MN Music Directory - cover bands

link I stumbled upon of MN area cover bands.  Orange Whip is great, but nice that there might be other good cover bands.  Interested in checking one that does the 70s/80s R&B/Funk steez ala Prince & Earth Wind Fire.

John Dean "Republican Rule is Dangerous article

article by John Dean, Nixon's "White House Counsel" lawyer

how-to: bandana

I found this helpful link via a Wikipedia external link, a how-to on tying a bandana that covers your entire dome (heretofore described as "dome steez")

I use a bandana not for fashion, but because my dome sweats profusely if I really do heavy cardio, like the ArcTrainer on level 10, or a 3+ hr all-court net rushing, lob-chasing tennis match. But I had always used the Federer/2Pac bandana steez. I tried the ArcTrainer with the dome steez, & it worked great. Better soaking of the sweat & less times I had to use the "wipe head with shirt sleeve" move.

Mike Stathis

econ/financial markets writer Mike Stathis site

Kenneth C Davis Don't Know Much

historian Kenneth C Davis Don't Know Much site. Davis writes books about many topics, correcting popular misinformation.

Working Life

Working Life/Jonathan Tasini site on US worker issues

pop/rock disco link

blog with link to some pop/rock discography

ReThug Hypocrisy: support Pubic Insurance Option for Trent Lott's house

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeZv8AEv0uQ

Kanye West "Yo" images

Have you seen these joke Kanye West "Yo" images mocking Kanye's douche behavior interrupting Taylor Swift @ MTV Awards?

example

I want to see one as follows

"Yo Obama, I acknowledge you're an epic Corporate Whore in general, & specifically for killing the Public Health Insurance Option, & I'll let you finish, but George Bush 43 was the Biggest Corporate Whore President of All Time"!

Leo Hindery Jobs Solutions for Our Jobless Recovery

good article, I agree on most of the policies Hindery recommends. It's a shame Obama & the Dem congress is not making the bold changes in economic policy required to fix the fugazi economy.

Paul Krugman refutes Austrian view of RGD1

Paul Krugman refutes Austrian economics view of the 1930s Republican Great Depression. The Austrian (Libertarians, Ron Paul heads, Peter Schiff, etc) would say that Fed Gov response made the Depression worse, but Krugman/Keynesian shows that lack of Fed Gov response from Repub Pres Hoover in 1929 when RGD1 started actually did make the Depression worse. Plus Krugman highlights some illogical aspects of the Austrian explanation wrt RGD1

Hiway Credit Union

a friend/existing customer highly recommended Hiway Credit Union, as a great bank for personal finance use. Dude said their rates are dece, the service is dece, & it's reassuring that one can go in & talk to a real manager at the branch.

After all the fraud in 2008-9 Banking Crisis, imho I feel like investigating Credit Unions more.

1 thing I worry about is if Credit Unions enjoy FDIC protection, or if they have an alternate protection, is it dece enough. Hit up the comments if u have a take on this issue.

Michael Boldrin "Against Intellectual Monopoly"

economist Michael Boldrin has a free pdf book "Against Intellectual Monopoly". Also has a Econtalk podcast.

Common Good Bank

Common Good Bank is a new type of bank, whose leader was interviewed by Thom Hartmann. IMHO, from the interview, their steez sounds similar to a credit union, but apparently their are some differences.

Twin Cities Hip Hop

Twin Cities Hip Hop lists local MSP metro area shows, & the local artists that often do local shows, such as Atmosphere, Brother Ali, Leroy Smokes, etc.

Jim Sinclair's Mineset

commodity dealer Jim Sinclair blog, who Thom Hartmann recommends

economist Alan Blinder, offshoring expert

economist Alan Blinder, who does academic researching on the effects of offshore outsourcing on US economy.

Working Group on Extreme Inequality

advocacy org Working Group on Extreme Inequality

review of interstate bus service

review of interstate bus service

Single Payer Action

Single Payer Action is a advocacy org for US Universal Health Care

Larry Beinhart "Tax Cuts: BS & the Facts"

Larry Beinhart editorial.  Beinhart demonstrates the facts that high income tax rate on the top income group has predictably led to good economic growth, and reduction of said rate leads to economic bubbles & recessions.

essay on Breaking Bad

Here's a great take on the greatness of the TV drama show Breaking Bad, from a random commenter dmallet on AMC's Breaking Bad website.

