Saturday Night Jazz at The MOTUS Twilight-Nocturne Lounge

Welcome to another evening at The MOTUS Twilight-Nocturne Lounge, where we melt the worries of life and time away with cocktails and music.

Little Mo is  tending bar tonight.

Just nod,  he knows what you want.

Tonight’s featured drink is the classic Manhattan cocktail:

The Manhattan is a boozy, sophisticated drink that embraces the energy of the city after which it's named. But unlike its cosmopolitan brother in arms, it is dark and moody: If the Martini is James Bond's drink, the Manhattan is Bruce Wayne's.

 

• 2 oz Bourbon or Rye Whiskey (Little Mo recommends Rye, although bourbon is traditional)
• 1 oz Sweet Vermouth (Little Mo recommends Dolin or Martini & Rossi)
• 2 Dashes of Bitters (Angostura or Cecil & Merl)
• 1-3 Cherries (Little Mo recommends dried tart cherries that you have marinated for a week in brandy or red wine)

 

• OR, a Twist of Lemon

• OR both

 

It’s a favorite of hapless Madison Avenue advertising executives like Mad Men’s Don Draper:

Don listens as boss Roger Sterling discloses his marital problems at the legendary Oak Room Bar in the fabled Plaza Hotel in this season-one Mad Men episode.

And North By Northwest’s Roger Thornhill, another  NY ad executive, curiously mistaken for a government agent and framed for murder. Boy, who wouldn’t want to do that – frame a government agent, I mean.

Roger Thornhill, in happier times at the Oak Room Bar, before he was identified as a government worker.

As long as you’re not a New York advertising executive, Manhattans, in moderation of course, are probably safe to consume. So chill out with this evening’s special entertainment - Georgie Auld with his sultry rendition of Earle Hagen and Dick Rogers’ classic: “Harlem Nocturne.”  I think it fits in nicely with tonight’s theme of  hapless hucksters who may be either Mad Men or government agents, or both.

Enjoy.

“Harlem Nocturne”

Linked By: @MuseumTwenty on twitter, and BlogsLucianneLoves, and NOBO2012 on Free Republic, Thanks!

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Obama: The Selective Promise Keeper

Well, it’s official; Barry reneged (can I say that?) on his promise that  “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor. Period.”

Why am I getting a deja vu sensation?  Oh yeah…it reminds me of something Barry said on the campaign trail back in '08:

“So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can – it’s just that it will bankrupt them,” -Barack Obama January, 2008 – PROMISE KEPT!

As you may recall, bankrupting electric companies was just 1 leg that BO promised to remove from our 3-legged energy stool:

“Under my plan … electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” –Barack Obama, January 2008 – PROMISE KEPT!

The three main components of Obama’s plan are:

— Get 1 million 150 mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on U.S. roads within six years.

— Require that 10 percent of U.S. energy comes from renewable sources by the end of his first term – more than double the current level.

—Reduce U.S. demand for electricity 15 percent by 2020.

So, if I’ve got this right:

1. First you replace gasoline demand for transportation with electric demand, thereby increasing overall electricity demand.
2. Provide huge federal grants/loans to large campaign bundlers to create more expensive “clean” wind and solar energy that nobody really wants and – ultimately – nobody actually makes.
3. Simultaneously announce your commitment to reduce the overall demand for electricity by 15%(!?!) 

I’m not a mathemagician butt that seems to add up to, at best, a sluggish economy.

Butt overall, I think we can mark energy “policy” down as one of Big Guy’s  “promises kept.”

Now if we can just get the do-nothing congress to pass that carbon tax, we can whack off that third leg too.

Hopefully, having delivered on his energy policy promise will take the sting out of breaking his promise that "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period."

If not, let me remind you of another promise that Big Guy has delivered on:

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” –Barack Obama October 30, 2008

Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that - on average – we’ll all be much better off if Big Guy doesn’t keep any more of his promises.

JoEllen and Lee Brothers, Obama loyalists who found out they couldn’t keep the healthcare plan they liked. And their new one cost twice as much.

 

SPECIAL PROGRAMMING NOTE: Be sure to tune in later this evening for another visit to the MOTUS Twilight-Nocturne Lounge. There may be a celebrity bartender tonight!

Linked By: BlogsLucianneLoves, and NOBO2012 on Free Republic, Thanks!

