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Personally, I'm more scared of Christian extremists in this country (and I'm Christian!) than Muslim extremists.
Plus, I think most Muslims worldwide are actually Asian (I think Indonesia is the largest Muslim country and there are a bunch of Chinese and Indian Muslims too) so should we be rounding up all the Asians in the military too? I'm pretty sure we still have those Japanese internment camps or we could just use a FEMA camp and I know the Glen Becks won't have a problem with that. And round up all the black people in the military, too. Pookie X might go off...ya never know.
Cynthia Tucker
Voters thinking about jobs, not Obama
5:00 pm November 6, 2009, by ctucker
It’s the economy, stupid.
James Carville’s old mantra rings as true now as it did when he tacked it to the wall of the Clinton war room in 1992. The results of last week’s gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey can be largely explained by three words: jobs, jobs and jobs. Exit polls from both contests show that voters rated the economy as their top concern.
Health care reform is a vital issue, as is climate change. (Carville’s sign also had a third bullet point: “Don’t forget health care.”) President Obama was right to press ahead with legislation to improve the dysfunctional health care system and regulate carbon emissions.
But nothing is more central to the immediate anxieties of voters than the economy, which is still raining pink slips. Job-seekers outnumber job openings six to one, and the official unemployment rate now stands at 10.2 percent. According to some economists, the government jobless rate minimizes actual unemployment, which may be closer to 15 or 18 percent. For the White House and Congress, then, creating jobs is Job One.
Despite the view on Wall Street that the deep recession has probably ended, the average American hasn’t experienced the return of stability, much less prosperity. Foreclosures continue unabated; credit is still hard to come by; employers aren’t hiring. So what if gross domestic product grew in the third quarter of the year? That’s meaningless to an out-of-work dad avoiding debt collectors.
You can hardly blame Republicans for trying to paint their victories as a referendum on the president’s policies. They chalked up impressive wins — especially in New Jersey, a deep blue state — and they’re using them to boost a dispirited base and rattle Democrats, who were already nervous about their prospects going into next year’s Congressional elections. That’s how the game of politics is played.
But the GOP knows a shaky economy, not Obama’s health care plan, is uppermost in voters’ minds. That’s why the Senate last week passed an extension of unemployment benefits 98-0, with nary a Republican “nay.” The bill also extended a tax credit intended to lure home buyers and shore up the lagging real estate market. A day later, the House passed the same bill.
So far, so good — but not nearly enough. The economy needs more government spending if businesses are to start hiring. Congress might also appropriate more money to help state capitals, which have met their balanced-budget mandates by cutting workers and trimming badly needed social services. That’s a vicious cycle which leaves individuals — and the economy — worse off.
What about the deficit? Well, some of the red ink will start to disappear when the economy rights itself; businesses and individuals will pay more in taxes, swelling government coffers. The recession is itself responsible for about 20 percent of the deficit, according to Michael Ettlinger and Michael Linden, budget experts at the Center for American Progress. Fiscal conservatives should take note of that.
If they’re serious about debt reduction, that is. Most of the Republicans now blasting the Obama administration for profligate spending were in power during the Bush administration, when the surplus was eaten away by tax cuts, two wars and a Medicare prescription drug plan. Since 40 percent of the deficit can be attributed to policies adopted during President Bush’s tenure, according to Linden and Ettlinger, it’s hard to take those Republicans seriously.
And Democrats would be foolish to listen to their no-government-spending mantra. It’s going to take more stimulus to juice an economy left very nearly in ruin by the banking crisis and the real estate crash.
Sure, it’s counter-intuitive to spend more with high deficits. As a beginning skiier, I had a hard time learning to lean forward to keep from falling. The natural tendency, as I swooshed downhill — fast and frightened — was to lean backwards. Fell every time.
This economy has fallen far enough. It’s time to lean forward.
http://blogs.ajc.com/cynthia-tucker/2009/11/06/...
By Derrick Z. Jackson
Globe Columnist / November 7, 2009
COLLEGE PRESIDENTS are treating American education like it’s Wall Street. At least the excessive salaries and bonuses on Wall Street are just about greed in a business based on greed. But university presidents are the role model we entrust our children to. We assume that tens of thousands of dollars later, we will be repaid on graduation day with an advanced life-form, brimming with thoughtfulness, creativity, and caring, and the ability to find the washing machine and converse about issues other than money.
We are not paying to have our presidents and chancellors ape Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, or Bank of America. But that is what they are doing. The Chronicle of Higher Education, in its annual compensation survey, reported this week that the median pay for presidents at the nation’s major private research universities rose 15.5 percent in the fiscal year that ended in 2008, to $628,000. Overall median pay at 419 private colleges rose by a healthy 6.5 percent, to $359,000.
Second in the nation was the ridiculous compensation of nearly $1.5 million for Suffolk University’s David Sargent. MIT’s Susan Hockfield, Boston University’s Robert Brown, Northeastern’s Joseph Aoun, and Brandeis’s Jehuda Reinharz made between $710,000 and $876,000. That made the $694,000 for Harvard’s Drew Faust look like she’s getting chumped at the most influential university in the world. Is it possible that even she, as oft is joked at Harvard, eats prestige?
Not really, of course. They all are eating our lunch. This is merely the latest in unconscionable news about salaries mushrooming way beyond inflation.
Last year, the Chronicle reported that the presidents of the nation’s 184 public research universities enjoyed a collective pay raise of 7.6 percent, to a median of $427,000. With public college presidents being more sensitive to student and taxpayer outrage during the recession, many have been forced to mute their growing elitism by donating their bonuses to student aid or not taking raises.
Still, the comfort for both pubic and private presidents bears no resemblance to the world beneath them. The American Dream is being fogged as parents drown in debt, students spend more time working to pay off campus fees rather than studying, and professors try to feed the brains of students with slashed resources. Yet, 23 private colleges now pay their presidents more than $1 million. None did so in 2002. The number of colleges charging more than $50,000 a year for a full ride multiplied by nearly 12 times in just the last 12 months, from five to 58.