"This is the finest dramatic work of art I have ever seen. Be it films, theatre, or television, this is the most spectacular entertainment to date. If America needs to see what the failure of the War on Drugs has caused, they need look no further than this show. Walt is the symbol of all unassuming people who have been seduced by the unregulated, uncontrolled universe of organized crime fuelled by drugs. But, it is not only a statement on a matter of policy and morality. It is also a detailed portait of a failing marriage. It is a commentary on the folly of youth. It is an expose of the sordid underbelly of addiction. It is a glimpse into corruption at every level. It is a terse and biting knock at the disarray of the American Health care system. It is an emotionally devastating dissection of the family unit from several different angles. It is another in a fine line of creative endeavors that has taken on the difficult task of satirizing suburban life and does so perfectly. It is all of these things and more. It is the most provocative, complex and rewarding show ever broadcast on television. 

Several years ago, a horrid, melodramatic film called Crash won the Oscar for best picture. It attempted to connect various characters and situations together to make a statement about the struggle between races for equality and acceptance. Here drugs and the criminal underworld act as an initial catalyst for a deeply felt, artful exposition of the human soul in all of its complexity. Where Crash, Magnolia, Short Cuts, or American Beauty succeeded ( and let me add that Crash fails on every count to feel the least bit genuine), Breaking Bad triumphs.

But don't view this simply as a pastiche of events...see it as the unfolding of a solitary decision....to sell a hard drug to help sustain his family after his death. A dark means to an end. Every man, woman and child has made a decision like this. Perhaps we have had a child as a result of a night of impulsive passion, unfurling a lifetime of changes, all based on a moment we decided to keep removing articles of clothing. Perhaps we have lashed out in anger, and escaped into a self destructive pattern of behaviour. Walt, Skyler, Flynn, Hank, Jesse, Jane...the entire cast of characters is a prism of the human condition.

One knows when they have witnessed great art when it conjures up emotions that cause a person to pause and reflect, to see this painful mosaic of life and identify with those elements that ring true in your own life. And simultaneously, it is supreme entertainment. 

I pray that come Emmy time, the Academy is willing to reward Season 2 for what it is...a watershed moment in television and art in general and do their part to ensure that the public knows of it. 

I have no hesitation proclaiming Breaking Bad as a modern masterpiece, alongside M.A.S.H and All In The Family as the best this or any genre has to offer"

Garden of Life

Garden of Life website, vendor of food powder that my homie LA recommended. Dude is smart in general, is dude's hobby is to read up on nutrition & exercise. So I'm following the guy's advice.

Been taking this stuff Perfect Food Super Green formula, has 46 nutritious items, most of which would be impractical for me to buy at the local grocery (don't stock it) & eat otherwise, such as grass juice, kelp, obscure vegetables, etc.

hilarious Obama quotes

some soundbites of Obama talking slang talk, including n-bomb, s-bomb, f-bomb. Taken from Obama's audio book, where he has to quote his school homie Ray's slang talk from back in the day

20 jobs that pay $20/hr

cnn article

Phone Scoop

Phone Scoop is a site the Radio Shack guy recommended, as a independent site that comments on mobile phone service & mobile phones.

I'll watch this site to see what happens to Boost Mobile. I'm a new Boost customer, but because of the crappy frequent dropped calls & "No Service 2F" outages, I'm gonna roll with $0.10/min for a while & "wait & see" if Boost actually scales up their infrastructure capacity, like they claim they're doing, to handle their massive increase in customers. The Radio Shack dude opined Boost will be able to scale up sufficiently within 2-3 months. Not sure if I believe it, but don't hate Boost enough yet to quit. Even no-contract Boost has the "switching cost" of having to cop another phone if I were to switch. Damn you switching costs!

A New Way Forward

Greenwald article on how Summers & Geithner are Wall Street Welfare Whores.

former IMF Bank economist Simon Johnson article on how the US Wall Street Welfare 2009 is similar to prior "emergent market" failures, where an oligopoly of bankers control the Government to extract Welfare.

