Best News Yet: Sanders appointed to Budget Conference Committee

Reid appointed Senator Bernie Sanders to the upcoming Budget Conference Committee.     And incidentally, it looks as if Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson will also be  on the Committee…   A compendium of reports:   Huffington Post   The Hill   Daily Kos   Politics USA   Sanders  …

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Federalism and Saboteurs

  INET economist Simon Johnson with one of the more salient post-shutdown takes yet, for its defense of federalism and its indictment of anti-government creep: The Long March of the American Right – NYTimes.com  With a last-minute agreement on lifting the debt ceiling, the immediate threat of legal and financial…

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Puppets and Puppeteers: A Moyers Interactive

  Who’s Pulling the Strings   Some gristle to gnaw upon: Ginni Thomas Virginia “Ginni” Thomas is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Critics have called out her activism as a potential conflict of interest with her husband’s judicial duties since 2000 – while working for the Heritage Foundation, she…

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Space: Einstein Ring, Jellyfish

  Hubble Detects Einstein Ring Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope report an incredibly lucky sighting of a young star-forming galaxy. The alignment of the normal galaxy and the distant galaxy had to be nearly perfect in order to create the gravitational lensing observed by the astronomers. Gravitational lensing, first predicted by…

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Exhibits A – F: Wackiness in Relief

  Exhibit A: Enrollees in ACA exchanges are an urban legend. Um, yeah. CBS This Morning’s Research-Free Health Care Report | Blog | Media Matters for America   Exhibit B: Mc Cain and Gohmert exchange bizarre vitriol. Oh, yeah? McCain: Louie Gohmert Has ‘No Intelligence’ The Post-Shutdown GOP Civil War…

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Kaleka Launches Exploratory Web Page

Amar Kaleka’s launch site: Petition to support Amar Kaleka’s candidacy   Son of Slain Sikh Temple Leader Mulling Congressional Bid – New American Media/South Asian   In an interview this week, a day before he filed papers with the FEC, Kaleka told India-West he believes gun violence can be controlled…

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Thursday Music: Ella and Oscar

In this video Ella Fitzgerald is glorious as ever; the Oscar Peterson Trio accompaniment is wonderful too. Well worth a couple of “rewinds” to tune into them as well.       Bonus Track: Canadian Oscar Peterson’s original composition, Hymn to Freedom, inspired by the U.S. Civil Rights movement:  

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Happy 159th to the Man in the Velvet Pants

  Happy Birthday, Oscar Wilde!     Oscar Wilde Biography     “Be yourself; everyone else is taken.”   “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”   “I am not young enough to know everything.”   “Every saint…

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Idle Distractions

A little randomness for Idle musings:     The Hall of Bright Carvings “Gormenghast, that is the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an…

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On GOP Rigging

The House GOP’s Little Rule Change That Guaranteed A Shutdown Late on the night of Sept. 30, with the federal government just hours away from shutting down, House Republicans quietly made a small change to the House rules that blocked a potential avenue for ending the shutdown. It went largely…

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