Video: Cody the howling dog

I suspect Cody is part Coton, as they're known to howl/speak like this.

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Geraldo Rivera: "I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin's death as George Zimmerman was"

Geraldo Rivera took to the airwaves of FOX News Friday morning for the purpose of giving his take on the Trayvon Martin case, quickly turning it into a racially-charged tirade against hoodies:

When you see a Black or Latino youngster, particularly on the street, you walk to the other side of the street. You try to avoid that confrontation... [Trayvon Martin] didn't deserve to die. But I bet you money, if he didn't have that hoodie on, that nutty neighborhood watch guy wouldn't have responded in that violent and aggressive way.

Victim-blaming in this nature is inexcusable. Rivera is arguing that if George Zimmerman in fact did act in a malicious and racially-motivated fashion his actions would be understandable because, "hey, we're ALL afraid of black kids in hoodies, right?" Apparently it's unreasonable to expect someone to resist their xenophobic impulses related to a person's clothing preference, but it's perfectly reasonable to tell kids that they should accept racism in our society and change what they wear out of fear for their safety.

Hoodies don't kill people, guns kill people. Wearing a hoodie shouldn't put your life at risk, and wearing one does NOT make you responsible for someone else's racially charged violence. Read the rest of this post...

Maddow on Mortgage Fraud—NC County Recorder sues big banks for dozens of instances of "fraud"

"The banks could start losing these cases," says Maddow. Yes, there's hope — the real kind.

This is an excellent primer on the mortgage mess (it's actually a crime scene, as you'll see). Very watchable, easily grasped. Please take time, if you have it, to view. This is ground-zero for the greatest challenge to our legal system in modern times. As Jeff Thigpen says in the clip, this is a "rule of law" story — writ large, in my view.

(Our primer is here, if you want a fuller explanation.)

Note especially that, despite the apparent impossibility of going through the Bush II–Obama I bank-fraud indemnification firewall, you (and your county clerk) can do it. As Maddow says (at 4:22):

Going after the banks by going through their paperwork turns out to be not that hard to do; regular people can do it, with a little training. ... It's looking more and more like they may be onto something.

Change "may be" to "are" and you have it.

It helps to have a Jeff Thigpen (4:50 in the clip; that's his face below), but there are lots of counties in the country. It won't take many of them to bust this wide. Watch:



This is about property rights (yes, good old libertarian property rights) versus hiding and indemnifying the massive criminal banking fraud that led to the 2008 crisis — and making sure that prosecuting said fraud doesn't bring down the entire U.S. banking system.

That's a really tough place to be, isn't it — caught between systemic banking collapse and protection of property rights. What's a money-hungry political ad campaign to do?

I'll have more on this — David Dayen and Digby have aired this issue in a recent Virtually Speaking episode that's a textbook explanation of this Scylla–Carybdis dilemma.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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Syrian civil war spreads

The massacre in Homs has not suppressed opposition to the Assad regime. Earlier this week the fighting reached the heavily guarded neighborhood where many of the senior members of the government have their homes.

Reporting from the region is still prohibited by the regime. Global Post has one of the few reporters still working there:

DAMASCUS, Syria — Rebel fighters landed their most serious blow yet against the Syrian regime’s security apparatus, even as dramatic but conflicting accounts emerged of what triggered an intense overnight firefight in a heavily protected neighborhood of Damascus earlier this week.

Both the regime and the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) claimed as a victory the battle that eyewitnesses said began around 11 p.m. and lasted into the early hours Monday morning. The battle involved heavy machine gunfire, rocket-propelled grenades and helicopters, the witnesses said.

The Syrian civil war is following a very different pattern to the one that brought down Gadaffi but that does not mean that Assad is winning. The longer Assad is unable to win, the more likely he is to lose. The Libyan uprising was a tribal affair where progress could be measured by the territory held by each side. The Syrian insurgency is an urban guerrilla war where both sides have the ability to deny the other effective control of an area. Read the rest of this post...

Emily Loizeau: "Je suis jalouse" (I am jealous)

It's been a rough week here at La Maison chez nous, and my view into next week isn't more promising.

So how about some fun. I wanted to put up a song by a terrific French singer-writer named Cali, but his best so far is "Elle m'a dit" — ("She told me she didn't love me, between the cheese course and dessert") — and that just seemed, well, off ... less fun than it could be.

So here's a song by Emily Loizeau called "Je suis jalouse" — I am jealous — with a terrific live action–animation combo vid that just a delight. And Loizeau proves to be quite the actress.

The story in simple: the main girl and guy, the ones in the carousel, have a problem. The guy turns out to be attracted to another women (in the video, she's the girl who shows up with the super-carousel that looks like a rocket ship).

So the first girl (Emily) fixes the problem. Enjoy the music, enjoy the video, enjoy the fun animation.



The YouTube version with the English subtitles seems to be missing, but if you care, the gist of the first verse is this:

I cried for two hours
Onto your tin cookie-box
The one that contained your letters
And the photos from New Hampshire

Your famous love trip with
Adele of Bayeux
I think her name is stupid
Sounds like a brand of sweaters

She wants to meet us
Have us over for lunch
She tells me she's going to adore me,
She insisted as much.

Oh yes, I'm jealous...

But you don't even need that much. She's upset and at least in the video, she takes care of business.

Happy Sunday,

GP

Update: I hope fans of these musical offerings (heh) are noticing that this song alternates between 5/4 and 3/4. The 5/4 is counted 3+2 (1-2-3-1-2) and is laid down twice before the singing begins. It's so well done, it's almost unnoticeable. Nice.

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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