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By Mark D, July 12, 2012 1:22 am

I was thinking about this the other day, how much Obama has gotten done despite the Republicans in Congress. It sort of amazes me the difference between the Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives, especially when you look at the last 5-10 years. Even when the Dems took control of the House, they still mostly passed W’s agenda. Sure they would put up a bit of a fight, but eventually the conservative leaning Democrats would jump ship and vote with the Republicans.

Then you have one of the major reasons the Democrats took control of the House way back when, the never ending War in Iraq.  Despite the war being hugely unpopular and Bush’s approval rating dropping through the floor, what did the Dems do? They only passed Non-Binding Resolutions, which W could feel free (and did) to ignore. Then they wonder why people were upset with them a few years later, when even with Bush out of office they still couldn’t just end the war.  For that matter the “War” in Afghanistan is still an ongoing issue.

But when the Republicans got control of the House? Forget about it. Especially following the “tea party” astroturf movement for the 2010 elections. Obama could try passing a bill that would stop kittens from being fed to sharks, and the GOP would squash it and claim that he was a socialist trying to upset the natural order of life. Sharks eat Kittens and that’s just how it is, so don’t change anything. The amazing thing is that the more the Republicans align themselves with corporate interests and against the little man, the more the little man cheers for them.

Despite this, Obama has obviously helped the economy somewhat, and given the country a type of universal health care. Sure it might not be the best health care plan, but at least it’s something. In the long run it’s going to save everyone money because people won’t be paying for the uninsured who currently have to use the emergency room for everything.

Even more amazing to me is that the platform the Republicans stand on is basically a repeat of the W years. We need to give big tax breaks to the people at the top because wealth trickles down. Really? I guess that’s why as the amount of wealth held by the 1% has absolutely exploded, cause they love sharing their wealth so much. I guess that’s why Reagan and Bush both caused Recessions, and Clinton’s years were actually a boom.

That and it also helped that Clinton actually cut the insane amount of military spending. Why do we need to spend 700+ Billion dollars on the military when China is only spending 100ish Billion and they are our closest competition? Maybe if we stop giving money hand over fist to Lockheed Martin we could spend money on social programs. Especially since if you give more money to more people, they tend to actually spend it on regular everyday things. Instead of gold plated tiger cages.

It sort of amazes me that somehow Romney has pulled to a dead heat with Obama in the polls. But I guess it shouldn’t be surprising given the amount of money that has been pouring into the Romney campaign. In comparison to Obama who raised a lot of funds across a very wide swath of people, Romney is getting consistent large donations from a small circle of the ultra rich. They already helped change the Wisconsin recall election (the first time someone retained their position in a statewide recall) by pouring out of state money into the campaign. In the end the move to recall Scott was outspent 7 to 1.

Right now there are hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on anti-healthcare propaganda. It’s no wonder that people are up in arms against it. That’s without considering how much the put gets hammered home by talking heads on the TV.

The amazing thing is to me, despite all this, Obama has gotten a good number of his campaign promises done.  Going by the Politifact Obama-Meter he has kept his promise on 188 items (for 37%) and compromised on another 65 meaning nearly 250 pieces of legislation. But I guess he’s a lazy good for nothing who is scheming with islamo-facist-socialists on the best way to destroy the country.

(Note, I wrote this while mostly sleep deprived over the course of a few days. I might be a bit scatterbrained. Also I might have wrote this same article once before, I can’t remember.

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By Mark D, July 27, 2011 9:25 am

So two or so weeks ago the amazing people at Red Letter Media wondered (in a facebook post) what would happened if everyone went to the Official Happy Madison youtube and happened to vote down the trailer for the upcoming Sandler movie “Jack And Jill”. The movie looks like one of the biggest Sandler stinkers in a while. In the long tradition of SNL comics, he now believes he is the God of Comedy and needs multiple roles in his own movie. In this he plays his twin sister. Oh, and Al Pacino falls for the female Sandler.

At the time RLM mentioned it, the trailer had a few hundred views, much like many other videos on the Happy Madison channel. Now it has over 100K views and is by far the most popular video on the HM Youtube account. While the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative in the comments and as part of the Like/Dislike option, you can never discount the value of publicity. Suddenly there are dozens if not hundreds of videos of idiots either “reviewing” the trailer, posting their thoughts on the trailer, or just posting reaction thoughts. There are also dozens of other uploads of the trailer around youtube now, some of them garnering over a 1,000 views themselves.

