StupidiNews!

• The CIA has foiled another Al Qaeda underwear bomb plot, this one designed to get around metal detectors to destroy a jetliner.
• Drugmaker Abbot Laboratories has been fined a record $1.6 billion for illegally marketing the anti-seizure drug Depakote for a variety of unintended purposes.
• Greece's far-right neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party has won enough votes to gain 21 seats in the 300 seat parliament, but new elections may be coming if no party can form a coalition.
• Rick Santorum has finally endorsed Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential nominee...by e-mail.
• Google's self-driving car got its special license plates from Nevada officials as the state becomes the first to pass laws dealing with driverless car testing.

Last Call

The latest USA Today swing states poll shows some pretty sobering news for Camp Romney.  As expected with Santorum and Gingrich now out, support for Romney has increased among the GOP.  The bad news?  It brought the enthusiasm gap back along with it, and unlike 2010, the gap is massively favoring the Democrats.

The president and the former Massachusetts governor start their head-to-head contest essentially even among registered voters — Obama 47%, Romney 45% — in the dozen battleground states likely to determine the election's outcome. That's closer than the lead of 9 percentage points for Obama in the Swing States survey in late March.

But the poll also finds a reversal in what has been a key GOP asset in the five previous battleground surveys taken since last fall: an edge in enthusiasm among voters. For the first time, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say they are extremely or very enthusiastic about voting — a shift from a 14-percentage-point GOP advantage at the end of last year to an 11-point deficit now.

That drop is driven by Republicans who describe themselves as moderate or liberal, about a third of the party, even though the candidate widely viewed as the most moderate in the GOP primary field is poised to be nominated. Just 7% of moderate and liberal Republicans now say they are extremely enthusiastic, down from 24% in January and compared with 34% of conservative Republicans who feel that way.

A 25-point flip in the enthusiasm gap in roughly five months in the swing states that will determine this election?  That's devastating news for the GOP and Romney.  There's more:

Obama has some advantages.

By a yawning 27 points, those surveyed describe Obama as more likable than Romney — not a frivolous asset. The candidate viewed as more likable has prevailed in every election since 1980. Even among Romney's supporters, one in four call Obama more likable.

By 10 points, voters say Obama is more likely to care about the needs of people like themselves. By 7 points, they call Obama a stronger and more decisive leader.

"No president can get everything done in four years," says LaTonya McCants, 44, a nursing assistant from Cleveland and an enthusiastic Obama backer. "He did make some good changes, and I feel he should get another four years" to finish the job.

Times may be tough, but she believes Obama is on her side. "He's for everybody," McCants says. Who does Romney care about? "Probably the business people," she says.

You want to know where that enthusiasm gap is coming from?  Romney should look in a mirror.

Tokyo Twister Kills One

It looks like we aren't the only ones having a savage tornado season so far.

TOKYO - A tornado tore through a city northeast of Japan's capital on Sunday, killing one person, injuring dozens of others and destroying scores of houses.

Firefighters and medical teams rushed to the area after the tornado struck Tsukuba city, 60 kilometres (40 miles) from Tokyo. The city is a science centre, with dozens of research and academic institutes, but the tornado appeared to be mostly in residential areas.

A 14-year-old boy died after being injured by the storm, Tsukuba Medical Center said.

On a (mostly) unrelated note, here is a far older video that still amazes me... a tornado in broad daylight, striking a soccer game.

AT&T Keeps Raking In The Good Publicity

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A former Kansas City woman who converted to Islam in 2005 said she was harassed for years at AT&T, and that the abuse boiled over in 2008 when her boss snatched her head scarf and exposed her hair.

A Jackson County jury on Thursday awarded Susann Bashir $5 million in punitive damages in her discrimination lawsuit, along with $120,000 in lost wages and other actual damages.

The Kansas City Star (http://bit.ly/JKWbqR ) reported Saturday the award appears to be the largest jury verdict for a workplace discrimination case in Missouri history.

