Open Thread – Monday (Edited)

Posted on September 30, 2012 by lmsinca

I’m still working but took a break this afternoon to do a little reading. I’m trying to finish Unbroken but I’m not there yet. Next weekend is the book review………..hint, hint. I’ve also been working on our taxes, that’s right we filed an extension (just like the Romneys), but I have even less money now than I did in April to pay what we still owe……………yikes. And we finally got the rest of the parts we needed to finish our big export order to Taiwan, which we’re trying to get out the door (that’s money in the bank). Anyway, I did read a couple of interesting pieces during my breaks this weekend that might spark a little conversation.

Last week Nova linked this piece from the Atlantic about why liberals shouldn’t vote for Obama. It was interesting but didn’t sway me. I’d already explored all of the issues and decided I’m going to vote for him anyway. The most important issue for me is health care reform and even though he didn’t get the bill I wanted I’ve decided repealing the ACA is too big of a threat for me to not support him.

One of the issues discussed was our drone policy, particularly in Pakistan.

Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost daily basis. The drone war he is waging in North Waziristan isn’t “precise” or “surgical” as he would have Americans believe. It kills hundreds of innocents, including children. And for thousands of more innocents who live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels. People are always afraid. Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of school. The stress they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead 24 hours a day, a deadly strike possible at any moment. At worst, this policy creates more terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy. And Democrats who believe that it is the most moral of all responsible policy alternatives are as misinformed and blinded by partisanship as any conservative ideologue.

Then today I saw these charts and thought what the hell? I haven’t had the time to look into where exactly the information came from but according to them there have been exactly zero civilian deaths in Pakistan due to drone strikes this year. Can that be true?

This piece, “Is Karl Rove Losing It?”, is a pretty interesting take on Karl Rove and the author wonders if he really has as much power as he thinks he does. It’s probably just wishful thinking, those of us on the left aren’t too fond of the guy.

Karl Rove is back as GOP party boss, but this time it’s clear that even the best-laid plans of the savviest political strategists often go awry.

That became obvious earlier this week, on Sept. 25, when Missouri senatorial candidate Todd Akin reaffirmed that he was staying in the race in defiance of Rove, who had demanded Akin’s withdrawal and yanked American Crossroads’ millions from his campaign after Akin touted the prophylactic character of “legitimate rape.”

When pulling the super PAC dough didn’t faze the stubborn Missouri Tea Partyer, Rove went ballistic. “We should sink Todd Akin,” he declared , according to Bloomberg Businessweek. “If he’s found mysteriously murdered, don’t look for my whereabouts!”

Rove’s remarks did more than just reopen the schism between the GOP establishment he embodies and the Tea Party, which has begun to see him as a ruthless party boss. It also showed that the Republicans have another serious problem in addition to Mitt Romney’s disastrous candidacy: Karl Christian Rove.

And lastly this one suggests three reasons why Romney isn’t doing better than he is. I do realize it’s not over though…..believe me.

1. His stand on the auto bailout “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” has hurt him in states like Ohio.

2. He probably lost Florida when he chose Ryan as his running mate as the majority of seniors apparently don’t like their plans for Medicare…………even if they were excluded from the cuts.

3. His lack of connection with ordinary Americans exemplified by his 47% comments.

Filed under: 2012, aca, Book Review, Medicare, Mitt Romney, Obama | Tagged: | 20 Comments »

Flip Flopper in Chief?

Posted on September 24, 2012 by lmsinca

I just don’t see how someone with so many different opinions or statements on one subject can realistically believe he can or even should be President.

A quote from Romney’s book “No Apology”;

After about a year of looking at data — and not making much progress — we had a collective epiphany of sorts, an obvious one, as important observations often are: the people in Massachusetts who didn’t have health insurance were, in fact, already receiving health care. Under federal law, hospitals had to stabilize and treat people who arrived at their emergency rooms with acute conditions. And our state’s hospitals were offering even more assistance than the federal government required. That meant that someone was already paying for the cost of treating people who didn’t have health insurance. If we could get our hands on that money, and therefore redirect it to help the uninsured buy insurance instead and obtain treatment in the way that the vast majority of individuals did — before acute conditions developed — the cost of insuring everyone in the state might not be as expensive as I had feared.

It’s not as if this interview with Glenn Beck was while he was in college, it was in 2007.

