GinoNapoli©August2010

The native Bostonian is hella funny. And he pulls no-punches with the best sarcasm akin to Jonathan Stewart, except Matt does it in writing.

His recent piece in the Men's Journal is a ribaldry about Sport's figures getting busted for both petty and serious crimes during the off-season called The Jock's Guide to Getting Arrested.

For those of you new to Taibbi, be forewarned, he is typical East-coastt in his "spicy" language and often explicit but accurate sexual references.

From the same source in the last post with Dr. Bea, the Geologist from Berkeley.

WB: The chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon said that the Macondo well was originally drilled in another location, but that “going faster caused the bottom of the well to split open, swallowing tools”, and that BP abandoned that well. You’ve spoken to that technician and looked into the incident, and concluded that “they damn near blew up the rig.” [See here and here].

Do you know where that abandoned well location is, and do you know if that well is still leaking?

Bea: The abandoned well is very close to the current well location. BP had to file reports showing the location of the abandoned well and the new well [with the Minerals Management Service], so the location of the abandoned well is known.

We don’t know if the abandoned well is leaking.

"Geology is fractured, relief wells may fail, and oil will leak for years...BP is using a "cloak of silence, and refusing to share even basic data with the government."

Oh ... but the brown people wanna put a mosque in downtown manhattan.

Follow the money.

Click here for the story.

Few people in the world know more about oil drilling disasters than Dr. Robert Bea.

Bea teaches engineering at the University of California Berkeley, and has 55 years of experience in engineering and management of design, construction, maintenance, operation, and decommissioning of engineered systems including offshore platforms, pipelines and floating facilities. Bea has worked for many years in governmental and quasi-governmental roles, and has been a high-level governmental adviser concerning disasters. He worked for 16 years as a top mechanical engineer and manager for Shell Oil, and has worked with Bechtel and the Army Corps of Engineers. One of the world’s top experts in offshore drilling problems, Bea is a member of the Deepwater Horizon Study Group, and has been interviewed by news media around the world concerning the BP oil disaster.

From Dennis G. at Ballon-Juice

It is the month where we learned about shark attacks and Gary Condit while George Bush ignored a security warning titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US.” It is the month where wingnutopia talking points for invading Iraq was manufactured and tested. It is the month that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began running ads about John Kerry while the rest of wingnutopia went crazy about the flip-flop meme. It was the month of Katrina. It was the month when Karl Rove convinced most of the media that he had “the math”. It was the month when the Palin traveling carnival of hucksters was introduced to America. It was the month of death panels. It was the month the Tea Party sprang forth from well fertilized astroturf. Now it is the month to worry about secret moooslims building things or terrorist cell groups of anchor babies. And always it is a month where the dumbest mother fuckers in America try to drive our National discourse with fear, ignorance and hatred.

Newsflash. They aren't building it on ground zero. It is two blocks away. Not even adjacent to the building at "ground zero".

Across the street from ground zero is a strip club.

But don't believe me. Click here for google map of the location.

Have you seen a picture? It is more like a community center that caters to a lot of the black muslims living in the lower East side, and mostly consist of native muslims (not arabs). From the above link by Matt Sludge at Huffington Post:

In addition, the building planned for 45 Park Place is a cultural center with a prayer room -- not a single-purpose house of worship for Muslims, which is probably what we should reserve the word "mosque" for. As Haberman also explains, "That it may even be called a mosque is debatable. It is designed as a multi-use complex with a space set aside for prayer -- no minarets, no muezzin calls to prayer blaring onto Park Place."

The so-called "mulah" is actually a man of peace who was actually co-opted by the Bush administration and the CIA/FBI to help root out potential muslim extremists.

This issue is Rethuglican hypocrisy based upon nothing of substance BECAUSE THEY WANT TO DISTRACT THE NATION FROM MATTERS OF REAL IMPORTANCE.

Muslims are no more a unified "they" than are Christians. Baptisms, Seventh-day Adventists, Episcopal, Methodists, Mormons, and Catholics are all different sects. Muslims are the same way. The image of Muslims all being dominated by the Holy Mecca is just as ridiculous as the Catholics all being dominated by the pope in Rome, or the branches of Christianity the evolved from the English Colonies either.

The 19 Egyptians and the 1 Pakistani who "attacked us" on 9-11 were not from the evil religion of muslims, and they are no more representative of the muslim faith than the people who shoot doctors in the name of Jesus, or the child molesting preachers in the Christian churches. It is unfair to paint with a broad brush all the of the people of faith just because of the crazed actions of a few.

