RandySF
RandySF's JournalJust saw The Wolf of Wall Street.
It should have nauseated me but I loved it. It lays bare all the worst things about the financial industry and how the rules of the game can easily turn greedy people into greedy monsters. Definitely a cautionary tale.
NOW the M$M is crying over falling oil prices.
As long as I've been alive, falling oil prices was a good thing for the consumer and the economy as a whole. Now, in 2014, everyone on CNN, CNBC and Bloomberg are wringing their hands over deflation largely due falling crude. What's changed? Are we now supposed to be more worried about oil companies and overpriced energy stock?
While we were fixated on Paris: "Piles of bodies"
“The whole town smells of decomposing bodies,” the 40-year-old fisherman added.
Kime was one of thousands who fled across the border to Chad when Boko Haram fighters stormed his hometown of Baga in Nigeria’s far northeast on January 3.
In the days that followed, the town and at least 16 settlements nearby were burnt to the ground.
What happened in the remote north of Borno state is gradually emerging, lending weight to fears that it may be the deadliest attack yet in a six-year insurgency that has killed over 13,000.
On Saturday, another man, Yanaye Grema, said he was forced to hide for three days while the militants ransacked Baga. He eventually fled into the bush under the cover of darkness on Tuesday.
“For five kilometres (three miles), I kept stepping on dead bodies,” he said.
Amnesty International said numerous eye-witnesses had described how the Boko Haram militants went from door to door, pulling out young men of fighting age and shooting them dead in the street.
“It is based on these witnesses’ testimonies that we are able to say that hundreds of civilians died in the attack, if not more, and thousands have been displaced,” said the group’s Nigeria researcher Daniel Eyre.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/01/piles-of-bodies-in-town-attacked-by-boko-haram-fisherman/
Will the Bush family ever return Geronimo's remains?
eronimo died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1909. A longstanding tradition among members of Skull and Bones holds that Prescott S. Bush — father of President George Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush — broke into the grave with some classmates during World War I and made off with the skull, two bones, a bridle and some stirrups, all of which were put on display at the group’s clubhouse in New Haven, known as the Tomb.
The story gained some validity in 2005, when a historian discovered a letter written in 1918 from one Skull and Bones member to another saying the skull had been taken from a grave at Fort Sill along with several pieces of tack for a horse.
Ramsey Clark, a former United States attorney general who is representing Geronimo’s family, acknowledged he had no hard proof that the story was true. Yet he said he hoped the court would clear up the matter.
Tom Conroy, a spokesman for Yale, declined to comment on the lawsuit but was quick to note that the Tomb was not on university property.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/us/20geronimo.html
2004: How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power
George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.
His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.
The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
Kamala Harris expected to announce for U.S. Senate tomorrow
Attorney General Kamala Harris is expected to enter the 2016 race for U.S. Senate on Tuesday, following an apparent decision by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom to instead seek the governor’s office in 2018.
Sen. Barbara Boxer’s announcement Thursday that she would not seek a fifth term provoked many of the state’s top Democrats to consider the rare opportunity.
“It’s always better to be candid than coy,” Newsom, a 47-year-old Democrat, said Monday in a message posted on Facebook. “While I am humbled by the widespread encouragement of so many and hold in the highest esteem those who serve us in federal office, I know that my head and my heart, my young family’s future, and our unfinished work all remain firmly in the State of California – not Washington D.C. Therefore I will not seek election to the U.S. Senate in 2016.”
Harris aides said they expected her to be the first candidate to declare an intention to run.
http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article6076293.html#storylink=cpy
Rant: I'm really hating Common Core, or at least how it's being applied.
Every week on our son's homework packet, our third-grader's teacher writes a reminder about where each child should be :according to the California Common Core". And I often feel like I am somehow failing our son if he is not where he should be at any given point in time (if your child is not at ____, please have him or her come and see me). I don't blame the teacher as she is carrying out what's been given to her, bur I'm starting to look for someone I can yell at and say that he's doing just fine!
Analysis: Shea-Porter for Senate?
This is what makes Shea-Porter really interesting as a U.S. Senate candidate in 2016. Should she ever consider it, she definitely has more of a path to victory than Kuster and maybe even Hassan.
Shea-Porter might be the most prominent true progressive ever elected to major office in New Hampshire in a century. She owns the label. She was running for office talking about the “99 percent” five years before it became the rallying cry for Occupy Wall Street protesters.
Her liberal positions matter because in a typical low-turnout Democratic primary for the Senate in 2016 a well-run liberal campaign is the one that will win.
Kuster showed how this played out in 2010 when she ran was the well-funded progressive challenging perceived Democratic front-runner Katrina Swett. In the years since progressives have lost favor with Kuster. One group, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, strongly backed Kuster in 2010 and 2012, only to totally drop her once she starting voting in Congress.
As one top Democratic put it to me: Shea-Porter would beat Kuster 10 to 1 in a Democratic primary for the Senate. Sure, Kuster can raise more money, but Shea-Porter has the Democratic base locked down in the state’s 1st Congressional District and would be favored in the more liberal 2nd Congressional District.
http://www.wmur.com/political-scoop/analysis-sheaporter-for-senate/30385232#ixzz3OYSG5nKc
Billionaire Tom Steyer mulls run for Sen. Boxer's seat
Billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer is aggressively exploring a run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Barbara Boxer and is expected to make a decision within days, according to multiple sources close to Steyer.
The former hedge fund titan has been huddling with advisors, polling California voters, buying website addresses and meeting with political and labor leaders as he weighs a bid, the sources said.
Boxer's announcement Thursday that she would leave her post in 2016 set off a frenzy of speculation about who would run for the first open U.S. Senate seat in California in more than 20 years. If Steyer opts in, with the ability to fund a race expected to cost tens of millions of dollars, he could upend a field that would otherwise be crowded with other ambitious Democrats.
"Steyer has the greatest incentive to plant his flag early," said Dan Schnur, head of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. He "has the capacity to scare other people out of the race."
http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-pol-boxer-steyer-20150110-story.html
Why Jerry Brown will probably never make a fourth try at White House
One big hurdle facing Brown is the inherent difficulty of running for president and simultaneously serving as California governor. As Dan Schnur, a veteran political strategist now teaching at USC, once put it, "There aren't any direct flights from Sacramento to Manchester [N.H.], and you can't run the state from a cellphone at O'Hare [airport]."
He should know. Schnur was part of then-Gov. Pete Wilson's administration when he waged a spectacularly unsuccessful 1996 run for president. It seems no accident that Ronald Reagan also failed the first time he sought the White House, in 1968, while serving as California governor.
But beyond age and logistical difficulties, there is another factor that has helped force Brown to abandon his White House dreams, apparently once and for all: He is acutely aware of his legacy, according to several who have taken up the subject with him, and is mindful of the damage he would suffer were he to launch another unsuccessful campaign for president.
Instead of being remembered as the governor who brought California back from the brink — a not-insignificant achievement to stack next to those of his legendary father, former Gov. Pat Brown — he would become the Democrats' Harold Stassen, a onetime political wonder who turned into a campaign punch line.
http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-pol-california-politics-20150111-story.html
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Gender: MaleHometown: Detroit Area, MI
Home country: USA
Current location: San Francisco, CA
Member since: Wed Oct 29, 2008, 02:53 PM
Number of posts: 58,776
