Patum Peperium

Rodeo Clown Droned While We Slept.

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Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium
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So we wake to the morning's news, the Missouri State Fair rodeo clown was droned while we slept:

"Missouri State Fair officials have now banned a clown who wore a President Obama mask during a performance that mocked the president.

"Fair officials also say they are with the Missouri Rodeo Cowboys Association, which ran the event, and that the association's personnel and performers must undergo sensitivity training if they are to work with the fair again."

-- NPR

The rodeo clown has been banned for life and his fellow rodeo clowns got sensitivity training. We've reached the point where clowns have to take sensitivity training if they ever want to hide in a barrel from a wild bull again.

Meanwhile, did you hear the latest on America's previous dronee, Paula Deen:

"A federal judge in Georgia has thrown out race discrimination claims by a former Savannah restaurant manager whose lawsuit against Paula Deen ended up causing the celebrity cook to lose a big slice of her culinary empire.

"Lisa Jackson sued Deen and her brother, Bubba Hiers, last year, saying she was subjected to sexual harassment and racist attitudes during the five years she worked at their restaurant, Uncle Bubba's Seafood and Oyster House. But U.S. District Court Judge William T. Moore Jr. ruled Monday that Jackson, who is white, has no standing to sue them for race discrimination."

Let's repeat that last bit - "Jackson, who is white, has no standing to sue them for racial discrimination."

The judge continued:

"that though others may have allegedly faced discrimination, Jackson can't sue since she was not one of the victims."

A white woman was suing Paula Deen for racial discrimination. A white woman. What's really eye-opening is that it took a judge to point out that she, as a white woman, had no standing and was, therefore, not a victim of alleged racial discrimination.

The woman's lawyer didn't point this out. Neither did the media.  Meanwhile Paula was droned -losing half of her empire.

Did you hear one of America's other empires got racially profiled? Yup. Empress Oprah who made a cool 77 million last year alone got allegedly dissed in Switzerland by a shop girl. From an Entertainment Tonight interview -note the interviewer knew about the 'incident' before lobbing the softball:

Nancy O'Dell ( Entertainment Tonight) "Just a couple of weeks ago, you faced a shopping incident while you were in Switzerland attending Tina Turner's wedding."

OPRAH: I didn't have my eyelashes on, but I was in full Oprah Winfrey gear, and I go into a store -- which shall remain unnamed -- and I say to the woman, "Uh, excuse me, may I see that bag right above your head?" and she says to me, (mocking her accent) "No. It's too expensive." Uh, one more time I tried. I said, "But I really do just really want to see that one," and she said, "Oh, I don't... I don't want to hurt your feelings," and I said, "Okay. Thank you so much. You're probably right. I can't afford it," and I walked out of the store. Now why did she do that?

Oprah continued:

"There's two different ways to handle it," said Winfrey who was in town for Tina Turner's wedding. "I could've had the whole blow-up thing and thrown down the black card, but why do that?"

So Oprah didn't throw 'the black card' down in Switzerland, she merely waited and threw it down a few weeks later on Entertainment Tonight. Thankfully Switzerland is still neutral so its government wasn't able to drone the store clerk. The droning was left to The Tourist Board viaTwitter :

“This person acted terribly wrong.”

The Tourist Board also issued a formal apology:

“We are very sorry for what happened to her because we think all of our guests and clients should be treated respectfully, in a professional manner.”

It's just the citizens of Switzerland who aren't treated with respect. It's drone first, ask questions later. Thankfully the shop clerk was a woman so she wasn't immediately flattened like men are. She spoke to the press saying Oprah is lying :

Now the saleslady has hit back, stating: 'I wasn't sure what I should present to her when she came in on the afternoon of Saturday July 20 so I showed her some bags from the Jennifer Aniston collection.