Net Neutrality is the most important issue of our lifetime. The Christian Coalition and the Gun Owners of Society want net neutrality. The Tea Party however calls it Gov'ment regulation and Glenn Beck says its a "Marxist takeover of the internet."

What more evidence do we need that the so-called "Tea Party" is just a corporate managed public relations sham. The worst thing for a small, very dispersed population of citizens is to allow large corporate Internet Service Providers to create tiers of internet service and charge for speed. If your small group can't afford the high speed lanes, anyone who goes to your site will have to download your site's contents on the slow lane.

As a business model, this will add extra costs to small businesses who will have to pay for the high speed lanes in order to remain competitive.

For those of you who are ignorant about net neutrality, here is a summary. Right now the speed of the internet is dependent only upon you computer speed and your download mechanism -- whether you use a Cable modem, an old Telephone Modem, or some other type of DSL connection. Customers already pay for broadband service to access the internet, and for an internet connected Server where web-sites files are located. The signals that get sent into wireless domain or onto fiber optics lines bounce off antennae or travel through different parts of the network based on density and speed of availability. The signal speed is the same for all signals that criss-cross this mixture of transportation mediums (wireless, cable, or land-line).

What corporations like Google and Verizon want to do is something else. Basically, they will place a header on all broadband signals emitting from customers on their servers that will determine the speed of the signals, or which lane the signals go. This is something other than Bandwidth, which customers already pay for. Bandwidth is how many MegaBytes or GigaBytes your server will release per month (sometimes even per day) to anyone who accesses your site.

There is no economic reason or greater efficiency benefit which merits creating different speeds of internet signals. This is just another way that corporations redefine the world in order to siphon more money from the citizens of the country where they operate. This is exactly what institutions do when they get large enough to have power over some critical component of the economic infrastructure.

Rachel: "Fox News ... consistently runs stories it says are news, but that nobody else really covers. Stories that are ginned up, exaggerated, caricatured, in some cases flat-out made-up scare stories designed to make white people feel afraid of black people. Designed to make it seem like black people -- or in some cases immigrants -- are threatening white people and taking what is rightfully theirs. You may not like that diagnosis of what Fox has been up to, but to say there's no evidence -- not 'a shred of evidence,' as he said -- that's bullpucky."

Some of you might not know why this vote had to go through the 2/3rd's reconciliation process. The reconciliation process is a way to pass legislation through the Senate without Filibuster and streams of Amendments. For a majority vote to happen, Amendments have to be allowed on the floor, and this Amendment process has been used by the Republicans like an automatic machine gun of often superfluous quality in order to delay and slice up the very legislation being voted upon. In years past, this type of political distortion of the majority vote was no where near what the Republicans are now doing.

For example. Say there is pending legislation to doing something important: like build a high-speed railroad from New York to Chicago and then to Seattle. The entire legislation is worked out, including the funding and the complete timeline. The Republicans do not want this at all, and they know they can win a 66% vote, so they torpedo the legislation with a barrage of amendments. For instance:

1. an amendment that makes the route dependent upon 2/3 rds local county votes for all the counties that the railroad will traverse -- the idea being to increase the costs and perhaps delay the effort long enough so they can point their finger at another example of bad government
2. an amendment that makes all employees on the train and the construction non-union
3. an amendment that makes it illegal for local funds to be used for the construction -- which seems innocent enough, until you realize the extra costs and time involved because of the difficulty this entails -- anyway the language can be just vague enough so that some partisan lawyers out there can use the tool of lawsuits, thus adding costs and causing delays
4. an amendment to prohibit criminals from using the train -- which would be difficult and costly to enforce -- because the language of the term "criminal" is vague and manipulative -- which is of course the idea

Tax decreases cannot and do not automatically get directed towards investment. Most of the recent tax cut to the upper 1% went into savings, and was thus outsourced into speculative or foreign markets seeking a high return. That is not the same thing as creating businesses and economic wealth in the communities across the United States.

Krugman is all over this in a recent New York Times Column.

Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits “in apocalyptic terms.” And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: “The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.”

But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts — period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has, however, stepped into the breach. Its numbers indicate that the Ryan plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next decade. If you add these revenue losses to the numbers The Post cites, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion.

You should check out what he also says on his blog.

Here is a link for the Tax Policy Center.

Here is a link about the 5 Myths about the Bush Tax Cut at the Tax Policy Center.