This is a parallel universe to how the nation’s top 23 investment firms and banks are about to grant their staffs a record $140 billion in compensation, according to the Wall Street Journal. This is despite them nearly ruining the country and jacking up taxpayers for a $700 billion bailout while unemployment surpasses 10 percent.
In a very real sense, you and I bail out public and private universities every day. Federal funds account for $31.2 billion, or 60 percent of the $51.9 billion universities spent on science and engineering research in fiscal 2008, according to the National Science Foundation. The 62 top public and private research universities in the Association of American Universities spend 3 1/2 times more federal dollars on academic research than what they spend themselves.
As a former adjunct professor at a private college, I have no qualm with decent salaries for quality presidents, but not one-year raises of 15.5 percent when most American households have less mean income in 2008 dollars than 10 years ago, and when the four-year cost at many private colleges has soared past the national median price for existing homes.
For starters, private university presidents should make no more than what the families are paying. With the four-year cost now commonly $200,000, these current million-dollar presidents should show respect for American families by taking home no more than $200,000 a year. That is still a nice payday for them, and the $800,000 left over would sure help many more Americans achieve the American Dream.
Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opi...
...and that "program" many of them sponsor, who's events usually are scheduled on Saturday's in the Fall, would make heads spin with the amount of faux-revenue...
But using a precedent established 30 years ago, private companies have claimed patents on some of these human genes -- not genetic tests or therapies, but the isolated genetic material itself. It's a legal claim that staggers the imagination -- and puts lives at risk, by discouraging open research and raising the cost on cutting-edge genetic tests and treatments. An estimated 20 percent of the human genetic code is now under patent -- and though most patent-holders freely license their "proprietary" material to other researchers and labs, some don't.
Consider two genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2. Women with mutations on one of these genes face a 40 to 85 percent chance of developing breast cancer in their lifetime -- leading some women who have tested positive for the gene to consider early mastectomies or other preventative treatment. But the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes have been patented, by a Utah-based company known as Myriad Genetics. And Myriad charges $3,000 to test women for the genes.
Myriad's patent, granted to the University of Utah 10 years ago and subsequently transferred to the private company, doesn't expire until 2014. Until then, women who want to be tested for the gene mutations must submit their samples to Myriad. Lisbeth Ceriani, a 43-year-old Massachusetts woman diagnosed in 2008 with cancer in both breasts, wanted to know whether she also faced risks for ovarian cancer -- and whether her 8-year-old daughter was also at risk. So she had blood samples sent to Myriad, only to be notified that because Myriad didn't accept her insurance, the company would not test her blood.
Ceriani is one of several women suing Myriad in federal court. The women are backed by the American College of Medical Genetics, the American Society of Clinical Pathology and the American Civil Liberties Union. (The American Medical Association, American Society of Human Genetics, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other national leaders in the medical/research field have weighed in as friends of the court on behalf of the plaintiffs.)
In its motion to dismiss the complaints, Myriad said the case was an attack on the fundamental nature of patents, and that those bringing suit don't have a proper legal basis to challenge their patents.
But the lawsuit does not argue that specific treatments, drugs or genetic tests should not be patented. Instead, it challenges Myriad's ability to patent something which is, in itself, a product of nature and "basic human knowledge." The suit also names the U.S. Patent Office, saying it never should have issued the patent in the first place.
Last week, a New York federal judge declined to dismiss the case, but gave little indication of his thoughts on the merits of the case. It could drag on for years -- leaving the legal status of human genetic material in question. And as more genes are discovered, more patent applications are being filed -- leading the National Institutes of Health to posit that the patents may present a significant barrier to future scientific research, especially as patents for new gene mutations are "layered" over patents on the underlying gene sequences.
Congress could resolve this issue, at least for future patents. In 2007, U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., introduced legislation that would make it illegal to patent human genes. The Genomic Research and Accessibility Act would not affect the hundreds of patents that have already been issued -- but it would stop future patents. The legislation officially died in 2008, but it should be revived and passed, making certain that lifesaving information -- much of which was developed using public research funding -- remains available to the people whose biological fates are determined, in part, by their own DNA.
Companies should have no lock on human DNA
that being said this case does present other problems:
1) MS Ceriani wanted her 8 year old daughter tested?
2) Ms Ceriani could have paid cash for the tests?
3) products of nature and basic human knowledge? - HUH?
a) some drugs are products of nature (penicillin) should these be covered under patents?
b) basic human knowledge??? -
Why not? "(Inherited BRCA mutations give a woman a 36 to 85 percent lifetime risk of developing breast cancer, and a 16 to 60 percent chance of ovarian cancer.)"
2) Ms Ceriani could have paid cash for the tests?
No. Medicaid
3) products of nature and basic human knowledge? - HUH?
a) some drugs are products of nature (penicillin) should these be covered under patents?
"Myriad's patents cover naturally occurring genes and mutations—and even govern the act of looking at two genes and comparing differences—the lawsuit claims the U.S. patent office's policy is unconstitutional and restricts freedom of speech by permitting "the patenting of products of nature, natural phenomena, abstract ideas, and basic human knowledge and thought." "
Basic human knowledge??
"The notion that patents interfere with free speech by restricting research communication presumes that the constitution recognizes research as a form of free speech"
LMBAO - "basic human knowledge and thought" = molecular biology at the post PhD level.
by Stephanie Taylor
Share this on Twitter - NEW POLL: Dems Who Oppose Public Option Bill Today Will Lose Obama Voters in 2010 Sat Nov 07, 2009 at 12:42:47 PM PST
Hours before the wavering House Democrats decide whether to vote for health care reform with a public health insurance option, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee is releasing new poll results fresh out of Virgina.