Cross-Posted and Featured on Patriot Action Network

You May See “Fat” But All I Can See is Racism. Everywhere.

What if we’ve been wasting our time all these years?

What if Lady M’s obsession with healthy eating:

And her seemingly endless tireless appearances to promote Let’s Move! 

in order to ensure No Child’s Fat Behind!

were all just misguided efforts? What if little black girls grow up to be obese not because of what they eat or what physical exercise they do or don’t do? What if obesity isn’t related to healthy living at all, what if it’s actually caused by…racism?

That’s right; racism. That’s how things are shaping up. You see, ever since Boston University got funding in 2012 to do a study that determined 4 out of 5 black women are overweight they had been frantically seeking additional federal research funding to determine the cause of this calamity. Fortunately they got it (thank you U.S. tax payer!) last year and were able to continue their very important, highly scientific study that has determined that one of the leading causes of obesity in black women is – you guessed it – racism!

That’s right, Boston University’s Slone Epidemiology Center established a statistically significant correlation between obesity and (self-reported) incidents of racism:

The findings, which currently appear online in the American Journal of Epidemiology, found the relationship between racism and obesity was strongest among women who reported consistently high experiences of racism over a 12-year period.

I don’t know how the study defined “racism” butt if it’s anything like how Chris Matthews, Al Sharpton and Rachael Maddow define it, we might want to stop right here and move on to more important news.

Absent that, let me share a few concerns that I have with this well-funded research study:

• Inconvenient truth #1: Epidemiology is not real science. It’s more like guessing.

Epidemiological studies rely on data that is self reported. This can create any number of problems, one being “recall error” which is related to butt not necessarily the same as lying. The corollary of Inconvenient truth #1 is:

• Inconvenient truth #2: Correlation is NOT the same as causation.

For example, just because 4 out of 5 black women are overweight, get their nails manicured and wear wigs, it doesn’t mean that manicures and wigs make them fat. Although with the proper funding I could probably produce a “prospective cohort study” that proves they do. That’s how post normal science works:

According to the "inventors" of PNS, Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, it is supposedly a scientific method of inquiry appropriate for cases where "facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent." What they describe however is more accurately recognized as politics than science, which is precisely the point: In postmodernism, everything is politics.

Butt I digress. Let’s get back to Lady M: now, in addition to promoting healthy eating and exercise, in order to wipe out childhood obesity in one generation she’s going to have to wipe out racism too! Wow. We’re going to need a whole lot of new clothes, and props, in order to pull that off.

So in another historic first, Lady M kicked off a huge cross promotion this week with two of her Big Corporate Let’s Move! partners, Disney and Subway. They will be teaming up to launch Subway’s sure-to-be-a-hit Pile on the Veggies campaign aimed at children and designed to wipe out racism in just one generation, or something. 

Look Kermit, if you think being green is tough, you ought to try being black!

So thank your lucky stars, kids, that you’ve got plenty of healthy kale chips to eat:

Because right now, somewhere in this country, there’s a black woman who doesn’t have any kale and is being forced to eat Cheetos and potato chips because, RACISM.

Subway’s Pile On The Veggies mascots; cute, butt next time make sure you find a black sheep.

Linked By: @ValCSilver on twitter, and BlogsLucianneLoves, and NOBO2012 on Free Republic, Thanks!

Cross-Posted on Patriot Action Network

Obamacare: America Moves Into a New Dimension of Sound and Shadow

Let’s recap today’s top news stories:

• Flight 370, the Malaysian Boeing 777 is still missing, butt apparently we have no clue when, or where, exactly it went missing.  I’m afraid this new information can lead us to only one conclusion: Flight 370 was hijacked by space aliens. Cue the music.

You are traveling through a new dimension…

• Barry is considering using his phone and his pen (sound and shadow?) to require overtime pay for previously exempt employees. Boy, that will get the engines of industry fired up again, no?

A dimension not only of sight and sound, butt of the mindless…

• Ditto the “Barry is considering using” the magic pen to rewrite Obamacare – again - and deferring the individual mandate until (quelle surprise!) 2016!

Maybe it would have been easier if we had found out what was in the bill before we passed it?

Perhaps this newest move is driven by the low number of enrollees, or, more likely, because he just found out how much it’s actually going to cost people. Hint, it’s more than their cellphone bill:

In September 2013, six months ago, Barack Obama told Americans, health care will cost less than your cell phone bill.