"'I explained to her the bags came in different sizes and materials, like I always do. She looked at a frame behind me. Far above there was the 35,000 Swiss franc crocodile leather bag. I simply told her that it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags. It is absolutely not true that I declined to show her the bag on racist grounds. I even asked her if she wanted to look at the bag. She looked around the store again but didn't say anything else. Then she went with her companion to the lower floor. My colleague saw them to the door. They were not even in the store for five minutes.'

"She emphatically denied ever saying to Winfrey: 'You don't want to see this bag. It is too expensive. You cannot afford it.'

"The saleslady went on: 'This is not true. This is absurd. I would never say something like that to a customer. Really never. Good manners and politeness are the Alpha and the Omega in this business.

''I don't know why she is making these accusations. She is so powerful and I am just a shop girl.

"'I didn't hurt anyone. I don't know why someone as great as her must cannibalize me on TV.

"'If it had all taken place as she claimed, why has she not complained the next day at the wedding of Tina Turner with Trudie Goetz, my boss? She was there also at the Turner wedding as a guest. I don't understand it.'

Ah, so the dreaded truth has come out - Oprah and the shop owner were at the same wedding the very next day. That was a perfectly appropriate opportunity time for business woman Oprah to professionally address her 'incident'. But Oprah didn't. She waited for the cameras to be rolling.

The store clerk's comments "I don't know why she is making these accusations. She is so powerful and I am just a shop girl." forced Oprah's hand.  At the LA premier of 'The Butler' Oprah attempted to explain her hurt feelings. (By the way in the old days of studios and studio heads, this 'incident' would've been easily seen by the public as a publicity stunt for a movie.) Note Oprah's not addressing the store clerk's claim she could've spoken with the owner of the store at Tina's wedding, instead she doubling down on the store clerk and said Switzerland -as in the entire country doesn't need to apologize to her :

Oprah Winfrey says she's "sorry" that a media frenzy emerged after saying she experienced racism during a trip to Switzerland.

"I think that incident in Switzerland was just an incident in Switzerland. I'm really sorry that it got blown up. I purposefully did not mention the name of the store. I'm sorry that I said it was Switzerland. I was just referencing it as an example of being in a place where people don't expect that you would be able to be there. It's not an indictment against the country or even that store," she continued. "It was just one person who didn't want to offer me the opportunity to see the bag. So no apologies necessary from the country of Switzerland. If somebody makes a mistake in the United States do we apologize in front of the whole country? No!"

Instead we drone them with no apologies.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal sums Oprah up perfectly:

We quite like this story as a parable of race relations in 21st-century America. Whatever actually happened at Trois Pommes, it was not a systemic indignity like the Montgomery, Ala., rule that required black bus riders to give up seats when white passengers boarded (to say nothing of the entire Jim Crow system of which that rule was a part).

What Winfrey construes as a racial episode is actually a story about class–a wealthy, privileged celebrity aggrieved by a lowly saleswoman’s lack of deference. And it’s not her first brush with this sort of impertinence: “The incident comes eight years after Winfrey was turned away from a Hermes store in Paris a few minutes after closing,” the News notes. Apparently fermé is un sifflet pour chien.

It’s reminiscent of the endlessly repeated claim that criticism of Barack Obama proves racism is alive and well in America. Somehow Obama’s defenders are unable to see past the color of his skin and notice that he is president of the United States. As for Winfrey, she went all the way to Europe to discover that racism is alive in America.

-- This Is Not Rosa Parks: Oprah Winfrey’s Swiss adventure.



So where are we? We're one clown down, Oprah buys bags made of real crocodile skin (that was the newsworthy part of her story) and we're still awaiting Jennifer Aniston's statement on learning her phony croc bags aren't good enough for Oprah. Oh puh-leaze, pleaze, pleaze Jennifer - do knock that one out of the park. Have PETA stand with you.

Meanwhile, for the serious folks, African American children in America still aren't being taught to read. This being done to them by our government :

"Two recent events -- one on the east coast and one on the west coast -- raise painful questions about whether we are really serious when we say that we want better education for minority children.

