Last Call

As Hurricane Sandy ravages the East Coast today causing rain, wind, and snow damage from Columbus, Ohio to Augusta, Maine, keep in mind what President Romney's response to the storm would be.

During a CNN debate at the height of the GOP primary, Mitt Romney was asked, in the context of the Joplin disaster and FEMA's cash crunch, whether the agency should be shuttered so that states can individually take over responsibility for disaster response.

"Absolutely," he said. "Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that's even better. Instead of thinking, in the federal budget, what we should cut, we should ask the opposite question, what should we keep?"

"Including disaster relief, though?" debate moderator John King asked Romney.

"We cannot -- we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids," Romney replied. "It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we'll all be dead and gone before it's paid off. It makes no sense at all."

Privatize FEMA because disaster relief is immoral unless we cut something else from the budget.  So if you live in Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, where your vote is crucial this year, you might want to keep that in mind.  At best, his plan is to leave national disasters up to states to deal with.

You're own your own under a Romney administration.  Nothing united about these states in a disaster.

Your choice, America.

Marines Prepare For Zombie Apocalypse

SAN DIEGO — Move over vampires, goblins and haunted houses, this kind of Halloween terror aims to shake up even the toughest warriors: An untold number of so-called zombies are coming to a counterterrorism summit attended by hundreds of Marines, Navy special ops, soldiers, police, firefighters and others to prepare them for their worst nightmares.

"This is a very real exercise, this is not some type of big costume parry," said Brad Barker, president of Halo Corp, a security firm hosting the Oct. 31 training demonstration during the summit at a 44-acre Paradise Point Resort island on a San Diego bay. "Everything that will be simulated at this event has already happened, it just hasn't happened all at once on the same night. But the training is very real, it just happens to be the bad guys we're having a little fun with."

Hundreds of military, law enforcement and medical personnel will observe the Hollywood-style production of a zombie attack as part of their emergency response training.

In the scenario, a VIP and his personal detail are trapped in a village, surrounded by zombies when a bomb explodes. The VIP is wounded and his team must move through the town while dodging bullets and shooting back at the invading zombies. At one point, some members of the team are bit by zombies and must be taken to a field medical facility for decontamination and treatment.

"No one knows what the zombies will do in our scenario, but quite frankly no one knows what a terrorist will do," Barker said. "If a law enforcement officer sees a zombie and says, 'Freeze, get your hands in the air!' What's the zombie going to do? He's going to moan at you. If someone on PCP or some other psychotic drug is told that, the truth is he's not going to react to you."

It's a smart way to teach teams how to react when faced with the unexpected.  With the face gnawing going on recently, it couldn't hurt.  From destabilized populations to fast-spreading infections, we need to be prepared to handle anything that comes our way.

I love me a good zombie story.  Sleep well, knowing our military may be  having a bit of a joke but moving in the right direction to keep us safe from the unexpected

Waxing And Waning Stupidity

Couples may argue, but when the argue about being evicted from their home...well, that's just a different ball of wax. 

Denise Harris, a 39-year-old DeLeon Springs, poured hot wax on her boyfiend's face and hair and bit him in the jaw -- after a heated discussion about their impending eviction, reports The Daytona Beach News-Journal. 

When the boyfriend pushed her off him, she reportedly punched him in the nose, the report states.

It gets worse, but I think the worst of all is when I saw the picture I would have sworn she was a dude.  Which would explain the hot wax and punching a lot more than anything else I could come up with.

As for biting on the face... what the hell is up with this new trend?  I don't think in my entire life of reading news I could think of a dozen cases of face gnawing and now it is practically mainstream.

More suspicious news on face biting coming at 7 PM Zandar Standard Time.

Jackasses Abound

A family in Woodstock, Georgia, learned a difficult lesson about the dangers of posting an online advertisement. The Vercher family, who recently lost their home of 20 years to foreclosure, posted an ad on Craigslist on Tuesday night, informing people that a yard-sale-style giveaway would take place at their home the following day.

Well, on Wednesday morning, people turned out in droves. However, instead of just taking the free furniture that the family had placed outside, crowds ransacked the house, taking nearly everything inside. The Verchers tried to stop people from walking off with their belongings, but their pleas were ignored.