A New Way Forward is an org of citizens that is fighting Wall Street Welfare 2009. I doubt they will be successful, but their effort is the only type I see having any chance regular US citizens have of changing Obama's Wall Street Welfare policy.

oDesk

oDesk is a homeshoring marketplace in which anyone can randomly take free certification exams, then become an oDesk "provider" working on tasks in a variety of fields.

I did some brief browsing to see about this homeshoring category, since I suspect it may be "a winners take all" niche where 1 or a few leaders dominate & end up getting more of the volume. It appears that eLance leads in volume, & oDesk is growing fast. Other sites like guru exist, but seem to have less volume than these aformentioned 2 sites. oDesk seems to provide more statistics than eLance about average hourly rates by skill & country, etc.

If anyone has experience with any of these homeshoring sites, pls hit up the comments with your $0.02.

Politifact

Politifact reports on the truthfulness of statements made by politrickians.

Checkbook.com

Consumers Checkbook aka checkbook.org is a site with local metro area consumer info, published by the same Consumers Union group that publishes the magazine Consumer Reports.

Richard Florida "How the Crash Will Reshape America"

urban studies professor Richard Florida article

Ian Welsh @ Firedoglake

UPDATE, apparently now Welsh does most of his writing on his own ianwelsh.net, while still posting somewhat on Firedoglake

--
Ian Welsh @ Firedoglake blog, is a 40s-yo Canadian in Toronto with a great broad take on US economic/politics topics, with an ability to take long historical perspective, ala Thom Hartmann.

I stumbled upon 1 of Welsh's posts. Welsh is great, I'll likely become a regular reader because this guy is dropping too much insight to be slept on.

Here's an example post labeling 3 groups in US political spectrum
reactionaries (Rethugs)
conservatives ("centrist" Dems like Obama)
liberals (very few exist in House & Sen)

Political Calculation

interesting blog with quantitative spreadsheet-like estimates on various economic & social matters.

AvaxHome

Good ebooks site AvaxHome

eBook search engine

This custom google search engine scans 100s of eBooks sites.

Booktraining

This site Booktraining.net fileshares many instructional videos for computer-related training, which is a focus I haven't seen. Like many other sites, it also shares many pdf eBooks.

MN Latino Economic Development Center

MN Latino Economic Development Center (link)

Disgusting behavior by Brazilian Catholic Church

this story is disgusting.

1 A 9 yr-old girl was raped by her stepfather
2 The girl became pregnant with twins due to the rape
3 The medical opinion is that giving birth to the twins would endanger the girl's life
4 The girl's mother arranges for the girl to abort her pregnancy, which is legal in Brazil for life danger &/or rape
5 A moron Brazilian Catholic bishop excommunicates from the Church the girl's mother, & the physicians who administered the abortion.

WTF?! I guess the pedophile rapist step-father is a good Catholic since he did NOT get excommunicated. The extremely immoral contrast in who did & did not get excommunicated is beyond absurd.

Religions that are both authoritarian & reject science seem dangerous to society.

issues that cause a divorce

typical issues that cause a divorce, per a divorce lawyer's experience.

Latin Tropical sites

A friend wanted some sites that have Latin music albums. Apparently this friend is not "nice" with "the googles".

Spent like 10 minutes with google & found these. Hope that helps.

Gru. Niche discography (might be missing some items, I don't know)
JL Guerra discography
Salsa 1 2 3 4

stimulus for electronic medical records = corporate welfare

Part of the 2009 economic stimulus plan making its way through the Congressional "sausage factory" includes money for electronic medical records (EMR).

EMR itself is a good idea. Healthcare industry is horrible at using, er not using, information technology to increase productivity. For example, the practice of some physicians poorly handwriting a prescription that a pharmacist can't read is excessive industry inefficiency, not to mention extreme incompetent arrogance (a deadly combination) for the physician offenders.

However, I don't see why in principle the Fed Government should be paying for EMR, this is straight corporate welfare for the healthcare industry.

To my knowledge, no other industries have gotten such corporate welfare for their IT. I suppose their may be some tax credit, but even so this would be at worst a partial deduction of the cost. Eg if a grocery retailer buys a $2 million transaction information system, they don't pay $2 million less in taxes, maybe at best they get to deduct $200K from their tax bill or some such.

