Category Archives: Mario Piperni

Inauguration Day – Mario Piperni

Barack Obama - January 21 2013   :    http://mariopiperni.com/

Mario Piperni’s posts and graphics never cease to amaze me…

Mario Piperni

Random stuff…

If you lived through Republican’s disgusting display of politics over the last four years, I’m sure you’ll appreciate this message to the right from Van Jones.

Van Jones@VanJones68

To those who wasted 4 years trying to keep this day from happening – you may as well have been trying to stop the dawn.#HopeWins#tcot#p2  21 Jan 13


Despite Mitch McConnell’s best effort, the one term presidency of Barack Obama was not to be.

I thought the President’s address was as progressive a speech as you could have hoped for.  My highlights…

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult.  But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it.”

and…

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall … Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”

Climate change and gay rights mentioned in a presidential inaugural address. This ain’t your granddad’s president.

John Liming shares his Inauguration Day thoughts:

I was proud to be an American when Truman was president and I have been proud to be an American under every president since up to and including President Barack Obama!

I am not proud to be an American because of who is in the white house or who is running their mouths in Washington - – I am proud to be an American because America is worth being proud about!

Some of my relatives died in the Revolution and some in some of the other wars.

I served in uniform (honorably) for seven years and a few months myself.

I gotta say, “Even if there was a president in the white house that I didn’t particularly like, when that trio of helicopters with the president inside of Marine 1 went over, I couldn’t help but shed tears of pride and joy and snap to attention and salute.

Read the rest of John’s post here.

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The Right’s Irrational Hate

Republican Warning Sign - http://mariopiperni.com/

Republican Warning Sign – http://mariopiperni.com/

Mario Piperni

Now that Republicans have been soundly beaten at the federal and state levels, and President Obama has won a decisive second term, will the right allow compromise and reason to enter the political process?

Don’t count on it.

They’re filled with pure irrational hate. There’s no reasoning with them. There’s no…hell, let me just quote Kyle Reese from the film Terminator.

Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

Same thing.

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Mittster Tales

 

Mitt Romney / Paul Ryan - The 2 Stooges   :    http://mariopiperni.com/

Mario Piperni

Here’s a lovely little chat George Stephanopoulos had with Mitt Romney.

Romney: “No one can say my plan is going to raise taxes on middle-income people, because principle number one is (to) keep the burden down on middle-income taxpayers.”

Stephanopoulos: “Is $100,000 middle income?”

Romney: “No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less.”

Median household income in the U.S. is just over $50,000. I’m starting to believe the rumors that Romney really is an idiot…albeit, a rich idiot.

___

And this…

With the first presidential debate less than three weeks away, Mitt Romney is spending lots of time getting ready behind closed doors.  In his first comments on that debate prep, he told me that Sen. Rob Portman is a tough stand-in for a president who basically lies in debates.

“I think the challenge that I’ll have in the debate is that the president tends to, how shall I say it, to say things that aren’t true,” Romney said. “I’ve looked at prior debates.  And in that kind of case, it’s difficult to say, ‘Well, am I going to spend my time correcting things that aren’t quite accurate? Or am I going to spend my time talking about the things I want to talk about?”

Lovely. A serial liar is accusing his opponent of lying. This is a clear case of Romney protecting himself in advance from the mauling he’s going to take in those debates. He knows he won’t be able to defend his positions on tax cuts, health care, Medicare, immigration and foreign policy, so he’s pulling a Palin. He’ll only answer the questions he wishes to answer and even then, he’ll follow a carefully scripted set of talking points.

This guy’s evasiveness could not be more transparent. I hope he doesn’t think he’s fooling anyone.

___

We discovered yesterday that Mitt Romney asked for 10 years of tax returns from Paul Ryan but still refuses to make public more than two years of his own returns. The Obama campaign came out with this ad yesterday.

Despite the pounding Romney has taken on this issue from all sides, it’s become evident that he won’t be releasing any more returns…which just reinforces the belief that there must be something terribly ugly in those returns. Romney’s making a serious bid for Worst Presidential Candidate Ever honors.

Related articles

 

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Shaking Up CNN

Mario Piperni channeled my thoughts on CNN’s programming and the media in general.

More on CNN’s  problems can be found here.

Mario Piperni

CNN doesn’t need a shake up in their leadership, they need a shake up in their programming.

I’m tired of all the partisan hacks — including John King and Wolf Blizter. About the only show CNN has that’s worth watching is GPS. State of the Union is better with Candy than John King, but it’s just another forum for the political hacks to spread more BS.

Here’s some free advice CNN.

How about educating the public on the facts contained in the bills and the consequences of them by the non-partisan wonks who can report facts not lies and spin.  Instead of having the politicos smearing them with their ideological spin, how about interviewing those who study the bills for their impact from, say, the Congressional Research Service — you know those really smart folks who write up the reports that apparently many members of Congress don’t bother to read?  Or someone from the Government Accountability Office, or some non-partisan think tanks that actually understand the impact a bill will have?

Let’s go behind the scenes and expose the back room deals and fund-raising meet-ups with the lobbyists!  Let’s raise some questions about the abuse of power, whether it be by Democrats or Republicans.

If we want D.C. to be cleaned up, then we need the media to get out of bed with the political class and start doing some real reporting. Who cares what the pols have to say — when it’s spin, CYA, or out and out lies? I’m tired of it — I love Rachel cause she goes after all of them with real facts and she takes on Democrats and Republicans.  She’d spend more time on the Democrats, if the GOP didn’t give her so much fodder.

If you want me to tune back in, ditch the pundits, commentators, politicos and start dishing out the truth and nothing but the unvarnished truth. We’ll never straighten out the mess we’re in, until we can agree on the facts and demand solutions.

