She was on my Board when I was Director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. At he death in 1993, her will created the Rothschild Foundation as a support source for artists.
This update from the NY Times is just a clip… go in and read the whole thing.
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Kstreet607 over at The Fifth Column supplies us with this video collection which gives us the Tea Partier’s roots (giggle giggle).
Let’s take a trip down the not too distant past and see what exactly got the “tea partiers” all riled up:
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We’ve lost another Democrat… and this is the way I hate to lose them.
This is the statement released by his office:
Congressman John P. Murtha (PA-12) passed away peacefully this afternoon at 1:18 p.m. at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, VA. At his bedside was his family.
Murtha, 77, was Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.
First elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in February of 1974, Murtha dedicated his life to serving his country both in the military and in the halls of Congress. A former Marine, he became the first Vietnam War combat Veteran elected to the U.S. Congress.
This past Saturday, February 6, 2010, Murtha became Pennsylvania’s longest serving Member of Congress.
The cause was complications from gall bladder surgery.
I’m not going to print it here because it is, I think, more of a joke than a serious piece of medical science.
BUT… if you want to learn about this iPhone application, go HERE.
This is the morning that everyone talks about Superbowl ads… and, seeing the Leno/Oprah/Letterman ad, I found some real invention here.
HuffPo, however, did a piece this morning on Outrageous advertising… these are NOT Superbowl related… and one was for the French eco-group, Fondation Nicolas Houlot. It reads: “For Nature, Everyday is 9/11.”
This organization, which campaigns against actions which damage the earth and thus impinges on people’s human rights, provoked much controversy… and, frankly, I find it tasteless. Using an event that killed over 3000 friends and family members (my son Buddy’s youthful basketball coach for one) does not promote their cause as much as it makes us remember something totally awful.
The image? Here it is:
You may disagree with me. I’m interested in your opinion.
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The new Opening Date for Hunting Of The Snark at Full Circle Theater Company in Shepherdstown, WV, will be Friday March 5. It will run two weekends through March 14.
I’d call in reservations now… before the dates changed we were starting to fill up on the opening… this will add to the pile.
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Remember when Sarah Palin criticized President Obama for speaking with a Teleprompter?
Apparently the delightful Sarah reads OFF HER HAND:
And what a (you fill in the blank) President she would make!
As many of you know from past years, Elly and I have absolutely NO interest in football. And, while as designers and production directors, we get a kick out of the commercials that are made for the Superbowl, they will be rerun on other television shows and on the web in a “let’s compare these things” kind of situation and we can see them there.
The sun has come out today and we have about 26 inches of snow to shovel and get off our cars… that will take up some time. This is also, usually, one of the best movie days on television… plus C-Span radio replays all the Sunday News programs (which, even with channel switching, we don’t see all of) in sequence in the afternoon… a great service.
I’ve got lots of Hunting Of The Snark jobs to work on… and speaking of jobs, I have my daily search of the online classifieds for work and probably three or four applications to do there.
So Superbowl Sunday is just like most Sundays, except that most of our friends and neighbors are crazy.
Joan Walsh has a pretty keen eye (and ear) and she commented on the Palin speech this morning.
A highlight:
This was the Palin we saw at the 2008 Republican convention, the snarling pitbull in shimmery lipstick. I know journalists aren’t supposed to use words like mean and dumb, but I can’t help it. Palin is one of the meanest people on the public stage today. She wallows in it. She loves it! Also? Possibly one of the dumbest. But mean works, and so does dumb. And so do lies, and there were many mean, dumb lies in her speech.
Like that? Go to The Pitbull In Lipstick Is Back! and read the whole thing.
Walsh’s sign-off is GREAT:
I have to say, I’ve been assuming Palin probably won’t run for president, and that she quit her job as Alaska governor to cash in on her fame. I now feel pretty certain she’s trying to do both. She’s certainly looking like a grifter, and cashing in at the for-profit Tea Party Nation event, and taking questions from the increasingly despised Phillips (Judson Phillips, organizer of the event), may hurt her politically. But it’s now pretty clear to me that in all her narcissism, she thinks she can get rich and run for president at the same time. And who am I to say she can’t, given the delusions of her right-wing supporters?
And here is Palin answering questions post speech:
I was reading a comment on one of the blogs I visit where someone compared the Tea Baggers to the Know Nothings of the mid-19th Century.
As Wikipedia points out:
The Know Nothing movement was a nativist American political movement of the 1840s and 1850s. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by German and Irish Catholic immigrants, who were often regarded as hostile to U.S. values and controlled by the Pope in Rome. Mainly active from 1854 to 1856, it strove to curb immigration and naturalization, though its efforts met with little success. There were few prominent leaders, and the largely middle-class and entirely Protestant membership fragmented over the issue of slavery.
Sounds familiar, no? After hearing Tancredo’s rag on Hispanic immigrants last night, you can just substitute South Americans or Mexicans for Germans and Irish… or substitute Muslims for Catholics. It’s all the same kind of garbage.
BTW – In 2006, an editorial in the The Weekly Standard by William Kristol attacked populist Republicans for not recognizing the danger of “turning the GOP into an anti-immigration, Know-Nothing party.”
I guess they didn’t listen to him.
Hey… if I didn’t need it, I wouldn’t ask.
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A few goodies this week:
1.) Mike Luckovich in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
This one made my Groundhog Day…
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Joel Pett in the Lexington Herald-Leader:
Quite an accurate picture of the Republican response to bipartisanship…
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John Trever in The Albuquerque Journal
Budget figure problems are all in your point of view.
“Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money.”
– RNC Chairman Michael Steele
Does this guy ever think before he speaks? Is he aware that the average middle-class American family lives on $50,000.00 a year (which means that the millions of folks below the halfway mark live on much, much less)?
And at the end of the piece he adds:
“If the Democrats want to have any chance of salvaging the midterm elections, they need to show voters that they are willing to fight.”
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Looks like another vote for Reciprocal strategy.
I think thus us a good one… I don’t know who put this out originally, but I’m glad Bob sent it along.
This makes sense…. which is why we need to drive it.
For too long we have been complacent about the workings of Congress. Many citizens had no idea that (1) Congress members could retire with the same pay after only one term; (2) that they didn’t pay into Social Security; and (3) that they specifically exempted themselves from many of the laws they have passed (such as being exempt from fear of prosecution for sexual harassment. Congress’s latest game is to exempt themselves from the Healthcare Reform Bill that is being considered. Somehow, this doesn’t seem logical. We do not have an elite that is above the law.
I truly don’t care if members of Congress are Democrat, Republican, Independent, liberal, conservative, progressive or whatever. The self-serving must stop. The below-listed proposed 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would do that. This is an idea whose time has come.
Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution:
“Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and Representatives; and Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States .”
This is fair, to the point and non-partisan. Who could be against it?
Congress, that’s who.
Each person receiving this is asked to forward it to a minimum of 20 people in their Address Book (using the Bcc: option) and ask each of them to do likewise. In 3 days every person in the United States will have received the message. Thanks for doing this, and thanks for contacting your congressperson and telling him or her you support this effort.
OK… I’ve passed this on to you (hope there are 20 of you this morning)… Now you can pass it on as well.
“If we in the Senate pledge to fix those top priorities right away through reconciliation… the House of Representatives should pass the Senate bill. The exact details of this process need to be worked out by the leadership and the president.
Like it or not, the reality is that big pieces of legislation often need to be fixed after passage. Health care is a historic undertaking and this is no different. I think we have to stop letting the perfect — and everyone has different definitions of perfect — we have to stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good… Walking away empty-handed to me is just not an option.”
- Sen. Al Franken (D- Minn.)
Al, of course, is calling for use of the Reconciliation process… and forget the Repiglicans’ 41 vote “majority”.
C-Span has been running the videos from the Tea Party Convention in Nashville all night, and I started watching when I got up in the morning… and, believe me, this is scary stuff. I especially was taken by one Joseph Farah, who is the Founder, CEO and Editor In Chief of WorldNetDaily.
This is scathing stuff about the country’s move to Socialism over 90 or so years, the Marxist description of President Obama, and the focus on changing our underlying culture with its non-political organizations away from the socialist-leaning entities that, he says, they have become.
It is particularly frightening to me because Theatre is one of the areas (Entertainment Industry) that Farah fingers and encourages his followers to overcome.
He ties everything together with ACORN (which he seems to think is an openly Obama-operated organization) and uses that connection to attack the poor, the immigrant population, etc., with the notion of “turning make believe crises into real crises… and why?… to take away our freedom and the American Way of life.
Is it dangerous to have this stuff up on TV… even at 6 in the morning? You bet it is. But, if like me, you believe in free speech, which I don’t think Farah does, you have to let this crap go on. If you want to accept his notion that Obama is using Government to replace God for Americans (and here I will go beyond my own non-religion base), then you will see that he is calling for an Above The Government control of the population.
If you see, as he does, that our elected leaders are a judgment on us and that we have to find tea-party-related leaders to elect, then you are already removed from freedom.
Time to actively work against these monsters.
The highlight of The Daily Show last night was when Jon Stewart asked NY Representative Anthony Weiner (D) about Joe Lieberman:
JON STEWART: “My question to you is this. Is he a dick?”
REP. ANTHONY WEINER: “Yes, Jon.”
And the audience exploded with cheers and applause,
I like it when politicians do simple, honest answers.
(Its a semi-known and entirely weird fact that, after college, New York congressman Anthony Weiner and Daily Show host Jon Stewart shared an apartment in Soho. Well, technically, Stewart and Weiner’s girlfriend shared an apartment, and Weiner was the guy who was there all the time, walking around in his boxers and drinking the last of the milk.
– Daily Intel )
OK… Friday morning and no snow yet. But they’ve already closed (or delayed) the schools and the grocery stores have been mobbed with people stocking up for the end of the world (I went to Martin’s yesterday afternoon, a really large store, and all 16 cash register spots were open with long lines of people at all of them… on a THURSDAY!…I’ve never seen that before.)
I have an 8:30 AM appointment for a car inspection and with luck I’ll get everything over with before the snow starts.
Dennis Kucinich comments on the impact of the Massachusetts election, the economy and Health Care for all.
A sample:
We can still have health care reform in America. We need to take a short-term and a longer-term view. On the short-term: We need to take away the antitrust exemption that insurance companies have. We need to make sure, on the short-term, that we can see everyone with a pre-existing condition have access to insurance. There are things that we can do with single-initiatives to help regain the momentum on health care.
And for the longer-term: The answer is “Medicare for All.” The answer was never to continue to give the insurance companies one out of every three dollars in our health care system. We’ll talk more about that later. But what we need to do is regain the initiative in our nation to create millions of jobs putting America back to work rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our water systems, our sewer systems – millions of jobs with an initiative called the Works Green Administration that will help with the design, engineering, manufacture, installation and maintenance of tens of millions in wind and solar micro technologies. We have so many different ways that we can get our economy moving again.
And here’s his whole message:
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