When they show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care paid for by you and me. If that’s not a form of socialism, I don’t know what is,” he said at the time. “So my plan did something quite different. It said, you know what? If people can afford to buy insurance … or if they can pay their own way, then they either buy that insurance or pay their own way, but they no longer look to government to hand out free care. And that, in my opinion, is ultimate conservativism.

And in a 2010 interview on Morning Joe he was asked if he believed in universal health coverage and said;

Oh sure. Look, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way.

And then surprise of surprises last night on 60 Minutes he reversed course.

“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance,” he said in an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday night. “If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”

h/t Sam Stein & Amanda Terkel

My oldest daughter finally convinced one of her friends to apply for the CA PCIP enacted as part of the ACA. Her friend Sara completely lost the ability to speak and also lost control of many motor skills while in graduate school about three years ago. Her medical insurance expired as she was forced to quit school and was also unemployable. Luckily, her partner was able to support the two of them, but just barely. Sara was unable to purchase health insurance and had no medical diagnosis so was also denied disability.

She has spent the last three years in emergency rooms and trying to get care and a diagnosis through the health department but most tests were denied and no one seemed able to make a diagnosis even though she has gone down hill dramatically in the past three years. At one point the state sent her to a mental health expert as they thought she was making herself sick or something. She now walks with the help of a walker, can no longer drive and barely leaves the house as it’s too much effort.

About a month ago she received her insurance through PCIP and was finally able to see both a GP and the neurologist he sent her to and now has a likely diagnosis and even medication to improve her condition. Her tests were ordered on an emergency status and she was diagnosed with PLS a very rare (only 500 cases in the US) and degenerative form of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s) that is not as deadly or rapidly progressive. There are treatments and while it is debilitating it isn’t a death sentence and can be mitigated while improving her quality of life.

We had a similar experience with our niece who died in 2008. We waited a very long time for her insurance company to approve the tests she needed but the approval never came. Instead she received a notice that her insurance had been terminated. We couldn’t get in to see a neurologist until we could prove we had the money to pay for whatever tests and treatment she might need. We converted our IRA’s to cash and put our rental house on the market but we were too late. While I was on the way to bring her home from Albuquerque to see the neurologist I’d found to treat her she had a seizure and died.

Mitt Romney can’t even seem to figure out if we have an obligation to help people in these circumstances or not.

Filed under: 2012, aca, health insurance, Mitt Romney | 10 Comments »

Money, money, money, money……………MONEY

Posted on September 21, 2012 by lmsinca

I read this yesterday and thought it was depressing.  I learned that Riverside County (my county) sits at just under 17% poverty, median income is down another $3,000 since last year  and 3 times as many residents need food stamps now than needed them in 2007.  These are some of the people who don’t pay federal income taxes I guess.  I’ve never understood why, when people need the safety net the most it is always under the biggest threat.  It’s almost as if we blame the victims of the recession for the recession.  I’m sure it all comes down to money and we know it didn’t just disappear so where is it?

I read this in TomDispatch:

Here’s what the latest census data tell us: in 2011, the middle class shrank to “an all-time low” (as the Washington Post headline had it), while the income of the wealthiest Americans continued to climb.  The poverty rate leveled off at a still shuddering 15%, with more than one of every five Americans under eighteen living in poverty.  The Gini Index, a measure of income inequality, rose by 1.6%, the “biggest one-year increase in almost two decades.”

In a way, of course, this should be no news at all.  Middle-class wealth has taken a staggering hit since the economic meltdown of 2007 (and African American and Hispanic wealth has gone through the floor). This disaster, linked to the Great Recession, has had a sideline effect.  On the theory that what goes up must come down, money flooding out of American households and into the coffers of the incredibly wealthy and their corporate cronies has also been flowing back down in tidal amounts.  It’s been pouring biblically into this season’s political campaign.

The news out of the dog days of August, for example, was that the Obama and Romney campaigns had raised a total of more than $225 million dollars that month alone.  (In the 1984 presidential campaign between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, the two candidates raised a “mere” $202 million during that whole election season!)  And, of course, those figures don’t even include the dollars filling Super PACs to the bursting point and the “dark money” going into the 501(c)(4)s that don’t have to disclose where their contributions even come from.  (Eight of the top 10 Super PACs are “conservative,” reports the Daily Beast, and 77% of all contributions this campaign season will come from “business interests,” according to the invaluable Open Secrets website.)