Stephanie Taylor's diary :: :: We polled 800 Virginia Democrats and Independents who voted for Obama in 2008 but didn't turn out for Creigh Deeds in 2009. The main finding? A huge majority of these voters thought Deeds "wasn't progressive enough."
Not only that, but many will decide whether to vote in 2010 based on whether or not Democrats pass a public option, and specifically said they were less likely to vote for Deeds after he said he would "opt out" Virginia from the public option.
Democrats in Congress: Are you paying attention? Below are highlights from the poll. You can see more results here.
If you haven't yet joined the PCCC for cutting-edge progressive activism, please consider joining us here.
Creigh Deeds seen as "not progressive enough" by huge margin. 64% of Democratic Obama voters and 58% of Independent Obama voters said Deeds was "not progressive enough" compared to only 8% of Democrats and 16% of Independent Obama voters who said he was "too far to the left." (Overall, 5 to 1.)
Obama's voters want the public option. 88% of Democratic Obama voters and 80% of Independent Obama voters favor a public health insurance option to compete with private insurance plans. 93% of those polled said health care is "very" or "somewhat" important when they vote.
Creigh Deeds hurt by opposition to public option. When asked, "Before the election for Governor, Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds said he would side with conservatives and push for Virginia to 'opt out' of the public insurance plan. Did this make you more excited or less excited to vote in this year's election, or did it have no impact?" 41% of those polled said it made them less excited, only 6% said it made them more excited (7 to 1).
Without a public option, Obama voters will continue to drop off in 2010. 43% of Democratic and Independent Obama voters said they are less likely to vote at all in the 2010 general election if Congress does not pass a public option as part of health care reform, compared to only 8% who are more likely to vote. If they do vote, by 46% to 6%, they will be less likely to vote for a Democratic candidate if Democrats do not pass a public option.
Did this dropoff among Obama voters matter to Creigh Deeds? Absolutely. From Blue Virginia:
Last November, Barack Obama received 2.0 million votes and John McCain received 1.7 million votes. This November, Creigh Deeds received 0.8 million votes and Bob McDonnell received 1.2 million votes. Which means that Deeds "underperformed" Obama by 1.2 million votes, while McDonnell "underperformed" McCain by only 0.5 million votes. The difference between those two "underperformances": 700,000 votes, or more than twice the total that Creigh lost by.
Those of us who work on health care reform have been warning Democratic leaders for ages, and now we have proof.
If congressional Democrats want to win re-election in 2010, they need to support a strong public option. If they 'pull a Creigh Deeds' and oppose a public option--or run campaigns to the right of the electorate--Democrats and Independents who voted for President Obama in 2008 have shown they simply won't vote. And the results will be devastating for the Democrats.
Here are three things you can do right now with this information.
Recommend this diary so others see.
If you know anyone who works in Congress or the Democratic Party, forward this post to them today. Together, we can catapult this into the conventional wisdom and make sure Democrats act both more progressively and in their political self-interest.
If you haven't joined the Progressive Change Campaign Committee yet, join us today to be part of effective activism. We're over 250,000 strong, and growing.
UPDATE: Just learned that the dropoff numbers and analysis were actually from Lowell at Blue Virginia, NOT Rootswire. I fixed the link, and send big apologies to Lowell
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/11/7/801...
Don't get me started on the VA election. People were practically BEGGING Deeds to give them a reason to vote for him and not McDonnell. People in VA did not want McDonnell. McDonnell didn't really start getting over 50% of the vote in the polls until around the time Deeds said that opt out mess.
Deeds wasn't ready for Richmond. Now he can stay his ass in his little one-stoplight county where he belongs. (I'm not busting on his county, they actually do only have ONE stoplight).
Comments
November 7, 2009
BY LYNN SWEET Sun-Times Columnist
WASHINGTON -- A lot of lives have changed since Barack Obama won the presidential election one year ago last Wednesday, none so much as the life of Chicago's Sam Kass, the engaging, shaved-head assistant White House chef and food initiative coordinator, a crusader for healthy eating who has shot to fame in the almost 10 months the Obamas have been in the White House.
It's not so much his cooking -- when we talked, Kass did not name a signature dish or style, instead emphasizing his overall food philosophy -- but his work on the White House kitchen garden and nutrition programs, signature projects of first lady Michelle Obama, that has vaulted him from the food section to the news pages.
Last spring, he landed on People magazine's "100 Most Beautiful People" list, and during the summer, he was part of President Obama's golf foursome on Martha's Vineyard.
Kass, 29, comes out of the local-food movement, and his menu is often inspired by what's ripening in the White House garden. His unusual dual roles mean he works in the White House kitchen and with White House policy advisers dealing with food and nutrition issues.
"My focus as a chef," Kass told me, "is to make sure that anybody that I am feeding, that I am sort of safeguarding the health of whoever it is that I am cooking for. And I think enjoyment and pleasure is definitely obviously a wonderful component of eating, but the reason we eat is for nourishment No. 1, first and foremost.
"So I try to make sure that the food is beneficial, that everything on the plate is beneficial and it is delicious. I also try to cook based on relationships as much as possible with the people who are growing the food and people [who are] involved in the process."
Around the White House, you can see Kass in his cooking whites -- or in a suit.
In Washington, you could, as I did one Saturday morning, run into him at a neighborhood farmers market. I met Kass before the Obamas' first big dinner last February, for the nation's governors, when Mrs. Obama gathered students from a local cooking school in the White House kitchen for a teaching preview of the meal.
Kass explained the fine points of the salad.
"On the bottom is watermelon radishes that are grown very close to here. They're really big and beautiful," said Kass. "And it's a citrus salad, so we carve our oranges and grapefruit. And then our lettuces are mixed with ice plants, which grow really well through the winter. And we have crystal lettuce, and they're very -- basically the same variety of plant, and with Sicilian pistachios that have been lightly candied, and a honey citrus vinaigrette. So it should be very tasty."