“You can offer your family the security of health care … for less than your cell phone bill.”

Last week at a town hall-style meeting with the Spanish-language media, President Obama seemed to scoff at a consumer who complained they couldn’t find affordable rates under Obamacare, saying maybe they haven’t prioritized health care.

“If you looked at their cable bill, their telephone, their cell phone bill… it may turn out that, it’s just they haven’t prioritized health care.”

So now it’s all about prioritizing? Funny, isn’t that what conservatives have been saying all along?

Imagine if you will, a world run by psychopaths…

What ever happened to the Nancy Pelosi’s promise of “having your cake and eating it too” – you know, eating our cupcakes while following their bliss?

WTF!?! Since when?

It’s a journey through a land whose boundaries are that of confusion…

Boy, this is going to be hard to swallow; apparently some Latinos agree with *gasp* the conservatives; Daniel Garza, Executive Director of The LIBRE Initiative for example:

"If the President actually believes that a family earning less than $40,000 per year can afford nearly $4,000 in health insurance premiums, then he truly does not understand middle-income families. Americans do not need the President to tell them how to Budget their households. People are already cutting back on things like cable television and cell phones, just to compensate for an awful economy.This President promised he would deliver on affordable health care. Instead, premiums are up, out-of-pocket expenses are up, and overall cost of living is up. The President simply doesn't get it. And his condescending attitude adds insult to injury."

At the signpost up ahead…

Code Blue! And I’m not talking about Flight 370.

Your next stop…

Obamacare, in need of resuscitation,

…is about to enter…

 

In the Twilight Zone, in the Age of Obama, we’ve written the ultimate bill to “serve” man:

 

Sadly, it too is a cookbook; butt the only recipe is for Jewish penicillin which, while good for a common cold, doesn’t really cure anything else.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone, also known as a black hole, or dark energy.

Linked By: Larwyn’s Linx on Doug Ross@Journal, and @ValCSilver, @MuseumTwenty on twitter, and BlogsLucianneLoves, and NOBO2012 on Free Republic, Thanks!

Cross-Posted on Patriot Action Network

Fernwood 2Night: #HipPrezzy #GetCovered #FunnyorDie

Big Guy’s most recent poll numbers were a little disappointing. Plus, the latest Obamacare enrollment numbers aren’t looking so hot either. So the Big White Big Brains got together and decided to kill two birds with one stone: they determined they could address both fronts by making Big Guy more hip.

So presidential decorum was sacrificed to the god of hipness to troll for a few more Obamacare enrollees. The performance took place on the FunnyorDie.com website show titled “Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis.” Seriously, a website show? Out of 1000 24/7 cable channels, not one felt it worth broadcasting – even at, say, 3:00 am?  That’s right; only the ultra-hip watch it.

There is absolutely no reason why you would know who Zach Galifianakisis is unless you are a fan of the Hangover trilogy, in which case you’d be too hip to be visiting my blog. Zack’s show – a huge hit with our target group (hip young invincibles) – consists of him interviewing celebrities between two potted plants.

Typically Zach’s interview “style” “consists of typical interview questions, bizarre non sequiturs, and sometimes inappropriate sexual questions and comments.” Gosh, that sounds like something Joey B could do!

With his eyes closed!

Armed with a carefully prepared script and his own innate acting ability, Barry appeared “on air” with third rate B movie actor Zach for what can only be referred to as a demeaning comedy routine. Even so, the minions were out in force yesterday, hyping how hilarious his hip appearance was. 

Judge for yourself (you get extra credit if you’re able to sit through the whole 6 minutes):

Is it just me - I’m not very hip – or does it strike anyone else as an odd venue to hype the benefits of Obamacare? I mean, “Funny or Die?” Maybe the Big Brains found that to be ironic.

Or, maybe it’s a message to hipsters that a little stand-up routine might help them avoid the thumbs down from the Obamacare Death Panel down the road.

Anyway, since he was in NYC yesterday to raise some badly needed funds to avoid further losses like the one in Florida yesterday, Big Guy stopped by a New York City GAP store. In addition to cementing his hip image, he was demonstrating his solidarity with management, who fell into goose-step by raising GAP’s minimum wage to BO’s suggested $10.10 per hour.

Although I’m not sure shopping for mom jeans will do much for his hipster image.

