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Do you watch every minute of the competitions, or do you yawn and give it a pass? We particularly liked the "image" of the Queen jumping out of the helicopter in a parachute, and the celebration of the National Health Care! Paul McCartney still rocks, and the visuals throughout were impressive. So much for Mitt's "concerns" that London was not prepared!
A few more ad-hominem terms have found their way to the blocked list. We will let you figure out what they are. Have a nice weekend.
Syndicated talk radio host and MSNBC personality Ed Schultz has been off of both of his programs for the past week and took the time yesterday to call in to his radio show to speak with guest host Mike Papantonio to announce that his wife Wendy is being treated for ovarian cancer. Schultz told his audience they received the diagnosis last Wednesday and Wendy underwent surgery on Tuesday of this week. “The doctors feel like they got all of it. It was a very successful surgery, but we got a long way to go.” Schultz took the opportunity to thank the staffs of both of his programs for their help in covering while he’s been away and said he will be missing from both programs for some time, although how long is not known. “Doing a radio and TV show isn’t exactly what I’m thinking about right now. I’m going to be with my wife through all of this…We both feel like we’ve been through the wringer and you lose track of time, you lose track of what you’re doing. And everything changes, but we’re going to be OK. We’re going to get through it.”
Progressive Town Hall Forum in Seattle. Premiere Networks syndicated talk host Randi Rhodes (center) was one of eight panelists who took part in “Showdown 2012: Recapturing Democracy,” a progressive town hall forum presented by Seattle’s Progressive Talk AM1090 (CBS Radio’s KPTK) at the ShoWare Center in Kent, Washington on Saturday, July 21. Rhodes appeared on a panel focused on the evolving role citizens play in the political and public policy process, including strategies to protect our role in democracy and to build a better future for everyone. Panelists in this picture are (from l-r): Congressman Jim McDermott, WYD Media talk host Thom Hartmann, talk host Mike Papantonio, Compass Media Networks talk host Norman Goldman, Rhodes, talk host Sam Seder, talk host Ron Reagan, and panel moderator David Postman, former chief political reporter for the Seattle Times.
Congressional Republicans are again organizing efforts to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR is hiring the lobbying firm Navigators Global to help shut that down. The Hill reports NPR spokesperson Dana Rehm says that the organization is a content provider but is also a trade organization representing member stations. “It is part of our mission to represent the interests of NPR member stations to Congress, executive, regulatory and judicial bodies. At a time when the federal government is running a large deficit, every program and function of the government deserves to be scrutinized, and a review of federal funding to public broadcasting is fair and to be expected.” Rehm says the firm’s job is to explain “how the federal investment in public radio stations and larger public broadcasting system provides one of the most effective returns of any program authorized by Congress.”
Talk Radio Rises to the Occasion in Covering Aurora Massacre Aftermath. The natural progression of the analysis and coverage of the killing of 12 and wounding of dozens of others at the Aurora, Colorado premiere of “Dark Knight Rises” continues and talk radio is rising to the occasion to serve its listeners with compelling and responsible discussion. Examples of talk outlets rising to a high level of performance through the use of experts in the fields of psychology, law enforcement, media violence, gun control and more are being reported to TALKERS from all over the country. Here two examples of similar coverage: Compass Media Networks nationally syndicated talk host Todd Schnitt featured an interview with shooting victim Pierce O’Farrill, who was hit three times by bullets from the shooter’s gun. O’Farrill described live on the air the chilling events at the theater, his perspective on the gunman, the death penalty, and his visit with President Obama.
XtreMedia president Kevin McCullough tells TALKERS several of his company’s programs – his own Kevin McCullough show, the Saturday evening “Baldwin/McCullough LIVE” broadcast and the Sunday night Dani Johnson show spent the bulk of their collective platforms allowing hurting, confused and stunned listeners to respond to the attacks. Actor Stephen Baldwin took time out from a publicity tour in neighboring Cheyenne, Wyoming (90 minutes from Aurora) to meet with those in Aurora whose lives have been touched by the shootings. While there, CNN‘s Don Lemon asked Baldwin (see photo above) to weigh in on his perspective of the events. Baldwin told CNN, “It may be time for those of us in the Hollywood community to re-examine how we advance violence through films, television, and video games. It also blows my mind that someone could purchase 6,000 rounds of ammo in 45 days. I’m a gun enthusiast but a red flag should’ve gone off somewhere.”
SEATTLE -- The Seattle Mariners' star outfielder Ichiro Suzuki has been traded to the New York Yankees.
The Yankees also received cash in the deal that sent right-handers D.J. Mitchell and Danny Farquhar to the Mariners. Both 25-year-old players will report to the Tacoma Rainiers.
The trade was prompted by a request from 38-year-old Suzuki himself, according to team CEO Howard Lincoln.
"Several weeks ago, Ichiro Suzuki, through his long time agent, Tony Attanasio, approached Chuck Armstrong and me to ask that the Mariners consider trading him," said Lincoln. "Ichiro knows that the club is building for the future, and he felt that what was best for the team was to be traded to another club and give our younger players an opportunity to develop."