Kass was the Obamas' personal chef who launched his home-cooking business, Inevitable Table, from his Pilsen residence, in 2007.
He is part of a University of Chicago network that takes in the Obamas and many of their close friends and associates -- some, like Kass, who ended up in Washington.
Kass attended the U. of C. Lab School for high school and some of his elementary years. His father, Robert, a fifth-grade teacher at Lab, taught Malia Obama last year. His mother, Valentine, who lives in Alexandria, Va., is a science educator at the National Science Foundation who, while at the Museum of Science and Industry, was the director of Omnimax productions and programs.
White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett knows Robert Kass from her days when she served on the Lab School board. Susan Sher, Mrs. Obama's chief of staff, is a past chairwoman of that board.
Karen Duncan, the wife of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, is a former Lab School athletic director who is now working with Kass on encouraging schools to serve healthy school lunches.
Kass, she said, "was a great baseball player for U-High when I was the AD there. He used to race off campus to the baseball fields during the day to rake them so the games could be played. The next time I saw him raking was in the White House garden."
"He wanted to be a professional baseball player," recalled Larry McFarlane the dean of students at U-High. Kass, after graduating high school in 1998, played baseball on a scholarship at Kansas City (Kan.) Community College. He later transferred to Triton College in suburban Chicago, eventually receiving a degree in U.S. history from the University of Chicago in 2004.
"One summer while I was at the U. of C., I worked at a restaurant in Chicago, 312 Chicago, and that kind of started me getting interested in food," Kass told me. "And my last semester at U. of C., when I was getting my history degree, was spent in Vienna, and while I was over there finishing up school, I was taken in by a restaurant over there and that is where I ended up staying doing my training."
In 2003 and 2004, he cooked under chef Christian Domschitz at the Morwald im Ambassador in Vienna, Austria, a restaurant described in a Frommer's review as "one of the best and most stylish in Vienna."
By 2005, Kass was back in Chicago, in the kitchen at Avec, where Koren Grieveson is the chef. Kass was a line cook. "He could put together whatever kind of cuisine he wanted to," she said.
Kass, who is single, moved to Washington earlier this year.
His policy work has had him meeting with victims of foodborne illnesses, speaking at the D.C. Central Kitchen and doing healthy-food demonstrations at area schools. He was also featured in a White House video about the kitchen garden. Kass played a central role in developing the garden.
Kass works with Jocelyn Frye, Mrs. Obama's domestic policy adviser.
"Sam has been really terrific," said Frye, "in part because what he helps us think about is how these issues operate in the real world, that is the sort of the practical experience he brings to the table. He's worked in the kitchen, he's worked with families, he understands what is realistic to say to people in terms of healthy eating and what seems sort of out of bounds."
Said Frye, "I think he is always a good sounding board for a lot of ideas that maybe fly across the table, but you know he is one of the people who always helps to bring us back to reality."
http://www.suntimes.com/news/sweet/1870697,CST-...
Unemployed and underemployed hits 17.5%
by Chris in Paris on 11/07/2009 06:20:00 PM
It's probably the worst jobs market since the Great Depression. The Obama administration continues to buy into the Geithner/Summers/Wall Street view of the world which puts Wall Street above everyone else at the expense of everyone else. Americans are generous people who grudgingly accepted the bailout to prevent an even worse economic failure but enough is enough. The greed and the acceptance of that greed - regardless of words - by the White House is wearing thin as Americans wait for the upside to the bailout. All pain and no gain can only be tolerated for so long. Meanwhile the 17.5% and their friends and family look at the outrageous bonuses that are being lined up and wonder how it can be possible.
In all, more than one out of every six workers — 17.5 percent — were unemployed or underemployed in October. The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent, in December 1982.
This includes the officially unemployed, who have looked for work in the last four weeks. It also includes discouraged workers, who have looked in the past year, as well as millions of part-time workers who want to be working full time.
The official jobless rate — 10.2 percent in October, up from 9.8 percent in September — remains lower than the early 1980s peak of 10.8 percent.
http://www.americablog.com/2009/11/unemployed-a...
The final compromises before a bill comes to the floor are never very pretty. This one, however, is worse than I anticipated. Opposition from anti-abortion Democrats, driven in large part by aggressive activism from the Catholic Church, forced Democratic leadership to allow a vote on Bart Stupak's amendment limiting elective abortion coverage from both private and public insurers on the exchange. It reads:
The amendment will prohibit federal funds for abortion services in the public option. It also prohibits individuals who receive affordability credits from purchasing a plan that provides elective abortions. However, it allows individuals, both who receive affordability credits and who do not, to separately purchase with their own funds plans that cover elective abortions. It also clarifies that private plans may still offer elective abortions.
Because of the limits placed on the exchanges, most of the participants will have some form of premium credit or affordable subsidy. That means most will be ineligible for abortion coverage. The idea that people are going to go out and purchase separate "abortion plans" is both cruel and laughable. If this amendment passes, it will mean that virtually all women with insurance through the exchange who find themselves in the unwanted and unexpected position of needing to terminate a pregnancy will not have coverage for the procedure. Abortion coverage will not be outlawed in this country. It will simply be tiered, reserved for those rich enough to afford insurance themselves or lucky enough to receive from their employers.
The amendment is expected to pass with relative ease. Republicans will join with anti-choice Democrats to push it over the finish line. Once the amendment passes, the bill is cleared for a vote, and all parties expect that vote to succeed. Today looks likely to end with a historic, and important, vote. A vote that is a first step towards helping more than 30 million people secure health-care coverage, and making sure hundreds of millions are better protected from the vagaries of the insurance industry. But Stupak's amendment is a bitter start. It is, however, not the end. Even if it muscles into the House bill, it will also have to pass in the Senate, and then survive conference, before it becomes law.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/200...
