Friday Recap #Rubio #Education #Hagel


 

1.       How can you expect to convince a creationist about climate change if they think the earth is only 6,000 years old.

2.       Still can’t figure out how Silver Linings Playbook garnered all of those Oscar acting nominations.  Further putting Bradley Cooper in there with Daniel Day Lewis is pink slime to filet mignon.

3.       Memo to Frank Luntz and GOP: you can’t call it rebranding and then roll out the same tired message.  And using young Marco Rubio is like polishing a turd.  It’s still a turd.

4.       Rumor in AZ is retired astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of Gabby Giffords, is considering a run in 2016 against John McCain.  Let’s hope so.

5.       A Bieber-free and Gaga-free Grammy Awards was very special.  Now if we can keep Taylor Swift away.

6.       I really want to enjoy SNL, but the writing is so bad it’s getting harder and harder.  And please stick a fork in that awful Californians sketch.

7.       Left leaning media loves to single out Israel for its blockade and isolation of Gaza.  Yet it was the Muslim Brotherhood led government in Cairo that flooded the smuggling tunnels linking Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai.  This rift between the allegedly close Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood highlights how dangerous Gazan militants remain.

8.       According to a recent Gallup poll the five most religious states in America are Mississippi, Utah, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas.  According to the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) report on American Education ranking of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, Mississippi ranks 48th, Utah 41st, Alabama 34th, Louisiana 49th, and Arkansas 45th.  Conversely, the most nonreligious  states and their respective education rankings are Vermont (2nd), New Hampshire (9th), Maine (14th), Massachusetts (1st), and Rhode Island (6th).  By the way, there is a direct correlation between education and ranking and median income. 

9.       Want to know why the Chuck Hagel SecDef nomination was filibustered?  Here it is straight from the horses’ ass, John McCain:  “But to be honest with you, Neil, it goes back to there’s a lot of ill will towards Senator Hagel because when he was a Republican, he attacked President Bush mercilessly and say he was the worst President since Herbert Hoover and said the surge was the worst blunder since the Vietnam War, which was nonsense. He was anti-his own party and people — people don’t forget that. You can disagree but if you’re disagreeable, then people don’t forget that.”  Yes the GOP blocked the nomination of a FELLOW Republican because he spoke out against the party.

10.   From the editorial page of the Financial Times: “As the Financial Times has long argued, austerity is necessary for countries with record high deficits and reliant on mobile investors.  But economies with relative fiscal space, such as the large euro members, or those with captive bond markets – the U.S. and Japan – should relax the tightening.”  Logic that seems to be incomprehensible to deficit hawks.

11.   Republicans oppose spending money on cyber security because there is no photo op potential.  Now building another unnecessary aircraft carrier….

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Secular American Jew and a Love for Israel

As many of you know, I have dedicated many postings to the State of Israel on a range of topics including: it’s history, the present day government, the Jewish-Palestinian question, and the region in general.   Growing up in a liberal conservative Jewish household (the oxymoron is quite common as American Jews were almost exclusively political liberals and the conservative branch of Judaism the most common) and attending Hebrew school as a kid you obviously build an affinity for the State of Israel.   I do not remember the Six-Day War of 1967, but I have vivid memories of celebrating Israel’s 25 th anniversary in 1973 and the Yom Kippur War later that year.   As a ten year old attending Yom Kippur services I saw the worried looks on my parents and the other adults at the shul as members of the congregation would periodically step outside to get news reports from car radios and transistor radios (We still drove and used electrical appliances during the high holidays, though several fam
Read more

September 10, 2001 was a Monday

Where were you on September 10, 2001?   What were you worried about?   What occupied your thoughts, worries, hopes, and dreams?   What were you excited about?   What were you interested in? September 10, 2001 was a Monday. Cindy and I were still laughing about the recent visit from the Three Amigas: Leah, Roseanne, and Valerie, and the adventures of Sedona, a certain screen door, a forgotten carrot cake, and breakfast for champions.   We were also dealing with a 1995 Chevy Blazer that seemed to be on its last legs, surviving our first Arizona summer, thinking about what to remodel in the house, dealing with the concept of a Home Owners Association, thinking that my best shot at a World Series game maybe with the fledgling Arizona Diamondbacks, and looking forward to a visit from Scott, Lori, and the boys. But what about America?   We knew nothing about a tiny town in Pennsylvania called Shanksville; Guantanamo Bay was the setting for A Few Good Men, and we still taped shows and listene
Read more

Sunni and Shia: So who are the bad guys again?

Baby faces vs. heals?   Cowboys vs Indians?   Good guy always where the white hat.   “Dig is he a good guy or bad guy?”   Bad guys always, looked, well, bad. You’re either with us or you’re against us.   Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are the axis of evil. Americans, for the most part, have a pretty simple outlook on conflict: just tell us who the bad guys are and we’ll know who to root against.   We tend to lump similar races and peoples into larger buckets, mostly due to the media’s inclination to treat us like potential Jeff Foxworthy competitors.   But the world is anything but simple and as I have written previously, the Middle East is as confusing and confounding place as you can find.   During the Iran and Iraq war of the 1980’s most Americans took the position that “…as long as they kill each other, I’m good.”   When civil war ravaged Afghanistan, we joined the side of the Mujahedeen because they were fighting the Soviets and the Soviets were our archenemy, a position they occupie
Read more