Speaking of grocery retailers, I heard that they are often the least profitable industry in the US, with a slim profit margin of say 3%, which often times is less than that of a regular savings account (depending on the interest rate level). If grocery retailers can pay for their own IT, why can't the super-expensive health care industry?

Perhaps the Feds should just mandate/regulate that EMR must be implemented by say 2014. Or implement EMR corporate welfare as an low-interest loan of sorts. Various healthcare industry participants could be levied a tax to ensure that they pay back the EMR corporate welfare within say 8 years. The tough thing would be ensuring that the healthcare industry doesn't just pass the tax on the consumers. Perhaps health care insurers & pharma companies company profits, as well physician/dentist/pharmacist incomes should get an extra 10% tax for the 3-10 years it takes to pay off this EMR loan.

Another point about EMR, is that the Feds should insist that any software used in the EMR should be completely FOSS (free & open source). This way whoever is paying the EMR bill, Feds &/or healthcare industry, they would be paying only the initial implementation/consulting fee, & a minimal annual maintenance fees. I don't want to see the closed proprietary enterprise software cartel of Oracle/SAP get paid off of this EMR corporate welfare, with their ridic initial license fees & usurious 22% annual maintenance fees. If there is any "functionality holes" in what is needed, the Feds could hire maybe at most 100 of the vast sea of US unemployed IT professionals to develop the missing functionality. If a small software vendor is already working on this functionality, the Feds could give some free IT workers' time in exchange for the vendor's committment to FOSS. Wikipedia notes that several FOSS EMR apps already exist.

Competence: Is Your Boss Faking It

interesting Time article

fw - free ebook sites

I stumbled upon a blogger's massive list of free ebook sites, pt 1, pt 2

fw - Job Market could be bleak for years

msnbc article on fugazi US job market.

Obama blacklists Progressive Economists

David Sirota editorial & Christopher Hayes editorial detail how Obama has shunned Progressive hires for the economic-related cabinet jobs. It would be great is Obama had named Dean Baker, who is not only Progressive, innovative, but most importantly has the benefit of being correct on calling the Nasdaq bubble in 1999 & housing bubble in 2004.

These Obama economists Larry Summers & Timothy Geithner were incompetent in the 1990s & deregulated financial derives. This action made the housing bubble & 2008 Financial ELE worse. Summers & Geithner also Wall Street Welfare Whores.

On economics, it seems that Obama is a Corporate Welfare Whore Lite, ala Bill Clinton.

I sincerely hope that Obama will prove Sirota, Hayes, & myself wrong.

Chris Hedges "It's Not Going to be OK"

Chris Hedges big-picture editorial about the US economy & state of democracy.

Obama salary limit for bailed out companies

Obama has announced a $500K salary limit for the employees of bailed out companies, including the CEO. Personally, given the Fed Gov's deficit spending, I'd put the limit at $200K, but hey I still support Obama for this effort.

I put on Morning Joe on MSNBC this morning while eating breakfast. This host/douche Joe Scarborough said that this plan is "Marxist" and "we can't get qualified CEOs".

What extreme idiocy from Scardoucheough.

Erin Burnett & Steve Forbes were crying the same river on Meet The Press on Sun Feb-1

The Fed Gov funding the banks is what is "Marxist". If the banks need the bailout money, they need to accept the terms of the US public aka the taxpayers.

The fact that the current bank CXOs are "talented" is in question anyways. If they were so "talented", how did they bankrupt their banks & wreck the broader US economy in the process?

Even if they are talented, where would these CXOs otherwise go for jobs? All the banks are downsizing.

Also, their are probably 1000s of bank executives who could do at worst "as good a job" as the current CEOs, from any of these 3 categories:
1 midlevel managers at the bailed out banks who have a track record of good performance AND were prudent in their risk/reward decision making, not causing Billions in losses for their department

2 CEOs of profitable regional commercial banks or successful not-for-profit credit unions, which unlike their more glamorous investment banking CEO competitors, did not ruin their organizations in the 2008 Financial ELE.

3 CEOs of profitable banks in BRIC-type countries. In India alone, there's probably at least 100 English-speaking & competent bank CEOs that would take the job for $100K, much less $500K. The Feds could allocate a few H1-B visas for them to relocate to the US.