Example — instead of all the spin about the health care bill, they should have brought in people who study the problems. There was a great white paper The Cost Of Lack Of Health Insurance by the College of American Physicians and by  who wrote The Cost Conundrum in the New Yorker. No one ever asked them a single question to explain the problems and discuss solutions.

The media is pathetic. Cronkite would cry.  And to my shortened post on this over at HuffPo, one response was “Murrow would puke.”

The American public is craving honesty in D.C. — how about setting a new trend CNN?

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Right-Wing Insanity Illustrated – Slideshow No. 31

Carmen is one of my favorite opera’s so Mario Piperni’s insertion of the famous operatic aria is a bonus.

However, the real story is Piperni’s political illustrations, which I have used a lot on this blog.   He has the GOP pegged to a tee and his illustrations are spot on.  I love this guy’s work.  His commentaries are really good as well.

Mario Piperni

What do you get when you combine Nana Mouskouri, one of my favorite operas (Bizet’s Carmen) and a few of my latest illustrations?

This, of course.

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Newsweek Asks Americans “How Dumb Are We?”

The dumbing down of America…real or imagined?

Mario Piperni

How bad are Americans when it comes to knowledge of their own history and system of government?  Well, going by a recent Newsweek poll, it’s not pretty.

They’re the sort of scores that drive high-school history teachers to drink. When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.

And when it comes to international affairs, Americans fall far behind Europeans in depth of knowledge. No surprise there.  Unlike real news organizations like the BBC and CBC, American television news rarely reports on anything of international significance unless a 1000 or more locals (or at least 2 Americans) have died in an act of nature or unless the U.S. is waging a war in that country.  Seriously, if one got all their news from Fox, they’d be hard-pressed to name a country in the world other than the United States, Iraq and Afghanistan.  OK, and Japan.  The same can be said of MSNBC, CNN and the major networks. 

In the 17th century, Galileo did his best to enlighten the masses by informing them that Earth was not the center of the universe. If he was around today, he’d be trying to tell Americans that the U.S. is not the center of the universe. I have no doubt that he’d be treated no differently now for his heretic beliefs than he was by the Catholic Church 400 years ago. Getting the truth out is always a difficult matter when up against a lifetime of ignorance.    Continue reading…

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For 200 Jeopardy Points: Who Is Watson, aka DeepQA?

Ok, my geek side loves this stuff and I wanted to share. 

In my opinion, Mario Piperni’s site has some of the greatest graphics and some of the best articles on the internet.

Mario Piperni

The machines are coming.  Beware or rejoice.

Former Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter lost by $1000 to IBM’s Watson DeepQA-based supercomputer during a three-category Jeopardy practice round Thursday night. The trio will officially square off for a $1 million grand prize during two Jeopardy matches that will air February 14-16.

Watson is IBM’s latest supercomputer based on the company’s DeepQA software, which combines natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval. The device is packing 15 terabytes RAM, about 2,880 processor cores that can perform 80 trillion operations a second, and is the size of 10 refrigerators according to Wired. Watson will have to rely on its self-contained databases for answers, and won’t be hooked up to the Internet during the Jeopardy challenge.

Watson has now won 65% of its matches against Jeopardy grand champions.  Here’s what Thursday’s match looked like.

Good stuff.  One could imagine the many applications that a smart natural language processing machine of this order could be used for.  Financing, marketing and medical diagnostic analysis are some.  For the latter, imagine a doctor inputting a patient’s symptoms and having a computer giving her a diagnosis based on the zillion medical texts scanned into its database.  It would be like having a second opinion from Dr. House, minus the attitude.

Here’s a link to more info on the inner workings of Watson, it’s algorithms and the future it holds for all of us.

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Mario Piperni: Did Someone Say Lame Duck?

Mario Piperni

Underestimating this President might be the most serious mistake one can make.  After getting a tax bill through Congress (imperfect as it was), [yesterday] he signed a bill repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – a move which a mere two weeks ago seemed near impossible. 

It appears that this not-so-lame lame duck session will end up being one of the most productive in history.  A measure funding health care for 9/11 first responders as well as ratification of START are set to pass Congress before Christmas.  Good stuff.

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Mario Piperni: Deficits, Frauds and Peacocks

Mario Piperni’s graphic artistry is simply amazing!  On his blog he writes:

Ezra Klein makes the distinction between deficit hawks and deficit frauds.

The deficit frauds are the folks who use deficits for short-term political gain: This year, they’ve mainly been Republicans who opposed unemployment benefits because they’d add $56 billion to the deficit but demanded tax cuts that would add $4 trillion to the deficit. And they’ve been empowered not by Peterson’s money or even the climate in Washington, but by the fact that people get very anxious about the deficit when the economy slows, as it’s a number that they think helps explain the economic problems even as it mainly tracks them, and because a misplaced analogy to the European debt crises has made our deficit look scarier than it actually is.

Matt Yglesias prefers referring to deficit frauds as deficit peacocks.  That works for me.

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Palindromes, Anagrams and Teapublicans

Mario Piperni never disappoints.  His graphic art and sense of humor in his posts are unique and refreshing.  In this case he reproduces a very funny comment from one of his readers…

Mario Piperni

A reader sent me this.  I had to laugh.

Did you know that the words “race car” spelled backwards still spells “race car”?

Did you know that “eat” is the only word that, if you take the first
letter and move it to the last, spells its own past tense?

Did you know that if you rearrange the letters in “Tea Party
Republicans” and add just a few more letters, it spells: “Shut the
fuck up you selfish, free-loading, progress-blocking,
benefit-grabbing, resource-sucking, violent hypocrites, and recognize
that you nearly wrecked the country under Bush and deal with the fact
that our president is black, so try and get over it.”

Isn’t that interesting?

Yes it is…and too funny.

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