This sort of thing doesn't go on, and go on for years, without the actual assistance of the business.  Missouri caps what Bashir will actually collect (yay for protecting those people versus businesses, am I right??) but it sets a standard in a state that often refuses to allow people religious or personal freedom.

Her boss snatched her head scarf off of her head.  Not only is that a religious issue, but I'm pretty damn sure it's beyond acceptable behavior even beyond the religious angle.

Maybe this is why we're having a hard time teaching kids that there is a better way than bullying.  Ya think?

The Best Three Minutes Of The Day

Oh please, PLEASE watch this video.  It has two of my favorite actresses telling Republicans what they want to hear (maybe hoping they will go away).

Get in my vagina.

I watched it, and the amusement grew.  Such delicate sarcasm, what brilliant directing.  And for you perverts, a chance to hear Kate Beckinsale invite you into her... well, you know.

I love Funny Or Die anyway, but this cements our lifelong friendship.

Republicans, Get In My Vagina! from Kate Beckinsale

So Long, Goober. We Will Miss You.

Sigh.  I grew up with this man in our living rooms.  My dad loved everything Andy Griffith, and now that you mention it, Hee Haw as well.  Not only was he a great character actor, but by all accounts George Lindsey was a good, kind man.  The icons are leaving us, and I may sound like an old fart when I say this, but there are few classics to take their place.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — George Lindsey, who made a TV career as a grinning service station attendant named Goober on "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Hee Haw," has died. He was 83.

The Marshall-Donnelly-Combs Funeral Home in Nashville said Lindsay died early Sunday morning after a brief illness.

Lindsey was the beanie-wearing Goober on "The Andy Griffith Show" from 1964 to 1968 and its successor, "Mayberry RFD," from 1968 to 1971. He played the same jovial character on "Hee Haw" from 1971 until it went out of production in 1993.

"At that time, we were the best acting ensemble on TV," Lindsey once told an interviewer. "The scripts were terrific. Andy is the best script constructionist I've ever been involved with. And you have to lift your acting level up to his; he's awfully good."

In a statement released through the funeral home, Griffith said, "George Lindsey was my friend. I had great respect for his talent and his human spirit. In recent years, we spoke often by telephone. Our last conversation was a few days ago ... I am happy to say that as we found ourselves in our eighties, we were not afraid to say, 'I love you.' That was the last thing George and I had to say to each other. 'I love you.'"

Unleash Joe Biden, Gay Marriage Edition

Vice-President Joe Biden's major duties in the Obama administration continues to consist mainly of being a combination trial balloon and lightning rod.

In an appearance on Meet the Press Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden said he is “absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women.” But, he added, “The President sets the policy.” 

Biden’s comments mean he has gone further than President Obama in expressing support for marriage equality. 

“I think Will and Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far,” Biden said Sunday. 

Two things I learned from Will and Grace:  Debra Messing has big feet, and people in New York City drink constantly.  But in all seriousness this is going to put the entire gay marriage issue on the map just as North Carolina votes on Amendment 1 tomorrow to end civil unions and domestic partnerships as well as end same-sex marriage.

It's an interesting play.  We'll see how the President responds, as he will be attacked by both the left and the right.

Dressed To The Nines

The New York Times figures the entire presidential campaign will come down to nine of the states the President won in 2008 that are up for grabs in 2012.

The nine — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — offer both parties reasons for hope, and concern. It is no coincidence that Mr. Obama chose two of them, Ohio and Virginia, to hold his first official re-election rallies on Saturday. 

“This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class,” Mr. Obama said at Ohio State University in Columbus. 

While the performance of the national economy will help shape the mood of the country and set the tone of each campaign, the situation on the ground in each of the nine states could be pivotal as well.

It would be hard to argue that these states are better off now than they were four years ago, given that they have yet to recover the jobs they lost. Often, that makes a compelling argument for a challenger trying to unseat an incumbent. 

