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Happy Saturday night, folks! It's Blue Gal from The Professional Left Podcast, bringing you this week's podcast round up. Be aware that these podcasts are also available on i-Tunes, and may not be safe for work.

Battleground Wisconsin: Recall the War On Women, and conservative efforts to undermine the Walker recall.

Opinionated: Ashley Judd uses the word “patriarchy” in public.

Throwing Shade: Nikki Haley and John Derbyshire

And if you like edgy old comedy, check out The Stan Freiberg Show from 1957, now online.

Open thread below....

Got a favorite Dylan song?

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Vidkun Quisling - Became synonymous with traitor, puppet, lackey, sellout - you name it.

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Vidkun Quisling was head of the puppet government which ultimately paved the way for Berlin to take over Norway with comparative ease. After this episode, anyone accused of selling out or being a traitor to his own country was referred to as a "Quisling". But the invasion of Norway wasn't without resistance, and the small Norwegian Army, still loyal to the King who was now in hiding somewhere in the mountains, was facing the German onslaught, along with assistance from Britain. It wasn't sufficient enough to prevent the German army from occupying Oslo and several other key cities in the country. As of this day, most fighting was taking place around the port city of Narvik and speculation was rife that Norway would be one of several small European countries coming under German occupation in the coming months.

News from Capitol Hill was also in reaction to the situation in Norway, with a feature report of heroism on the part of American Ambassador to Norway Daisy Harriman in aiding refugees and keeping the State Department informed of the goings on.

All of this led many in Washington to wonder just how long it was going to be before the U.S. got involved in the shooting war.

But at the moment, it was all very distant and abstract, even as it was being reported by the NBC Blue Network on their News Of The World for April 13, 1940.

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Cenk and his panel -- Michael Shure, Ana Kasparian and Stephanie Miller -- tear into CNN's Wolf Blitzer for bullying Hilary Rosen into apologizing to Ann Romney for a second time after she'd already apologized to her earlier that same day.

They also weighed in on whether the Obama administration surrogates were too quick to throw Rosen under the bus or whether they should have stood up for her and the point she was trying to make. And they discussed The Catholic League's Bill Donahue and his disgusting attack on Rosen which we covered at this site, but has been completely ignored by the rest of the media. I did not see any other show cover it other than The Young Turks here.

They also brought up the woman who called into Stephanie Miller's show earlier that day who claimed to be Ann Romney's nanny and who told Miller that Hilary Rosen was right about Ann Romney never having worked a day in her life. They thought she might have sounded legit but there's been no confirmation that the woman that called in ever actually worked for Ann Romney. While I don't doubt that may very well be the case since she grew up rich and married a rich man, I don't know how her childhood nanny would be qualified to weigh in on whether she ever "worked" or not as an adult.

I think the one thing we can be sure of is that she lived in households that were wealthy enough to afford domestic help both as a child and as an adult, which is not the type of lifestyle most typical Americans have experienced, and the point that ought to be driven home if Mitt Romney wants to continue to hold his wife out there as some representative of average American women and their concerns.

The 50-state blog round-up has existed over the years in various forms. The idea is to take a look at state and local blogs in order to see what important things are going on in state politics and campaigns, to get a preview of what's coming to the national stage and to recognize the work of great state and local bloggers.

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Rachel Maddow highlighted part of an event that took place earlier this week where she sat down with Bill Maher at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills, CA to promote her new book Drift. They discussed Ronald Reagan and the Iran-Contra scandal and the fact that the one person who bought Reagan's excuse that anything a president does when it comes to national security is legal, was Dick Cheney.

I hope the rest of the event is posted on line somewhere because I'd really love to get a chance to watch the whole thing. I'll add a link here if I find it.

"The Evolution of the Butterfly," a four-minute short by filmmaker Abraham Heisler, features the renowned cellular biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton narrating the process of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly over footage Heisler shot of the early stages of Occupy Wall Street. Like a caterpillar, which must change its form to survive, our society birthed a revolutionary movement when it became evident that the system the 1% built was no longer sustainable for humanity. After society broke down and went into its metaphorical cocoon (triggered by the economic collapse), unique individuals came together, carrying with them the blueprint for a beautiful new structure, mirroring the cellular process of the caterpillar as it takes on a new form.

"Large scale social movements like #OWS are bringing together imaginal cells to create the blueprint of a new society," Heisler said. "We see it in general assemblies and the hope and inspiration found in the process of direct democracy and social justice."

This film is an elaboration on the ideas of Dr. Lipton, who believes that "humanity is on the brink of a spontaneous evolution."

This enlightened thinking is the next phase of our evolution as a species. As "the butterfly is an evolutionary advance over the caterpillar," so the Occupy Movement is an advance over an economically unjust society.

What on earth could possibly go wrong with one of the world's largest banks betting heavily on high-risk derivatives? Originally, that was supposed to be banned under Dodd Frank with the Volcker Rule. But lobbyists made sure it was just a hollow joke.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to pay for another round of bailouts for these jerks:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has transformed the bank’s chief investment office in the past five years, increasing the size and risk of its speculative bets, according to five former executives with direct knowledge of the changes.