Tom went on to publish parts of an essay by Lewis Lapham that I thought was well worth the read.  It’s the same link, the essay is under Tom’s comments which I quoted above.

Thomas Paine in the opening chapter of Common Sense finds “the strength of government and the happiness of the governed” in the freedom of the common people to “mutually and naturally support each other.” He envisions a bringing together of representatives from every quarter of society — carpenters and shipwrights as well as lawyers and saloonkeepers — and his thinking about the mongrel splendors of democracy echoes that of Plato in The Republic: “Like a coat embroidered with every kind of ornament, this city, embroidered with every kind of character, would seem to be the most beautiful.”

Published in January 1776, Paine’s pamphlet ran through printings of 500,000 copies in a few months and served as the founding document of the American Revolution, its line of reasoning implicit in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The wealthy and well-educated gentlemen who gathered 11 years later in Philadelphia to frame the Constitution shared Paine’s distrust of monarchy but not his faith in the abilities of the common people, whom they were inclined to look upon as the clear and present danger seen by the delegate Gouverneur Morris as an ignorant rabble and a “riotous mob.”

From Aristotle the founders borrowed the theorem that all government, no matter what its name or form, incorporates the means by which the privileged few arrange the distribution of law and property for the less-fortunate many. Recognizing in themselves the sort of people to whom James Madison assigned “the most wisdom to discern, and the most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society,” they undertook to draft a constitution that employed an aristocratic means to achieve a democratic end.

Accepting of the fact that whereas a democratic society puts a premium on equality, a capitalist economy does not, the contrivance was designed to nurture both the private and the public good, accommodate the motions of the heart as well as the movement of the market, the institutions of government meant to support the liberties of the people, not the ambitions of the state. By combining the elements of an organism with those of a mechanism, the Constitution offered as warranty for the meeting of its objectives the character of the men charged with its conduct and deportment, i.e., the enlightened tinkering of what both Jefferson and Hamilton conceived as a class of patrician landlords presumably relieved of the necessity to cheat and steal and lie.

Good intentions, like mother’s milk, are a perishable commodity. As wealth accumulates, men decay, and sooner or later an aristocracy that once might have aspired to an ideal of wisdom and virtue goes rancid in the sun, becomes an oligarchy distinguished by a character that Aristotle likened to that of “the prosperous fool” — its members so besotted by their faith in money that “they therefore imagine there is nothing that it cannot buy.”

Filed under: 2012, Poverty | Tagged: | 8 Comments »

Who are the 47%?

Posted on September 18, 2012 by lmsinca

You’ll all be glad to know I’m done with my brief obsession with the people who produced, filmed and promoted the crappy video that turned the ME on it’s head.  I was more interested in the psychological profiles of the characters involved than the political ones anyway.  Now I’m stuck on Romney.

Here are his comments again, the ones I had a truly visceral reaction to.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

Romney went on: “[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Earlier I challenged Scott to say what he meant.

I think the elephant in this room is that you agree with him. Just say so.

jnc replied first,

I’ll own this. I definitely agree with him. I mean it when I say I’m a libertarian. It’s the most persuasive argument he’s made in my view thus far in the campaign. Note also that the 53% vs 47% meme isn’t original to Romney. The first I saw of it was from Erik at Red State in the Facebook posts in response to the “We are the 99%” meme as part of Occupy Wall Street. The “divide the country” approach didn’t start with Romney, he just draws the line differently than OWS

then went on to talk about the “Life of Julia” and his ideas on the flat tax.  Just a reminder, I ridiculed the “Life of Julia” and said it reminded me of the dopey sex ed material the girls watched in the 60’s and btw, a lot of us are intrigued by jnc’s tax proposals.  Too bad Romney didn’t mention either of those.  He was too busy embarrassing the 47% of the population that don’t pay Federal Income Tax or the 47% of Obama’s base, and brought out the tried but true euphemism that Brigade (of PL fame) always trots out……………..liberals are on the dole and only vote for Democrats so they can continue to get “free stuff”.

