Occupy Sandy

Occupy Sandy live-streaming post-storm cleanup efforts — This webcast is an incredible thing to witness. @OccupySandy teaming up with a biker club to clean up homes in New York's Staten Island ravaged by the hurricane. Doing what FEMA can't/won't. The Occupy Sandy movement is an amazing thing. Just when the media declared OWS "dead" and "without purpose," this leaderless volunteer movement showed the world what community activism really means—and what the ability to mobilize at a moment's notice can accomplish.

Popeye For President

No more politics for a while?...well...maybeeee, but first we have to wait until Olive Oyl votes!

The Rejected Mexican Pope Leaves The Stage

Indulge me, please. I cannot control myself, this is like finding the holy grail, only better. The Mothers of Invention perform the piece, Progress, at the Royal Festival Hall in London in 1968 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra augmenting the band. I have this on a cd entitled the The Old Masters. But this is the piece complete with Theodore Bikel and Roy Estrada's extraordinary performance as the rejected Mexican Pope. There is a little extra commentary from band members explaining some of the sequences. This piece was expanded and eventually became the genesis of the 200 Motels Film a few years later. I am as happy as a little girl! BTW, The opening sequence with Don Preston, who is one of the pioneers of modern electronic music and the electronic keyboard player with the Mothers at the time is very cool. Don is still around and finding new ways to derange and dementedly exploit every advance in technology as fast as the developers can think them up!

One Giant Step Closer To The Big Brother State

An educational video about surveillance that is even more poignant after the disclosure that there is a newly disclosed Microsoft patent that covers spying on people in their homes using cameras attached to their TVs, in order to levy fines against them for allowing too many people to watch movies at once:
Basically, when you buy or rent something like a movie, you’ll only be granted a “license” for a certain number of people to watch it. If Kinect detects more people in the room than you had a licence for, it can stop the movie, and even charge you extra. So if Microsoft has its way, you won’t just be renting movies any more. You’ll have to decide how many people are watching, and no doubt pay more. And if one extra person turns up to your movie night? So help you God, you are going to pay.
Of course, big companies patent all sorts of stupid ideas, many of which never get incorporated into products. But hey, now you know that researchers at Microsoft sit around spitballing ideas like, "Wouldn't it be awesome to spy on our customers in their homes so that we could fine them for having too many people over to watch movies? Wonder if anyone is Hollywood would give us preferential access to movies if we could promise them that they could do nose-counts of people in their own homes?"
This Kinect Patent Is Terrifying, Wants To Charge You For License Violation

Three Card Monte Explained

Karl Rove in an instructional video illustrating how to deceive idiots (the deluded billionaires who donated to his Crossroads GPS Super PAC) who have already succeeded in deceiving themselves. This is the theory behind the Three Card Monte Scammers on the street corners of Urban America who make a pretty good living scamming the idiots who think they have figured it out, except, Karl isn't on some street corner in Philly looking our for cops, he's some kind of big shot on FOX NEWS!
Sorry Suckahs!

Ethan Persoff is an archivist, sound artist, and cartoonist based in Austin, Texas. He maintains a widely read Internet Archive of unique "drug comics", "government comics," and other "comics with problems." He took the drunken rant of a rabid Romney supporter which seems to have gone viral on the internet and added a pleasant orchestral backdrop, so you can savor each exotically flavored drop of her incoherently intoxicated impotent bile!  This piece of found sound art was curated by the FMA Organization.

THE BOTS

Two Brothers, Mikaiah Lei (vocals and guitar) and Anaiah Lei (drums) from Glendale, CA. They have been performing since they were 12 and 9 years old...now they're 15 and 18....

Just guitar and drums, these guys are pure energy and this just might be my new favoritest band.

This performance was just a few months ago. I love Mikaiah's Danoelectro cheap ass guitar...

The Roots of Contemporary GOP Voter Suppressio In America

Why the GOP does not want you to vote as explained over 30 years ago by Paul Weyrich, the man considered the founding father of the modern conservative movement. He founded ALEC and co-founded the Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority, Council for National Policy, and Free Congress Foundation, among others. 

Speaking more than 30 years ago at a right-wing conference in Dallas, Weyrich set out the case for voter suppression. The right-wing and GOP are still acting on it to this day.

Book 'em, Danno....

(I humbly request that you play the theme music while reading this piece!)

Here's our top 5 most w suspects, while we got them in custody, it's time for the Perp Walk!

