Nicole Sandler Spreads Word on Twitter Chat #99erAID at 8pm Tonight ET

Nicole Sandler spread the word about tonight's Twitter Chat #99erAID at 8pm ET with event organizer Jason Tabrys on her Radio-or-Not show this morning. (see video below at 15:40 in the stream )

PLEASE join us tonight!!!!! #99erAID The event will be moderated by @99erAID (Examiner.com’s Jason Tabrys) and all who participate are asked to use the hash-tag #99erAID in their tweets.

Reminder: Deadline for State Director Nominations Draws Near

The deadline for filing nominations for Union of Unemployed (UCubed) State Directors is two weeks away - Tuesday, March 1, 2011. All candidate filing statements must be emailed to the UCubed Executive Director at UCubed@iamaw.org on or before this date in order appear on the ballot.

States with 50 or more UCubed members are eligible to participate in the State Director elections. Candidates are encouraged to recruit new members in order to meet this requirement, as well as garner votes in their favor. By the way, South Carolina is the newest state to become eligible.

Voting will begin Friday, April 29th until Monday, May 9th. Winners will be announced Tuesday, May 10th.

All individuals elected to the office of State Director will be invited to attend a week-long training session at the IAM’s William W. Winpisinger Education & Technology Center in Hollywood, MD, from Sunday, May 22nd to Friday, May 27th. The group will work to define UCubed organizing objectives, plan political and legislative campaigns and refine leadership skills. Participants will also have the opportunity to lobby on Capitol Hill, as well as learn tips for working with the media. Travel expenses, room and board will be covered.

Please keep in mind that the office of UCubed State Director is a volunteer position. For more information on the election process and rules, click here.

If you are not yet engaged in U-Cubed Please DO SO TODAY:

U-Cubed on:

FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/ucubed

TWITTER: @U_Cubed

WEBSITE: http://www.unionofunemployed.com

CPAC 2011 Had "Obama Hands In Chains" Bumper Sticker For Sale

This is why there are people who think Couch Potato Conservatives are just really unfortunate people and that CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, draws not a small collection of jokers in their ranks.

Banter Media Group blogger Mike Stark of The Stark Reports took a photo of a table at the with a bunch of bumper stickers. But the one that stood out, but Stark didn't get a close-up of, was one that reads "OBAMA: CHAINS we can believe in."

That's an obvious insult that goes beyond President Barack Obama and to me.

So, this blogger, me, took the photo and made a close up of the offending bumper sticker, because it took me a few seconds to pick out the image that Mike was referring to.  Plus, Mike wrote the blog post with so few words, and a title that rendered it almost unsearchable online. I had to step in and fix matters.

Now, we know this crap's out there.  This vile bumper sticker sold at CPAC.

Now that's sick on several fronts. First, that someone would make the bumper sticker. Second, that someone would try and sell the bumper sticker. Third, that the bumper sticker would be sold at CPAC. Fourth that anyone black at CPAC would be forced to see such an image just by attending CPAC.

For those of you who don't get it, let me spell it out for you in basic English. OK? When African Americans, or blacks, were enslaved, placing them in chains was a common habit for slave owners. Now, fast forward to the supposedly advanced 21st Century and after we've elected the first black President of The United States, we are presented with the ignorant and insulting creation of some cretin who's obviously welcome at CPAC to sell this crap.

Whoever makes it, they're also selling it on Amazon.com, and it would be cool if Amazon removed it - here.

Designed By A 12-Year Old What?

The Amazon.com description reports that the bumper sticker is:

Designed by 12-year-old Patriot
American made on self adhesive vinyl
Movable and easily removable without residue
Looks great on bumper, gun case, toolbox, refrigerator, locker and everywhere else

Designed by a 12-Year old? So someone's raised a kid to be a bigot in their early teens, or worse, is brainwashing the kid to be a bigot. Poor kid undoubtedly doesn't know any better at all.  This is not funny and it sure as hell isn't patriotic.

Lady Gaga Smokes Pot, Drinks Whiskey To Write Music

Lady Gaga, who came up with the craziest Grammys entrance yet when she arrived in an egg (that was quickly parodied by Next Media Animation), and wore horns on her face and kept them on for her appearance on Jay Leno, admits that she "smokes a lot of pot" and drinks straight whiskey to come up with her music creations.

Cool.

That's not much different from Biggie (AKA The Notorious BIG) coming up with his best work after chillin with some weed and women. One has to wonder what kind of music Lady Gaga would come up with if she also threw sex into the equation. But I digress.