Romney seems to be confusing the 47% of people who don’t pay Federal income tax with 47% of the population at large who are Obama’s base who will naturally vote for Obama.  A large number of the 47% who don’t pay income tax are seniors, vets, people living in the poorer states in the south etc., many of whom also generally vote for Republicans.  It’s a little confusing who he’s actually insulting here but it seems to be just about everyone who isn’t in an exclusive group of wealthy Republicans.

And then after challenging me on what he considered my mis-representation of Romney’s words and taking something out of context, Scott said this,

I thought I did, but if I need to be I can be more clear. I agree with him.

I have said this many times, but if the way in which we fund our government is through income taxes, then everyone should pay income taxes, and the tax rate should be flat with no exemptions.

I think this is interesting because none of the quotes I was objecting to had to do with a flat tax or even Romney, Scott or Jnc’s tax solutions which are all slightly different if I understand them correctly.  Romney/Ryan don’t like to get into the same kind of specifics that Scott or Jnc do, so I know less about them than I’d like to.

Political differences and tax solutions aside, I wanted to know whether they agreed with the Romney comments I quoted above.

And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax”.

Here are a couple of maps showing counties that voted for Obama and the richest vs poorest counties in the country.

Matt Welch over at Reason.com:

I should theoretically be the target audience for this stuff. I never took out a federally guaranteed student loan, never enjoyed the mortgage-interest deduction; I worry all the time about government spending and entitlements, and I am not unfamiliar with the looter/moocher formulation. But this kind of reductionism does not reflect individualism (as David Brooks charges), it rejects individualism, by insisting that income tax is destiny. It judges U.S. residents not as humans but as productive (or unproductive) units.

There are to my mind many more important things to consider in this presidential race than Mitt Romney’s reductive parroting of plausible-but-wrong GOP tropes. But the reason this controversy will have legs is ultimately because many Republicans think Romney’s comments were just fine .  They are about to learn what the rest of the country thinks about that.

That piece above from “The Corner” (linked in the Reason piece) should please Scott and Jnc.  We’ll see who’s right…………….but I think Romney just screwed his chances of ever becoming President of the United States.  Personally, I don’t think he deserves it.

Filed under: 2012, Mitt Romney | Tagged: | 25 Comments »

Anniversaries and a Local Connection to Libya

Posted on September 15, 2012 by lmsinca

Hi All,

I’m really sorry I missed the Anniversary.  I wanted to bring balloons and a banner and have a real party but thankfully Scott wrote a nice post and the rest of you joined in with congratulations to ATiM and each other.  Next year we’ll have a big bash with music, speeches and lots of toasts.   I should be able to drink something stronger than apple juice by then.  I’ll just reiterate everyone’s appreciation of Brent and his morning reports and a heartfelt thanks to the rest of you who have taken the time to publish posts and participate in the comments and have also helped with the technical end of things.

Like many of you I’ve learned considerably more about subjects I wasn’t previously that familiar with, discovered interesting tidbits of information about each of you (an unfolding mystery), and personally confronted a few more short-comings in myself than I originally bargained for.  It’s been an interesting endeavor, so thanks everyone.  It’s true; I did tell Scott I hated him once (thanks for telling everyone….lol), about three years ago.  What he forgot to mention, or may have simply forgotten, is that I also apologized right away.  I realized even then, that although we were strangers (much more so then than now) and I didn’t appreciate or like what he was saying, he certainly didn’t deserve my hate.  I was embarrassed I’d even said it as I had gotten caught up in the moment of a heated exchange on health care reform, something I am very passionate about.  No excuses though, even as a few come to mind…………………….hahahahaha.

It’s been a rough year for me health wise, and I’ve been away from ATiM almost as much as I’ve been around.  I’m hopeful all that’s behind me now once I get caught up on my sleep and finish this last round of antibiotics, which I’m having a little trouble keeping down………yuck.   What I learned in the past six or seven months is that my efforts at being healthy my entire adult life didn’t protect me from a health threat I hadn’t anticipated or an unexpected depletion of our funds set aside for emergencies.  What I thought was, and probably should have been, a fairly routine bout of food poisoning in March got very complicated and damn near killed me.   It should be a lesson to all of us that we shouldn’t take our good fortune or good health for granted.   I do feel grateful though that I had some excellent doctors and nurses treating me, even though there were times they seemed more than a little stymied (slightly terrifying), and that I will recover and be as good as new again.  Well, as new as any 62 year old can be, that is.  I’m very cognizant of the fact there are a lot of people who can’t say that with certainty so I feel particularly blessed and more than a little bit lucky right now.

