The New Republic: Sean Mcelwee: Republicans Focus on Mobility Over Inequality Has a Major Flaw

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Erik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

Economic mobility is the ability of people to move up in the economic system, to see their income increase, allowing them to live in freedom without the government benefits that Sean Mcelwee talks about in his column in The New Republic today.  They can pay for those things themselves and decide where they get those services because they have the resources and the options to choose how to get the services that they need to live well.

I agree that it is a good thing that Republicans, especially House Republicans and a few Senate Republicans, are talking about social mobility and are finally putting some serious proposals on the table as they relate to the Earned Income Tax Credit. Even though I wouldn’t say this is the cure-all to solving the income gap problem, a term I prefer over income inequality, I wouldn’t just throw out everything they are talking about and put it in the garbage either.

When you talk about the income gap and, more broadly, poverty in America, you must first decide whether you believe in social mobility, because you can’t be in favor of creating more public benefits and telling people in poverty that the taxpayers will take care of them and on the other hand believe in social mobility and empowering people to be able to take care of themselves so they can move up the economic ladder on their own. That means providing education, job training, and work experience so people at the bottom can acquire the skills needed to become socially mobile.

For people to become socially mobile, they need additional skills to get themselves another good job, perhaps in a different field. They need job training and education, and people on welfare who aren’t working and have paper-thin resumes, if that, also need job experience, even at a entry level job, so they can gain the experience they need to move up in that field.

If you are not interested in social mobility and would like to see a grand welfare state where government provides most of the benefits for people, especially on the lower end of the economic ladder, then you aren’t talking about social mobility and the ability of people to move up on their own without public assistance. You are talking about an expansive welfare state social democracy, which is very different.

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A&E Biography: Ann-Margret

Posted on February 23, 2014 by kireschneider

Source:The New Democrat 

To put it simply Ann Margret is one of the best looking sexy babes of all time.  I don’t know if that has to do with her Swedish-Nordic ethnicity or the smooth skin Scandinavians are known for, or because she had great parents or has just taken great care of herself over the years, but that is exactly what she is, one of the hottest babes who ever lived, in the same class as Raquel Welch, Gena Rowlands, Barbara Eden, Sophia Loren, and others.

And what I mean by that is not just the babyface looks and the great body but how long she’s remained a sexy babe.  In the movie Grumpy Old Men from 1993, she’s 52 and still turning men on. Yes, that is a movie, but it is also reality in the sense that she still had that in her fifties. And you throw in the fact that she’s able to combine those looks and body with her singing and acting and who wouldn’t watch or listen to her?.

There are not many entertainers who deserve the term “the total package,” meaning someone who is very good at everything, but it applies to Ann Margret because that is exactly what she is, someone who is physically a goddess but also a great professional talent, a great singer, dancer and very good actress as well. She also knows how to use her incredible sex appeal to enhance her films without looking like a slut.

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Russia Today: Thom Hartmann: ‘Time for White Americans to Wake the Hell Up’

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Derik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat

What Thom Hartmann doesn’t mention that is some of the stereotypes of the African-American community get positive play in the hip-hop community, a community that obviously has huge influence over the African-American community when it comes to music, movies, lifestyle, clothing, and I could go on but I’ll spare you. But also it has to do with what hip-hoppers like to call Thug Life or Gangsta Life, and young African-American men especially see this and decide that this is how they want to be and to be seen and tend to be successful at achieving that.

Mr. Hartmann is not making any news here because, of course, people are people and just a small percentage of people of all races, not just Caucasians, see people as members of groups that should be avoided. We should all just be treated as individuals and not members of groups, which is one of my core values as a liberal. But no one race in America has a monopoly when it comes to racism and having racist views and no one race in America has a monopoly when it comes to the effects of being looked at stereotypically.

The far left doesn’t seem to understand that no one race in America has a monopoly when it comes to stereotyping one race of people. I mean, if you want to use the cab driver analogy when it comes to African-American men, with Black men, let’s say not being able to get a cab because of their skin color, well guess what, not all cab drivers, in case you are not that experienced with cabs, are Caucasian and a lot of them are South Asian or Native African, such as Ethiopian, or Middle Eastern, and African-American, who are turned down for cabs by people of various races.