Funny how Wall Street was cheerleading for US nonfinancial corporations' offshore outsourcing for PhD engineers, radiologists, accountants, etc. Because apparently all work skill sets are comodities whose price needs to fall in a "Race To The Bottom", & we should not worry about the effect of this massive US job loss on the US economy. But yet somehow their expertise is some unique Jordan/Federer/Einstein skill set than only NYC investment bankers have? FOH!

Corporate Welfare Whores like Joe Scarborough practice the REAL CLASS WARFARE. Everyone else needs to show extreme competence & ruthlessly compete with globally cheap labor. But the how dare we plebeians suggest the US' 0.1% superrich class of Wall Street execs, douche cable pundits (like Scarborough), etc, have to ACTUALLY COMPETE in an actual global free market! No, we 99.9% plebeians should "bow our heads" (c) Cenk Uyger, & let the 0.1% enjoy Corporate Welfare aka Conservative Nanny State protection, while basic government services for the common folks are getting cut.

An extreme FOH to Joe Scarborough, Erin Burnett & the rest of these unAmerican US Corporate Welfare Whores. They can all EAD.

IBM relocating US employees to BRIC

IBM is relocating US employees to cheap-labor countries such as India, of course getting the much lower salary. Presumably the fugazi choice for many US employees is IBMer in India on a $15K engineer salary, or possibly $15K as Walmart clerk in Rochester, NY.

IBM can EAD.

Judd Gregg same bad behavior as Blago

C&L makes great point that NH Sen now Sec of Commerce Judd Gregg did similar action as disgraced IL Gov Rod Blagojevich aka Blago.

Economics & Revisionist History

A TYT listener blogger, sisco66, has a good take on the RGDs aka Republican Great Depression(s).

need mp3 encoding advice/winLAME

What do you use to rip audio CDs to MP3? Any suggestions or advice?

I had heard that the "LAME encoder" was a better technology to "encode MP3s" than whatever Apple iTunes uses. This open source/free software winlame allows one to use that LAME format.

I downloaded this app & tried it. It seems to work good. I picked
Encoding Quality = High
Quality = 4 (0 = best/big file, 9 = worst/small file)
Variable Bit Rate Mode = Standard

The resulting files sound good to me, but I'm not an audiophile. The albums (1 jazz, 1 electronica, 1 world genre). They were all about 50 minutes & the albums created were about 50 MB in size, with mp3 files of about 150 kbps VBR.

Fiscal Therapy

David Cay Johnston article Fiscal Thearpy, editorial on how to fix the US fugazi economy.

CNN's Stimulus 101 overview

CNN has an overview of the proposed 2009 stimulus plan.

Baker's ideas for 2009 stimulus package

Dean Baker article has some ideas for the 2009 stimulus package, many of which are ideas from his Conservative Nanny State book. I really support the public funding of pharma clinical trials that would eliminate the current pharma monopoly system.

Obama's current stimulus plan is very disappointing. Per Rachel Maddow, only 18% is on infrastructure. More than that infrastructure amount is more supply-side Reaganomics tax cuts, which have been proven failures since the 1980s. If the Feds are gonna spend $820 B, it should all be bang-for-the-buck items that have a good chance of getting a return.

It seems that on economic policy, Obama is like B Clinton, a moderate ReThug, a less whorish Corporate Welfare Whore. I sincerely hope Obama proves me wrong on this stimulus package & other economic policies in this 2009Q1. Just being less corporate welfare whorish than WOAT Bush, but still whorish, is NOT "change that I can believe in".

offshore outsourcing of drive thru

article on how Jack In The Box fast-food restaurant (same niche as McDonalds), in its Charlotte restaurants, has started using offshored drive-thru order takers.

ESPN2 Aus Open schedule

BTW, peep the Hewitt pic of dunny doing his classic "come on" gesture.

ESPN2 has stepped up their tennis coverage tremendously.

IIRC, it was just 3 years ago when ESPN was derided/ethered by Jon Wertheim as "Eternally Shafting Players Non-American". They would stay showing rerun blowouts of the Williams sisters & Roddick, while a live epic 5-set match was going on bt non-Americans such as M Safin v F Gonzalez or some such. The only exception was the Non-American they vag-rided even more than the few American stars, Maria Sharapova.