"One of these events was an announcement by Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., that it plans on August 19th to begin "an entire week of activities to celebrate the grand opening of our new $160 million state-of-the-art school building."

"The painful irony in all this is that the original Dunbar High School building, which opened in 1916, housed a school with a record of high academic achievements for generations of black students, despite the inadequacies of the building and the inadequacies of the financial support that the school received.

"By contrast, today's Dunbar High School is just another ghetto school with abysmal standards, despite Washington's record of having some of the country's highest levels of money spent per pupil -- and some of the lowest test score results.

"Housing an educational disaster in an expensive new building is all too typical of what political incentives produce.

"We pay a lot of lip service to educational excellence. But too many institutions and individuals that have produced good educational results for minority students have not only failed to get support, but have even been undermined...

-- Thomas Sowell

Let us end with a hymn from Hillary in Selma, 2007:

 


"People now talk about their Obama vote in the same disbelieving tone used when they tell you they took an Ambien and woke up naked outside."

-- Dennis Miller

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Who Are The Real Clowns?

 

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Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium

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A clown wearing a President Barack Obama mask appeared at a Missouri State Fair rodeo this weekend and the announcer asked the enthusiastic spectators if they wanted to see “Obama run down by a bull.” [...]

Perry Beam, who was among the spectators, said “everybody screamed” and “just went wild” as the announcer talked about having the bull run down the clown with the Obama mask.

“It was at that point I began to feel a sense of fear. It was that level of enthusiasm,” Beam, a 48-year-old musician from Higginsville, said Sunday, referring to the reaction from the crowd that filled the fair’s grandstand.

He said another clown ran up to the one wearing the Obama mask, pretended to tickle him and played with the lips on the mask. [...]

“It was the usual until the very end at bull riding,” he said. “As they were bringing the bulls into the chute and prepping them ... they bring out what looks like a dummy. The announcer says ‘Here’s our Obama dummy, or our dummy of Obama.

“They mentioned the president’s name, I don’t know, 100 times. It was sickening,” Beam said. “It was feeling like some kind of Klan rally you’d see on TV.”

-- The Washington Post

We have televised Klan rallies? Since when? But wait, it gets even better :


From the Republicans:



From the Democrats:

Scott Holste, spokesman for Missouri's Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon, said Sunday in an e-mail that Nixon "agrees that the performance was disrespectful and offensive, and does not reflect the values of Missourians or the State Fair."

“If what’s being reported is true, then it’s shameful and it’s unacceptable. The State Fair is funded by taxpayer dollars, and is supposed to be a place where we can all bring our families and celebrate the state that we love. But the young Missourians who witnessed this stunt learned exactly the wrong lesson about political discourse-that somehow it’s ever acceptable to, in a public event, disrespect, taunt, and joke about harming the President of our great nation. Missouri is better than this, and I expect someone to be held accountable.” -- Senator Claire McCaskill

Again from the one State Fair attendee who posted his complaint on Showmeprogress.com which caused the ruckus:

"This isn't the Republican Missouri State Fair," Beam said. "It was cruel. It was disturbing. I'm still sick to my stomach over it. ... I'm standing here with a mixed-race family. My wife's from Taiwan, and so was the student (his family was hosting). I've never seen anything so blatantly racist in my life.

-- USAToday

 

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Who are the real clowns?

 

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What You Get When You Judge A Man By The Crease Of His Trousers : President Crazy Pants.

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Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium


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“I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”

-David Brooks on Obama, NYTimes columnist, October 2008


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August 2013:

Broad Terror Alret Mystifies Experts, 'It's Crazy Pants' One Says.

"...If ordinary Americans are confused, they’re in good company. Analysts who’ve devoted their careers to studying al Qaida and U.S. counterterrorism strategy can’t really make sense of it, either. There’s general agreement that the diffuse list of potential targets has to do with either specific connections authorities are tracking, or places that might lack the defenses to ward off an attack. Beyond that, however, even the experts are stumped.