And it’s not just one race of people who are guilty of stereotyping and it is not just racial minorities who are victims of racial stereotyping. Caucasians get stereotyped, especially if they are from the South or rural America, as being bigots across the board by people not from their culture and lifestyle. Or they get stereotyped as Ivy League or rich and they are stereotyped by people from the media and even from their own race.

Latino is not a race, but Latino men and women in this group are stereotyped as illegal immigrants and people on welfare are stereotyped as as car thieves. And not just by Caucasians and Asians, Orientals especially are stereotyped as being brilliant or intellectual and not being American, who can’t speak English, and again not just by Caucasians. So racial profiling and racism are all around us, practiced by all sorts of Americans and are something in America that the far left needs to understand if they are truly interested in racial equality.  Stereotyping by perceived good qualities may be just as negative as stereotyping by perceived bad qualities.

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RT: Video: The Big Picture: John Farrell: What is Energy Decentralization?

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Derik Schneider

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This sounds very interesting, because instead of talking about nationalizing energy or State or local governments turning energy companies into government-owned agencies, John Farrell is saying the opposite.  Instead of creating a new government or public or private monopoly, he’s talking about ways to empower individuals and private groups to provide their own energy rather than use the energy provided by a public or private monopoly.

I’ve been thinking about this for about 7 years now I guess, as a native Marylander and still a Maryland resident who lives halfway between Maine and Florida, meaning we can get both Arctic weather in the winter and Caribbean hot and humid weather in the summer, which means northeasterly blizzards in the winter and long heat waves in the summer with no rain.  When we finally get rain, it comes as a violent storm that wipes out much of our power.

The State of Maryland has one private utility company, Pepco, which is responsible for all of the electricity for the State, meaning it has no competition and no incentive to be efficient. It provides lousy service to say the least, and on several occasions in the last few years, as in the July 2012 heat wave, we were out of power for about a week in a 100-degree heat wave because Pepco was unprepared to handle power outages for a State of 6 million people all by itself.

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The Atlantic: James Parker: Madder Than Hell: How Network Anticipated Contemporary Media

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Ederik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

This is an interesting topic for a blog that I got from James Parker over at The Atlantic. The 1976 movie Network, which is not only a great movie but one of my all-time favorites, predicted and has influenced today’s media. Network is about a struggling fictional TV network called UBS, probably United Broadcast System, and its struggling news division, UBS News, and how they are buried in the TV ratings.

So what do the genius executives at UBS, not including the head of its news division, do, but to find ways to boost the ratings of the network including UBS News by combining news with entertainment. They give their lead news anchor, Howard Beale, played by the great Peter Finch, his own satire/talk show or variety show where Beale can go off on what he sees in the world and what he thinks of it. Imagine Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley or Howard Smith given that role, because that would’ve sounded crazy in the 1960s and 1970s, but that is what UBS does with UBS, News, combining entertainment and news. Go from UBS in 1975-76 all the way up to today with CNN and MSNBC, and to a certain extent FNC, and it’s no longer what is newsworthy and what is important to know that are important to these news networks but what is interesting or, to use pop culture phrases, what is hot or awesome or, yes, sexy and what can we report that the non-educated population, at least when it comes to current affairs, finds interesting enough to watch.

The Trayvon Martin story from 2012 to 2013 is a good example, with CNN and MSNBC delaying or postponing current affairs programming to show the entire George Zimmerman trial or coming in with so-called special shows to show the latest on the story. But forget about 2012-13 and you could go back to 1994-95 with OJ Simpson, which started with the famous tedious Ford Bronco chase.  The next latest sexy trial, for lack of better phrase, could involve Justin Bieber and his drug case if it goes that far, starting with MSNBC breaking away from a discussion on terrorism and privacy to report Breaking News” on Bieber being arrested.