Sharapova is injured this year, so we don't have to bare her-shrieking unsportsmanlike anorexic ass this year preempting more interesting matches.

But ESPN2 aka "the deuce" (no scatalogical jic) is rolling mad hours of live coverage.

Well done ESPN.

Here's the ESPN2 sched (source tennis.com):

ESPN2 live schedule
Mon Jan-19 21:00-02:00
Tue Jan-20 03:30-08:00, 22:00-02:00
Wed Jan-21-Thu Jan-22 03:30-08:00, 23:00-02:00
Fri Jan-23 03:30-08:00, 19:00-21:30, 23:30-02:00
Sat Jan-24 03:30-08:00, 22:00-01:30
Sun Jan-25 03:30-08:00, 21:00- 01:30
Mon Jan-26 03:30-06:00, 21:30-01:30 QF
Tue Jan-27 03:30-06:00 QF, 21:30-02:00 QF
Wed Jan-28 03:30-06:00 QF, 21:30-01:30 W SF
Thu Jan-29 03:30-06:00 M SF, 23:00-01:00 WD F
Fri Jan-30 03:30-06:00 M SF
Sat Jan-31 03:30-05:30 W F
Sun Feb-01 03:30-06:30 M F

Ravi Batra on the 2008 Financial Crisis

Economist Dr Ravi Batra's essay breaks down the 2008 Financial Crisis like an organic compound, no Keith Murray. Batra's website here, unfortunately he doesn't update it much, but will drop some essays periodically.

Batra is mad nice, too bad Obama overlooked "economists who called it correctly" like Batra & Dean Baker, in favor of 90s Clinton retreads who got it wrong like Larry Summers.

Carbonomics

free ebook Carbonomics by Steven Stoft on energy/economics issues. You can download the free pdf here or cop a printed book at that same site or at Amazon.

I dig the tagline "How to fix the climate & charge it to OPEC". Word?! I love the sound of that solution! "Fock it, do it live", no Bile O'Really.

Ron Paul kicks the truth on the Gaza massacre

Ron Paul quickly in 3 mins drops some intellectual ether on Israeli's Gaza massacre, & hypocrisy in US foreign policy since the 80s to now.

Even offshore outsourced at enterprise software oligopolists getting ethered

Even the enterprise software oligopolists SAP & Oracle are laying off workers at their offshore outsourced Indian offices.

Supposedly some of this is India-specific sales, which I could understand more.

But the majority of these Indian offices are working on offshored work in product dev, consulting, internal G&A tasks such as Finance/Accounting, etc, for a rich country end customer, especially the US.

Either overall global employment in enterprise application software is in a bubble, or SAP or Oracle are just too damn greedy. Perhaps the CXOs feel that to maintain their multimillion pay packages, they need to eliminate even those "greedy" $10-25K (not sure on actual amount, just know it's much lower than the US which motivated the offshoring) salaried Indian employees doing real customer work.

If the oligopolist offshored knowledge workers getting eliminated like this, what does this say for US workers at non-oligopolist vendors? "Shhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid" (c) The Wire's MD State Senator Clay Davis.

I hope open source takes over the enterprise app software business, indy or small business software engineers, project consultants, etc have a chance at decent careers, or even self-employment.

Those that don't actually help the end customer, brutal arrogant oligopolist, parasite CXOs like Larry Ellison or Safra Catz can eat an infinite johns sandwich. I'm sure the Bangalore staff are saying similar things in Hindi right about now.

CNN profiles the underemployed

Case studies on how several workers have seen their careers ethered, going from 110K to 33K for instance.

Keep in mind these "underemployed" don't show up in the U3 reported unemployment figures. They sometimes show up in the U6 figures.

Expect to see more college degreed "knowledge workers" driving trucks, taxis, waiters, etc. Nothing wrong with those jobs, but it shows the social contract in the US is broken. Workers take time, & often debt, to become a knowledge worker.

Apparently in the US now, it's a luxury to work a knowledge worker job until retirement.