It’s not just RLM and a small handful of people, a quick look at google trends for Jack and Jill shows a jump at the beginning of July to almost double the normal search rate. What this means is that every jackass who jumped on the trend of bashing Jack and Jill will now try to outdo one another to post their reviews/thoughts/vlogs about the actual movie. So basically all RLM (for as much as I like them) has managed to do is get this shitty movie that might have disappeared in the X-Mas season more publicity.

But I’m not blaming RLM. How were they supposed to know that a bunch of idiots would jump on their bandwagon and drive it towards a wall.  In the end though all these bandwagon jumpers are doing is helping Jack and Jill. They know the movie is horrible, yet they are going to get a ticket to it so they can review it. That way they can be the first people to officially bash Jack and Jill on youtube while everyone has done nothing but bash it for the last two weeks.

I keep saying it, but I find people are still stupid. If you want to get rid of something bad, don’t give it any publicity. I hate that I’m even giving this absolute crap movie any publicity. That’s why I originally didn’t write anything. But now, after seeing all the BS on Youtube, I at least can’t do any worse.

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By Mark D, February 5, 2011 10:06 am

So I live on the edge of the Philly Suburbs. I have been living in the same place for a good chunk of time now. We have seen a LOT of crazy storms come and go. We’ve had power blink once or twice, but never a long outage. Well apparently the freezing rain was enough to do everything in Wednesday morning as the power was out. Of course being the maniac I am, I was up at 5AM or so when it went out for good. I woke up at 4PM and went to check the clock on the stove. I realize it’s not on and I think “Oh, that’s right it needs to be reset… unless all Power is out” I open the fridge and see no lights “well powers out”.

I grab a book and start reading it, and the roomie comes home about 45 minutes later. The first thing she asks is if the Power is out and I say yes. Then she says that both neighbors have power. So I take a look outside, and it ends up that our house is older then the rest that face the main road. So they didn’t have power along that road at the time and they just put this house into the power with the houses behind it. Those power lines are sandwiched between two rows of houses now and go out into the woods. So its probably sort of surprising we haven’t had a bad power outage yet.

That night we see the guys working on the transformer from our porch, and even see an outside light go on at another house that had no power. Figure no big deal, the power will go back on soon. Of course this is after we had already freaked because we had just bought a ton of groceries and frozen stuff. In a brilliant move we put the frozen stuff outside on the ice and snow covered porch. My moment of genius? I was about to say let’s go to Wawa for some ice, but I thought about it and just filled up some bags with snow.

So get through another day and there’s again no signs of power coming back on. It ended up that since the power lines go through the backyards of multiple houses they aren’t exactly easy to get at when surrounded by ice, frozen snow and trees. I lose all patience and decide to break out my old BBQ grill to boil some water so I can make ramen. Which must have looked interesting for anyone passing by as I had the small grill setup on the front lawn. It was also nighttime and since I didn’t have real charcoal I used a bunch of woodchips and a lot of lighter fluid. It was just enough to make one bowl of ramen, which was fine by me.

So my neighbor finally gets tired of waiting and decides to setup a power generator for the house. Unfortunately it’s on for maybe all of 45 minutes before the power comes back on. Fortunately the power comes back on with plenty of time for the Roomie to catch that night’s Flyers game.

Lesson learned? Come hell or high water your power will stay up, until a freezing rain appears. Or unless your power is setup completely asininely then a bit of freezing rain will take it out for over 24 hours.

This took longer then I thought it would. Mostly because the cat that doesn’t like me keeps demanding my attention. He does that by sitting on my keyboard the second I take my hands off the keys. I think it’s an evil plot by him to make sure he gets into my blogs/videos by being annoying.

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By Mark D, October 6, 2010 1:45 am

Angry consumers have rallied together and made life better for everyone involved. No, Not Really, Not at all. In one of the stupidest movements of all time, people have gotten Frito Lays to revert Sun Chips to their previous bag design. The problem with the new bags? They were 100% biodegradable, but the plant material the bags were made of were stiffer then the common potato chip bag. This caused Sun Chips to be much louder then a normal chip bag. Somehow people couldn’t understand the idea of just pouring chips out onto a bowl or napkin.

I mean really, the one time a company actually does something good for everyone, and people complain about it. Frito Lays almost would have been better adding something to Sun Chips that kill you slowly. Hell they probably did add something to Sun Chips that kill you slowly, people wouldn’t care. But you better not make the bag crinkle any louder.