But political scientists have found that past elections have been more influenced by the changes in the economy in the year or two before the election. And a range of economic data provided by Moody’s Analytics shows that all nine states are rebounding and that most now have unemployment rates below the national average. If voters in those states begin to feel the improvement by the fall and the economy does not take a turn for the worse, it could aid the president’s efforts to hold on to enough of them to win. 

Seems to me that the Times is making the case this race is wide open.  It's not.  The Real Clear Politics averages map shows right now President Obama needing only a couple of tossup states, or really just one: Ohio or Florida, to win outright with a 253-171 lead of Mitt Romney.  Romney would have to win at least 7 of 9 tossups in this scenario and cannot lose either Ohio or Florida or it's over.  In other words, the reality here is that Romney has a major uphill battle right now.

But the Times model ignores North Carolina, another state that went for President Obama (barely) and doesn't mention it as a toss-up.  It also takes Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada out of President Obama's column, and ignores perennial swing state Missouri which barely went for McCain.  If we make those changes and keep NC for Obama and give Missouri to Romney, it's still a 232-180 race, but Romney has more options, and in that scenario Pennsylvania and Florida become far more important than Ohio.  It's still tough for Romney to win, but not nearly as tough as the truth.

In other words, the Times is selling you a horse race where Romney remains extremely competitive.  Our liberal media, folks.

StupidiNews!

• As expected, French Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande has ousted French President Sarkozy in a 52-48% result.
• The US treasury will sell some $5 billion in AIG stock as it continues to unwind the near-bankrupt insurance giant.
• Arizona GOP Gov. Jan Brewer has signed legislation that eliminates all public funding for Planned Parenthood in the state.
• Leftist Greek party Syriza came in second in Sunday's elections behind New Democracy, putting the long-time ND-PASOK coalition that has ruled Greece for a generation in ruins.
• PC gaming giant Blizzard will take 15% off the top and another 15% for using other payment services in its real world auction house for Diablo III equipment later this month.

Last Call

As widely expected, French Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande has beaten French President Nicholas Sarkozy for his job.

Hollande received 52 percent of the vote to the 48 percent garnered by the conservative Sarkozy, who conceded to his opponent an hour after projected results were in.

The outcome makes Hollande the first candidate from the country’s Socialist Party to become president in France since 1988. It also makes Sarkozy the first president to not get re-elected to a second term in France since Valery Giscard d’Estaing in 1981.

Sarkozy, who was rumored by local channel France 24 as leaving politics altogether after the result, told his audience that he would not spearhead his conservative party into June’s parliamentary elections.

“Stay together, we must win the battle of the legislatives,” he said while reading a draft of his concession speech to senior party officials. “I will not lead that campaign.” 

The big winner here is ultra right-wing nutjob and unapologetic racist Marine La Pen of the National Front party.   With Sarkozy's center-right party leaderless and in tatters, Le Pen plans to swoop in as the face of the opposition to Hollande, and her main goal is to drive France further to the right.  Sound familiar?  It worked for the Tea Party here in 2010, after all.

But the big difference between Le Pen's blithely casual racists and our own is she doesn't have the backing of hundreds of millions of dollars, and Le Pen's clowns will blow up the second they have to govern.  Here in the US, the GOP was only saved from that particular fate by Citizens United and FOX News.

We'll see how this goes down.

A Glass Half Empty, A Field House Three-Quarters Full

They're the same thing if you're the wingnut blogs attacking the President in any way you can.  Breitbart's Big Liar:

Obama Launches Campaign in Empty Arena
Barack Obama launched his campaign in unspectacular fashion today at the Ohio State University, the largest college in this crucial swing state.  According to a photo posted to twitter by Mitt Romney’s campaign spokesman Ryan Williams, the event was poorly attended. 

And then the reality:

About 14,000 filed into the 18,300-seat Schottenstein Center, with the arena’s upper deck nearly empty. Student attendance at the rally was modest.

So surely Mitt Romney can do better right?

Despite falling short of expectations, the crowd at Obama’s Ohio State University event was still many times larger than Romney’s biggest crowd this year so far. Romney has drawn crowds of several thousand people during the GOP primary race, but none topping 10,000.

