Sarah Palin: Tracy Morgan Says She's "Good Masturbation Material" On TNT NBA

Overall, Sarah Palin's had a rough two weeks, and for all practical purposes, 30 Rock's Tracy Morgan added the icing on the cake when he said Palin was "good masturbation material," before the start of tonight's NY Knicks vs. Miami Heat game, and much to the shock and amusement of TNT's Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith, and Charles Barkley.

 The result, thanks to social media, was "Tracy Morgan" became a Twitter Trend at Sarah Palin's expense, and gives the media something new to chew on for Thursday.

TNT's apologized for the "event," but the damage is done already. Palin's got to feel like the Lord punishing her because a number of negative events have happened since U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot at point blank range by Jared Lee Loughner in Tucson, Arizona.

First, Palin was hammered for her infamous "crosshairs" map that marked Gifford's Tucson district, then she made her image worse by defending it,...Which I complained about in this vlog:



...then used a term offensive to some in the Jewish community while working to get publicity on the day of the Arizona Shooting Memorial, then her husband, Todd Palin was fingered by The National Enquirer as allegedly involved in a sex scandal, and on Tuesday, Palin used the wrong historical reference in complaining about President Obama's State Of The Union Adress, and now this.

The best action for Governor Palin is to pray for forgiveness, because all of this is happening too fast to be of coincidence.

Meanwhile, Tracy Morgan's legend grows.  That man will say anything, anywhere, at anytime.  

SFO To Fresno To Las Vegas On A United Propjet

CES 2011 was an interesting trip for this blogger. It resulted in the first trip ever using a prop jet, and twice: SFO to Fresno to Las Vegas on a United Propjet

What happened was that the flight from SFO (San Francisco International) to Las Vegas that left out of Gate 92 at the International Terminal was so tight no standbys got on it at all. So we were sent to another flight to Fresno, with a connector to Las Vegas.

What wasn't made clear was that it was a prop jet. That brings up all kinds of images of projets in the movies with failing engines and ratty interiors. So, this alternative wasn't the best choice, but it seemed to be the only one.

The first leg, SFO to Fresno went 40 minutes quick. What was memorable was that it felt like every vibration the plane might make came through the passenger seat. Seriously. But, with all of that, the ride was smooth, if loud, and the landing quick and neat. Impressive.

The layover in Fresno was for 3 hours, and in a facility that's a small airport designed to look like a much bigger one. The end result is something like a weird aviation movie set, but with real working airplanes and propjets.

And there was reason to think one of the airplanes was going to be the next one to Vegas.

Nope.

It was another United Airlines Propjet.

This right was significantly longer and more cramped. Not in the exit row seat, I turned my body sideways to fit better and worked to sleep off the journey. What kept me awake from time to time was the scenery: the snow-covered Rocky Mountains are a breath-taking site to see, even if it brought up every horror of (again) prop jets crashing into mountain ranges.

For some reason, the sheer beauty of it all took that fear away.

Eventually, we hit the Nevada desert and landed in Las Vegas, smartly.

In all, not a bad trip and this blogger would do it again. Still, the preference here is for a 737, or even one of those real small Brazilian planes United Express also flies.

But I got their in one piece, and CES 2011 was a blast!

Sammi Slaps Ronny

There will be a much longer in-depth analysis of tonight's episode of Jersey Shore (which is not over yet) - just thought that there should be an image out there of what just happened. Sammi just punched Ronny in the face because she found out he's friends with JWOWW. Jenni was saying that she told Sammi about Ronny cheating and did the note so that Sammi would leave, not to be a good friend. Snooki's intentions were not that way.

Don't worry, Sammi comes to her senses.

Kim Kardashian Wrong: President Obama Has More Twitter Followers

Kim and Kourtney Kardashian are on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight as this blog post is written, and Kim's pumped up her image in more ways than one. Kardashian told Piers she's got more Twitter followers than President Barack Obama.

Kim Kardashian's Wrong.


President Barack Obama at @BARACKOBAMA has, as of this writing 6,454,206 Twitter Followers, versus 6,046,312 for Kim at @KimKardashian.

So Kim's just over 400,000 Twitter Followers behind, not ahead, of The President Of The United States.

There ya go, Kim.

MacWorld 2011 Gadgets ArtRage for iPad and RingO

MacWorld 2011 is underway and while the iPad, iPhone, and Macbook take center stage, there are gadgets for those products to be had and in some cases at discount prices.  Two of them are ArtRage and RingO.

During Macworld 2011, ArtRage for iPad will be available at a discounted rate of only $2.99 (normally $6.99) here at the Apple iTunes Store.

ArtRage for iPad lets you become a mobile digital artist, providing the experience of actually “painting” digitally on a computer canvas with oil painting effects that smear and blend and watercolor strokes that merge to create soft, wet gradations, just as they would in a traditional art studio.

An ArtRage - enabled iPad, tablet, or touch-screen laptop allows artists of all levels to bring their computer everywhere they go to be ready to spontaneously unleash their creativity on the spot by drawing, sketching, and painting in a wide range of artistic styles with tools that interact on the screen just as they would with real paint, ink, chalk, pen, or pencil.

RingO iPad Mount at Vogel's Booth #650

Vogel's at http://www.vogels.com, the European market leader in Audio/Video & TV mounting solutions, announced today the RingO Universal iPad Mounting System from Vogel's, the "Ipad on the Wall" at www.ipadonthewall.com/usa.