The way media have changed, especially the broadcast medium, is the perfect example of the dumbing down of our culture, and I’m not trying to sound like a stiff or anything, but it is the perfect example of how cable news and pop culture have changed the news media. What is popular or interesting or, yes, that word awesome is now just as important as what is considered essential for people to know that affects their quality of life, for example, whether our government is spying on us and checking in to determine whom we communicate with.

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Movie Clips: Grumpy Old Men Official (1993) Trailer

Posted on February 22, 2014 by kireschneider

Source:The New Democrat 

What else do two lonely grumpy old men who also happen to be played by one of the best comedy teams of all time,Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, need more than Ann Margret. But that is exactly what this movie is about: two lonely guys who happen to live across the street from each other, their worst enemy, and yet probably couldn’t explain why they do not like each other. And there just happens to be this gorgeous sexy redhead played by Ann Margret who moves into their little rural Minnesota town and energizes both their lives.

I haven’t seen this movie in a while but if memory serves, these two senior citizens are in their late sixties or seventies and hate the hell out of each other but also happen to have lived across the street from each other in a rural small town in Minnesota for 40 years or more. They hate each other but don’t know why and are also lonely widowers with kids, and  Jack Lemmon’s character is a grandfather as well, with a son-in-law, and they have plenty of time to play childish pranks on each other.

Things change when Ann Margret comes to smallville Minnesota to live up the street from Walter and Jack and gives both of these lonely widowers something to live for. They are both old enough to be Ann’s father but both make a big play for her and take her out in the hope of starting a romance. This movie becomes a competition over who will be Ann Margret’s next boyfriend.

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Jonestown: Nightmare in Paradise

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Derik Schneider

To understand Jonestown, you first have to know about the People’s Temple, which started out in downtown San Francisco, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and in a many ways an actual paradise, which is where a lot of members of Jonestown were from or at least were living before they moved to Guyana in South America in the early to mid-1970s to build what became Jonestown, which at the end of the day was not much more than a prison camp.

The People’s Temple in San Francisco was put together by a Socialist Christian, the Reverend Jim Jones, who moved his organization from Indianapolis, Indiana, where it was unwelcome because his group was a biracial multi-ethnic church. Far-right religious conservative Indiana in the 1960s and early 1970s did not accept non-Caucasians and people who didn’t believe in their American way of life, whatever the hell that was supposed to be, so the group moved to San Francisco, which was seen as progressive or socialist, and sufficiently tolerant to allow them to build their community.

I think this is where the paranoia of Jim Jones comes in, because San Francisco, for whatever reasons, was not not acceptable for what he wanted, which was to build a community and an organization, where people literally took care of each other and lived off each other in a socialist communitarian Christian way of life, real Christianity if you will, and not the religious-right silliness that is more common in America.

The People’s Temple in San Francisco comprised American outsiders of all races and ethnicities, including Jim Jones himself, people who couldn’t make it in America for all sorts of reasons, including drug addiction, who were looking for something that would give their lives meaning.  They wanted to make a difference or hoped to make the world better. These were the people who made the People’s Temple run and did much of the work.

If you take Jim Jones out of the picture here and replace him with someone like Dr. Martin King or Dr. Andrew Young or Reverend Jesse Jackson, or even Dr. James Dobson, a leader of the Christian Right, the People’s Temple, I believe, is still in business today because it had the strong moral leadership of people only interested in serving the then under-served and would have the financial backing to be in business today.

Source:The New Democrat

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Belle Zonder Hetbeest: Video: Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Derik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat

Forget about the Manson Crime Family when it comes to cults, because at the end of the day, the Manson Family was a family of criminals but Jonestown was a cult that ended horribly with several hundred people, if not more, murdered by their leader, a paranoid dictator/terrorist, Jim Jones. This was a real cult, a group of Americans lost inside the United States, the country of their birth, looking for a new concept that would make their lives worth living.

With regard to the paranoid evil aspects of Jim Jones, someone strong enough mentally and physically could have taken on Reverend Jones and said “enough is enough,” for lack of a better phrase. “What you are doing is wrong and we should not be a concentration camp in Guyana, but instead a socialist communitarian community of people living and working together to make a good life for ourselves and our families. Jonestown could probably still be in business today and thriving because, with another philosophy, it would have had the structure needed to be successful.