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Here's hoping that Mayor Adrian Fenty (D) has absorbed the meaning of the close call experienced on Election Day by his political godfather, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. With his billions, a well-oiled campaign machine and supreme self-confidence, Republican-turned-independent Bloomberg narrowly won reelection against an underfunded Democratic challenger who was ignored by the White House and who ran with little organized party support or chance of winning.
If Fenty somehow missed the message from Manhattan, it's this: Money and a slick, professional campaign strategy can take an incumbent, even one as seasoned as Bloomberg, only so far; likability counts, too. And after years of Bloomberg as mayor, voters have begun to find him wanting.
New Yorkers, according to exit polls, were certainly put off by Bloomberg's rewriting of the term-limit law so he could run again. His extravagant campaign spending, swamping his opponent 14-to-1, didn't win him much applause, either. But it was the change in voter perception that helped erode his popularity.
As the New York Times reported, change could be heard in the words of voters: "Not so much visceral dislike as a sense that a once-admired politician had grown more distant and tetchy, and too filled with self-regard." Said voter Gerni Oster, 34, on Election Day, "I think that Mayor Bloomberg is too egotistical and arrogant for me to vote for at this point."
District of Columbia, sound like anybody we know?
Ironically, Bloomberg had a record to run on: improved schools, less crime, better public services. But he and his outsized ego got in the way of his accomplishments. Adrian Fenty seems headed in the same direction.
Earlier this year, I reported on a level of dissatisfaction with the mayor among residents that was hard to ignore ["His Highness the Mayor," May 16]. Fenty's demeanor seemed to have changed, I wrote. There was a sense of self-importance not seen before his election. "Arrogance" was the word that came to mind.
That more than six-month-old concern remains my worry today: that having won every voting precinct in his race for mayor, Fenty has come to regard himself as never wrong, invulnerable and beyond accountability. That could prove politically fatal.
A year ago, I wouldn't have written those words, perhaps because the flaws weren't so apparent. True, the 2008 elections did raise the possibility of Fenty inheriting a council majority that could pose a threat to his agenda [ "A High-Stakes Election for Mid-Term Fenty," Nov. 1, 2008].
The replacement of Carol Schwartz with Michael Brown portended an anti-Fenty cabal on the council that could imperil his education agenda, program initiatives and spending decisions. My initial reaction, however, was to chalk up the expected change in the Fenty-council relationship to politics. The consequence, so I thought at the time, might be a council strong enough to face him down.
Now, there's the possibility that it could get worse for Fenty, and in a way that Michael Bloomberg never encountered in New York.
The $82 million in government contracts given out by the D.C. Housing Authority to managers, contractors and subcontractors with personal and political ties to Fenty carry a whiff of something that is disagreeable to the nose.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ar...
I watching "Liza With A Z"
My inner gay guy is loving it!!! (I know not all gay guys love Liza, but my BGF loves Liza)
I swear, I was a musical theatre Geek in another life.
I could sit and talk with you about the love stories in Rogers and Hammerstein musicals and how brilliant The King and I is, and why it's their most complex.
ENJOY!! :>)
Guess U "AXED" 4 - - THIS :>)
ENJOY!! :>)
memories....it's so beautiful. so put together. Brynner was born for the role, and Kerr was perfection too. that the two characters were really only one for about 5 minutes in the entire show - the culmination of their ' romance' only really one scene - brilliance.
Maybe This Time
And of course Kristin Chenowoth from Glee
by Meteor Blades [Subscribe]
Sat Nov 07, 2009 at 04:16:12 PM PST
The number of Americans receiving food stamp assistance soared above 36 million for the first time in August, the eighth month in a row that enrollment set a record, the U.S. Agriculture Department said on Wednesday.
USDA said 36.492 million people were receiving food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In July, enrollment stood at 35.851 million. At the current rate, an estimated one in eight Americans receive benefits.
[...]
In the latest data, the average person received $132.99 in August, compared with $101.31 in August 2008.
The program, which has its origins in a four-year program begun in 1939, was made permanent nationwide in 1964. In the past 10 months, enrollment has risen by 4.707 million, with 2 million people initiating their participation from May to August, which is the latest month for which there is data. This surge is attributed to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
But food stamps as a modest life raft for those in poverty and/or without work are not just factor of the Great Recession.
Mark Rank of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis recently completed a long-term study of children in families that receive Food Stamps. The results: Nearly half of all U.S. children will live in a household that uses Food Stamps at some point before they are 20. Rank said, "Food stamp use is a clear sign of poverty and food insecurity, two of the most detrimental economic conditions affecting a child's health."
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/11/7/801751/...
November 4, 2009, 12:01 am
Phys Ed: Why Doesn’t Exercise Lead to Weight Loss?
By Gretchen Reynolds
“Walking, even at a very easy pace, you’ll probably burn three or four calories a minute,” beyond what you would use quietly sitting in a chair, said Dan Carey, Ph.D., an assistant professor of exercise physiology at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, who studies exercise and metabolism.
But few people, an overwhelming body of research shows, achieve significant weight loss with exercise alone, not without changing their eating habits. A new study from scientists at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver offers some reasons why. For the study, the researchers recruited several groups of people. Some were lean endurance athletes; some sedentary and lean; some sedentary and obese. Each of the subjects agreed to spend, over the course of the experiment, several 24-hour periods in a special laboratory room (a walk-in calorimeter) that measures the number of calories a person burns. Using various calculations, the researchers could also tell whether the calories expended were in the form of fat or carbohydrates, the body’s two main fuel sources. Burning more fat than carbohydrates is obviously desirable for weight loss, since the fat being burned comes primarily from body fat stores, and we all, even the leanest among us, have plenty of those.
