking in cell phone service right now)
  • Reliability (4 “9”s of reliability, something that is lacking in cell phone service right now, as well as various IP telephony services like AT&T’s UVerse)
  • Emergency calls that work. (911 standards)

As is clear to anyone who spent even a few years under Ma Bell, these are not new concepts.  Our phone system has run under this for the past 80 years, since the New Deal.

Unfortunately, with the urging of what I call the “free market mousketeers”, these principals have been slowly been rolled back, and this is not a good thing, as the people and first responders who were left without communications following super-storm Sandy can attest to.

As Mr. Feld notes, the real solutions to many of these problems is to separate the service (voice telephone) from the underlying technology (PSTN vs. IP, or whatever might succeed IP) from a regulatory perspective.

Watch the video.  It is both clear, and does a good job of making what is ordinarily a very dry subject accessible.

Your Military Video Pr0n

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Here is a video from Saab for the Gripen.

It’s a little bit fantastical, but at least it has a narrative, as opposed a to pr0n movie metal soundtrack.

I think that the Gripen really has the possibility to be this generation’s F-5, small, cheap, and ubiquitous, though it is operating at a political handicap, because it is not made by, or going to be fielded by, the nations that are the biggest players diplomatically or militarily.

H/tThe DEW Line

Stewart On Guns

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Best news analysis in the media

If you want to get a good background on the whole gun safety issue, you’d may not find a better primer than what Jon Stewart did last night.

He outlines the basics of the debate, and how the NRA has castrated both the ATF and the ability to collect meaningful data about gun violence.

Funny and educational.

He is a F%$#ing Comedian

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Blah, blah, blah!

So until the pundits are subjected to some scrutiny for their fact free gaffes, leave Jon Stewart alone. </LeaveBritneyAlone>

You can see the video, and I don’t think it’s great. It shows off his not-infrequent forays into “a pox on both their houses” land, but there is a difference between saying, “Not up to his normal standards,” and:

I won’t say that Stewart has the same obligation to be accurate the journalists have—in fact, if he had brought up the coin only to make a lot of silly jokes about whose face would be on it, that would have been okay. (A missed opportunity, but nothing more.) But instead he grossly misled his audience.

At its best the Daily Show is about satirizing the actual reality of American governance in an honest way. Stewart has built up a lot of credibility over the years. A great many people trust him implicitly, believing that while his main objective is to be funny, he also won’t under any circumstances BS them. Yesterday, he betrayed that trust.

Shame on you, Jon Stewart. You’re better than this.

It’s one thing to say, “It’s not his best,” and it’s another to treat it as one of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse.

Ryan Cooper, please get a life.

There is One Man Who Can Challenge the Gun Lobby

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Jon Stewart doesn’t challenge gun ownership per se, but rather the sh%$ storm freakout accompanying Bob Costas’ comments on gun violence in the context of the Jovan Belcher murder/suicide.

He made the rather unremarkable observation that absent Belcher’s (legally owned) firearms, he and Kasandra Perkins might still be alive today.

The NRA, and its inadequately endowed paranoid ilk, want to make discussions of gun violence, and gun culture literally unspeakable in the media.

Not Enough Bullets

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If I were Al Sharpton, I’d be Screaming at Her

Remember Carly Fiorina?  The former CEO of HP?  The one who first came to prominence by presiding over massive accounting irregularities masquerading as blockbuster sales at Lucent?

Well, when she got fired as CEO, HP employees are reported to have spontaneously burst into song, specifically the song Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.

I’m sure that she cried all the way to the bank, because she got a $40 million dollar golden parachute.

She knows what the problem with the good old USA is, it’s that public employees’ unions have it too good: (at about 3 minutes into the video.

Carly Fiorina, who reportedly stood to receive more than $42 million after being ousted at HP in 2005, says that public workers should receive less benefits because “it is not fair” that unions are “so rich.”

During a Sunday panel segment on NBC, MSNBC host Al Sharpton asserted that Congress must agree to raise taxes on the wealthy before cutting spending.

“This is about fairness,” he explained. “Why do we need to need to deal with the tax on the rich first? Because we must ensure Americans we are dealing with fairness. We keep talking about shared sacrifice, there was not shared wealth and shared prosperity. So, you’re asking people that didn’t enjoy the good times to share in paying for the tab that they never enjoyed.”

Most of the American public might think that a an unbroken record of failure, capped by a $40 million golden parachute might be a bigger problem than the the deferred compensation known as a mortgage.

Seriously, business management seems to be a petri dish for sociopaths.

H/t Chris in Paris at Americablog.

Word!

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Grace under pressure

In protest of increasing management interference in the news (primarily of the right wing variety) two co-anchors on stations WVII and WFVX in Bangor, Maine, announced their resignations on the air, and later cited excessive management interference in the news process:

Citing a longstanding battle with upper management over journalistic practices at their Bangor TV stations, news co-anchors Cindy Michaels and Tony Consiglio announced their resignations at the end of Tuesday’s 6 p.m. newscast.