Yeah, 1969. That was a hip year.

Meanwhile, back in D.C. we’re leaving no stone unturned; we’ve sent our own Geek Squad out to convince the rest of the young geeks across America to #GETCOVERED:

This is great! All the power in the world and our own TV network too! I wonder why nobody ever thought of this before? Oh wait…

 

Today’s post was brought to you by our affiliates at Fernwood 2Night.

Linked By: Sultan Knish, and @batfreight on twitter, and BlogsLucianneLoves, and NOBO2012 on Free Republic, Thanks!

Cross-Posted on Patriot Action Network

#BanBossy: The Cow Stands Alone

This whole Bossy the Cow thing is very confusing, so make sure you’ve had your coffee.

We’re apparently championing a new hashtag campaign:

I thought it was one of those made-up urban legends until I read Doug Powers article, “Go figure: ‘Bossy’ not a horrible word 3 months ago but now FLOTUS wants it banned.” The #BanBossy campaign is a joint effort of the DNC’s fight against the GOP’s War on Women,

the Girl Scouts,

and Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook (Field Marshall in the War on MOTUS) and author of “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,”  the little book of feminist wisdom and other tropes. Sheryl’s using #BanBossy as a marketing campaign for her book, which holds forth the same argument against calling girls “bossy:”

Sheryl Sandberg has long criticized the use the of the word "bossy" to describe young girls who are assertive. Instead, the Facebook COO has urged people to forgo the word with all its negative connotations, and instead describe these girls as "feminist" or displaying "executive leadership skills."

Here’s where it gets confusing: apparently the group-think on this is if you call a girl “bossy” it’s sexist or something. So let’s call them assertive.

The argument, as laid forth in the Wall Street Journal article:

Sandberg — the chief operating officer of Facebook and author of the best-selling book “Lean In” — is spearheading the launch of a campaign today to ban the word “bossy,” arguing the negative put-down stops girls from pursuing leadership roles.

“We know that by middle school, more boys than girls want to lead,” Sandberg said, “and if you ask girls why they don’t want to lead, whether it’s the school project all the way on to running for office, they don’t want to be called bossy, and they don’t want to be disliked.”

Because if you call a girls “bossy,” it will kill her ability to act assertively and be a leader in the executive suite.  So JUST STOP DOING IT! - NOW! That sounds pretty bossy to me.

Given that everyone from Lady M to Beyoncé has jumped on the bandwagon, it might be impolitic of me to point out that being bossy is different from being assertive. Here are the synonyms I found for “bossy:” autocratic, cocky, dictatorial, high-handed, imperious, tyrannical, oppressive. Butt I didn’t see “assertive” anywhere, which has it’s own list of synonyms: confident, decisive, emphatic, forceful, insistent, self-assured, self-confident – none of which sound necessarily “bossy” to me. “Bossy” is more like a specific, ego-centric, know-it-all, my-way-or-the-highway sort of behavior most often associated with children (of either sex) who are in need of a little adult supervision. They need to be taught and coached so their behavior is directed in more suitable directions and their basic instincts molded into more effective behavior; otherwise they’ll remain social pariahs for the rest of their life.

So let me make this perfectly clear: just because Bossy is a female cow,

this is not exclusively a female problem. For example, if we go through the synonyms for “bossy” –  

autocratic:

cocky:

dictatorial:

high-handed:

imperious:

tyrannical:

oppressive:

…we find that they apply equally to men. And not always in a complimentary manner either. I leave it to you to determine if they connote leadership skills.

In the meantime, #BanBossy is off and running. I find it remarkable how quickly the herd of cows bossy gals jumped on the haywagon (don’t ask me what Condi’s doing in with this group: I’m guessing it’s a misguided commitment to the Girl Scouts). It’s already so viral that it’s almost like a MSM sound-bite rolling through the echo-chamber.

In summary then, I think this whole bossy cow thing is overhyped. Men can obviously learn a lot from bossy women,

Big Guy performs a Bossy Cow mind-meld

I’m so gob-smacked by the whole thing all I can say is:

...or, More Boob Belt! depending on your mood. (H/T Gerard)

Linked By: Larwyn’s Linx on Doug Ross@Journal, and Maggie’s Notebook, and @betyangelo, @MuseumTwenty on twitter, and BlogsLucianneLoves, and NOBO2012 on Free Republic, Thanks!

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