"Take this sampling of reactions from prominent al Qaida observers:

“'It’s crazy pants – you can quote me,' said Will McCants, a former State Department adviser on counterterrorism who this month joins the Brookings Saban Center as the director of its project on U.S. relations with the Islamic world.

“'We just showed our hand, so now they’re obviously going to change their position on when and where to attack', said Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst who was part of the team that hunted Osama bin Laden for years.

“It’s not completely random, but most people are, like, ‘Whaaat?’ ” said Aaron Zelin, who researches militants for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and blogs about them at Jihadology.net

“I’m not going to argue that it’s not willy-nilly, but it’s hard for me to come down too critical because I simply don’t know their reasoning,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism specialist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington research institute..."

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/06/198681/broad-us-terror-alert-mystifies.html#storylink=cpy

Continue reading...

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More:

Obama’s ‘Crazy Pants’ Embassy Closures Sparked by Super Thug Conference Call

The crucial intercept that prompted the U.S. government to close embassies in 22 countries was a conference call between al Qaeda’s senior leaders and representatives of several of the group’s affiliates throughout the region.

[...] Lake points out that al Qaeda thought its conference calls were secure, but now that the Obama administration is disclosing that we’re listening in on them, the terrorists will stop using them. Ditto the courier that we’ve disclosed intercepting. So we’ve jeopardized a potential gold mine of intelligence.

The conference calls do point toward central al Qaeda control and management of its far-flung affiliates, which is something the Obama administration has insisted is not happening after Osama bin Laden’s demise. They’ll probably go on insisting that it’s not happening. They’ll insist that “core al Qaeda” is still on the run, despite the fact that its conference call caused the Obama administration to go on the run from embassies across about a quarter of the planet, more or less.

Long-time intel hands are looking at the closures and evacuations ordered departures as a “crazy pants” move. Disclosing the fact that the US had tapped into al Qaeda’s “Legion of Doom” conference call is just as crazy pants.

--PJ Tatler

 

 

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The Washington Post Goes The Way Of The Detroit News & Free Press.

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Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium
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Yesterday's fire sale of The Washington Post is Reason No. 2,341,649 Americans need to wake up and face what happened to Detroit. It's a simple lesson in economics - you can't sell newspapers if people can't read them.


DETROIT 2011:

According to estimates by The National Institute for Literacy, roughly 47 percent of adults in Detroit, Michigan -- 200,000 total -- are "functionally illiterate," meaning they have trouble with reading, speaking, writing and computational skills. Even more surprisingly, the Detroit Regional Workforce finds half of that illiterate population has obtained a high school degree.


DETROIT 2011:

Faced with years of financial losses, dwindling circulation and advertising revenue declines that forced job and benefit cuts — along with slashing home delivery most days — Detroit's two major newspapers are now funding a contest to help stop the bleeding.

The Detroit Media Partnership LP, which manages the joint business functions of The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, today unveiled IdeaQuest 2011, which offers $10,000 in prize money for the two best ideas that help the newspapers "better serve the community and help grow their audiences." [...]

Despite cost-cutting measures such as limiting home delivery and reducing staff size and benefits, the partnership has acknowledged that it continues to lose money, but hasn't been specific on how much. Losses are believed to remain in the millions annually.

Average daily average circulation at The Free Press fell 9 percent to 245,326 from 269,729 in Schaumburg, Ill.-based Audit Bureau of Circulations' six-month period of measurement ending in October. The newspaper's Sunday edition dropped nearly 12 percent to 494,013 from 560,188 in that time.

The Detroit News' daily average circulation dropped 12.4 percent to 146,962 from 167,849. That includes its home-delivered Thursday and Friday print editions and its newsstand editions Monday-Wednesday and Saturday. It doesn't have a Sunday edition.

[The combined weekday circulation is now 437,569]

The combined weekday circulation of the newspapers was more than 900,000 before the 1995 strike and boycott by unionized employees -- a labor dispute that lasted more than five years and cost the publications more than $200 million.