Everything is gone, including items of sentimental value.  I'm not sure how someone could claim a misunderstanding, I would think pleading for them to stop would be a red flag.  What kind of jackass could take from a family that had lost almost everything?  Apparently, an entire crowd of them exist.

School Teaches Kids How Shakedowns Work

A Mississippi town is facing a lawsuit for operating schools that handcuff and send children to prison for minor classroom infractions like violating the dress code or talking back to teachers.

Students in the town of Meridian sometimes spent days in a prison 80 miles away from their school without a probable cause hearing. They were not read their Miranda rights and sometimes spent more than 48 hours waiting for a hearing, which violates their constitutional rights.

Meridian police routinely arrested students without determining whether there is probable cause of an infraction or whether the school wants to press charges. Handcuffed, the students were sent to Rankin County youth detention center, which is about an hour and a half away by car.

Students were jailed for “dress code infractions such as wearing the wrong color socks or undershirt, or for having shirts untucked; tardies; flatulence in class; using vulgar language; yelling at teachers; and going to the bathroom or leaving the classroom without permission.”

Furthermore, all of the imprisoned schoolchildren referred to court were minorities, the lawsuit states. More specifically, the “school-to-prison pipeline” mostly affected African-American children and those with disabilities.

After being arrested, students are usually put on probation, sometimes without appropriate legal representation, the lawsuit claims. Students who are already on probation and violate more school rules could face suspension – time that would be spent at the detention center rather than at home.

Federal civil rights lawyers filed the lawsuit two months after the Justice Department warned local and state officials that they had 60 days to cooperate with an eight-month investigation into the jailing procedures. The Mississippi town failed to cooperate.

The town is clearly in the wrong, and their failure to see that and to pretend to give a damn is appalling.  Kids should be learning their legal rights in school, but not through having them violated and those actions upheld by the town.

This is what happens when abuse of power goes too far.  It's also what happens when government fails to see the difference between serving the people and controlling them.  Kids are constantly learning, even when they don't realize it.  In this case, the lesson is what you see when government goes wrong.  Let us hope they eventually learn better.

This is nothing less than conditioning our young to give up their rights, to be afraid to speak up when their rights are violated.  We simply cannot allow this to happen.

Racing Around The Country

The outstanding Goldie Taylor brings it on race and this election.

“We are not as divided as our politics suggests,” Obama told us. Whites and blacks alike hitched their wagons to the hope of a new day.

An Associated Press poll released Oct. 27, tells a much different story. Rather than quell, our racial tensions have flared. According to the study, “The number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election.”

Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who co-developed the survey said, “As much as we’d hope the impact of race would decline over time…it appears the impact of anti-black sentiment on voting is about the same as it was four years ago.”

Regrettably, white poll respondents attributed stereotypical terms like ”violent” and “lazy” to blacks and Hispanics.

“When we’ve seen [racial] progress, we’ve also seen backlash,” said Jelani Cobb, professor of history and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Some believe that backlash could cost Obama the election. In fact, if John Sununu and Donald Trump are any gauges, Republicans are still banking on “white fear”— the same fear that drove Reagan democrats to the polls in 1980. The late North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms used the infamous “Hands” ad during his 1990 campaign, to stoke white fears of losing employment opportunities to blacks because of affirmative action.

Unfortunately, history tells us that those campaign tactics can be successful — especially in an economic downturn when everyone is scrapping for a job.

If you want to know why this race is close, it's because race is always close.

Romney Up Against The Wall

With just over a week left, an increasingly desperate Romney has now descended into "McCain knew he lost" territory from four years ago and is now pulling out all the stops in the rapid-fire lying department here in Ohio.



Of course, the ad is a total and complete pile of lies.

1. “Mitt Romney has a plan to help the auto industry.” No specific plan is referenced in the ad, and Romney’s campaign web site does not include a plan to “help the auto industry.” In 2008, Romney wrote a New York Times editorial titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” and he re-upped his call against the auto rescue during the Republican primaries this year.

2. “[Romney] is supported by Lee Iaccoca and the Detroit News.” Chrysler Chairman Lee Iaccoca has indeed endorsed Romney. The Detroit News, a self-described “conservative newspaper,” endorsed him last week. But in that endorsement, the paper slammed Romney’s “wrong-headedness on the auto bailout.”

