The Hollywood Liberal

Blizzard Cuts Power to 3 Million
More than 3.2 million homes and businesses have lost power on the East Coast from an early snowstorm. The storm cut off 800,000 in Connecticut, 670,000 in Massachusetts, 600,000 in New Jersey, 390,000 in Pennsylvania, 285,000 in New Hampshire, 11,000 in Maryland and 6,000 in Vermont.

Late, Late Night FDL: Legend of Wooley Swamp
Charlie Daniels Band – Legend Of Wooley Swamp

Charlie Daniels Band – Legend Of Wooley Swamp

What’s on your mind tonite…?

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The 1% is all Mustache
Failed Shopping Center Tycoon by proxy and international cab-driver whisperer Tom Friedman has officially attempted to join the 99%.

Failed Shopping Center Tycoon by proxy and international cab-driver whisperer Tom Friedman has officially attempted to join the 99%.

Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. One consumer group using information from Opensecrets.org calculates that the financial services industry, including real estate, spent $2.3 billion on federal campaign contributions from 1990 to 2010, which was more than the health care, energy, defense, agriculture and transportation industries combined. Why are there 61 members on the House Committee on Financial Services? So many congressmen want to be in a position to sell votes to Wall Street.

Better late than never, but Tommy and company have spent an entire generation — the entirety of their professional lives — deliberately ignoring this reality while they profited from it.

But now that he’s written a column his conscience is clear.

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3 Signs Anti-Wall Streeters Are Succeeding
We may be reaching an inflection point, the moment when the terms of the political argument change decisively.

By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

We may be reaching an inflection point, the moment when the terms of the political argument change decisively.

Related Entries

• October 30, 2011 3 Signs Anti-Wall Streeters Are Succeeding
• October 30, 2011 How Economic Inequality Harms Societies

Robert Teitelman: Occupy Wall Street on the Eve of Halloween
Some of the charm of OWS comes from the belief of the young and the idealistic that they have somehow discovered something new; in fact, with the exception of their use of social media, it’s very, very old.

Libya’s Prime Minister Confirms Presence Of Chemical Weapons
TRIPOLI, Libya — Libya’s interim prime minister on Sunday confirmed the presence of chemical weapons in Libya and said foreign inspectors would arrive later this…

Clinton Credited With Key Role In Libya Successes
TRIPOLI, Libya â?? At 5:45 p.m. on March 19, three hours before the official start of the air campaign over Libya, four French Rafale jet…

Pair Of Women Accused Herman Cain Of Inappropriate Behavior
During Herman Cainâ??s tenure as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, at least two female employees complained to colleagues and senior…

WATCH: Fox News Host Hammers Cain Spokesman Over Harassment Story
Herman Cain’s beleaguered spokesman had a tense conversation on Sunday with Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera about the allegations of sexual harassment surrounding the GOP frontrunner….

Former OK Judge Loses Pension Over Penis Pump
A former judge in Oklahoma has lost his pension after he was convicted of indecent exposure for using a penis pump under his robes during trials.

John Edwards Defense Strategy: But What About John Ensign?
Lawyers for former Democratic presidential candidate and Senator John Edwards have a question for the Justice Department officials prosecuting his case: what ever happened with that whole John Ensign thing?

NYT: Top NY Foreclosure Law Firm Threw Homeless-Themed Halloween Party
A New York Times opinion column from Joe Nocera out on Saturday tells the story of last year’s Halloween Party at the law firm of Steven J. Baum, a law practice outside Buffalo that the column refers to as a “foreclosure mill.” The firm thought that they would celebrate last Halloween by throwing a homeless-themed party, complete with the staff dressing costumes that made them look destitute and signs describing the various faux problems their characters had. One sign seems to read “Will Worke For Food,” and photos show part of an office named “Baum Estates.”

Rick Perry Tries Praying to a New God

Election Laws Tighten in GOP-Run States
Republicans in states like Florida and Ohio are making it more challenging to vote or to register others, the Los Angeles Times reports.

It’s part of a national trend, “as election law has become a fierce partisan battleground. In states where Republicans have taken majority control, they have tightened rules for registering new voters, reduced the time for casting ballots and required voters to show photo identification at the polls. The new restrictions were usually adopted on party-line votes and signed by Republican governors.”