Despite long lines, voter suppression laws and Republican efforts to discourage voting, President Obama won reelection last night. Many of these roadblocks to voting did not happen by accident. Meet five of the Republican state elections officials who criminally plotted to thwart the constitutional right of thousands of American citizens to legally vote!  
Suspect #1: Jon Husted


Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has become much more than just the Katherine Harris of 2012. No one in the USA did more to skew a state’s vote to increase Mitt Romney’s chances of winning this election. Husted advocated firmly and repeatedly to cut early voting in Ohio, potentially disenfranchising thousands of voters who lack the job flexibility to vote on election day. He openly defied a court order requiring early voting hours to be restored, although he eventually backed down after a federal ordered him to attend a court hearing regarding this refusal to comply with the law. And he retaliated against his opponents by firing them.  He illegally ordered the installation of uncertified "experimental" software in the Ohio vote tabulation systems just days before the election and fought any attempt to have it looked at.To top it off, Husted issued a last-minute directive that directly conflicts with Ohio law which could lead to thousands of provisional ballots being trashed.
Suspect #2: Ken Detzner


Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner is Tea Party Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) hand-picked chief elections official, so he played a leadership role in Scott’s discredited plan to purge thousands of Florida voters from the state’s voter rolls. According to the Tampa Bay Times, “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters [were] the most likely to be targeted” by this purge. About 58 percent of the voters targeted by the purge are Hispanic, a demographic that overwhelmingly favored President Obama. The list of supposed non-citizens proved unreliable, however, and the purge was eventually shut down after the state’s local elections supervisors refused to move forward with it. Nevertheless, Detzner vowed to restart the purge at one point saying it was his “moral duty” to purge people from the voter rolls. To date, Florida’s purge caught just one non-citizen voter.

Suspect #3: Scott Gessler



Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler is currently under investigation for allegedlymisusing taxpayer dollars to travel to a Republican National Lawyers Association event. Even if these allegations prove false, however, Gessler has still distinguished himself through his efforts to restrict the franchise. As a candidate for his current job, Gessler campaigned on a promise to fight the wildly exaggerated problem of election fraud. As Colorado’s chief elections official, Gessler spearheaded a voter purge targeting thousands of alleged non-citizens on his state’s voter rolls. He was eventually forced to largely abandon this purge, however, after his efforts revealed that non-citizen voting is a virtually non-existent problem.

Suspect#4: Carol Aichele


As Pennsylvania’s Secretary of the Commonwealth, Carol Aichele played a key role in defending that state’s voter ID law — despite her admission during court testimony that she does not “know what the law says.” After state officials released data indicating that 9 percent of the state’s voters lacked the ID required by the law, Aichele claimed that the real number was actually closer to 1 percent. When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court expressed skepticism that the voter suppression law would not disenfranchise voters, Aichele announced minor tweeks to the requirements to obtain an ID in Pennsylvania. The judiciary deemed this dodge insufficient, and largely suspended the law. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania continued to run misleading ads suggesting that voters must show ID in order to vote.

Suspect #5: Matt Schultz


Like Colorado and Florida, Iowa attempted its own voter purge targeting the illusionary problem of non-citizen voting, with Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz spearheading this purge. An Iowa court temporarily blocked this purge, however, warning that it “created confusion and mistrust in the voter registration process [and] have created fear that new citizens will lose their right to vote and/or be charged with a felony and [have] caused some qualified voters to feel deterred from even registering to vote.”

Extra Point Bonus Suspect #6: Charlie White
Indiana’s Republican former Secretary of State Charlie White was removed from office last February after he was convicted of six felony counts of perjury, theft and election fraud.

Book 'em, Danno!

La Chute

The Donalds Real Bad Hair Day
These are his real tweets from last night!

and then the final descent into madness:

Love America!

The President of Groland sends his traditional congratulations on the re election of Barack Obama as President of The United States of America 

For 4 More Years!

Alive In Johannesburg

A gritty short film about what it would be like if Johannesburg was home to marooned extra-terrestrial refugees, directed by Neill Blomkamp.

This short film eventually led to the production of a feature-length film which focuses on the same topic - District 9.

Remember, Republicans Never Lose, They Cheat!