I was in the hospital last week with no access to the internet but I did follow the news a little and read the local newspaper.  I became fascinated with the story behind the so-called film that started, or was blamed for starting, all the trouble in the Middle East.  I’m a big proponent of free speech, as we all are, but it’s a shame so much of this tragedy swirls around what was essentially an alleged con-artist’s effort to stir up trouble and probably rip a few investors off.  I’m speculating here a little but I did have time yesterday to do some research, in between naps……lol.  I don’t know if anyone here has already covered this ground or not, as I haven’t had the chance to read through all the comments yet, but here are a few stories that I found particularly compelling.

Some of you may remember I commented here a couple of times that I quit participating in our local city council meetings and citizen commissions a couple of years ago when our conservative city aligned itself with Arizona’s volatile immigration bill.  One of the reasons I became so disillusioned was because there were outsiders (out of state even) around town agitating community members and our council members were swayed by their arguments.  One day last week I saw this guy’s photo in the paper and recognized him as one of those outsiders.  At the same time all of this was going on in 2010 some anti-Obama/anti-Muslim protesters set up a table just outside of the Post Office handing out fliers and propaganda and generally trying to stir up trouble.  Here’s the local story on this Klein character with the photo I saw.  And apparently the film maker is a CA man as well.

Steven Klein, owner of Wise Home Insurance Services, said he believes Muslim extremists control most of the mosques across the United States and that his intention is only to tell the truth.

A Cal State San Bernardino center that monitors extremist groups describes Klein as part of a national anti-Muslim hate movement.

Klein said he founded a group called Courageous Christians United after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks spurred him to get involved in what he called educating people about Islam. He said he later handed the group over to another person.

He then founded Concerned Citizens for the First Amendment, which also educates people about Islam, he said.

Although he has distributed literature about Islam, Klein said he did not attend protests against the building of a new mosque in Temecula in 2010.

But he said he and other members of Concerned Citizens for the First Amendment distributed leaflets on Islam in high schools across Southern California, including in Temecula, Corona, Murrieta, Norco and Menifee.

Klein said he has written on issues other than Islam, targeting illegal immigration, gays and lesbians serving in the military and Mormonism. But he said he has not attended or organized demonstrations on those issues.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate activity, on Wednesday put out a dossier on Klein. The center quotes him from his Facebook page in 2011 as saying Muslims “are a cancer that WILL attack us and KILL as many as they can to further the Islamic doctrine of Sharia law … Beware, there IS a holy war coming.”

I’m tempted to email all of these stories to the council members and my friend who is the Mayor Pro Tem right now, but I promised my husband I would stay out of it.  Small town politics can get pretty ugly as I’ve discovered anew in the last four years.

Here’s another piece I read that details more on the film-maker and highlights rather obviously that the initial media reports weren’t exactly accurate.  Apparently he’s a convicted meth cooker and scam artist still on probation and not of Israeli origin.  No wonder he went into hiding.

As an example of the early reporting, here is the opening of a top story in the Los Angeles Times, based on AP reporting: “An Israeli filmmaker based in California who made a movie belittling Islam’s prophet Muhammad that has ignited Middle East riots and led to the death of the U.S. ambassador in Libya says he is in hiding. Sam Bacile, 56, who described himself as an ‘Israeli Jew’ who develops real estate in California, told the Associated Press by phone that he went into hiding Tuesday after assaults by conservative Muslims on U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya.”

The AP, in an early report, flatly called Bacile “an Israeli fillmmaker.” Even Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, published this under the headline, “Israeli Filmmaker in Hiding.”

The media accounts on “Bacile” slowly fell apart as the day wore on yesterday, as I documented here in update, thanks mainly to reporting by blog sites, including Gawker, Buzzfeed and Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic’s site. Then last night, the AP weighed in with an excellent report that seemed to track down the real Bacile, using some fine investigative techniques, and outed him as one Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (Basseley=Bacile, for one thing) in Cerritos, California.

And lastly, the LA Times with a little more background on the film’s producers.  A convict and an agitator deny their culpability now that the shit has hit the fan.

One ran a low-profile Christian charity from a sleepy suburb east of Los Angeles. The other was a financially strapped gas station operator just out of federal prison.

