“Working for Marvel, the Super Bowl commercial,” Sam Rubin asked. “Did you get a lot of reaction to that Super Bowl commercial?”

“What Super Bowl Commercial?” Samuel L. Jackson asked.

“My mistake.” Sam Rubin replied.

“You see what, you’re as crazy as the people on Twitter,” Samuel L. Jackson said. “I’m not Laurence Fishburne.”

“We don’t all look alike,” Samuel L. Jackson said. “We may be all black and famous but all don’t look alike. … You are the entertainment reporter for this station and you don’t know the difference between me and Laurence Fishburne? … I am the ‘what’s in your wallet’ black guy. He is ‘the car’ black guy.”

“You do know who they all are though, right?” Samuel L. Jackson said. “Just in case they have some of them on the show, do your homework. Do your research. Make sure you don’t confuse them with those other white actors.”

I respect Lee Rogers, because he is the doctor who founded and directed the Amputation Prevention Center, and reduced amputations by 72%. But that’s not why I’m asking you to support his run for Congress.

I know that we need a progressive doctor like Lee Rogers in Congress, to help Drs. Ami Bera and Raul Ruiz (D-CA) counter the demented ravings of Drs. Paul Broun (R-Paleolithic), Scott DesJarlais (R-Patient Dating), Michael Burgess (R-Fetal Wanking) and Larry Bucshon (R-Guns). But that’s not why I’m asking you to support Lee Rogers’s run for Congress.

I’m asking you to support Lee Rogers for Congress, because we have to win a seat like his to turn the U.S. House of Representatives blue.

…Please contribute to the Lee Rogers for Congress campaign today. Every dollar counts, because every person counts.

Do it for Nancy Pelosi, to make Nancy-- the first female Speaker of the House-- Speaker once more. Do it for me, so that I can push through all of our legislation for justice, equality and peace. Do it for yourself and the people you love, so that all of us can enjoy the blessings of good government.

https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/joni?REFCODE=Feb10CnL

“Hillary Clinton wrote me a nice letter — after I lost,” Ms. Buono said, pointing out that the potential Democratic standard-bearer did nothing to support the candidacy of the party’s first female nominee for governor of New Jersey. (“You and I are no strangers to the challenges of seeking and holding public office,” read the letter, signed, “Hillary.”) “The vice president called me directly — after I lost.” Senator Cory Booker, the New Jersey star? “No no no. No, no,” she said. “I didn’t get help from a lot of people, and he was one of them.”

The list is rife. Patrick Gaspard, the former White House political director and Democratic National Committee executive director, promised help but did not deliver. The committee’s chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, “came at the very end and it was like you were at a funeral, she was just not very encouraging.” When Ms. Buono asked the chairwoman to send out an email from her fund-raising list, Ms. Wasserman Schultz suggested she would and then “didn’t even do that; isn’t that sad?” (Ms. Wasserman Schultz has since gone on the Christie warpath, following the governor around the country and telling reporters: “Chris Christie has a culture of intimidation and retribution in his office. It was directed at his own constituents.”)


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/nyregion/amid-christie-scandal-buono-says-some-democrats-have-buyers-remorse.html

She said she watched Mr. Christie’s 108-minute-long news conference on January 9 with her daughter but had a hard time sticking with it. “He is a fraud, a charlatan,” she said. (Mr. Christie’s office declined to respond.) And she confesses bewilderment about the national Democratic strategy of demanding Mr. Christie step down. “He should stay, right, there!” she said, smacking the table for emphasis. “Stand next to all these candidates who are running for governor in 2014. Of course they won’t stand next to him anymore. It is a little comical.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/nyregion/amid-christie-scandal-buono-says-some-democrats-have-buyers-remorse.html

(Reuters) - The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other U.S. trade relationships are outdated and need an "upgrade", U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said on Tuesday during a trade visit to Mexico.

Attitudes toward labor and the environment as well as e-commerce and new technology have shifted trade concerns since NAFTA was signed, so the U.S. government is focusing on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would establish a free-trade bloc stretching from Vietnam to Chile, she said.

"NAFTA was a groundbreaking agreement 20 years ago and it has served all of the North American countries well," Pritzker said of the 1994 treaty between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. "But now it's time to be looking at how can we upgrade our trade relationships."

Mexico and the U.S. are two of 12 countries negotiating the TPP, which would encompass about 800 million people and almost 40 percent of the global economy.

The Obama administration is seeking the authority to fast-track trade deals, like the TPP, to reassure the 11 other countries involved that any agreement, once signed, would not be changed later by Congress.

When asked whether there was any push to change the NAFTA agreement specifically, Pritzker replied that the administration was focused on getting TPP done.

Pritzker, a businesswoman and heiress to the Hyatt Hotel fortune who has been a prolific fundraiser for U.S. President Barack Obama, is in Mexico on a five-day trade mission along with representatives from 17 U.S. companies, ranging from railroads to the medical supply industry.



http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/05/us-usa-trade-idUSBREA1401220140205

“To be singing in the choir and be lectors, and everything, it’s all God. He just took it away in a second. I just really don’t understand where his heart is.”

“I take issue with how he reduced my daughter to a “distressed baby” who cost the company too much money. How he blamed the saving of her life for his decision to scale back employee benefits. How he exposed the most searing experience of our lives, one that my husband and I still struggle to discuss with anyone but each other, for no other purpose than an absurd justification for corporate cost-cutting.”

cont'

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/02/tim_armstrong_blames_distressed_babies_for_aol_benefit_cuts_he_s_talking.html

“For me and my husband—who have been genuinely grateful for AOL’s benefits, which are actually quite generous—the hardest thing to bear has been the whiff of judgment in Armstrong’s statement, as if we selfishly gobbled up an obscenely large slice of the collective health care pie.”

The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to what would have occurred otherwise rather than as an increase in unemployment (that is, more workers seeking but not finding jobs) or underemploy­ment (such as part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week).

From the outset, the probe focused on possible “illegal campaign coordination between (name redacted), a campaign committee, and certain special interest groups,” according to a filing signed by the five district attorneys in the case.
The campaign committee under the microscope?

Almost certainly it’s the Friends of Scott Walker, the governor’s campaign committee.
“Good guess,” said one source familiar with the probe. “That’s it.”

Several others, however, were reluctant to identify the governor’s campaign, noting the secrecy order remains in place. A John Doe probe is similar to a grand jury in that it allows prosecutors to collect evidence and gather testimony in secret.

http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/noquarter/unsealed-john-doe-filings-reveal-roots-of-recall-probe-b99195982z1-243271991.html

WCFG’s Board of Directors includes Eric O’Keefe, a right-wing political operative with deep ties to the Koch brothers, and who helped form groups including the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity and American Majority. WCFG is led by RJ Johnson, a close Walker ally and advisor.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Wisconsin_Club_for_Growth#cite_note-2