The 38-year-old Suzuki had spent his whole big league career with Seattle. The 10-time All-Star and 10-time Gold Glove winner is batting .261 with four home runs, 28 RBIs and 15 stolen bases this year.
Suzuki is a career .322 hitter and former AL MVP. He has never played in the World Series and now joins the team with the best record in the majors.
"Ichiro will be missed. He owns a long list of Major League Baseball and Mariners club records, has earned many prestigious awards, and in my opinion, he will someday be a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame," said Lincoln.
At a news conference, Suzuki recounted his past 11 years with the Mariners with misty eyes.
"When I think about taking off the Mariners uniform, I was overcome with sadness," he said with the help of a translator. "I will be moving on with pride on acount of the last 11½ years I spent with the Mariners."
The announcement came on Monday afternoon as the team prepared to face off against the Yankees in a series opener at Safeco Field. Suzuki will play for the Yankees against the Mariners.
When asked how he felt about having to face his former team in his first game as a Yankee, Suzuki grew tearful.
“It'll be hard for me to tell until I step onto that field,” he said.
Yankees Manager Joe Girardi said Suzuki will primarily play left field for his team.
A new report from the Tax Justice Network puts the amount of money diverted offshore into tax havens at $21 trillion. At least. It may be as much as $32 trillion. Even at the lower figure, that's more than the Japanese and American economies combined.
According to James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey, half of that gigantic stash is owned by just 92,000 individuals. That is 0.001 percent of the world's population.
Here is an overview of the study, The Price of Offshore Revisited.
But even that $32 trillion doesn't account for everything. Because TJN's report only covers financial assets, not all the real estate, fancy automobiles, yachts and other non-financial assets owned by the ultra-super-mega-rich.
This offshore sector that specializes in tax dodging, the report's authors say, is "basically designed and operated, not by shady no-name banks located in sultry islands, but by the world’s largest private banks, law firms, and accounting firms, headquartered in First World capitals like London, New York, and Geneva. Our detailed analysis of these banks shows that the leaders are the very same ones that have figured so prominently in government bailouts and other recent financial chicanery."
[James Henry says] "This offshore economy is large enough to have a major impact on estimates of inequality of wealth and income; on estimates of national income and debt ratios; and – most importantly – to have very significant negative impacts on the domestic tax bases of 'source' countries" [...]"These estimates reveal a staggering failure," says John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network. "Inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people.
Around the world, in very many countries, paying off government debt is dealt with through austerity, cutting programs for the middle and lower classes and imposing tax systems that are unfair on their face. But that's not good enough for the looters. Their offshore stash of trillions goes untaxed.
One major aspect of all this hidden wealth is that it convincingly demonstrates that measurements of inequality between rich and poor (in both income and wealth) are off base. The real gap, already bad enough, is far larger. A major reason for this is that the one percent at the top of the heap rarely participate in surveys that calculate how much wealth and income people actually have. The very poor are also excluded, Milorad Kovacevic, chief statistician of the UN Development Programme's Human Development Report, told Guardian reporter Heather Stewart. Even meticulous programs like The World Top Incomes Database underestimate inequality.
Among the findings:
• The top 50 private banks in the world collectively managed more than $12.1 trillion in cross-border invested assets for private clients.
• The three private banks handling the most assets offshore on behalf of the global super-rich are UBS, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs.
As TJN's Christensen says, "What's shocking is that some of the world's biggest banks are up to their eyeballs in helping their clients evade taxes and shift their wealth offshore."
I wonder if my jar of quarters counts?
SEATTLE - Chris Wedes, who played beloved local celebrity clown J.P. Patches and entertained generations of kids and adults during a career spanning more than 50 years, died Sunday. He was 84.
His family was at his bedside at his death and confirmed that he passed away Sunday morning.
"We've lost an institution," said his widow, who was married to Wedes for 56 years.
The Emmy Award-winning J.P. Patches Show was one of the longest-running locally-produced children's television programs in the United States, appearing on Seattle TV station KIRO channel 7 from 1958 to 1981.
J.P. was the "Mayor of the City Dump", where he lived in a shack and welcomed frequent guests: Seattle boy scout and girl scout troops, various local and national celebrities. Among his more well-known guests were Colonel Sanders, Jacques Cousteau, Slim Pickens and Tiny Tim.
He also had a beloved cast of supporting characters - Gertrude, Boris S. Wort, Grizwold, Esmerelda and Tikey Turkey.
Many children signed up to be "Patches Pals," and J.P. announced some of their birthdays by "viewing" them on his "ICU2TV" set (a cardboard prop that created the appearance that J.P. was looking at you from inside your television).
J.P. Patches (the J.P. stood for Julius Pierpont) also made frequent fundraising appearances for local charities. He was a common sight at Children's Hospital, visiting sick kids and promoting the work of the hospital.
Wedes had suffered from a form of blood cancer for the past six years, yet still kept up a schedule of performances at county fairs and other venues. He gave his last performance in September 2011 at Fishermen's Terminal.
On average, in one year 35 Australians are killed by guns. In the UK, 39. It's 194 in Germany and 200 in Canada. In the US, on AVERAGE, it is 9,484.