If that's the case, did her creative manager Lori Ann Gibson smoke pot and drink whiskey when she came up with the Lady Gaga Egg Entrance for the Grammys?   Gibson told CNN's Showbiz Tonight that it was she who came up with the idea and brought it to Lady Gaga, who was all over it.

But was Gibson high or drunk, or high and drunk when she did?

And what about the horns?  Was that idea from the weed too?

Just asking.

Oh, and you can see Lady Gaga's Egg Entrance here in Next Media Animations' awesome take:



Lady Gaga on CBS 60 Minutes (which aired just before The Grammys on the East Coast) told Anderson Cooper that "I smoke a lot of pot when I write music. I'm not gonna, like, sugar coat it for 60 Minutes that, you know, I'm some, like, sober human being, 'cause I'm not. I drink a lot of whiskey and I smoke weed when I write."

Now we've got to find out what kind of whiskey she drinks.

Meanwhile, MTV reports that her new single "Born This Way" is topping the download charts, which, once you get over the irony of that report, is quite impressive.

Academy Awards: Can "Toy Story 3" Win Best Picture?

We're less than 14 days away from The Academy Awards and it's time, again, to think about which movies have the best chance of taking home the Oscar for Best Picture.

Before I continue, let me explain that I just learned while doing a cyber walk for this blog, that Pixar, based in Emeryville and for which I have an increased respect for selfish reasons (and perhaps am a bit annoyed that I'm still not on their press release list), has a movie in Toy Story 3 that has almost an equal chance of taking home the prize as The Social Network does.

That's not from me - it's from The Oscar Guy.  And note, I said almost.

It's fun to whirl around the Internet and see what movie observers are thinking. But for me, there's only one person who has a real history of looking at the Oscars from a "win probability" perspective, and that's Wesley Lovell, who goes by the moniker "Wesley The Oscar Guy," and has for about 14 years.

Wesley is a gem: he writes his blog while working as an insurance broker in Springfield, MO, and has what he calls an "utter aversion to having my picture taken." While Hollywood media types chase after Nikke Finke for a photo, they should be swarming around Springfield in search of Wesley. That they don't says as much about the problems with mainstream media as anything else.

Wesley specializes in predicting which movie will win what Oscar, and explains why including calculated odds. For Toy Story 3, Wesley says that it has a 6 / 29 chance, but The Social Network is not far off at 8 / 26.

The front runner's The King's Speech at 10/15 odds.

Overall, The Oscar Guy has a 55 percent success rate at correctly predicting The Best Picture winner.   To put things in perspective, that's about just less than a 66 percent sure thing in stats.  There's only one person I can think of who has a better track record.

Me.

Over the last 10 years, I've correctly guessed The Best Picture winner 7 of 10 times.  I missed three times: for Brokeback Mountain at The 78th Academy Awards, and for Slumdog Millionaire and for The Departed in 2008 and 2006 respectively.  But my overall rate is 70 percent for Best Picture.

For a glorious unbroken period from 2001 to 2005, I correctly guessed an average of 80 percent of the Oscar winners for all categories.   The reason was simple: my friend had an annually raging San Francisco Oscar Party with a cash prize pool and they asked me to score the ballots for it.  I believed I had to go in prepared because of this great responsibility.

So while everyone was running their mouths - and about what they were going to wear or who they were going to bring - I came having spent a good two weeks researching what AMPAS (The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences) members might do on Oscar night.

So, armed with a ton of data, as well as the knowledge that a good portion of the party patrons were going to play the pool while totally drunk, I decided to enter myself.  Preparation being the friend of fortune, I won year after year and developed my own "picking" technique in the process.

So, my prediction this year is solidly for The King's Speech for Best Picture and in the face of my personal desire to manufacture a reason why Toy Story 3 will win.  

Tom Hooper winning Best Director at The DGA's nailed it for the film. The DGA's is a shockingly effective "domino effect" predictor.

Still, anything can happen.  After all, that's why we play the game.

Stay tuned. 

Lady Gaga Egg Entrance At Grammys 2011 In Animation

The event: The Lady Gaga Egg entrance At Grammys 2011 is now in animation, and done by the same people who created the now famous animated video of Tiger Woods wooing his mistresses and of his now ex-wife Elin Nordegren chasing his Cadillac SUV with a golf club on that memorable Thanksgiving night 2009, "those crazy Taiwanese animators" (as they call themselves) Next Media Animation.