In the last year, these men, both Egyptian immigrants, became unlikely collaborators in an endeavor that has shaken the stability of the Middle East.

Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih, the president of the Duarte-based charity Media for Christ, and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a convicted felon from Cerritos, emerged Thursday as forces behind “Innocence of Muslims.”

Both men appeared to have gone into hiding Thursday. As the furor over the film grew, they and their associates have distanced themselves from the production. Nakoula told the Associated Press he was a logistics manager on the movie, not the director. He told a Coptic bishop Thursday that he had no role in it, the clergyman told The Times.

“He denied completely any involvement,” said Bishop Serapion of the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of Los Angeles.

He [Nakoula] was convicted on state drug charges in 1997. In 2010, he was convicted in an identity theft scheme. According to the court file, Nakoula, who ran gas stations in Hawaiian Gardens, operated under a dizzying array of aliases, including Kritbag Difrat. He was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison and was released last summer.

Somewhere in the links above is mentioned the lack of public interest in the film itself.  Apparently, there was a viewing of the entire film in a theater recently and no one showed up, literally, not a single person.  This kind of story is right up my alley but the really sad aspect to all of it is, of course, the loss of life.  The thing with free speech is that there are consequences and they generally rest on those who abuse the privilege.  Even if it is ultimately discovered, as the speculation now suggests, that the assault on the consulate was planned and carried out separately from the protests surrounding the youtube trailer of the film, the so-called film will always be associated with the deaths of at least four Americans.

Update 1……….I got a kick out of reading the diet and exercise talk among the guys yesterday but serious congrats to Kevin, McWing and FB’s wife for losing the weight.  Yellow won with the best comment though………OMG.  I’ve always been thin and not a big eater but I’ve gotten too thin this year and am trying to gain back some of the weight I lost.  I was doing pretty well and heading back up to 125 until a little over a week ago, now I get to start all over again as I weighed in at 115 this morning.  I’m still just under 5’9” and big boned so need to get back to about 135 if possible as that’s my healthy weight.  My husband got up to about 235 at 6’2” about 5 or 6 years ago but when he was diagnosed with gout he went on a really strict diet I designed for him and he really lost the extra pounds fast and eliminated the gout as well.  He’s around 200 now which seems to be maintainable and no complaints from the doctors, he’s a swimmer like me and we both ride the stationary bike and I walk our dog most days.  He missed a lot of his workouts earlier this year because of a broken leg but just cut his calories down to make up for it and it seemed to work.  I do most of the cooking and I can tell when he’s gaining a little weight so I just cook a bit differently and he doesn’t even seem to notice……….hahahaha.  I also know when he sneaks out to get a hamburger on the way to the bank or post office and cut back accordingly.

Update 2………….Just read this interview.  I think maybe someone should just wire Romney’s jaw shut at this point.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the film that seems to have sparked all this, the Innocence of Muslims film? Secretary Clinton today said she thought it was disgusting. How would you describe it?

MITT ROMNEY: Well, I haven’t seen the film. I don’t intend to see it. I you know, I think it’s dispiriting sometimes to see some of the awful things people say. And the idea of using something that some people consider sacred and then parading that out a negative way is simply inappropriate and wrong. And I wish people wouldn’t do it. Of course, we have a First Amendment. And under the First Amendment, people are allowed to do what they feel they want to do. They have the right to do that, but it’s not right to do things that are of the nature of what was done by, apparently this film.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: We’ve seen General Martin Dempsey call Pastor Jones to say, “Please don’t promote this film.” You think that’s a good idea?

MITT ROMNEY: I think the whole film is a terrible idea. I think him making it, promoting it showing it is disrespectful to people of other faiths. I don’t think that should happen. I think people should have the common courtesy and judgment– the good judgment– not to be– not to offend other peoples’ faiths. It’s a very bad thing, I think, this guy’s doing.

Happy Saturday everyone!!!!!!!!!

Filed under: 2012, ATiM, Mitt Romney, weight | Tagged: | 86 Comments »

Dem Convention Open Thread

Posted on September 4, 2012 by markinaustin

Comments are welcome.

Booker? Castro? First Lady?

Your thoughts. Please. I missed it, in favor of time with grand daughters, and will continue to do so.

I rely on the beneficence of strangers.