 Michaels and Consiglio, who have a combined 12½ years’ service at WVII (Channel 7) and sister station WFVX (Channel 22), shocked staff members and viewers with their joint resignations Tuesday evening.

 “I just wanted to know that I was doing the best job I could and was being honest and ethical as a journalist, and I thought there were times when I wasn’t able to do that,” said Consiglio, a northeastern Connecticut native who broke in with WVII as a sports reporter in April 2006.

 Not everyone was shocked by the on-air resignations.

 “No, that was unfortunate, but not unexpected,” said Mike Palmer, WVII/WFVX vice president and general manager. “We’ll hire experienced people to fill these positions sooner rather than later.”

 Neither reporter had told anyone of their decisions before Tuesday’s newscast.

 “We figured if we had tendered our resignations off the air, we would not have been allowed to say goodbye to the community on the air and that was really important for us to do that,” said Michaels, the station’s news director, who has spent six of her 15 years in Bangor’s radio and TV market at WVII.

 Both Michaels, 46, and Consiglio, 28, said frustration over the way they were allowed or told to do their jobs — something that has been steadily mounting for the last four years — became too much for them.

For what it’s worth, Mike Palmer, the aforementioned general manager, got some national ink in 2006, when he issued an edict forbidding any coverage of anthropogenic climate change until, “Bar Harbor is underwater.”

The fact that they surprised management by quitting on the air is telling.  They knew that the could not trust them.

Big surprise that one of the stations is a Fox affiliate.

H/t A Siegel at the big orange Borg.

There is a Difference Between a Conservative Democrat and a Disloyal Democrat

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That’s Gotta Leavea Mark!

Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, and on the list for the 2016 nominee, appears to have been actively working to maintain a Republican majority in the state senate:

IIf the New York state Senate remains controlled by the Republican Party, it won’t be because of the voters. Democrats have 30 seats, with 32 required for a majority. They’re also ahead in two races currently being recounted. Simcha Felder, who won a Senate seat on the Democratic and Conservative Party lines in Brooklyn, has already announced that he will caucus with the Republicans. If the Democrats end up with a majority, there is a good chance a bunch of conservative Democrats will switch parties to ensure that the GOP retains control. One guy who’s staying conspicuously out of the fight: Democratic governor and 2016 presidential contender Andrew Cuomo.

………

But it’s not just that Cuomo’s not trying to help his party win a majority that voters actually voted for. He has at times actively hindered their chances. Cuomo signed off on gerrymandered state Senate districts and did not demand independent, nonpartisan redrawing. In doing so he intended to preserve the status quo — Republicans in charge of the state Senate, Democrats in charge of the more representative assembly — but voters in New York pretty clearly decided that they preferred Democrats in charge of both houses, even with districts drawn specifically to make that nearly impossible.

……… 

And if Republicans get their majority, with the tacit support of Cuomo, the governor will have once again shown that he is not the progressive figure he will likely try to sell himself as if he runs for president. His tenure so far has been marked by flashy liberal victories on issues like gay marriage, along with a quietly conservative economic agenda: A property tax cap, total neglect of mass transit, and (partial) support for fracking. Even on economic issues where Cuomo has more liberal priorities, he rarely pushes his Republican friends particularly hard. (A Republican-controlled state Senate will almost certainly block a minimum wage increase Cuomo ostensibly supports.) There’s a reason, in other words, that the National Review loves him.

You can also see Chris Hays unload a case of whup ass on him as well. (see vid)

Let’s be clear here: In every case where Andrew Cuomo had to make a decision regarding the state senate, that decision cut to favor Republican control of the state senate to the maximum degree that political realities make it possible.

If there is a lesson to the Democratic party regarding the career of Joe Lieberman, it is that there is a difference between a conservative Democrat and a disloyal one.

Cuomo seems to be inclined toward the latter.

 I don’t know who is going to be the Democratic nominee in 4 years, but I really hope that it is not him.

H/t Crooks and Liars.

Stewart Misses the Point

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Jon Stewart faults his own journalistic chops on l’affaire Petraeus:

Yes, he interviewed Paula Broadwell, and did not pick up anything untoward, but so did a lot of people.

What he has is enough self-awareness to realize that he missed a big story.

It could be worse. Robert MacNeil, formerly of the MacNeil/Lehrer report, on November 22, 1963, at Dealy Plaza, he ran into a man, and asked where he could find a phone.

The man he ran into was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Journalists don’t have any more senses than the rest of us, and Jon Stewart has an almost unrivaled ability to call out bullsh%$ in a clear and concise matter.

I do think, and Jon Stewart would agree, that it’s f%$#ed up that a comedian is arguably one of the finest journalists on cable today, but we are living in a f%$#ed up world.