Daily Archives: January 14, 2009

So once again there is rioting in the black community. Once again the rest of “racist America” (which for all of the rest of you means anyone that isn’t with dark pigmented skin) has to sit by and watch “African Americans” loot, pillage and burn down their own neighborhoods in Oakland.

Incredibly enough, the silence in the media is deafening. I couldn’t imagine why. Might it have something to do with the fact that a half WHITE, half black man is about to become President off the United States of America? THEY ARE RIOTING IN OAKLAND! Should be the headline on Google News. I SEE NOTHING!!!! Well I did see an article about the so called “community leaders” asking the media to define the word “Riot” and what actually constitutes a riot.

Heaven forbid if we, “RACIST AMERICA” tell it like it is. A cop shot and killed an unarmed man. This was wrong and the cop should be tried on murder charges. But . . . black gang members do this and worse every day in every inner-city ghetto EVERY DAY in America. Hundreds if not thousands of African Americans are killed each year in black on black crime, But we will ignore this and focus on the cop and what he did.

Just when you hope and pray that things among the races might get better, and what happens? A bunch of thugs fuck it up again. The media refuses to call looting and burning a riot. It’s amazing and embarrassing at the same time. Why? Because we have a black President. I really do hope things change with regard to race relations. I guess now might be a good time to pray. JD

A great actor and truly wonderful to watch in old westerns, but someone should have shot that dead rodent off his head. He once said “By the way, there is no such thing as “Corinthian Leather.” as he proclaimed in his 1978 Chrysler ads. JD

He was often cast — and stereotyped — as a Latin lover and later was best known as Mr. Roarke of ‘Fantasy Island.’ He was respected for his work to improve the roles and image of other Latino actors.
By Lorenza Muñoz
5:09 PM PST, January 14, 2009
Ricardo Montalban, the suave leading man who was one of the first Mexican-born actors to make it big in Hollywood and who was best known for his role as Mr. Roarke on TV’s “Fantasy Island,” has died. He was 88.

Montalban died Wednesday morning at his Los Angeles home of complications related to old age, said his son-in-law, Gilbert Smith.

Within the entertainment industry, Montalban was widely respected for his efforts to create opportunities for Latinos, although he and others believed that his activism hurt his career. In 1970, he founded the nonprofit Nosotros Foundation to improve the image and increase employment of Latinos in Hollywood.

“He paved the way for being outspoken about the images and roles that Latinos were playing in movies,” said Luis Reyes, co-author of “Hispanics in Hollywood” (2000).

On Wednesday, actor Edward James Olmos called Montalban “one of the true giants of arts and culture.”

“He was a stellar artist and a consummate person and performer with a tremendous understanding of culture . . . and the ability to express it in his work,” Olmos told The Times.

Montalban was already a star of Mexican movies in the 1940s when MGM cast him as a bullfighter opposite Esther Williams in “Fiesta” and put him under contract. He would go on to appear alongside such movie greats as Clark Gable and Lana Turner.

When major film roles dried up for him in the 1970s, he turned to stage and eventually TV, where he was familiar to millions as the mysterious host whose signature line, “Welcome to Fantasy Island,” opened the hit ABC show that aired from 1978 to 1984.

While “Fantasy Island” was renewing Montalban’s career and giving him financial stability, he also won an Emmy for his performance as Chief Satangkai in the 1978 ABC miniseries “How the West Was Won.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, Montalban was also familiar to TV viewers as a commercial spokesman for Chrysler. He was later widely spoofed for his silky allusion to the “soft Corinthian leather” of the Chrysler Cordoba, although no such leather actually existed.

While making “Fantasy Island,” Montalban also gave one of his best movie performances — as Khan Noonien Singh in the “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” (1982), a follow-up to a beloved 1967 “Star Trek” television episode that also featured Montalban.

New Yorker magazine critic Pauline Kael said Montalban’s performance as Khan “was the only validation he has ever had of his power to command the big screen.”

Born Nov. 25, 1920, in Mexico City, Montalban was the youngest of four children of Castilian Spaniards who had immigrated in 1906 to the city, where Montalban’s father owned a dry goods store.

After graduating from high school, Montalban came to Los Angeles with his oldest brother, Carlos, who had lived here and worked for the studios.

“I felt as if I knew California already, because of the movies,” Montalban said in “Reflections: A Life in Two Worlds,” the 1980 autobiography he wrote with Bob Thomas.

Montalban studied English at Fairfax High School, where an MGM talent scout noticed him in a student play. He was offered a screen test, but his brother advised him against taking it and took him on a business trip to New York City.

The handsome Montalban soon found himself the star of a short film that was made to play on a screen atop a jukebox. That three-minute movie, which debuted at the Hurricane Bar in midtown Manhattan, led to small roles in plays.

When his mother’s illness took him back to Mexico, Montalban got a one-line role in a parody of “The Three Musketeers,” starring Cantinflas. Around that time, he also met Georgiana Belzer, a model and Loretta Young’s sister, whom he married in 1944. She died in 2007.

