Recommended Reading
from Bruce
The 32 Wittiest Comebacks Of All Time (BuzzFeed)
Anonymous: Bank Transfer Day on November 5th
Honoring Paul Krugman (Economic Policy Institute)
On Nov. 1, the Economic Policy Institute presented New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman with EPI's first ever Distinguished Economist Award. EPI also produced a candid video in which Krugman shared his vision for a decent society, discussed the radicalizing impact of the policy debates of the last decade, and revealed his philosophy on making our society a better one for all.
Michael Smerconish: "The Pulse: Vanguard founder's praise of protest"
I can't picture the legendary founder and former CEO of the Vanguard Mutual Fund Group, clad in Brooks Brothers suit, adjacent to City Hall, or as one of the 50 who were arrested in Atlanta, not to mention those being sprayed with tear gas in Oakland. But that doesn't mean the Main Line patrician and capitalist icon is lacking in sympathy for some of their grievances. Bogle believes attention must be paid to their complaints.
Keep Wall Street Occupied From Your Mailbox
Presenting a subversive way to strike back at the banking behemoths and credit card junk mailers clogging your physical mailbox, and to generally excise your daily stress and aggression, via a few small stuffed postal packets …
David Weigel: Did Occupiers Just Beat Bank of America? (Slate)
Is this the first popular victory for Occupy Wall Street? The first politician who hinted as much was (get ready for a shock) Sen. Bernie Sanders, who went to the floor of the Senate to congratulate the "American people" for beating the bank.
Mark Morford: Seven billion ways to swallow God (SF Gate)
Seven billion eager souls later, you'd think we'd have it sort of figured out.
Tom Danehy: Tom's Las Vegas-style odds on Tucson city-election outcomes (Tucson Weekly)
In a few days, Tucsonans will go to the polls ... no, wait, they'll stay away from the polls ... anyway, they'll help determine the course of their city government over the next few years.
Jesse Bering: Culinary Racism (Slate)
Trying to explain the "Obama Fried Chicken" incident and others like it.
Grocer Drops $5 Sandwich Theft Charges Against Couple
Safeway is declining to press charges against a Honolulu couple whose arrests over stolen sandwiches led state workers to take custody of their 2-year-old daughter and sparked nationwide outrage.
David Bruce has 42 Kindle books on Amazon.com with 250 anecdotes in each book. Each book is $1, so for $42 you can buy 10,500 anecdotes. Search for "Funniest People," "Coolest People, "Most Interesting People," "Kindest People," "Religious Anecdotes," "Maximum Cool," and "Resist Psychic Death."
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Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
BadtotheboneBob
Baby Hippo
some guy
1% -- 99%
BadtotheboneBob
Veterans Heeding Occupy Call to March
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Still sunny and seasonal, but 'they' say rain is heading this way.
Answers T-rump
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart says he's hurt by Donald Trump accusing him of a "very, very racist rant" -- especially given Trump's self-described "great relationship with the blacks."
Trump took to YouTube this week to criticize Stewart after a segment in which he made fun of Herman Cain's response to sexual harassment allegations. At one point he did a voice that Trump took to be Stewart's impersonation of Cain.
"Okay this hurts me on two levels. One, does Donald Trump really think that was my Herman Cain impression?" Stewart asked on Wednesday night's "Daily Show." "And two, doesn't Donald Trump realize that that wasn't even the most offensive accent I did in that particular bit?"
Stewart said he was especially hurt because Trump is in a great position to criticize him, given Trump's past assertion in a radio interview that "I have a great relationship with the blacks."
Jon Stewart
Artist Sets Sights On Corzine
Geoffrey Raymond
Artist Geoffrey Raymond, famous for his paintings of troubled Wall Street figures, has found his next muse in MF Global Holdings Ltd's Jon Corzine.
Raymond told Reuters on Thursday that, after news broke of the former New Jersey governor's fallen firm, he went back to his studio in Troy, New York, painted a fresh coat of primer over an initial sketch of Bank of America Corp's Ken Lewis and now plans to use that canvas to paint Corzine.
MF Global filed for bankruptcy on Monday after a failed attempt by Corzine, its chief executive, to turn the futures brokerage into an investment bank. Corzine's efforts to boost profits by taking more risk ended up bringing about the firm's demise.
"The missing $600 million dollars was what really pushed me and got me charged up," said Raymond, referring to funds that regulators say are missing from customers futures accounts at MF Global.
