Weekend Pot Luck

Here are some random thought from this weekend.

1)   It is amazing how much control conservatives have over media in this country.  Right now, we are in a bit of a dead zone for news.  Most people don't care about the day to day goings on in the world as we are in December, the time for holiday shopping and good cheer.  If you did pay attention to the news, you'd have heard the country is in the best hiring year since 1999, the deficit has been slashed dramatically under the Obama administration and oil prices have plummeted, partially due to the Presidents handling of world crisises and his international policy.  I had a conservative friend, ask me on Facebook, "this is very impressive, so why didn't the Democrats mention this before the election?"

From August to Election Day, the media in this country, not only the clearly corrupted by agenda and money big 5 (CNN, FOX, ABC, CBS, NBC), but other, more trusted outlets such as NPR, Huffington Post and Yahoo, did the journalistic equivalent of running around, waving their hands in the air and screaming "EBOLA!!!!"  Then, the day after the elections, they just stopped.  There wasn't a grace period, there wasn't a transition, they just stopped.  The only 'news' outlets who didn't seem to be controlled by the news disinformation machine were the BBC and Al-Jazeera.

There was a concerted effort by the media in this country to prevent the American people from hearing anything positive about the President and the Democrats prior to the election.  They buried all of this positivity until after the election was over, and now, with no agenda driven message to present to the masses, and all of the Christmas sales securely in place, they stumble back to their original job, reporting news.  In the future, one thing the media in this country will be judged on is not only their failures to report the truth for the last 20 years, but their complicit nature as accomplices to Conservatives in driving the right's agenda.  I swear, if I hear another 'bought and paid for' journalist or editor bloviate their insistence about how they are fair to both sides and hold Republicans accountable...BULL!

2)  To be fair, the media wasn't the only thing which cost the Democrats the Senate in this last election, it was God awful Democrats as well, whether incumbents or candidates, who should have never been part of the party in the first place.  It's with that, I say "let the door hit you in the ass on your way out" to soon to be former Senator Mary Landrieu, the fake Democrat from Louisiana.  She lost.  She was an embarrassment to have in the Democratic Party anyway, so good riddance.

3)  This brings up a third point about elections, and the real important one coming up.  No, I'm not talking about 2016, although that is very important.  I'm talking about 2020.  In 2020, the state legislatures who win get to decide if the current unabashedly unfair US House districts stay the way the GOP gerrymandered them, or do they get redrawn to represent people fairly.  That year, 2020, the President is the biggest office up for grabs, but now, due to the wins in 2014, the GOP has to hold a ton of Republican Senate seats they likely will not be able to hold, the US House will have their biannual money suck, and the GOP will be pouring money into individual state legislature and governor races at never before seen, incomprehensible levels.  My guess is, since the total cost for the GOP will likely be in the trillions, they will have to take off the 2018 election cycle in order to stockpile cash for 2020.  If the right wins in 2020, well may God have mercy on us all.

4)  If you still insist the police used acceptable force in Ferguson and on Staten Island, and have never once condemned Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who has stolen a million dollars from the American people, a person who when Bureau of Land Management employees, law enforcement, came to enforce the laws, his followers pointed loaded weapons at the heads of said law enforcement, clearly threatening them with deadly force, you are not worth listening too.  If you condemn Cliven Bundy just as vigorously as you condemn Michael Brown or Eric Garner, I won't agree with you, but at least you're consistent.  If you insist there is a difference, you're not fooling anyone.  You back up Bundy, whose crimes were far worse than Brown or Garner's, because he is white, and you hate the two dead men because they were black.

5)  Minnesota ranked 5th in a 24/7 Wall Street poll of best run states.  Unlike a lot of polls, there wasn't the usual Democratic states are in the top half while the Republican states are in the bottom half outcome, but rather the states are scrambled nicely.  Minnesota is the highest rated state with a major metro area (with all due respect to Omaha and Des Moines, both lovely towns, you're not the same as Minneapolis/St. Paul.  But with all sincerity, if you are looking for a fun weekend, those are great towns).

Democratic states like Minnesota can be well managed, business friendly, economically sound and worker and middle class strong, even top five in the nation.  What this proves is not what the GOP wants you to believe.  They want you to think states like Mississippi, Kansas and Wisconsin are great, but they are only great for the wealthiest of wealthy and largest corporations.  I'll put it bluntly, I know a lot of people moving to Minnesota from Wisconsin, I don't know one person who has moved from Minnesota to Wisconsin in the last two years.  Seriously.  That's a new trend.

6) Finally, and completely away from politics, I made a really interesting observation about eggs the last two weeks.  Yes, you read right.  I needed eggs around Thanksgiving and my wife picked up a dozen while running an errand.  They were not the eggs we usually get.  For many years, I've been only buying organic eggs from cage free chickens.  The eggs my wife bought were from some corporate farm.  It was really scary how different they were from my usual eggs.  The shells were very fragile, the yokes broke way too easy and they did not taste like eggs.  They tasted (pardon the pun) like a hollow shell of themselves.  This is one of those things you need to be used to the organic ones to really notice the difference, but it was undeniable to me.