Filed under: 2012, Democrats | 107 Comments »

Labor Day Open Thread

Posted on September 3, 2012 by lmsinca

I love this quote from the US DOL:

The vital force of labor added materially to the highest standard of living and the greatest production the world has ever known and has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy. It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pay tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership — the American worker.

With so many people out of work this Labor Day and an election on the horizon I think most of us are a little more apprehensive this year than other years in the more distant past.  Regardless, I always love Labor Day as the end of a long hot summer of  beaches, swimming, busy work days, sleepovers with the grand kids and the transition to making plans for the Fall.

I’m about ready to go out and tear out the rest of my summer garden and will plant the Fall one in two weeks.  We’ll swim another few weeks here and then I’ll switch to the high school pool as it’s heated year round and ours will begin to cool as the nights get colder.  We had our last big beach trip this weekend, the grand kids are back in school and our youngest just left this morning to finish writing her thesis and so we won’t see her again until Christmas.

Here in our local community is the big (we like to think of it that way) fair and a parade down Main Street.  At the fair we still have displays of quilts, canned goods, arts and crafts and the 4H Club will show off their ribbon winning animals and cute bunnies and baby chicks.  It’s always a reminder to me of the way things were when I was growing up and that those values are still alive and well in pockets of America.

Wishing all of you a happy Labor Day and hoping you’ve all enjoyed the last real break in what appears to be a heated campaign season.   Haaaaahaaaaa, I’m rested and have my boxing gloves on so watch out…………. just kidding.

Filed under: 2012, Labor Day | 108 Comments »

Republican Convention Open Thread

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Michigoose

You’re welcome, Don Juan!  🙂

 

Are you quite sure you don’t want to become an author with full rights and privileges for starting arguments?

MiA adds: Every time someone double posts, if I catch it, I trash one. All of us but one are following on a comments thread and the double posting is annoying. The “one” should learn to use this site.

Every time someone posts without a category (uncategorized), I jam it into one, if I catch it. KW used to do it for us, and sometimes Lulu did. Brent, look at the categories list, click the Most Used tab, and you will be surprised to find Morning Report as the second most used.

Now we wait for WMR to make his speech. If any of you watch it, please report in the comments.

Filed under: 2012, Open Thread, Republican Party | 161 Comments »

Republican Convention Rundown

Posted on August 29, 2012 by yellojkt

I spent last evening channel flipping between CNN and MSNBC in an attempt to catch a smattering of speeches amidst the punditry. The theme of the night was We Built This, a topic honored more in the breach, at least among the televised marquee speakers. Here in semi-random order are my day-old impressions of some of the speakers.

Bob McDonnell/Rick Scott/ John Kasich served up a round robin of feel-good pep talks on how great their economy was doing despite the best efforts of the Democrats to torpedo them. Every single one had hair that was perfect. The future of Romneytron Enterprises is assured with new models rolling off the assembly line with industrial precision.

Nikki Haley at least gave some visual relief for not being a lily-white male but her schtick was the same. Her one distinguishing remark was a passage where she union bashed Northerners and bragged of the low-cost right-to-work airplane factory she sniped from Washington State.

Artur Davis, DINO turned Republican, provided a little color, both literally and figuratively. Last time around the Republicans were able to snag Joe Lieberman as their token turncoat. Davis’s lackluster soundbites showed just how far the GOP has fallen in its outreach programs. He also wins lame musical call-out (barely beating out Christie’s Springsteen allusion) with his “Somebody that I used to know” reference.

Rick Santorum provided the red meat portion of the evening puffing on a dog whistle until his cheeks turned red by cramming as many instances of “work” and “welfare” as possible into a single sentence. He also went on a long extended handsy metaphor which ended is some sort of uplifting tale of his special needs daughter. By Santorum standards it was a well-thought out speech but it just seemed out of place given the other speakers.

Ann Romney was one of two featured speakers who made it to prime time coverage. Stepping onto the stage directly from the set of “Father Knows Best” she started off with a tribute to the recently departed Phyllis Diller with five minutes of man bashing. In it she outsapped Hallmark with her tribute to the mothers and wives who really make this country run. By the end of it I was ready to vote her PTA president. She must run a heckuva bake sale. Less convincing were her tales of deprivation as the spouse of a starving college student. She was aiming for touching but it just came off as phony. Having to eat tuna fish instead of caviar. How demeaning. She sure loves that affable lug Mitt and it showed even through all the scripted folksy gushing.