On Twitter on Saturday, campaign operatives jousted over the visuals of the Ohio rally.
“View from floor during @BarackObama speech. Not the “overflow” crowd he promised,” tweeted Romney spokesman Ryan Williams.

Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse fired back with a photo of Romney’s February economic speech in Detroit, where 1,200 people turned out for an event in a stadium that seats 65,000.

Yes, let's talk about empty stadiums, shall we?

Three-quarters full is an "empty arena" when the President is Barack Obama.  They hate him this much because he says things like this:



So in the world of Big Moron, Obama game a speech to an "empty arena".  There's no downside to the lie, of course.  It's not like our liberal media will call them on it.  In fact, it's more likely they will repeat the lie until it becomes fact, then a trend consisting of facts, then a President locked in a tight race for his political survival (when the opposite its true.) It may demoralize voters.  It will give observers the illusion of a close race, and of course the opinion-makers of the Village must be heeded in a situation like that.  A boring, lop-sided competition becomes a razor-thin slugfest.  You know, just like 2008 wasn't.

When he wins, it will be "How could he possibly have won when he gave campaign" rallies at empty arenas?  He couldn't possibly have won without his Chicago thuggery!  It must be VOTER FRAUD ON AN UNPRECEDENTED SCALE!  IMPEACH!  IMPEEEEEEEACH!"

And let's be honest:  The next six months of this aren't really about helping Romney win.  He can't and they know it.  It's all about pre-emptively delegitimizing Obama's second term now.  The plan really is simple.  Six months of "empty arenas" and "unspectacular attendance" will prove that the polls showing the President ahead are all "suspect".  When he wins, it will be "hard for the country to accept how it happened when nobody came to the President's rallies".

And that of course, Republican in Congress will have to investigate because the "people will be clamoring to know".  The people lied to by Breitbart, and FOX, and Drudge, and the rest.

Really is that simple.  How well it will work?  For tens of millions who only get their info from FOX and still believe the President's birth certificate isn't real?  For tens of millions more who get their news from the Villagers who insist only they have the power to see the future of this race that's "too close to call"?

What do you think?

The Octomom Lesson

Republicans, listen up.  Octomom is making porn. And accepting state money.  And rumor has it, that while the babies were conceived IVF, she's had sex.  And now, she's done it on camera.

TMZ reports that she has successfully finished her first porn scene, and that they were told she "is a natural" on film.

We could learn a lot from this generally useless woman, who unsuccessfully pimped her kids and herself out and has lived on the scraps of pity ever since. She is the face of greed and stupidity, despite her education.  Her fame has backfired, and all of her children will pay the price.  But not her, no.  She's still enjoying the television circuit amid reports that her children are "living in squalor" and that she is one step ahead of eviction.

What will happen to the kids when they grow up and realize they were an experiment, a means to grab attention and nothing more?  What will it do to their sense of self-worth to be stamped with the Octomom brand, and forever be ashamed of where they came from?

Or how about this: when they watch the porn video she just filmed to show her desperation and try to grab one last fleeting glimpse of "fame" as we know it today?

Save the kids.  Please.

A Small Victory, But We'll Take It

The case of a tortured Afghan child bride whose treatment shocked the world has led to three members of her husband's family being jailed for 10 years, an official said on Saturday.

Sahar Gul, 15, who was burned and beaten and had her fingernails pulled out was found in the basement of her husband's house last December in northeastern Baghlan province, where she had been locked in a toilet for six months.

"The court sentenced her father-in-law, mother-in-law and sister-in-law each to 10 years in prison on Tuesday," Afghanistan's supreme court spokesman Abdul Wakil Omari told AFP.

Hell yes, finally.  We covered this a long time ago, when the story originally broke.  I have kept Sahar's story on my follow-up list and waited, praying for the world to care about this young woman who was treated so badly that reading the story makes tears of rage come to my eyes.