3. “Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy.” Obama did take both companies into a managed bankruptcy, the path Romney says was originally his idea. Romney, however, supported private sector financing of the bankruptcy, a plan that was “pure fantasy” at the time since no private lenders could lend to the companies in the middle of the financial crisis. Without federal intervention, the companies would have almost assuredly collapsed, costing 1.3 million jobs, according to industry estimates.

4. “[Obama] sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.” This week, Romney claimed he read a news story that said Chrysler was planning to “moving all production to China.” The Bloomberg News piece he referenced, though, made it clear that Fiat, the Italian company that now owns Chrysler, was opening new factories in China to make Jeeps for Chinese consumers. No American plants will be closed, and no American jobs will be lost. The ad’s claim may not be as false as Romney’s previous statement, but it is certainly misleading.

But it doesn't matter.  He gets to lie with impunity.  And at least 45% of the state, if not 47%, will vote for him anyway.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Sandy takes aim at New Jersey as the massive super-storm is expected to cause serious damage from Ohio to Virginia to Maine.
• A Texas state judge has issued an order blocking Gov. Rick Perry's defunding of Planned Parenthood, but Perry is expected to ignore the order.
• Consumer confidence numbers for October closed at a 5-year high as Americans expect that looming economic problems will be dealt with after the election.
• The San Francisco Giants have swept the Detroit Tigers in four games to win their second World Series title in 3 years.
• The US Supreme Court today will hear arguments on reselling textbooks that could have major implications for ownership of intellectual property.

Last Call

PJ Media's Roger L Simon becomes the first to call for President Obama's immediate impeachment after the election.

If Barack Obama is reelected, will he face impeachment over Benghazi — a yet more unpleasant and far more wrenching result than to lose an election?

It could happen — and in my estimation should happen — the way revelations are playing out over the bloody terror attack that took four American lives and has led to weeks of prevarication and obfuscation.

The scandal thus far has at least tarnished and quite possibly implicated everyone from the CIA director, to the secretaries of State and Defense, to the UN ambassador and, of course, the president himself — with no end in sight, because Obama, normally loath to expose himself and even less so in an election season, refuses to answer questions on the subject.

It’s not the crime, but the cover-up, we learned in an earlier impeachment, only in this case the crime may be just as bad or worse.

If you think the insanity is over just because the President will most likely win and keep a Dem Senate and GOP House status quo, you have anything thing coming.

The insanity is just beginning.  Ask Clinton.

All Knotted Up In Ohio

Supposedly.  The paper of record here in Cincy has a poll showing a 49%-49% tie with one percent undecided and one percent third party candidate.

The race for the White House continues to be too close to call in Ohio, according to a new Enquirer/Ohio News Organization Poll that shows President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each with 49 percent support from likely voters.

That’s a slip for the president, who took 51 percent of likely voters in the newspaper group’s September poll.

Romney’s support grew among males, among high school and college graduates and among respondents in every age category except 18 to 29.

The two candidates also tied in scaring voters – 29 percent of poll respondents said they’d be scared if Obama won, and the same amount said they’d be scared if Romney won. Half said they were very enthusiastic about voting, 21 percent said they were not so enthusiastic or not enthusiastic at all.

Your mileage may vary on the poll's accuracy, but they do get the next part right strategically:

“In the final days before the election, both campaigns will focus on turning out their bases, appealing to independents and attracting the few undecided voters that remain,” said Eric Rademacher, co-director of the University of Cincinnati’s Institute for Policy Research, which conducted the poll. “Absent any more twists and turns, a remarkable presidential campaign may end with the campaign that executes the best  ‘ground game’ narrowly delivering Ohio for the next president of the United States.”

Needless to say, Josh Romney's involvement in voting machines here in Ohio is even more important, as is continued early voting.

Christina Aguilera Embraces Her New Body

Levine, 33, even goes so far as to stand up for Aguilera, 31, who has been the object of criticism for her weight. He says the naysayers should "grow up." 

"The one thing about the culture right now, celebrity culture particularly, is people feel like they can just say nasty things about other people whether it's Christina or whether it's me," he says. "She gets a lot and it pisses me off. Of course I have her back and of course I defend her."