WASHINGTON DC 2007:

About one-third of the people living in the national's capital are functionally illiterate, compared with about one-fifth nationally, according to a report on the District of Columbia.


WASHINGTON DC2012:

Washington, D.C. had the worst high school graduation rate in the country in 2011 — down roughly 20 percent from just two years ago. The drop appears partially the result of a new (and better) accounting system that tracks actual students rather than allowing a ridiculous calculation method that tended to inflate numbers. Nevada had the lowest graduation rate of any state (62 percent) and D.C. did worse than Native American reservations (61 percent).


WASHINGTON DC 2012:

At first glance, The Washington Post’s numbers reported Tuesday morning in the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ March report look grisly: Of all the Top 25 papers in the report, The Post has the steepest drop in average Sunday circulation, down 15.66 percent. That reflects a loss of 133,560 readers in a year. Average daily numbers are down 43,206 copies for a 7.84 percent drop.


WASHINGTON DC 2013:

The announcement that the Washington Post Co. sold its flagship paper to billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million, surprised everyone. And in an era when the Washington Post sells Newsweek for $1 and the New York Times sells the Boston Globe at a 93% loss; $250 million might sound like a lot of money. But buried in the Post's own reporting of its sale is the news that ten years ago the Post would have sold for $2 billion with a -B-.

That represents an 87% loss in just a decade. You figure in ten years of inflation and we are probably over 90%.


UNITED STATES 2012:

-  54% of African Americans graduate from high school, compared to more than three quarters of white and Asian students.

-  On average, African American twelfth-grade students read at the same level as white eighth-grade students.

-  The twelfth-grade reading scores of African American males were significantly lower than those for men and women across every other racial and ethnic group.

-  Only 14% of African American eighth graders score at or above the proficient level. These results reveal that millions of young people cannot understand or evaluate text, provide relevant details, or support inferences about the written documents they read.

-  The majority of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails are people of color, people with mental health issues and drug addiction, people with low levels of educational attainment, and people with a history of unemployment or underemployment.

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...We have been successful too because Americans have known that one's status of birth is not a permanent condition. Americans have believed that you might not be able to control your circumstances but you can control your response to your circumstances.

And your greatest ally in controlling your response to your circumstances has been a quality education. But today, today, when I can look at your zip code and I can tell whether you're going to get a good education, can I honestly say it does not matter where you came from, it matters where you are going? The crisis in K-12 education is a threat to the very fabric of who we are.

[...]

And we need to give parents greater choice, particularly, particularly poor parents whose kids, very often minorities, are trapped in failing neighborhood schools.

This is the civil rights issue of our day.


-- Condolezza Rice, August 29, 2012 Republican National Convention


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Obama Just Gave Hollywood The Bat To The Head.

 

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Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium

 

 

"'It's a morass of regulations and requirements, and everyone's trying to figure out what their exposure is," says Eric Belcher, president and CEO of Cast & Crew Entertainment Services. Adds Mark Goldstein, CEO of Entertainment Partners, which has held 16 seminars to help studios understand ACA: 'It's going to be a very big deal.'

Determining the exact nature of the new laws has been difficult, given that many ACA terms have yet to be worked out. Hollywood productions, for instance, might find it irksome simply trying to categorize employees as full- or part-time, seasonal or variable, and it's important that they get the classifications right lest they face hefty fines. 'ACA is thousands of pages, and it wasn't written with this industry in mind,' says Belcher." [...]

One of the unintended consequences, say some industry insiders, is that it could lead to productions running to foreign countries, given that ACA doesn't apply to U.S. citizens working abroad. Some also say the number of production days in the U.S. are likely to be cut due to ACA because there's a 90-day waiting period before productions must either pay a penalty or offer health insurance to full-time workers. [...]

"Do I expect the cost of doing business to go up? Yes, I do," says Mike Rose, CEO of Ease Entertainment Services.