The People’s Temple and Jonestown had the vision and the people to be successful, but they lacked the necessary leadership to succeed as a community of people who would care for each other, where no one would go hungry and live in poverty or be a prisoner of addiction, and who would have the basic health care needed to be successful. They would have been able to produce what they needed to live well in Guyana.

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ESPN SportsCentury of Evander Holyfield

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Ederik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

I don’t believe Evander Holyfield is an underrated boxer or an overrated boxer but he gets the respect that he deserves from the fans and media people who’ve covered his career and are familiar with it.  I’ve seen most of his fights as a heavyweight because he became a heavyweight when I was in junior high and high school in the late 1980s and early 90s. He gets the respect that he deserves as a four-time World Heavyweight Champion and a warrior whom you literally had to beat the hell out of to stop because he didn’t know how to quit.

Evander Holyfield was a beefed-up heavyweight unlike a Muhammad Ali, George Forman, or Larry Holmes, who were simply born to be heavyweight boxers as well as champions. Evander wasn’t born with that type of body even though he was 6’2″, which is a good height for heavyweight boxers, but was still fighting at 185-190 pounds in his mid- and late twenties and bulked up and got to 205-210 by the time he started fighting as a heavyweight because he was dominating the cruiserweight division as the world champion and needed bigger stronger competition, which is what he got.

Evander, not being the natural heavyweight that he was, had to go through a vigorous training program to put on the legitimate muscle so he could not only fight as a legitimate heavyweight but also as a strong, successful heavyweight. By 1989 he was not a knockout artist who could take you out in a couple of punches but someone who could avoid getting hit and take huge punishment, as he did against George Forman and Riddick Bowe, but also beat the hell out of you with a variety of different punches from a variety of different angles with great hand-speed and solid punching power.

One good thing about Evander’s career was that he was in the prime of his career as a heavyweight in the last good decade of the heavyweight boxing division in the 1990s, which meant he was in a lot of great fights, and it’s the warrior in him taking on these bigger stronger fighters like George Forman, Larry Holmes, Buster Douglas, Riddick Bowe, Michael Moorer, and Ray Mercer and later in his career, Lennox Lewis, that empowered him not to take on a lot of these fighters, but to beat most of them simply by always going at them and refusing to be beaten.

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NFL Films: Jim Brown Ultimate Highlights

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Erik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

For anyone who’s not a math junky or a professional accountant or statistician who understands more than numbers and stats when it comes to sports and is actually interested in what goes on in football games and how plays happen and what the offense has to do to be successful and exactly what the defense needs to do to stop the offense, I’m going to explain why Jim Brown, the former great Cleveland Browns running back, is the greatest running back of all time, if not the greatest football player of all time. And then I’ll even throw in some numbers for the younger stats-addicted generation as well.

To look at Jim Brown, sure, you could look at his numbers and say they were very impressive, especially considering he only played nine seasons and 116 games and rushed for over 13,000 yards, averaged 5.1 yards per carry, and scored over 100 touchdowns. He averaged over 100 yards a game rushing in his NFL career as well but that still wouldn’t be enough to give Big Jim all of the credit he deserves, and you would need to go much further than that.

Another way to look at Jim Brown would be his size and physical talents: 6’2″, 225-230 pounds, 4 or 5 percent body fat.  He could outrun not only a lot of receivers back in the 1960s but also outrun a lot of receivers today. He ran a 4.2 or 4.3 40-yard dash; I mean, he was literally a human horse with all of that power, size, and strength constantly going up against defenders; he was not only stronger, bigger, and faster than another man of that size and and speed coming right at you, but you had to stop him and that meant tackling him.

The way I look at Jim Brown is the way I look at all running backs; that is, what do defenses have to do to stop him? Based on that alone, forgetting about the stats for a minute, Jim Brown is the greatest running back of all time because he was simply the hardest to defend against and was always one broken tackle away from scoring because of his size and speed. There are plenty of running backs with that quality but no other running back was a bigger threat to score than Jim Brown.

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