"One of the first rules is you're not allowed to use client money to take care of your own stuff."
Geoffrey Raymond
CNN Remaking Morning Lineup
Soledad O'Brien
CNN announced on Thursday it is remaking its morning lineup and will bring Soledad O'Brien back as host of a "conversational ensemble" show beginning next year. O'Brien's program is set to air on weekdays from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. ET.
Ashleigh Banfield and Zoraida Sambolin will be hosts of a news show that will air from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m., the network said. Banfield, most recently at ABC News, played a prominent role at MSNBC a decade ago. Sambolin has worked in local news in Chicago.
CNN's "American Morning," where O'Brien worked from 2003-2007, has struggled competitively. Conversational shows "Fox & Friends" on Fox News Channel and "Morning Joe" on MSNBC do better in ratings and buzz, and CNN is often eclipsed by its sister channel HLN with Robin Meade in the morning.
Since former co-hosts John Roberts and Kiran Chetrey left "American Morning" in the past year, the network has experimented with other approaches and anchors, adding more business news and a greater story count.
Soledad O'Brien
Sold For $40M
Gustav Klimt
A 1915 painting by Gustav Klimt that was looted by the Nazis and returned to the owner's grandson has sold for $40.4 million at auction.
The painting, Litzlberg (LIHT'-zehl-behrg) on the Attersee, was returned to 83-year-old Georges (zhorzh) Jorisch by an Austrian museum in July.
The landscape was originally owned by Austrian iron magnate Viktor Zuckerkandl before being passed on to his sister, Amalie Redlich.
She was deported in 1941 and never heard of again. Her art collection was seized by the Nazis and sold off. Jorisch is her grandson.
Gustav Klimt
Tops List Of Hollywood's Overpaid
Drew Barrymore
Some might argue that all stars are overpaid, but Drew Barrymore and Eddie Murphy are in a league of their own, according to a survey conducted by Forbes.com and published on Thursday.
Top stars can make tens of millions of dollars on a single film, and the payout can be justified when a movie like "Pirates of the Caribbean" brings in several hundred million at box offices. But when their movies bomb, that's another story.
Barrymore saw her 2010 romantic comedy "Going the Distance" earn just $17.8 million in ticket sales. Her 2009 movies "Everybody's Fine" and "Whip It" fared worse.
Forbes.com said the actress returns just 40 cents for every dollar movie studios spend for her participation. By contrast Murphy's films returned $2.70 for each dollar he was paid.
Drew Barrymore
You Paid More Taxes Than...
Thirty Companies
Thirty large and profitable U.S. corporations paid no income taxes in 2008 through 2010, said a study on Thursday that arrives as Congress faces rising demands for tax reform but seems unable or unwilling to act.
Pepco Holdings Inc, a Washington, D.C.-area power company, had the lowest effective tax rate, at negative 57.6 percent, among the 280 Fortune 500 companies studied.
The statutory U.S. corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world; but over the 2008-2010 period, very few of the companies studied paid it, said the report.
The average effective tax rate for the companies over the period was 18.5 percent, said Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, both think tanks.
Their report also listed General Electric Co, Paccar Inc, PG&E Corp, Computer Sciences Corp, Boeing Co and NiSource Inc as among the 30 that paid no taxes.
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Thirty Companies
Biggest Jump Ever
Greenhouse Gases
The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.
The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.
"The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing," said John Reilly, co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.
The world pumped about 564 million more tons (512 million metric tons) of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009. That's an increase of 6 percent. That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries - China, the United States and India, the world's top producers of greenhouse gases.
It is a "monster" increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past.
Greenhouse Gases
Conservative Family Values Judge
Judge William Adams
A Texas family law judge says his daughter posted a YouTube video of him beating her several years ago because he told her he was reducing her financial support and taking away her Mercedes.
Aransas County Court-at-Law Judge William Adams issued a statement through his lawyer on Thursday in which he questions his daughter Hillary's motives for posting the secretly-made 2004 video online last week.
The judge does not apologize in the three-page statement for lashing his then 16-year-old daughter 17 times with a belt while she wailed and pleaded with him to stop. He told a TV station Wednesday that the video "looks worse than it is" and that he was just disciplining his child.
Police are investigating and Adams says he will "respond" to any investigations.