Today in America is a maelstrom event. We've lived with the constant backbeat for the last few months of Republicans casting doubts on the integrity of the vote, using the fraud joker card to disenfranchise as many potential Democrat voters as possible. They have abused the positions of power in the states they control to install suspect technology. Even today, in Ohio after the specter of the Romney controlled Hart Intercivic voting technology was exposed, at the last minute, The Ohio Election Chief, John Husted illegally ordered the installation of "uncertified, experimental" software patches in the ES&S electronic vote tabulation system used in 39 Ohio counties.
This is just the tip of the election anomalies being uncovered and reported hourly today and the ugly truth? Voter intimidation by True The Vote reports all over the country. True The Vote fraud uncovered in Ohio. Touch Screen Voting mysteriously flipping Obama votes to Romney votes in Pennsylvania. Republican Oregon Election official caught altering ballots. The myriad of fraud is a collection of incidents all seemingly perpetrated by Tea Party Poll Watchers and crooked Republican election officials. This is not a lot of little mistakes and errors, this is beginning to look like a deliberate tactic to destroy the integrity of the election. We have seen the numbers which seem to indicate that Barack Obama will handily take the Electoral College vote. But the attempt by the Conservatives to destroy the integrity of the popular election and influence the margins in every state they can would seem to be a deliberate attempt to orchestrate a theft of the election. How might they accomplish this?
An explanation. This is the nightmare scenario in which Republican aggressiveness could be used to trump Democratic timidity (or collegiality, or complicity; your choice on the phrasing). One of them is what happens if Obama wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote.
First the strategy, then the logic. The strategy involves Republicans pumping up the popular vote in states Romney will win — Texas, Kansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, as well as the obvious Utah (click for an electoral map). At the same time, they count on Obama to pull his resources out of states he’s clearly winning. Hello, California, where the Sacramento Bee notes “both presidential candidates [are] devoting little time or resources in California.”
Changing the margin of victory has two effects. First is the one we’re going to talk about, the nut-cutting strategy. The second has to do with down-ticket races. I’ve been hearing substantial talk since 2010 that Obama does little to benefit down-ticket races, and this seems to be borne out in California, where the same Sacramento Bee article states (my emphasis and reparagraphing everywhere):
 
No matter what happens nationally, the presidential race is all but decided in California, with President Barack Obama maintaining a double-digit lead in the polls. Yet how well the rivals perform could tip the scales in the state’s most competitive congressional and legislative races. The narrower Obama’s win in the state, the better for GOP candidates on the rest of the ballot.
Dan Lundgren, one of the worst of the CA Republican representatives, gets his name mentioned as a potential beneficiary of this Dem strategy.
The logic of this move is obvious, yes? Maximize power. What else are modern Republicans about. Couple that with the obvious tendency of Democrats to surrender power and you have another perfect storm, for us.

So, no matter what the results of the election tomorrow, even if Romney concedes, he will not really concede. Expect the worst. The strategy, if pursued, would include all of the pieces of the reported 2000 Bush strategy — Fox News; talk radio; dueling pundits (pundit-on-pundit violence); business “leader” and CEO-influence on employees; “non-partisan” preachers who suddenly love “democracy” — plus whatever else the phrase “full-on attack” implies these days. Why go at all if you don’t go all-out? Remember, above all, Megalomaniacal Power Crazed Republicans never lose, they cheat. What ever the outcome tomorrow, we will have suffered the effects of a compromised crippled and sabotaged electoral system which we will have to fight to fix!

The Roots of Voter Suppression In America

Paul Weyrich is widely regarded as the "founding father of the conservative movement." He founded ALEC and co-founded the Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority, Council for National Policy, and Free Congress Foundation, among others.
Speaking more than 30 years ago at a right-wing conference in Dallas, Weyrich set out the case for voter suppression. The right-wing and GOP are still acting on it to this day.

Bama Lama Bama Looo

I haven't been able to post the last few days. We had some visitors from NYC who just managed to get out as Sandy was hitting. They were staying in the big room I have my computer in and they were on line trying to get in touch with friends. We took them up to Limoges today to catch a train to Paris and they repaid our hospitality by taking us to one of the best Bistros I have been to in years. Limoges is a very gourmand city and very renown for it's beef. Really, if you are ever in Limoges and want a great experience and really not that pricey, check out Chez Alphonse at 5 Place La Motte, in back of the wonderful covered market. The pave de veau was amazing, but the mashed potatoes were the absolute best I have ever had in my life!

So, I cannot think of the election anymore. There is nothing more to write tonight. I hope for the very best and will try to monitor it tomorrow as best as I can, but because of the time difference, I probably won't know the results until Wednesday morning here. Tonight, I'm gonna listen to Little Richard and scream Bama Lama Bama Loo......

Please Wash Your Brains 

This is for all of my friends in Toledo, Ohio, where I lived for 10 years and still come back from time to time. This came out today....Stay strong and VOTE!

Cause it's Friday Night! Okay?