Add 12 dead and 59 injured, at last count, to the toll of Americans whose lives have been ended or interrupted by this country's obsession with firearms and glorified violence.
The latest mass killing — individuals die from gunfire on America's streets every day — took place at a movie theater in a Denver suburb, Aurora, not too far from the infamous 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton.
The alleged shooter, James Eagan Holmes, a 24-year-old University of Colorado graduate school dropout, was said to be armed with tear gas, sophisticated explosives, a high-powered rifle, a shotgun and two pistols. Police said today that he had been planning this for months.
The Aurora massacre and the growing list of others like it are especially tragic not least because they, or at least some of them, might have been prevented. If this nation wasn't awash in firearms that are efficient mass killers, easily accessible to just about any whack job who wants to buy an arsenal, Thursday in Aurora might have been just another night at the movies.
America is an enormous country with a diverse population, a violent history and even today, a frontier mentality. We have a devotion to individual rights that in all but a few areas, such as guns, serves us well. Gun violence is no stranger. The country is one huge firearms market open 24/7 with few stringent controls on what can be sold and to whom.
Our political class is in thrall to the special-interest gun lobby that opposes even the most reasonable restraints. The nation's courts take extremist, pro-gun rights positions at the expense of the public's safety.
Unfortunately, there will be more Auroras, more Columbines, more Tucsons, more Virginia Techs, more Roosevelt coffee shops — more massacres — until Americans rise up and demand to be protected.
We have lost our sense of community, of oneness. Our deep partisanship over public policy issues — taxation, environmental regulation, and yes, gun control — is spilling over into a nation split into camps. Not only are the people we disagree with wrong about policy issues, they're wrong about life. They are the other.
We've been here before. In the years before the Civil War, the growing divide in the country played out violently in many corners of the nation long before war broke out. In 1856, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks nearly killed Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor for a perceived insult over slavery. It was just the most high-profile example of a society increasingly at war with itself.
So are we helpless to stop ourselves from going down that same path? In truth, this will not be the last time someone's tenuous grasp on sanity gives way and they seek the limelight with an act of horrific destruction. One thing we know for certain is that killers at Columbine and Virginia Tech and the Aurora movie theater had lost their capacity for compassion, their gene for empathy. You cannot slaughter with impunity if you feel the pain of your victims.
We can push back with a determined effort to be more compassionate, more considerate, more civil people.
For the shooting victims, and their loved ones, in the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, this is a very sad day. Take time today to tell those closest to you that you love them.
Politico is reporting today that, "Investigators for an Arizona sheriff’s volunteer posse have declared that President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is definitely fraudulent. [...]
Mike Zullo, the posse’s chief investigator, said numeric codes on certain parts of the birth certificate indicate that those parts weren’t filled out, yet those sections asking for the race of Obama’s father and his field of work or study were completed."
Yes! Look at the codes! And the state of Hawaii, all the candidates he's ever run against, the Republican Party, and everyone else not certifiably in-flipping-sane is in on it!
And only a rag-tag band of professional conspiracy theorists given a platform by an embroiled-in-controversy nutcase of a sheriff can show us the truth!
You may remember that Mike Zullo is selling a book on the subject, and so has a particular interest in milking this cow for all it's worth. You might also remember that said book was co-authored by ultraconspiracy megatheorist Jerome Corsi, who wrote a previous, more expansively dumb book on the subject that tanked when Obama released that document Corsi said he wasn't releasing. You may also remember that Sheriff Joe is, well, freaking insane. Nonetheless, they assure us they only have our best interests at heart.
Sheriff Joe is still, technically speaking, a public official, though what the hell he does during his actual day job is certainly a mystery to all. Since his constituents appear to be in no particular hurry to stop the public shaming of their county, all we can hope for is that, at some point, Arpaio retires to spend more time with his pet theories and find even crazier people to share them with. He and Donald Trump can form a road show. (Hat tip to Hunter)
Barack Obama released a PDF version of a certified copy of his original hospital 1961 birth certificate at a White House press conference on April 27, 2011. That document resides on the White House web site and has been the subject of intense criticism from those whose ideas about the President’s birthplace are challenged by it.
One of the interesting characteristics of the form is penciled notations adjacent to some data items, consisting of numbers and letters. While they were a mystery to some, it was clear to those experienced in old data systems that these were codes for data entry operators
In August of 2011, the Department of Health & Human Services released information under the Freedom of Information Act regarding the coding of natality (Birth) data in 1961. The first part of the response response consisted of a hyperlink to the 1961 document titled Vital Statistics Instruction Manual, Part II Coding and Punching, Section C, Geographic Code Final, Births, Deaths and Fetal Deaths Occurring in 1960-1961 (VSIM). The second part of the FOIA response was a 12-page document titled: Division of Data Processing, Vital Statistics Programming Branch, Tape File Information, 1960-1961 Natality Tape Files for the United States (NTFUS).
The NTFUS is the layout for all of the data stored by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), all 26 reels of magnetic tape comprising 2,134,172 records for 1961. The document can be used to inform us how data was submitted by the states. How did Zullo turn this into a conspiracy theory? He counted on nobody remembering there is a Google.
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