Aguilera herself recently spoke out about her body, telling PEOPLE, "I've always been one to make it very clear, love me or hate me, take it or leave it, this is who I am. I embrace my body, and I embrace everything about myself."

Good for her.  First, for showing what it means to own yourself, and secondly for refusing to apologize.  She has gained weight, but not so much that she's a health risk or unsafe.  She doesn't owe the world a perfect ass forever.  Why would anyone feel she has to explain this phase of her life?  I say she's worked out her entire life, if she wants to laze a bit and enjoy carbs with her new motherhood, so be it.

1,000 Pound Pig Saves Gumbo

Three days after a fire blazed through a New Hampshire farm on Sept. 6, the only thing more devastating than the physical damage was the presumed death toll: 14 horses and three cats. 

But if there was someone who hadn't lost hope, it was Colby, the farm's 1,000-lb. pig. 

After breakfast, the Bedford, N.H., Perry Hill Farm mascot, characteristically slow and sluggish, started wandering into the woods nearby. 

"She was on a mission," her caregiver and farm owner Harriet Finks, who followed the pig, tells ABCnews.com. "For her, it was quite a distance." 

The 9-year-old pig, sniffing around the woods, led her caregivers to Gumbo, one of the cats they never found after the fire.

Gumbo survived and is doing well.  He has been reunited with a sibling and other survivors.  Losing so many animals would be devastating, any good news is better than expected.

Prof. Stoller, In The Salon, With The Self-Inflicted Gunshot

Matt Stoller erupts into feigned relevance again like the political emoprog herpes he is as he takes to Salon to convince people to abdicate voting.  He officially veers off into unintentional comedy in paragraph three with a chart on corporate profits:

So why oppose Obama? Simply, it is the shape of the society Obama is crafting that I oppose, and I intend to hold him responsible, such as I can, for his actions in creating it. Many Democrats are disappointed in Obama. Some feel he’s a good president with a bad Congress. Some feel he’s a good man, trying to do the right thing, but not bold enough. Others think it’s just the system, that anyone would do what he did. I will get to each of these sentiments, and pragmatic questions around the election, but I think it’s important to be grounded in policy outcomes. Not, what did Obama try to do, in his heart of hearts? But what kind of America has he actually delivered? And the chart below answers the question. This chart reflects the progressive case against Obama.

Yeah, Obama has in fact crafted an entire society in just 45 months.  Let's give a pass to the Republican's effect on the Body Politic, causing a heart attack and an collapsed lung of an economy and two broken legs.  We get all that fixed, and Dr. Obama is a terrible President because we're doing 5Ks on the slow end and not running full marathons.

But then Stoller veers into Privileged White Guy territory towards the bottom of his screed:

Now, it would not be fair to address this matter purely on economic grounds, and ignore women’s rights. In that debate with Ellsberg, advocate Emily Hauser insistently made the case that choice will be safe under Obama, and ended under Romney, that this is the only issue that matters to women, and that anyone who doesn’t agree is, as she put it, delusional. Falguni Sheth argued that this is a typical perspective from a privileged white woman, who ignores much of the impact that Barack Obama’s policies have on women, and specifically women of color. And even on the issue of choice, you could make a good case, as she does, that there’s less of a difference between Obama and Romney than meets the eye.

Yeah, you have the white guy going after a personal friend of mine because supporting the black president is actually damaging to women of color.

Falguni Sheth's argument, by the way, is complete tripe.  It assumes that there's no stated functional difference between Romney and Obama because Congress has Republicans in it, and since Obama has yet to declare himself dictator for life (which is hypocrisy because DROOOOONES) then there's no difference.  Which means Sheth is as full of emoprog crap as Stoller is.  Surprise!

It really is tiring to see any/every emorprog "case against Obama" boil down to the paragraph above, but it still apparently must be pointed out because they keep doing it constantly.  But for Stoller to say what he did is such massive assumption of privilege that it borders on the tragic.  It's based on the assumption (there's that word again Matt, pay attention here) that persons of color AND women are too stupid to see how "awful" Obama is for them, when the opposite is actually true.