Achilles Macris, hired in 2006 as the CIO’s top executive in London, led an expansion into corporate and mortgage-debt investments with a mandate to generate profits for the New York-0based bank, three of the former employees said. Dimon, 56, closely supervised the shift from the CIO’s previous focus on protecting JPMorgan from risks inherent in its banking business, such as interest-rate and currency movements, they said.

Some of Macris’s bets are now so large that JPMorgan probably can’t unwind them without losing money or roiling financial markets, the former executives said, based on knowledge gleaned from people inside the bank and dealers at other firms. Bruno Iksil, a London-based trader in Macris’s group, gained attention last week after moving markets with his trades, drawing a comparison to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s power in the government-bond market.

“What Bernanke is to the Treasury market, Iksil is to the derivatives market,” Bonnie Baha, head of the global developed credit group at DoubleLine Capital LP in Los Angeles, where she helps oversee $32 billion, said in a telephone interview.

Macris’s team amassed a portfolio of as much as $200 billion, booking a profit of $5 billion in 2010 alone -- equal to more than a quarter of JPMorgan’s net income that year, one former senior executive said.

The shifting role of the CIO group at JPMorgan, which reported record firmwide profit for 2011, underscores how blurry the line can be between “proprietary trading” and hedging, and it highlights the challenge U.S. regulators face in curbing speculative bets by federally backed lenders under the so-called Volcker rule. JPMorgan, whose $2.27 trillion of assets at year- end made it the biggest U.S. bank, says the CIO manages the firm’s risks, with trades like Iksil’s forming a part of that effort.

“It’s a complete tempest in a teapot,” Dimon said on a conference call with investors today after the bank announced first-quarter earnings. “Every bank has a major portfolio and in those portfolios you make investments that you think are wise.”

Shorter Jamie Dimon: Trust me!

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As Raw Story's Stephen Webster noted, on the heels of a recent study which found that "people who have negative feelings toward homosexuality often have secret attractions to the same sex — and are more likely to have grown up in households that forbid homosexual feelings," we have Thom Hartmann asking about that very topic during this interview with the leader of an anti-gay organization which the SPLC has designated as a hate group.

Hartmann confronts anti-gay leader: Do closeted gays run your movement?:

On Russia Today TV’s The Big Picture Thursday, progressive radio host Thom Hartmann confronted Family Research Institute chairman Dr. Paul Cameron and asked him an unusually pointed question: “Does it concern you that many of your colleagues in the anti-gay movement may actually be closeted gays?”

“Um, no,” Cameron replied. “Very few of them are homosexually interested. First of all, um… Most people are not interested in homosexuality. There’s not at all. A few homosexuals like to say — and they’ve been saying this now for at least the last seven years — almost everybody is bisexual, maybe some homosexual…”

“I’ve never heard anybody say that,” Hartmann replied.

Cameron went on to claim that biologist Alfred Kinsey, whose groundbreaking research pioneered the study of human sexuality, “was gay” and “pushed that idea,” making his scientific findings somehow less valid. “Most of the homosexual leadership… have pushed that idea,” he added. “But it’s not true!”

Cameron didn’t provide any source or research to support his claim, so interested viewers may just have to take his word for it. Read on...

Here's more from the Southern Poverty Law Center on Cameron:

Continue reading »

Ralph Reed baits the trap for Mitt Romney with a Washington Post opinion piece in which he warns Mittens he has to channel Little Ricky Santorum to win. (He does very little to address the point that Little Ricky himself couldn't win, but whatever.) It's pretty clear that he's trying to get some cash out of the Romney campaign to do his manipulative thing:

Santorum has been denounced as a sore loser, a religious extremist, a crank. MSNBC host Martin Bashir referred to him as a theocratic version of Stalin. One columnist alleged in the Daily Beast that Santorum would use the power of the presidency to impose “his ideal of a Christian America” on the nation. The New Yorker compared him to Islamic extremists who seek to execute their opponents, adding that we need separation of church and state so that “Santorum and his party can’t impose dominion of one narrow, sectarian, Bible-based idea of the public good.”

But Santorum and his supporters may have the last laugh. From John C. Fremont to William Jennings Bryan in the 19th century to Barry Goldwater, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Ronald Reagan in our time, losing presidential candidates have previewed the ideological trajectory of their parties — and often of the nation.

Romney would be wise to remember this in his general-election campaign. Of course he can’t neglect independents, or women, or Hispanics, or other nontraditional Republican constituencies. But his immediate task is to consolidate conservative support and unify the party. The best way to do that is to appropriate the best parts of Santorum’s message.

I wonder who would be best suited to help Mittens do that? Hmm, let me think a minute. Oh yeah, the most weaselly unindicted Abramoff co-conspirator of them all!

Reed has been renting out his services to various Republicans for a while. His specialty? Riling up the fundie base to get the troops out there and vote against whichever Godless heathen the Democrats are running, just on general principles. (Would it be rude to point out that Ralphie couldn't get his own self elected to the Georgia state legislature?)

Ralph is very good at pretending to be against/for the same things fundamentalist Christians support/oppose — while he's playing the other side to get rich.

So if Mittens wants to play that same old game, I'm sure Ralph is just the right man. Assuming Jack Abramoff doesn't decide to give a tell-all interview, that is.