The Denver researchers were especially interested in how the athletes’ bodies would apportion and use calories. It has been well documented that regular endurance training increases the ability of the body to use fat as a fuel during exercise. They wondered, though, if the athletes — or any of the other subjects — would burn extra fat calories after exercising, a phenomenon that some exercisers (and even more diet and fitness books) call “afterburn.”
“Many people believe that you rev up” your metabolism after an exercise session “so that you burn additional body fat throughout the day,” said Edward Melanson, Ph.D., an associate professor in the division of endocrinology at the School of Medicine and the lead author of the study. If afterburn were found to exist, it would suggest that even if you replaced the calories you used during an exercise session, you should lose weight, without gaining weight — the proverbial free lunch.
Each of Melanson’s subjects spent 24 quiet hours in the calorimeter, followed later by another 24 hours that included an hourlong bout of stationary bicycling. The cycling was deliberately performed at a relatively easy intensity (about 55 percent of each person’s predetermined aerobic capacity). It is well known physiologically that, while high-intensity exercise demands mostly carbohydrate calories (since carbohydrates can quickly reach the bloodstream and, from there, laboring muscles), low-intensity exercise prompts the body to burn at least some stored fat. All of the subjects ate three meals a day.
To their surprise, the researchers found that none of the groups, including the athletes, experienced “afterburn.” They did not use additional body fat on the day when they exercised. In fact, most of the subjects burned slightly less fat over the 24-hour study period when they exercised than when they did not.
“The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/phys-e...
07
Nov
Unspoofable
by John Cole
Because I have no life, I’m listening to C-Span while playing Dragon Age, and the dumbest man in the House, Mike Pence, just gave what can only be described as the funniest speech I have heard from the well of the House. I seriously hope someone can put the close up on youtube, because it ended with a call to arms, asking the Democrats to take a stand for freedom and to do battle with this bill, and they will go down in history as defenders freedom.
With Allah as my witness, I expected him to yell Wolverines when he finished. And you have to watch his facial expression when he finished speaking. It looked like he was confused or didn’t know what to do next.
*** Update ***
Boehner is now basically reading Betsy McCaughey’s WSJ editorial today. Just clowns.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=29429
http://www.deephousepage.com/forums/showthread....
October 14, 2009
I’m going to keep this brief because I’m so angry I’m shaking and when I get this angry it’s difficult for me to keep my language clean. In Volume #567 of the Treat Black Women/Girls Like a Fucking Zoo Exhibit Chronicles, this woman decided to attack Zahara Jolie-Pitt, a freaking four-year-0ld, about her hair! First, regardless of who her parents are, this is a little girl, a child. Why is it that the hand’s off policies that apparently applies to the Palin daughters and Miley Cyrus don’t also apply to her?
Samuels apparently takes issue with the fact that apparently the Jolie-Pitts don’t subscribe to the same hair tyranny that makes life for many little black girls a living hell of hot combs, relaxers, braids, twists and barrettes so tight they take your hair out. In the photo the child’s hair looks moisturized and well-tended, yet somehow Samuels has a problem with the fact that it’s not braided or up in twists, or in one of the elaborate do’s that mean a black child’s hair is “done”. God forbid her hair should revert or puff up. That’s what African hair does, and who says there’s anything wrong with it? Why is puffy hair somehow unruly, unless you’re enslaved to a European hair aesthetic. Sasha and Malia Obama have beautiful well-groomed hair as you stated, but guess what their hair would be just as beautiful out of braids and twists. They’re children for God’s sake! Why are we carrying this holdover from slavery and Jim Crow and trying to impose it on others? Ms. Samuels, your shackles are showing. And get this, she supports her bullshit thesis with posts from Media Takeout and other blogs. She’s supposed to be a reporter and this is where she gets her supporting evidence?
I am so tired of this box, this obsessively fucked up mindset that says that black women/girls have to have their hair “fixed” like it’s a fucking cleft palate. She’s four-years old can she not grow up believing her hair is perfectly fine just the way it is? Does she have to believe that her hair is a birth defect so she becomes like Tyra, a beautiful, talented woman who was AFRAID (her word) to show her own hair? Or like the young women/girls I knew when I worked at Job Corps who spent every dime they earned at some wig shop where they were treated like crap buying hair that no self-respecting Barbie doll would be caught dead in?
It’s time to draw a line in the sand, somebody has got the be Gandalf. Leave black women/girls and OUR hair alone. We are not zoo exhibits to be examined and dictated to by some crazy bitch at Newsweek. The unmitigated gall of these people just takes my breath away.
http://roslynholcomb.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/a...
Tami Winfrey Harris: Natural Hair Is Not Unhealthy
Newsweek
As part of NEWSWEEK's Good Hair Week, senior writer Allison Samuels discussed Zahara Jolie-Pitt and the politics of natural hair and interracial adoptions. Her article, which implored the Jolie-Pitt parents to pay more attention to Zahara's hair, and its follow-up were much discussed at NEWSWEEK and on the Internet. We invited three bloggers to offer their own opinion on the topic. -KD
I once wrote about my natural hair:
My hair is nappy. It is coarse and thick. It grows in pencil-size spirals and tiny crinkles. My hair grows out, not down. It springs from my head like a corona. My hair is like wool. You can't run your fingers through it, nor a comb. It is impenetrable. My hair is rebellious. It resists being smoothed into a neat bun or ponytail. It puffs. Strands escape; they won't be tamed. My hair is nappy. And I love it.
I may love my hair. But common wisdom, even among people with hair just like mine, is that my hair isn't "good," at least as it naturally grows from my head. It needs to be tamed, preferably by straightening, but at the very least, especially in young children, hair like mine should be restrained somehow--in plaits or cornrows or something that hides its unruly nature. It should be shiny. You should be able to run a comb through it. All this in defiance of the natural properties of most black hair.
I suspect NEWSWEEK writer Allison Samuels follows this common wisdom.