Judge William Adams
Daddy Dearest
Hillary Adams
Hillary Adams says that until last week, only a couple of close friends knew about the savage beating she received seven years ago from her father, a Texas judge who handles child abuse cases.
Now the beating is on display to the world on YouTube thanks to a secret video she made, and her father, Aransas County Court-at-Law Judge William Adams, is the subject of a police investigation.
Hillary Adams, 23, says the outpouring of support and encouragement she's received since posting the 2004 video online last week is tempered by the sadness that it's her father lashing her 17 times with a belt and threatening to beat her "into submission." The 8-minute video had been watched nearly 2 million times by Thursday morning.
"I'm experiencing some regret because I just pulled the covers off my own father's misbehavior after so many people thought he was such a good person. ... But so many people are also telling me I did the right thing," she told The Associated Press outside her mother's home in the Gulf Coast town of Portland, near Corpus Christi.
And she said the videoed attack was not a one-off. "It did happen regularly for a period of time," she told NBC's "Today" show on Thursday.
Hillary Adams
Ttrapped In Airport
Terri Weissinger
Sure, hurricanes and unseasonal blizzards can create major delays in air travel. And the ordinary air traveler faces plenty of exasperation via the heightened, and not always rational, security measures of the Transportation Safety Administration.
But Terri Weissinger, a native of Sonoma County, Calif., has suffered a new scale of airport indignity: Seeking to start a new life in Idaho, Weissinger was condemned to eight days in the limbo of the San Francisco International Airport--because she was unable to pay the fee her airline assessed for an additional piece of checked baggage.
As Michael Finney, a correspondent with the local ABC news affiliate KGO, reports, Wessinger, "was broke" when she left for the airport.
"She had nothing but an airline ticket and $30 in her pocket." She also hadn't traveled by air in the last five years--meaning that when she stepped to the ticket counter to check her bags, she was in for a serious case of sticker shock. The U.S. Airways agent checking her in told her that it was cost $60 to check both her bags. Weissinger offered to pay the fee when she arrived in Idaho, but the agent declined. She also offered to leave one bag there at the San Francisco Airport. That, the agent explained, would be in violation of security regulations.
Wessigner's next move was to try to scare up the full fee by calling friends in the area. She came up empty, and by the time she'd finished working the phones, she missed her flight. That's when things started to get truly Kafka-esque. To get a new flight "she'd have to pay her bag fees plus $150 in change fees," Finney notes . Without a place to stay nearby, Weissinger stayed the night at the airport. She awoke to more bad news: U.S. Airlines explained that, since she couldn't pay a change fee, she'd have to book a new flight from scratch. That would run about $1,000.
Terri Weissinger
Launches Digital Book Library Service
Amazon.com
Online retailer Amazon.com said Kindle owners with an Amazon Prime membership will now get access to the company's new digital book library service.
Kindle owners with the Prime membership can choose from thousands of books to borrow for free on a Kindle device, including more than 100 current and former New York Times bestsellers, as frequently as a book a month, the company said.
Amazon Prime costs $79 a year in the United States and gives members free two-day shipping along with free access to almost 13,000 TV shows and movies from the company's internet streaming service.
Amazon.com
In Memory
Leonard Stone
Leonard Stone, the actor who played the father of Violet Beauregarde in 1971's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, died Wednesday, Nov. 2, after battling cancer. He would have turned 88 Thursday.
Though Stone is best known for his Beauregarde role, whose most famous line was "Violet! You're turning violet!," the actor had numerous parts on TV shows, films and also Broadway.
He appeared in television shows Lost in Space, Mod Squad, Mission: Impossible, M*A*S*H and L.A. Law, as well as Toys in the Attic and I Love My Wife (among others) on the big screen.
Stone was nominated for a Tony for his performance in Redhead on Broadway.
Leonard Stone
In Memory
Wyatt Knight
Actor Wyatt Knight, best known for playing bad boy Tommy Turner in all three Porky's movies, was found dead in Hawaii last week.
TMZ reports that Knight, 56, was found Oct. 26 in an isolated area near a home at which he'd been staying.
Maui law enforcement say that results from the autopsy performed on the body have not been released, but his death is believed to be a suicide.
In addition to starring in Porky's, Porky's II: The Next Day and Porky's Revenge!, Wyatt had numerous TV credits -- The Waltons, Family Ties, Chicago Hope and Star Trek: The Next Generation among them.
He had most recently appeared in online comedy series Crafty in 2010.
Wyatt Knight
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