Stoller's cool because the "marginal" difference on policies that actually affect him where he is allows him the privilege of it not mattering to him regardless of whom is elected.  For a great many of the rest of us, we live on that margin.  We don't have the luxury of "Oh well, it doesn't matter."  We don't have the luxury of the 40 year progressive plan for a new society.  We need to get things fixed now, and I'm going with the guy fixing them as opposed to the guy going back to the same things we did in 2001-2008.

Yes, the macro-level stuff is horrible.  Inequality?  Unacceptable.  Climate change?  Being ignored.  it's awful.  But I know for a fact Romney won't make any of that better, and Obama will at least try to correct the micro-level stuff so that the macro-level stuff can be fixed later.

Those are my two choices.  And I live in Kentucky where my vote for President is utterly, utterly meaningless.  Doing it anyway out of patriotism and to honor those before me who fought and died for my right to vote.

Period.

Get over yourself, Stoller.

Last Call

Hurricane Sandy's transformation into the Nor'easter From Hell over the next few days really could cause serious problems for anyone north or east of where I am in Cincy.  Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, up through the mid-Atlantic and into New York, Boston and New England could be hit by inches of rain and/or several feet of snow before it's all over, and if there are still sections of Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania especially that still don't have power by Election Day, we could have chaos on our hands.

Hurricane Sandy, currently on a direct course for the East Coast, is sending residents across multiple states scrambling to prepare for heavy wind, rain, and snow. The Obama and Romney campaigns are surely taking stock of its effects as well.

The implications for the election are uncertain, as is the path and extent of the storm’s damage. But given that it’s projected to directly impact such states as North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, there’s plenty of potential for disruption.


In Virginia, the storm is already poised to wreck a scheduled joint rally with President Clinton and president Obama on Monday. Romney has already cancelled a Virginia Beach event for Sunday. Early voting is less widespread in the state than others like Ohio, since Virginia only accepts absentee votes, so the impact could be minimized at the ballot box if things are back to normal by election day.
That said, if there’s major flooding or snow, where it hits could have an influence. While the coast is evenly divided between swing counties, other regions are more polarized.

“It depends on where it hits and how much, it’s just impossible to say in advance,” Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told TPM. “If Obama were directing the snowstorm it would be in the Shenandoah valley and Southwest Virginia as they want as low a turnout as possible in those rural areas. If Romney were directing the snowstorm, it would go right down the corridor from Northern Virginia into Richmond, which is where Obama’s votes come from.”

The Dems' lead in early voting in Ohio now looks even more important should the storm shift to the west and hit the eastern half of Ohio up into Cleveland.  Sandy could play just as important a role in the swing states as early voting does.

We'll see.

The Return Of Making Work Pay

The White House is kicking around the return of the working-class tax cut for Americans used as part of the stimulus:  Making Work Pay, a $400 tax cut ($800 for couples) off the top.

The White House is weighing the idea of a tax cut that it believes would lift Americans’ take-home pay and boost a still-struggling economy, according to people familiar with the administration’s thinking, as the presidential candidates continue battling over whose tax policies would do more for the country.

Obama administration officials have concluded that the economy, while improved, is still fragile enough that it may need another bout of stimulus. The tax cut could replace the payroll tax cut championed by President Obama in 2011 and 2012, which was designed as a buffer against economic shocks such as the financial crisis in Europe and high oil prices. It expires at year’s end.

As David Dayen points out, the flat $400 tax cut would be far more progressive than the current 2% payroll tax cut, andfor more effective for lower-income Americans.

Making Work Pay, the name of the stimulus-era tax cut, was actually a better deal for the working poor. The flat $400 tax credit provided a bigger boost at the low end to anyone making under $20,000 a year than the payroll tax cut, which gave back 2% of income to everyone on the portion of their income affected by the payroll tax, around $110,000. This made it a more stimulative tax cut, since it provided more money to those with a higher marginal propensity to spend. Employers accomplished the tax cut by taking less out of withholding, making it kind of a hidden tax cut that workers didn’t know about. But it did raise their take-home pay.

Gonna have to agree with D-Day here.  This is a solid idea, it was a solid idea when it was used before, and makes a concrete pledge to cut taxes for working-class Americans with real numbers and a real world benefit that people will see and use.

Which means House Republicans will kill it, of course.

Well, after the election.