Two weeks ago she sparked furor around the Net with an article taking Angelina Jolie to task for her daughter Zahara's allegedly uncared-for tresses. In the face of considerable backlash, Samuels didn't back down. In a NEWSWEEK online exclusive this week, Samuels answers her critics.
There is a lot I could challenge in Samuels's articles, but I will confine this post to one point: Samuels seems to embrace the notion, a gift of society's Eurocentric beauty standards, that tamed hair = healthy hair, and unfettered black hair = hot mess. What's worse, she wants little Zahara to learn to embrace this thinking, too--a terrible lesson for a girl with tresses that naturally feature fuzzy parts and curls that spring akimbo.
In a society with Eurocentric beauty standards, it is natural that hair common to people of European ancestry would be the marker for beauty, professionalism, and good grooming. And it is natural, though I think not good for us, that those of minority cultures have absorbed the standards of the dominant culture and adopted beauty rituals that support those standards.
This is why so many of us have memories of sitting at our mother's or grandmothers' knees, holding our ears, and listening to sizzling grease, as our hair was tamed into a straight, shiny, combable mass and woven into multiple neat plaits. Most of us remember this bonding time fondly. But, in reality, straight, shiny, combable, and neat are NOT markers of whether black hair is cared for or not. That so many of us, including Samuels, think these descriptors are related to hair health shows how much we have absorbed the idea that hair common to people of European ancestry is the norm by which all other hair must be judged. As I type this, my ginormous twist-out is shiny, but not straight, combable, or neat, And, I promise you, my hair is very well cared for.
Yes, I know that braiding has deep roots in African culture and is an ingrained part of black American culture. My beef isn't with plaiting; my beef is with the fear of the nap--the idea that unrestrained black hair, apart from other hair, is unacceptable. To many of us with natural hair, Zahara seems to be wearing a wash-and-go. But we are taught that black women can't simply wash their hair and go. Our hair has to be "fixed," made presentable. I think this hair hatred was born and nurtured right here in Western culture where the yardstick by which we judge our hair's beauty, health, and rituals of care is invariably a white one.
There is no way of knowing whether Zahara's hair is conditioned by scanning paparazzi shots. You can't assess its softness. You can't check for split ends. You can't see breakage. What Samuels is reacting to, I think, is the fact that Zahara's hair is "wild" and unrestrained. And black women and girls are taught that this isn't okay. It isn't pretty. It isn't proper. It isn't professional. It isn't ladylike.
I'll say this--I agree with Samuels that most little, black girls would NOT be comfortable wearing their natural hair loose as Zahara does. That is, in great part, because of the unrelenting messages they get, within and without our black culture, that their hair is inherently wrong. Must Zahara adopt these feelings of self-hatred to earn her black card? I like to think, as a black woman who has wrestled and come to terms with her own hair issues, my job is to help free the girls in my life from damaging self-hatred, not encourage it as a litmus test for fitting in.
My hair is nappy. It is soft and cottony, a mass of varying textures. My hair is fun to play with. I like to pull at the spiral curls and feel them snap back into place. My hair defies the laws of gravity. It reaches energetically toward the sky. My hair is unique. In a fashion culture that genuflects to relaxed, flat-ironed tresses and stick-straight weaves, my fluffy, puffy, kinky mane stands out. It is revolutionary. My hair is natural. It is the way God made it. My hair is nappy. And it is beautiful.
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thehumanconditio...
JUST! 2! A-DOR-A-BLE!! :>)
LOVE me some MR. PRESIDENT!! :>) :>)
' oh no he's NOT playing Peek-A-Boo', and then went ' awe'.
JUST - - 2 - AWWWWWW! :>) :>)
+AWWWWWW! SWEET LOVE!! :>)
I LOVE THEM!! :>)
The Night They Drove the Tea Partiers Down
By FRANK RICH
Published: November 7, 2009
FOR all cable news’s efforts to inflate Election 2009 into a cliffhanger as riveting as Balloon Boy, ratings at MSNBC and CNN were flat Tuesday night. But not at Fox News, where the audience nearly doubled its usual prime-time average. That’s what happens when you have a thrilling story to tell, and what could be more thrilling than a revolution playing out in real time?
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As Fox kept insisting, all eyes were glued on Doug Hoffman, the insurgent tea party candidate in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. A “tidal wave” was on its way, said Sean Hannity, and the right would soon “take back the Republican Party.” The race was not “even close,” Bill O’Reilly suggested to the pollster Scott Rasmussen, who didn’t disagree. When returns showed Hoffman trailing, the network’s resident genius, Karl Rove, knowingly reassured viewers that victory was in the bag, even if we’d have to stay up all night waiting for some slacker towns to tally their votes.
Alas, the Dewey-beats-Truman reveries died shortly after midnight, when even Fox had to concede that the Democrat, Bill Owens, had triumphed in what had been Republican country since before Edison introduced the light bulb. For the far right, the thriller in Watertown was over except for the ludicrous morning-after spin that Hoffman’s loss was really a victory. For the Democrats, the excitement was just beginning. New York’s 23rd could be celebrated as a rare bright spot on a night when the party’s gubernatorial candidates lost in Virginia and New Jersey.
The Democrats’ celebration was also premature: Hoffman’s defeat is potentially more harmful to them than to the Republicans. Tuesday’s results may be useless as a predictor of 2010, but they are not without value as cautionary tales. And the most worrisome for Democrats were not in Virginia and New Jersey, but, paradoxically, in the New York contests where they performed relatively well. That includes the idiosyncratic New York City mayor’s race that few viewed as a bellwether of anything. It should be the most troubling of them all for President Obama’s cohort — even though neither Obama nor the national political parties were significant players in it.
But first let’s make a farewell accounting of the farce upstate. The reason why the Democratic victory in New York’s 23rd is a mixed blessing is simple: it increases the odds that the Republicans will not do Democrats the great favor of committing suicide between now and the next Election Day.