This video is totally funny and features a giant chicken to start, and ends with Lady Gaga in a chest-burster scene that's a reference to a number of Twitter jokes, and the famous chest-burster scene in Alien.  In Taiwanese, tt has English subtitles at the bottom.

Check out Next Media Animation at: nma.com.tw.

No word on what Lady Gaga thinks about this.

Charlie Sheen Interview On The Dan Patrick Show

With Charlie Sheen, The Dan Patrick Show made a big splash today, moving into territory normally claimed by RadarOnline.com and OK Magazine - they interviewed him at length.

What happened (the LA Times was wrong about it being a "surprise phone call" and where that came from, I don't know) was that "Fritzy," who's known as Todd Fritz in real life, and who normally books on air guests, was upstaged by Paul Pabst, or "Paulie," who happened to have "an old phone number" for Charlie Sheen. So he called and managed to get a hold of the star of Two And A Half Men, who was quite eager to be on the DirecTV Channel 101 sponsored and presented cable and radio show.

Once on, Charlie Sheen did not disappoint. The highlight was Sheen's statement that he tried to go back to the studio for his job as the star of Two And A Half Men on CBS, and no one was there. So he yelled and knocked but "got nothing." He says he's ready to go, even if the producers and execs may not be.

What happened, according to TMZ.com, was that Warner Bros. has cancelled four episodes because of Sheen's absence. The crew was not paid. That may have been the reason there was no one to answer the door when Sheen came knocking a few days ago.

Whatever the case, Sheen says he's clean. But that aside, he did a great job of talking about his roles as a baseball star in Major League and in Eight Men Out and how he coached Todd Zelle to hit a home run on Dodgers Stadium. Dan Patrick invited Sheen to be a co-host on a future show and to even bring on his own guests.

I can't wait for that one.

For the entire account and the recorded interview, click here to visit The Dan Patrick Show website.

(As a closing thought, I bought the Wall Street movie series and could not help but notice that over 20 years or so, Sheen has basically not aged.  It's freaky.)  

Chevron Ecuador: $8 Billion Award In Sham Case No Surprise

The Chevron Ecuador matter reached a new point today when the Ecuadorian court did what this space expected it to do: declare Chevron guilty of alleged environmental damage, even though Chevron has been out of the country in all ways since 1992.



This case has been a sham from the start, and a slap in America's face.

As explained in this space many times over the last three years or more, Ecuador itself has been a key party in this lawsuit. Moreover, lead lawyer Steven Donziger has admitted he expects to become a billionaire from the case. The only organization standing in his way is the Government of Ecuador itself, where its attorney general has said that it, and not Donziger, would collect 90 percent of any damage amount declared.

Meanwhile damage estimates that started at $16 billion then rose to $27 billion, then most recently $113 billion, were all based on a report that the media has sloppily reported as from a "Court appointed researcher" when it was really from a study prepared for the court by (drum roll please) Steven Donziger and his associates.

The misinformation around this case has served to throw a smoke screen around the fact that Ecuador has kicked out American oil companies and made room for foreign oil producers, all the while working to keep oil revenues (they call it nationalization) and float high-minded ideas about helping the poor of Ecuador, but doing nothing.

Meanwhile, President Rafael Correa sits as if he's really trying to alter the state of how oil's produced in Ecuador, when upon study it's obvious that the country's just interested in gaining more dollars for its wealthiest people. Indeed, the President's own brother has been fingered as being the negotiator for $700 million in oil production contracts with companies that would do business with him.

According to Reuters:

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa is fighting accusations by a government watchdog that he knew about $700 million in state contracts that the panel says were improperly awarded to his brother.

Correa denied the allegation made by a four-member committee he created in 2009 to examine the business dealings of his older brother and political nemesis, Fabricio, a conservative who has threatened to run against him in 2013.

According to a report handed to state anti-corruption authorities last week by the Citizens Oversight Committee, the older sibling secured a slew of state oil exploration and public works contracts that broke anti-nepotism laws.

Fabricio has denied wrongdoing in the matter.

Correa's brother is at odds with him but remains cordial. However, he's also involved with the same Ecuadorian political movement that includes President Correa's sister, who has also been fingered as the possible recipient of millions from any damage award from a case that would go against Chevron.

All of this came out during the period of time that Ecuador Judge Juan Nunez was accused of taking bribes to rule against Chevron. He was eventually replaced by another judge.

The signs point to Correa's relations and Ecuador trying to work a big payoff from an American oil company 20 years removed while foreign companies and the State-run Petroecuador have polluted the land and waters.

A sham case and a slap in America's face.

Stay tuned.