Look, there’s really nothing more I can say here about this, I just wanted to get it off my chest. I mean Bush can slaughter thousands of innocent people on lies, but people couldn’t care less unless he made chip bags crinkle. Tobacco companies were fine until their packaging started making more noise. So congratulate yourself angry consumers, you have finally made the world a safer place to live!

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By Mark D, October 2, 2010 11:23 am

When I was younger I was a fan of “Life With Louie”, and I’ll always remember one episode in which lil’Louie takes a trip around America and learns that his neighborhood/town isn’t 1/3rd the size of America. That episode never really made sense to me, but I guess that comes from growing up in the shadow of Manhattan. I mean all you have to do is go to Todt Hill and you could see the Manhattan Skyline and how massive it was to understand how small you were. For that matter I remember never really seeing stars until I was 13 and went to football camp and went outside after dark. It felt like I was looking at eternity, since on Staten Island you could never see the stars or at least more then one of them.

So growing up on Staten Island you learn pretty quick that the place you live is completely inconsequential in the big picture. Even the local paper, the Staten Island Advance, tended to not have local stories on the front page. So whenever I hear about Staten Island in the news, I never expect it to be anything good. Actually I usually expect it to be that another Ferry crashed into the pier. To one day see my own neighborhood in the news, I would expect it to have to begin with “North Korea bombs Midland Beach”. Midland Beach is actually pretty small, not small enough that everyone knows each other, but it’s one of the smaller neighborhoods on the Island. Historically Midland Beach used to have one of the smallest Post Offices in the US until it was closed in the 80s.

Now of course Midland Beach wasn’t nuked by anyone, but they found an even worse way to get into national headlines. With all the headlines about the “Times Square Mosque” (and in that situation I’m doing the air quotes with my hands), Midland Beach managed to slip into the argument. An abandoned convent owned by the local diocese (St Margaret Mary’s [Class of 94 Representing]) was going to be sold to the Muslim-American Society so they could build a new Mosque and community center. Immediately all the wing nuts in the neighborhood suddenly found the internet and started claiming that MAS was tied to Islamic terrorists.  Of course they came up with other reasons such as traffic and parking concerns.

The fact of the matter though is that all of Midland Beach deserves to be ashamed of all their actions. For being a part of New York City you would think people would be a bit brighter. But no, and this is really just as bad as the half finished Mosque that got burnt down in the South. It is the right of all people to be able to practice their religion. The Mosques currently on Staten Island are overflowing and they are trying to alleviate that overflow. The idea that this Mosque would somehow become a terrorist training center is just insanity. Don’t take my word for it, here’s a quote from Representative Micheal MacMahon after speaking with the FBI

The FBI responded to my request for information and they gave me no indication whatsoever that the Muslim American Society is affiliated with any organization that threatens our national security

The claims about parking and traffic problems? They are absolutely preposterous. I haven’t lived in Midland Beach in over 10 years, so conditions have only gotten worse, but St Margaret Mary’s faces and feeds out to Lincoln Avenue a one way one lane road. Not only that, but the parking lot for SMM is not only usually overflowing onto the two streets next to it, but the traffic when mass gets out is just chaotic. The position of the old Convent would actually feed traffic onto Greely Avenue, a two way two lane road that could handle traffic far better then Lincoln. If another non-Islamic religion wanted to move into there not a single person would complain about the traffic before they started building.

The case is quite clear that even Staten Island can’t claim the high ground. Midland Beach is packed with white people with a complete misunderstanding of the Islamic religion who put Islamaphobia behind a facade to keep out people that were different. Shame on you residents of Midland Beach. You should realize that treating the moderate and even conservative members of Islam like this only strengthens the radical members overseas. It shows them that there is no middle ground, no common area that people of all religions can come together. So thank you Midland Beach for giving more power to the terrorists, for giving comfort to the terrorists, those same terrorists you were trying so hard to fight.

Ironically this almost reminds me of Wiemar Era Germany. The Socialists and Communists had more combined strength then the Nazis. But the unwillingness of the Communists (under direction from Stalin) to form a united front (they actually claimed the Socialists were the real fascists) meant doom for members of both parties as they were the first ones imprisoned in the concentration camps as enemies of the people. Today we could help stop terrorism by reaching out to moderate and conservative members of Islam who are out there around the world. But instead we seem to take every path possible to insult them and degrade them as second class citizens.

So Congrats Midland Beach on your victory over the Terrorists, you make me sick.