This race was a damaging setback for the hard right. Hoffman had the energetic support of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Fox as well as big bucks from their political auxiliaries. Furthermore, Hoffman was running not only in a district that Rove himself described as “very Republican” but one that fits the demographics of the incredibly shrinking G.O.P. The 23rd is far whiter than America as a whole — 93 percent versus 74 — with tiny sprinklings of blacks, Hispanics and Asians. It has few immigrants. It’s rural. Its income and education levels are below the norm. Only if the district were situated in Dixie — or Utah — could it be a more perfect fit for the narrow American demographic where the McCain-Palin ticket had its sole romps last year.
If the tea party right can’t win there, imagine how it might fare in the nation where most Americans live. Some G.O.P. leaders have started to notice. Mitt Romney didn’t endorse Hoffman despite right-wing badgering to do so. On Wednesday, Michael Steele dismissed the right’s mantra that somehow Hoffman’s loss could be called a victory and instead talked up the newly elected Republican governors who won by appealing to independents and moderates. Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell are plenty conservative, but both had rejected Palin’s offers to campaign for them. They also avoided the tea party zanies, the fear-mongering National Organization for Marriage and the anti-abortion-rights zealots Hoffman embraced. They positioned themselves as respectful Obama critics, not haters likening him to Hitler.
In the aftermath of this clear-cut demonstration of how Republicans can win, the revolutionaries are still pledging to purge the party’s moderates by rallying behind more Hoffmans in G.O.P. primaries from Florida to California. And they may get some scalps. But Tuesday’s loss revealed that they’re better at luring freak-show gawkers into Fox’s tent than voters into the G.O.P.’s. As if to prove the point, protesters hoisted a sign likening health care reform to Dachau at the raucous tea party rally convened by Michele Bachmann on Capitol Hill on Thursday.
Should the G.O.P. avoid self-destruction by containing this fringe, then the president and his party will have to confront their real problem: their identification with the titans who greased the skids for the economic meltdown from which Wall Street has recovered and the country has not. If there’s one general lesson to be gleaned from Christie’s victory over Jon Corzine in New Jersey, it’s surely that in today’s zeitgeist it’s less of a stigma to be fat than a former Goldman Sachs fat cat, even in a blue state.
Michael Bloomberg’s shocking underperformance in New York was an even more dramatic illustration of this animus. Tuesday’s exit polls found that he had a whopping 70 percent approval rating, as befits a mayor who, whatever his quirks and missteps, is widely regarded as a highly competent, nonideological executive who has run the city well. Yet only 72 percent of those who gave him a thumb’s up voted for him. Though the mayor wildly outspent and out-campaigned his bland opponent, Bill Thompson, he received only 50.6 percent of the vote.
This shortfall has been correctly attributed to Bloomberg’s self-serving, highhanded undoing of the term limits law he had once endorsed. The ferocity of the public reaction to this power grab surprised him, pollsters and the press alike. That it became a bigger deal than anyone anticipated — arguably bigger than it merited — is an indicator of how much antipathy there is toward the masters of the universe in the financial capital. Americans don’t hate rich people, but they do despise those who behave as if the rules don’t apply to them. “Michael Bloomberg is About to Buy Himself a Third Term” was the cover line on New York magazine in October. However unfairly, some voters conflated his air of entitlement with the swaggering Wall Street C.E.O.’s who cashed out before the crash and stuck the rest of us with the bill.
The Obama administration does not seem to understand that this rage, left unaddressed, could consume it. It has pushed aside the entreaties of many — including Paul Volcker, the chairman of the White House’s own Economic Recovery Advisory Board — to break up too-big-to-fail banks. Those behemoths, cushioned by the government’s bailouts, low-interest loans and guarantees, are back making bets that put the entire system at risk. Yet last Sunday, we once again heard the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, on “Meet the Press” dodging questions about the banks in general and Goldman in particular with unpersuasive bromides. “We’re not going to let the system go back to the way it was,” he said.
Surely he jests. On Monday morning, a business-savvy Democratic senator, Maria Cantwell of Washington, publicly questioned Geithner’s fitness for his job, given his support of loopholes in proposed regulations of the derivatives that enabled last year’s collapse. On Tuesday, Congressional Democrats, with the White House’s consent, voted to gut the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the post Enron-WorldCom law passed in 2002 to prevent corporate accounting tricks and fraud. Arthur Levitt, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, told me on Friday it was “surreal” that Democrats were now achieving the long-held Republican goal of smashing “the golden chalice” of reform. If investors cannot have transparency, Levitt said, “the whole system is worthless.”
The system is going back to the way it was with a vengeance, against a backdrop of despair. As the unemployment rate crossed the 10 percent threshold at week’s end, we learned that bankers were helping themselves not just to bonuses as large as those at the bubble’s peak but to early allotments of H1N1 vaccine. No wonder 62 percent of those polled by Hart Associates in late September felt that “large banks” had been helped “a lot” or “a fair amount” by “government economic policies,” but only 13 percent felt the “average working person” had been. Unemployment ranked ahead of the deficit and health care as the No. 1 pocketbook issue in the survey, with 81 percent saying the Obama administration must take more action.
The tea party Republicans vanquished on Tuesday have no jobs plan. They just want to eliminate all Washington spending — a prescription that didn’t go down too well in New York’s 23rd, where the federal government has the largest payroll. The G.O.P. establishment’s one-size-fits-all panacea is tax cuts — thin gruel for those with little or no taxable income. The administration’s answer is the stimulus, whose iffy results so far, it argues, can’t be judged this early on.
Fair enough. But a year from now the public will register its verdict in any event. Meanwhile, both parties have their own delusions, not the least of which is the Republicans’ conviction that Tuesday was a referendum on what Obama has done so far. If anything, it was a judgment on just how much he has not.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/opinion/08ric...