Chris Christie was the most anticipated speaker of the night and like a Chris Farley SNL sketch the dramatic tension was to see just how outrageous he would get. After his seeming de riguer tribute to his immigrant parents (a theme far more prevalent than the official one), he laid into to his trademarked schtick about how he stood up to the bullies in the teacher union and their cushy low-to-mid five figure incomes.  The Twitter game (which I indulged in) was to see how long he could speak with out actually saying the name Mitt Romney. Quite a while as it turns out, fifteen to twenty minutes depending on who was holding the stopwatch.

His speech was far less the keynote of the 2012 Republican National Convention than the kick-off of the 2016 Christie Presidential Campaign. Even by the standards of New Jersey blowhards, this was a monumentally self-aggrandizing performance.

Mitt Romney managed to say not a word the entire evening. After being introduced by his adoring wife, he rushed her off the stage so quick that if you blinked you missed it. My hopes for an Al “Get A Room” Gore display of public affection were completely dashed. The rest of the evening he sat as stiffly and uncomfortably as the victim of a Friar’s Club roast.

The conventions are carefully scripted spectacles but I had no idea who the target audience was. Romney was rarely mentioned by any of the speakers. The inspirational tales of constitutionally mandated state budget balancing were tepid at best. Even the conventioneer hats seemed oddly subdued. The entire evening was completely skippable and if it weren’t for bourbon and internet snark it would have been unendurable.

Filed under: 2012, Republican Party | 195 Comments »

The Generation Game-Sunday Open Thread

Posted on August 19, 2012 by lmsinca

I’ve been looking around all afternoon for something to begin a new thread with and found this piece from Crooked Timber fairly interesting.  We keep hearing a lot about Baby Boomers and Gen X and Y or whatnot and so I thought this might be a conversation starter.  While I was reading the comments I came across one guy who was insistent that the boomers were the worst generation ever and a bunch of narcissistic destructive dolts or something along those lines.

One of the standard ploys in journalism, marketing and political commentary is the generation game. The basic idea is to label a generation ‘X’ or ‘Y’, then dissect its attitudes, culture, and relationship with other generations. The most famous generation, of course, is that of the Baby Boomers, born between the end of World War II and the early 1960s, and their most enduring contribution to the generation gap is the ‘Generation Gap’ between children and their parents.

The generation game is played with particular vigour in cultural commentary, but its reach seems to be extending all the time. No US Presidential election would now be complete without voluminous commentary on the generational backgrounds of the contenders. There is even a branch of economics called generational accounting, which is supposed to show whether one generation is subsidising another through the tax and welfare system.

Once we strip out the more-or-less constant social distinctions associated with membership of a given age-group, the idea that we can say much about any particular cohort becomes far more dubious. In fact, cohort effects are only of much importance between the ages of 16 and about 25. The experience of childhood is dominated by family and school, and, while both families and schools have changed since the 1950s, the rate of change from one decade to the next has been quite slow.

On the other hand, by the time the members of a given cohort reach their late twenties, their live courses have diverged so much that they cease to form a well-defined group with common experiences. The differences between men and women, rich and poor, workers and bosses, married and single, parents and nonparents count for much more than the commonality that comes from sharing a date on a birth certificate.

For the crucial decade from 16 to 25, however, common experiences related to growing up at a particular time can be very important. Whether the labour market is in a boom or a slump when you finish school can make a big difference to your subsequent career. For males, an even more important question is whether the years of military age coincide with a major war. Peacetime and wartime generations, or boom and slump generations, can be very different.

This is a re-publication of a piece written prior to this recession but I thought this was interesting and I think we all know how both the 16-25 and the over 50 crowds are suffering this time.

It was not until the recession we had to have, from 1989 to 1992, and the waves of downsizing in the 1990s, that the end of postwar prosperity really hit the Vietnam generation and the baby bust cohort. Although the focus of policy attention remained firmly on youth unemployment, the real story of the 1990s was the disappearance of jobs for workers over 50, and particularly for men over 50. The employment rate for this group has fallen from nearly 100 per cent during the postwar boom to around 50 per cent today.

Filed under: 2012 | Tagged: | 6 Comments »

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