- Hollywood Reporter, July 19, 2013

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June 2013:

Meet the New George Soros

The aging, mostly hands-off Soros is still the right's biggest bogeyman. Conservatives should pay more attention to Jeffrey Katzenberg.

On the night of March 23, 2011, four political operatives arrived for dinner at Scarpetta, a posh Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills' Golden Triangle. They wore DC power suits but ditched the ties—their one concession to LA fashion. For a bunch of hacks more at ease on Capitol Hill than Rodeo Drive, they blended in well enough. Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney had spent their adult lives climbing the rungs of Democratic politics, including a stint together in the Obama White House; pundit and consultant Paul Begala had advised Bill Clinton in the 1990s; Geoff Garin had been a top pollster for some 30 years. A hostess led them through the Mediterranean-themed dining room, all dark woods and tan walls lit by golden glass lamps, then up a flight of stairs to a private room. Awaiting them was the man they hoped would be their bell cow.

That was the term Begala, the Texas-raised funnyman of the group, used to describe a megadonor who leads his rich friends to bankroll a candidate or cause. Their dining companion, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation, raised millions for the Obama campaign in 2008, and the fate of their project—and, potentially, the presidency—hinged on convincing him to raise millions more in 2012. They wanted him to take the lead in funding a new super-PAC to support president Obama's reelection.

Burton, Sweeney, Begala, and Garin didn't like super-PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited amounts. Nor did the president, who had ripped them as a "threat to our democracy." Nor did Katzenberg, who felt that the 2010 Citizens United decision was a huge blunder. And yet here he was, listening to a pitch that Begala had rehearsed on the flight to LA. It was hard to think of a presidential election, Begala said, with more at stake. With the economy on the mend, health care reform on the books but not yet enacted, the wars in the Middle East winding down…

"I know all that," Katzenberg interrupted. "Tell me your business plan." At 60, Katzenberg, who stands 5-foot-5, cut a lean and fit figure ("On background, he's incredibly buff," says a friend of his), his clean-shaven face taut and tanned, with a disarming, horsey smile. What remained of his graying hair was trimmed to a fine stubble. He wore a V-neck sweater over a T-shirt, slacks, and sneakers—his Hollywood CEO uniform—and he grilled the four operatives with the same intensity he would a potential business partner. What was their fundraising target, and how would they reach it? How would they spend their money—on broadcast, cable TV, online? Who would be their research director? Their ad maker? How much would they pay themselves? What was their strategy?

The answer to that last one was simple: Destroy Mitt Romney. The Republican primaries were nearly a year away, but the four politicos believed that Romney would end up the nominee, so they would focus on him and ignore the rest of the field. They would attack him using the same approach employed by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and other groups in 2004. "Just as the conservatives took away Kerry's war record," Begala said, "we're going to take away Romney's strongest asset: his business record."

Katzenberg, who is worth an estimated $800 million, liked what he heard. By the end of dinner, he pledged $2 million to the super-PAC, later named Priorities USA Action, and promised more money down the road—no strings attached. He also offered to tap his network of wealthy friends and colleagues. And he picked up the tab.

Begala had found his bell cow. "It was the most important meeting of the entire campaign," he told me recently. "If you tell people, 'Jeffrey's behind this, Jeffrey's helping us,' man, that really helps."

Katzenberg's investment paid off big for Obama. Priorities zeroed in on Romney's time at the private equity firm Bain Capital, cutting a series of ads depicting him as a real-life C. Montgomery Burns. In one, a union worker recounted how he was ordered to build a stage at his Indiana paper factory; days later, Bain executives strode across it to announce they were closing the plant and firing everyone. It was rated the most effective ad of the campaign; as Republican message maker Frank Luntz would say, "That ad alone has killed Mitt Romney in Ohio."