“Democrats have denounced new restrictions as ‘voter suppression’ laws intended to deter voting by students, the elderly, the poor, the disabled and minorities.”

Exchange of the Day
“Have you ever been accused, sir, in your life of harassment by a woman?”

“He breathed audibly, glared at the reporter and stayed silent for several seconds. After the question was repeated three times, he responded by asking the reporter, ‘Have you ever been accused of sexual harassment?'”

— Herman Cain, responding to a question by Politico, in a story that broke last night.

4 Simple Steps for Taking Your Money Out of the Vampire Banks
Bank Transfer Day (Nov. 5) is just around the corner. Time to assert your economic citizenship and end the dysfunctional relationship with your blood-sucking bank.

“I Wanted Something Productive to Do": Creating Space for Books and Learning at Occupy Wall Street
Education is at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement, from the student loan bubble to the library and teach-ins at the center of the park.

Post Revolutionary Egypt’s First Woman Candidate Begins Her Presidential Campaign
When Egypt holds presidential elections next year, Buthaina Kamel is set to become the first woman in the country’s modern history to run for the highest office.

The War on Halloween: A Mixed Message from Fox News and the Right
Conservatives can’t make up their mind: is Halloween Satanic or an all-American tradition being sabotaged by immigrants?

Were U.S. Elections Sold to Corporations So Clarence Thomas Could Reward His Friends?
The ethical problems posed by Thomas’ involvement in the Citizens United case hardly mark the end of questionable behavior by Thomas and his wife, Ginni.

Aid To Israel: Linkage, Linkage, Linkage
In a column this week in the Washington Post, Prize-winning journalist Walter Pincus suggested that it’s time to re-examine U.S. aid to Israel. Israel, with a population of seven million, receives $3 billion a year from the United States while…

When ‘Diversity’ at Elite Schools Deepens Inequality
The recent death of New York University law professor Derrick Bell, a black champion of “critical race theory,” and a recent report that the Supreme Court may take up a new challenge to affirmative action at the University of Texas…

Let Children Vote
Via Jonathan Bernstein, Sally Kohn writes about a campaign in Lowell, Massachusetts to let seventeen year-olds vote in local elections. More power to them, but I say let any American citizen vote in any American election he or she wants to. Objections to this usually take the form of imagining a highly disciplined party of […]

Via Jonathan Bernstein, Sally Kohn writes about a campaign in Lowell, Massachusetts to let seventeen year-olds vote in local elections. More power to them, but I say let any American citizen vote in any American election he or she wants to.

Objections to this usually take the form of imagining a highly disciplined party of seven year-olds reliably delivering bloc votes to whichever candidate credibly promises endless kindergarten. If you think for five minutes about the practical problems of political organizing, and then for five minutes more about the practical problems of getting kids to do anything I think you’ll see quickly that this is a misguided worry. Realistically, voter turnout in the United States is not particularly high to begin with. Older teens and twentysomethings are already disproportionately unlikely to vote. If we extended the vote to more children, my guess is that relatively few of them would exercise it. But those who did would come from an unusually dedicated and informed sub-set of American teenagers. Meanwhile, if seven year-olds somehow do manage to organize themselves into an effective political lobby, I say more power to them. R

VHS Hipsters
This is appalling: Mr. Husney, the director of the independent distribution company Drafthouse Films, is part of a small but devoted subset of fans, distributors and programmers who thrill to low-budget horror from the movies of the 1980s: the kind in which brains were made of Jell-O and the cast was paid in wine coolers. […]

This is appalling:

Mr. Husney, the director of the independent distribution company Drafthouse Films, is part of a small but devoted subset of fans, distributors and programmers who thrill to low-budget horror from the movies of the 1980s: the kind in which brains were made of Jell-O and the cast was paid in wine coolers. These fans aren’t watching movies on a tablet or DVD. Instead they’re blowing the dust off their VCRs and sliding in movies that have been newly released on the behemoths known as VHS tapes. […]

“I enjoy the aesthetics of VHS,” said Josh Schafer, the founder of the horror magazine Lunchmeat. “I like putting it in the VCR and rewinding and pausing and fast-forwarding. It’s an experience nobody gets to do anymore because they consider VHS dead.”

It would be a pitch-perfect April Fool’s Day article, though.