Unions & pro-employee government policies are needed ASAP. Let's see if Obama & the Dems do a little something for us wage slaves & unemployed wage slaves, or they bitch out as Corporate Whore DINOs ala Bill Clinton did on NAFTA in the 90s.

Howard Dean gets no love like foster kids

Howard Dean, was an innovator in using the internet for campaign donations in his 2004 Presidential Campaign. Dean also innovated as the Democratic Party Chair (aka DNC Chair) with the "50 State Strategy", which led to the Dem party performing well in the 2006 & 2008 elections. Both Dean innovations greatly influenced Obama's 2008 campaign.

Note that many typical "centrist Dems" like Rahm Emmanul, Bill & H Clinton & her WCs like space alien/campaign advisor James Carville all scorned Dean for trying something different. Dean's approach was more democratic a "bottom-up" approach from everyday people on the internet. The old Clinton approach was "top down" appealing to big rich individual & corporate donors, & ignoring the grass roots, especially in "red states" that recently had been voting ReThug.

This C&L article notes Dean will not even be at new DNC Chair Tim Kaine's induction ceremony. It states that Obama Chief of Staff & former Dem US Rep Rahm Emmanuel was a big Dean & 50 State Strategy hater, & may have something to do with Dean not being named to a Cabinet office in the Obama staff.

Dean, a former VT Governor who implemented a good health care reform, & a physician, could have been a great qualified pick for a health-related position, but Obama gave Health & Human Services to Tom Daschle, & Surgeon General to CNN TV medical PR dude Sanjay Gupta.

What the fock. No reward for doing a great job for Dean. Dean "gets no love like foster kids".

Obama has made some good decisions like naming Dr Chu to Sec Energy, & is infinitely superior to WOAT Bush or McShame. Despite this, with moves like shafting Dean [||], Obama is half-wack in his approach so far. Man, funk dat (c) Sagat.

ur racist files: Busta Rhymes "Arab Money"

Damn, I guess ignorance is bliss on not listening to music on the radio.

I randomly saw this Busta Rhymes video "Arab Money"



wtf is more offensive:

1 Busta's WC/R&B chorus singer singing Koran verses vocoder-style

2 Busta bragging about gambling with the late Palestinian leader Arafat

3 arab & douche DJ Khaled cooning/dancing in the video


Maybe Busta could get make even more publicity & partially make amends for offending arabs, by giving half the profits of the iTunes single sales to the UN Gaza efforts in the current Israeli massacre of Gaza Palestinians.

I don't think this is what pro-globalization stans have in mind as a shining example of globalization.

PC Roberts ethers the MSM

Paul Craig Roberts pwns the MSM aka the lamestream media

Equity markets globally ethered in 2008

Check out this Economist magazine link.

I had already known the US equity market (S&P 500) had collapsed 40.8% in 2008.

I was surprised to learn most other countries' equity markets had been more severely ethered.

In particular, the BRIC countries, aka "their takin our US jobbs" coalition aka the 21st Century new superpowers got pwned in 2008, both in their own currency & in USD terms.

In other words, the BRIC caught a brick, dunny! More like a dumptruck of bricks fell on their head.

Damn sonn, this doesn't bode well for labor globally, whether you're in the US or Vietnam. Whether you're a PhD scientist or a HS dropout manual laborer. More justification for more race to the bottom tactics. China is getting ethered despite paying $0.40/hr for factory workers, & India likewise paying $15K/year for PhD engineers & scientists in offshore outsourcing R&D centers? If the "Ownership Society" cats are getting ethered, best believe they will "trickle down" the pain to us wage slave laborers. Maybe Busta Rhymes was prophetic, yet 10 years early in his ELE prognostications.

Country Local Currency USD
Brazil -42.0% -57.0%
Russia -66.6% -71.9%
India -53.0% -61.7%
China -64.8% -62.5%

Question: I like how The Economist lists all this data, but I also want to see Price-to-Earnings (PE) & Price-to-Sales (PS) ratios to see the relevant valuations between countries, & more importantly, the relevant current valuations over the 100+ year historical valuations of the US stock market. Hit up the comments if you know of such a site, help a brother out mayne!

Flowchart of Ice Cube's "It Was A Good Day"

flowchart You don't even have to use ur AK