Katzenberg gave $3.15 million to Democratic super-PACs during the 2012 cycle—almost 30 times more than his total reported giving in 2008. (There's no telling how much he might have given to other groups that don't disclose their donors.) He steered millions more to Priorities—his friend and business partner, Steven Spielberg, gave $1 million, for instance. He hosted numerous fundraisers for Obama and raised more for the president than anyone else in California. All told, Katzenberg gave or raised more than $30 million to reelect Obama, helping Hollywood make up for Wall Street's plummeting financial support of the president. And that's not counting the funds he marshaled for other Democrats, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and California Gov. Jerry Brown.

"It's hard to think of any other donor going back to the [1990s] or even further who did what he did," says Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation. "He's like soy sauce in Chinese food: He's everywhere."...

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-- Mother Jones

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Like Hollywood, Democrats in Congress were also freaked out that their (personal) costs were going up. Unlike Hollywood, they didn't merely support Obama and his law plus finance his re-ecletion, they just passed Obamacare into law. The Democrats on the Hill demanded an opt-out. They got one, but not legislatively. Obama simply ordered the Department of Personnel Management to write one with the American taxpayers picking up 75% of the tab. Average salary on the Hill; over $72K. Average American taxpayer salary;$46,326.

Hill gets Obamacare fix

POLITICO

Lawmakers and staff can breathe easy — their health care tab is not going to soar next year.

The Office of Personnel Management, under heavy pressure from Capitol Hill, will issue a ruling that says the government can continue to make a contribution to the health care premiums of members of Congress and their aides, according to several Hill sources.

A White House official confirmed the deal and said the proposed regulations will be issued next week.

Just Wednesday, POLITICO reported that President Barack Obama told Democratic senators that he was personally involved in finding a solution.

The problem was rooted in the original text of the Affordable Care Act. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) inserted a provision which said members of Congress and their aides must be covered by plans “created” by the law or “offered through an exchange.” Until now, OPM had not said if the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program could contribute premium payments toward plans on the exchange. If payments stopped, lawmakers and aides would have faced thousands of dollars in additional premium payments each year. Under the old system, the government contributed nearly 75 percent of premium payments.

Obama’s involvement in solving this impasse was unusual, to say the least. But it came after serious griping from both sides of the aisle about the potential of a “brain drain.” The fear, as told by sources in both parties, was that aides would head for more lucrative jobs, spooked by the potential for spiking health premiums.

There was a certain sense of urgency, too, since enrollment in the exchanges was set to begin Oct. 1. There were discussions of a legislative fix — attaching language to a must-pass bill to fix the problem. But that would’ve been too difficult in today’s paralyzed Washington.

White House officials acknowledged that a fix was needed. But they knew that once they dealt with it through a regulation, some Republicans would use it against them – even though most of their party was privately obsessing over it.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), in a statement Thursday night, touted the law’s benefits and Democrats’ efforts to educate consumers.

“Members of Congress and their staffs must enroll in health marketplaces as the Affordable Care Act requires,” she wrote. “As we continue our work to ensure the smooth implementation of this law and look forward to the start of enrollment on October 1st, we will continue our efforts this August to educate consumers on the law’s provisions and tout the critical benefits already in place for millions of Americans.”

Anger was already evident as well. Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) tweeted a link to POLITICO’s story Thursday night, with the comment: “Outrageous exemption for Congress.”

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Outrageous? No, audacious as well as par for the course. Ah well, Obamacare's overreach is only within our borders. So Hollywood can move all of its production to China to avoid the new law :


Speaking at a Fortune Global Forum panel, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg said he could ‘confirm’ that the animation studio – which has already established the Shanghai-based Oriental DreamWorks company with an assortment of powerful state-backed Chinese companies – will be working with Wanda … Wang Jianlin, the real-estate mogul whose company is the largest cinema operator in China and also the owner of North American cinema chain AMC, said Wanda has already ‘reached an initial co-operation agreement’ with DreamWorks Animation … The two CEOs did not reveal further details of the planned partnership.

-Hollywood Reporter June 2013


Ah well, as DeNiro playing Al Capone said, "Life goes on." It may be curtains for California's economy which has been on life support for some time now.

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