Introduced today at Macworld, RingO is reported to keep your iPad safe by securely mounting it and other tablets everywhere you go: at home, at work and in the car. It lets you use your iPad to watch movies in the car or as a home media control system in front of your television.  You can also listen to music or display a modern themed alarm clock in your bedroom.

Check out ArtRage and visit Vogel's booth to see RingO at MacWorld 2011.

San Francisco News: Local 2 Unite Here, Mike Casey, Losing SF Hotel Negotiations?

Local 2 Unite Here Union Leader Mike Casey's reportedly facing problems according to a vast number of sources to this blogger.  Mr. Casey needs to pay better attention to World economic events, and have a better understanding of the dynamics of the hotel business.

The legendary and largely popular Casey's got a problem: hotels need to cut costs in the face of what have been in some cases dramatic revenue declines, even with occupancy improvements. Hotel workers want to keep their jobs, which should mean accepting pay cuts. But Casey, who would have an easier time of it when the economy was better as it was in the early 2000s, is seen by some as standing in the way of a good resolution to the problem of maintaining hotel jobs, let alone San Francisco getting new convention business as well as maintaining existing events.

What Casey and his charges want flies in the face of most of what other workers have realized reasonable agreements on, from the union's website: Affordable, high-quality health care; Modest increases in wages; Modest improvement in pension.

The one outlier is health care, which even some hotel managers agree should be maintained in some effective way; beyond that a "Modest increases in wages" and "Modest improvement in pension" seem like political pipe dreams today, when even some hardline progressives dare talk of the need to cut pensions for public service workers.

This is why Casey's reportedly having a problem in effectively mobilizing his troops this time around. (And a number of members of his own union are sporting the "Mike Casey's Union NO, Union Yes!", button around San Francisco.) Membership in the union has decreased 30 percent from 13,000 to 9,000 in three years.  The union's contract with the hotels expired  August 2009.

Hyatt Hotels Fights Back

Casey's efforts have targeted the following hotels: Grand Hyatt, Hilton San Francisco, Hotel Frank, Hotel Metropolis, Hyatt Fisherman's Wharf, Hyatt Regency Embarcadero, Le Meridien, Palace Hotel, Westin St. Francis, and the W Hotel. The union asserts that hotels like the Hyatt have realized occupancy gains; the hotels assert that they're trying to counter rising costs and tightening margins in a still-tight economy.

It's more than occupancy rates, which have increased since 2008, but room rates. While the occupancy rates are better, overall revenues are not and that's due to, in many cases, dramatic decreases in room rates just to capture those occupancy rates.

In this, the Hyatt Hotels fought back, filing National Labor Relation Board (NLRB) charges against Local 2 Unite Here on January 19th 2011, and for allegedly violating the collective bargaining agreement and say the union "quietly diverted money [two cents an hour] from the Child & Elder Fund [to the Legal Fund], without bargaining with Hyatt."

That issue aside, the real matter is in how Mike Casey is handling this issue. It's not, with all due respect, an intelligent approach.  Mr. Casey needs to understand that hotels are businesses.  He needs to focus on how to help the hotels recover a better level of net operating income which will assure the maintenance of jobs and improve the overall standard of living for his union employees at the same time.  

If Mr. Casey created a giant online simulation of the fiscal dynamics of the SF hotel industry, took that into discussions, and used it it as a tool for the crafting of a resolution that works for everyone, he would find better conversational weather with hotel managers frantically trying to avoid losing money.

But if he continues his anti-intellectual, 1960s, and in some cases thug-like approach, he will serve neither his members or the San Francisco Hotel Industry well, and the current negative management / labor climate will continue, possibly with job cuts to follow.

No one wants that.

Mr. Casey would do well to follow the conversation at The World Economic Forum in Davos.  The World's industrialized nations are struggling with lower revenues, enormous debt, and fears of a double-dip recession.  This the climate Mr. Casey is in today.

Stay tuned.

San Francisco News: Good Discussion Of Progressives Future At The Wall

What's the future of San Francisco (and really SF Bay Area) Progressives (preference here for the term "liberals") in the wake of an economic climate that calls for lower taxes and spending? That's the subject of a terrific forum conversation at The Wall SF, also called Able Dart's Bathroom Wall.

The main point is that it's harder to be an effective common Progressive elected official because of San Francisco's enormous deficit of over $300 billion (as of this writing). The result is, and has been, a paving of the way for more "moderate" San Francisco political voices to take the place of some progressive voices.

One poster, "Chrysippus" summed it up best, writing:

Our local progressive sect has become just another fixture of a failed status quo. The moderates cater to big corporations, developers, and banks. The progressives cater to the unions, the nonprofit political complex, and the cannabis capitalists. Both sects overlook the ordinary person struggling to get through daily life in the neighborhoods.

The overall fact is we've spent a generation now chasing manufacturing out of the SF Bay Area in favor of industries like biotech, which has jobs that only a handful of people who live here can qualify for.

It wasn't always that way.

During the 70s and 80s the SF Bay Area Economy was far more balanced, with well-paying manufacturing jobs that only called for a GED to get, as well as higher-skilled and well-paying positions.

The job of government here during that time was to maintain the lower skilled jobs against foreign competition, but that didn't happen. In many cases, economic development officials dropped the ball and now the whole State of California's weaker for it.  

In fact, California stopped fighting for new large scale economic development projects long ago.  That's how the state lost the competition to have the largest atom smasher long ago.  Now, the World's Largest Atom Smasher is beneath the Swiss / French boarder; California's best known Atom Smasher's a roller coster ride at Six Flags Magic Mountain.

Now, "the ordinary person struggling to get through daily life" just wants government to create jobs.  Period.   And by any means necessary.