Montalban intended to stay in Mexico, where his film career was taking off, but MGM wanted him for “Fiesta.” In the 1947 musical, he had a memorable dance scene with a young Cyd Charisse.

“Fiesta” led to a contract at MGM, where he had a friendly rivalry with Fernando Lamas — later Williams’ husband off-screen — as the studio’s resident “Latin lovers.” Bill Murray immortalized the duel between the two men with his classic “Saturday Night Live” skit, “Quien es mas macho, Fernando Lamas o Ricardo Montalban?”

This is good news! We need more of this kind of shit. They already tried this in Hawaii and it did exactly what this article says it will do nationally. Why would I pay for private insurance for my children when I can get it for free? Keep up the good work back there in Washington. It will be your loss when control of the house and the senate are returned to the Republicans in 2010. JD

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to expand a children’s health program and raise cigarette taxes to pay for it, giving President-elect Barack Obama a jump-start on a campaign promise to insure more Americans.

Similar legislation was twice vetoed by President George W. Bush, who opposed raising tobacco taxes and argued that expanding the popular program would push more children into government-run health care instead of private plans.

In stark contrast, expanding the Children’s Health Insurance Plan could be the first legislation from the Democratic-controlled Congress that Obama puts into law.

“It may very well be the first bill the president signs,” House Democratic leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland said.

The House voted 289-139 for the bill and the Senate is expected to move swiftly on its version. The Senate Finance Committee is scheduled to discuss the legislation on Thursday.

Obama, who takes office on Tuesday, said in a statement the U.S. economic downturn made expanding the children’s health care program more urgent.

“This coverage is critical, it is fully paid for, and I hope that the Senate acts with the same sense of urgency so that it can be one of the first measures I sign into law when I am president,” Obama said.

The bill passed by the House aims to increase the number of children enrolled in the program to about 11 million from 6.7 million. The expanded program is paid for in part by raising the cigarette tax to $1 a pack from 39 cents. Taxes on cigars and other tobacco products also would rise.

The program is designed to provide health care to children in families who are unable to afford health insurance but earn too much to qualify for the Medicaid health care program for the poor.

“This bill is a down payment, a down payment on health care for all Americans,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who as head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will play a crucial role in helping craft Obama’s planned overhaul of the $2.3 trillion U.S. health industry.

REPUBLICAN OPPOSITION

Republicans decried a lack of input into the Democratic-backed bill and argued that it would allow states to enroll too many families with incomes as high as $80,000.

They also complained about a provision that would prohibit doctors from referring their patients to hospitals in which they have an ownership interest.

“Physician-owned hospitals employ highly skilled workers. They are the engine in the local economy and language in this bill will devastate most of them,” said Rep. Sam Johnson, a Texas Republican. “Many facilities have poured millions of dollars into constructing hospitals that will be shut down because of this bill.”

Republicans also expressed concern about a provision that would lift a ban on providing the benefit to legal immigrants who have lived in the United States for less than five years.

Despite those concerns, 40 Republicans joined majority Democrats to pass the bill.

The legislation has received strong support from a number of health care organizations, including the American Hospital Association, which backed the provision to stop doctors from referring patients to facilities in which they have a financial interest.

There is nothing wrong with the economy. We are in a recession. This happens every ten years or so. Stop with all the hysteria. The Stock market can’t go up forever. There has to be correction in ALL markets when things become over valued. These are called “economic cycles.”

Economic cycles, sometimes referred to as business cycles, are the fluctuations in economic activity that occur in any developed market economy. Theoretically, any deviation from average growth is considered an economic cycle, whether growth of GDP, household income, employment rates, etc. In practice, economic cycles are divided into two main categories: booms and recessions. Booms are associated with a strong economy, while recessions are characterized by below-trend economic growth. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) defines economic cycles a bit differently.

Rather than booms and recessions, it classifies the economy as being in expansion or contraction. Expansion is when several pieces of economic data are improving, and contraction is a decline in the same data. These definitions focus more on the movement of data, whereas the boom/recession definition only refers to the data’s position relative to historical averages.

The basic idea behind economic cycles is that they’re just that: cycles. Any steep decline in economic activity will likely be offset by future surges in the economy’s growth. In the long term, the highs and lows average out to form the trend, or average, economic growth rate. This trend growth rate is subject to change, but it has remained relatively steady in the past, indicating the general rate of growth that we can expect to see in the future.

Below is a simple chart that will demonstrate how the economy runs through cycles.

As you can see, prices rise as demand becomes greater than supply. When demand for any product or service declines, so do prices. Once supply exceeds demand, you begin to see contraction. The problem today is this is not simply hitting the economy of the United States, its hitting all the economies of the world. There was a time before the great race toward globalization, that some countries would go into recession while other countries went almost unscathed by most standards.

But today all economies have become so intrinsically connected that it creates and even exacerbates the situation. This truly is the first recession that I can remember that has been so widely felt around the world. Perhaps a global economy isn’t such a good idea after all. As far as I can tell virtually all of the things I have seen and read in the media are nothing more than hype and hysteria. I would invite anyone that wants the real scoop on economic trends to visit the National bureau of Economic Research. JD