Some groups protest that it isn't enough, and they are right.  There is no price tag on abuse of this level, no amount of punishment can ever make this right.  But ten years is a good start, and in a country where this is still considered acceptable by portions of the public, the best they're going to get.

Still think women have a fair chance in this world?  Read this:

According to figures by British charity organisation Oxfam, 87 percent of Afghan women report having experienced physical, sexual or psychological violence or forced marriage.

Yeah.  Keep fighting, but let victories like this encourage us to focus.

Too Much Even For The GOP

It turns out that in an election year anyway, there are places not even the Republican party is willing to go.

A stark mug shot of domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski briefly took center stage in the increasingly ugly debate over climate change Friday as the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank funded by major corporations, launched a billboard campaign equating people convinced that global warming is real to the convicted killer.

“I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” read big orange letters next to the Unabomber’s infamously grizzled face on an electronic billboard along the Eisenhower Expressway outside Chicago, the Heartland Institute’s home.

The billboard went live Thursday afternoon. But by 4 p.m. Eastern time, an outcry from allies and opponents alike led the Heartland Institute’s president, Joe Bast, to say he would switch off the sign within the hour.

“The Heartland Institute knew this was a risk when deciding to test it, but decided it was a necessary price to make an emotional appeal to people who otherwise aren’t following the climate change debate,” Bast wrote in an e-mail to some of the institute’s supporters, explaining his decision to end the campaign.

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), scheduled to headline the Heartland Institute’s annual conclave of climate-change skeptics this month, said through a spokeswoman that he “will not participate in the upcoming climate-change conference if the Heartland Institute decides to continue this ad campaign.” 

You read that right.  With Sensenbrenner up for re-election like the rest of the House, not even he's willing to go to the mat for the Heartland Institute if they're openly calling global warming proponents terrorists.  Apparently that's actually a step too far for these groups.

Go figure.

Last Call

I don't expect Republicans to actually understand economics, only to cherry pick statistics.  The latest nonsense is about the labor participation rate, or the number of people in the workforce.  It's shrinking rapidly.  Republicans claim it's "Obama's failed economic policies destroying the work force."  The rality is of course far more interesting and far more complex.  Yes, some people are being criven out of the work force by economic conditions.  But far more are being driven out by simple Boomer demographics.

Demographics have always played a big role in the rise and fall of the labor force. Between 1960 and 2000, the labor force in the United States surged from 59 percent to a peak of 67.3 percent. That was largely due to the fact that more women were entering the labor force while improvements in health and information technology allowed Americans to work more years.

But since 2000, the labor force rate has been steadily declining as the baby-boom generation has been retiring. Because of this, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago expects the labor force participation rate to be lower in 2020 than it is today, regardless of how well the economy does.
In a March report titled “Dispelling an Urban Legend,” Dean Maki, an economist at Barclays Capital, found that demographics accounted for a majority of the drop in the participation rate since 2002.


And what about the most recent downturn? Based on survey data, Maki found that about 35 percent of Americans who have dropped out of the labor force since the recession began in 2007 do want a job, but they have become too discouraged to fire off résumés. That’s a sign of a weak labor market. But the other 65 percent are people who have left the labor force and do not want a job. The biggest chunk of that group seems to be composed of baby boomers, those 55 and older, who have decided to retire early.

That suggests, Maki and his colleagues wrote, that unemployment will not necessarily start ticking up again as the economy keeps adding jobs, as many people expect.

“Such an event has not happened in the past and we do not believe it will this time either,” they argued.

Yes, if labor force participation were as high as it used to be, unemployment would be in double digits.

It's not going to be that high again in our lifetimes, and that's simply due to Boomers like my parents retiring.  It's not a massive economic conspiracy, it's Boomers hitting 65, period.  The next decade will see tens of millions of new retirees.  The Bush crash simply drove them into retirement earlier than anticipated.  The labor force would be shrinking no matter who was President right now, and it will continue to shrink, period.

It's simple math.  But Republicans think you are too stupid to understand it.