Last Call

President Obama spoke at length from the close of this evening's G-20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico and had quite a bit to say about the plan to tackle Europe's looming financial disaster.

President Obama said tonight that European leaders must quickly fix their ailing economies and banking systems in order to help boost world financial markets -- and create jobs in the United States.
"Slower growth in Europe means slower growth in American jobs," Obama told reporters after the G-20 summit it Los Cabos, Mexico.

He also acknowledged that the festering European problems could cost him the election -- but said that's not his immediate concern.

"If we're taking the right steps, if we're doing the right thing, then the politics will follow," Obama said.

After a two-day summit of the Group of 20 economic powers, Obama expressed confidence that Europe is "determined to move quickly on measures to promote growth and investment," which he said could help "provide confidence and break the fever."

"Our friends in Europe clearly grasp the seriousness of the situation and are moving forward with a heightened sense of urgency," the president said.

I'm glad that the Europeans are aware they are pretty close to the point of no return, but the reality is they've yet to do anything substantive to fix the Greek Fire, and time is now running critically short.  Spain's short-term borrowing costs have jumped to over 5% interest, and their 10-year bonds are at 7%.  They are in the danger zone and will not be able to keep this up for more than a few months at most at these levels, and that time decreases rapidly if rates keep rising.

Germany remains the key to any eurozone plans.  If they don't play ball, the game ends.  We'll see.

It Never Hurts To Be Prepared For The Zombie Apocalypse

Despite the recent bath salts attacks and general nuttery going on out there, I am really not worried that the dead will walk the earth.  Mostly.

What I do worry about is an act of war that takes out communication.  I worry that disease is going to run from coast to coast, as we see more antibiotic resistance.  Zombies aren't scary, but crowds of stupid people are.  For those who live in larger cities, you are just swimming in stupidity.  We have become a generation that seems short on practical, hands-on knowledge.  In other words, we are primed for a StupidiBlast of some sort to teach us a lesson in preparedness.

I'm not stocking a storage room full of toilet paper and bottled water.  I just like the way the aluminum foil hat makes my eyes, pop.  Honest.  But my husband and I have watched many a horror movie and chatted, and I realized last week that George Romero may have helped us define our national emergency plan.  Imagine if you had to be stealthy, clever, and in good enough shape to hike several miles.  Outrun enemies.  Live hand to mouth, minute to minute.  Most of us have never given it a single thought, and would be starting from square one if we were at the base of some catastrophe.

It was the basis of this that led me to write about zombies in the first place.  In my fiction, the zombies are background buzz, the really interesting thing is how people survive.  The miracle is that we actually do, at least in most cases.

Readers: do you do this?  Do you watch a movie or series like Walking Dead and think about what you would do?  If not, maybe I should just keep the foil hat on.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Steve M. is 100% correct about K-Drum and SCOTUS.

If you're Kevin Drum, you can't really believe that powerful people who hold positions of great responsibility act like this. You can't believe, for instance, that they'd saddle their own political primaries with a Sheldon Adelson just because freeing people like him to give unlimited cash pisses us off. Even now, they can't believe the Supreme Court will overturn a law that reduces government spending, and that Republicans in Congress won't replace it with something that addresses the country's real health care problems in some serious way.

But that's not how it goes anymore. Right-wing decision-makers, first and foremost, want to crush liberalism. They are not acting in good faith. And everyone needs to grasp how seriously messed up a political system is when half its actors are out of control in this way. 

Yes.  At least four of the Justices on the Supreme Court will overturn the mandate or the entire ACA just to screw over President Obama, the Democrats, and liberals in general.   Stare decicis and precedent and jurisprudence be damned,  it's time to make the dirty effing hippies pay, and pay we will if we lose the ACA in the next week or two.

It's entirely the hell possible, as BooMan points out, it's very probable at this point.  We need to start considering how to respond.

Speculation is running high that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) will soon strike down the individual mandate in the president's Affordable Care Act. If they do, they will leave us no option but to create a Medicate For All plan. And this is true whether they let the rest of the Act stand or they strike the whole thing from the books.

If the SCOTUS rules that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, it will destroy the only private means anyone has come up with to make sure that everyone can has access to medical care. Even if the subsides for the poor remain in place, meaning that no will be denied care because they can't afford it, the insurance companies can't remain profitable if they are required to cover people with pre-existing conditions unless those costs are offset by tens of millions of relatively healthy customers. Ezra Klein provides proof of this here. This isn't a matter of choice on the insurance industries part. It is just the nature of underwriting.

It is not possible to have a private health insurance industry that covers people with pre-existing conditions unless there is also an individual mandate requirement. Under those circumstances, the government would be forced to do away with its insistence that people with pre-existing conditions get coverage. And if the health care reforms don't cover people with pre-existing conditions then not only will people with cancer and diabetes and other chronic diseases go bankrupt or go without treatment, but we won't see any downward trend in the cost of health care. Without the mandate, people will wait until they get sick to seek insurance (which they will be denied) and treatment (which the insured will have to pay for with higher premiums). And we'll go back to a system where getting sick while uninsured lands you in bankruptcy court. 

It's a good plan.  But it's going to require us to vote in unprecedented numbers.  It's going to require work.  It's going to require door knocking to win back the states, to win back redistricting, to win back the House and keep the Senate.  It's going to require a decade of work, easily. The Republicans put 16, now going on 18 years in since 1994.  They all but reversed the Clinton landslide in 2 years.  They got Bush for 8, then reversed a hell of a lot of Obama's win in just 2 years again. Now they stand 3 Senate seats and an Oval Office away from total control of the country for the next generation.  They took state after state out from under us because we let them.

If we don't stand up here, we're done.  And I mean that.

Like A Good Neighbor...

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — An Oregon woman's neighbors had reason to worry: Virginia Cartier hadn't picked up her Sunday newspaper and her car had not been moved.

When police forced their way into her condo to check on her, they found Cartier, 67, had been pinned beneath a dresser for four days without food or water.

"She is like crazy about her Sunday paper, and she hadn't picked it up," Kyla Sexton told KGW-TV. "And her car hasn't moved. So we were really worried about her."

It's scary to live alone, but especially when older and apparently fiercely independent it does present its challenges.  You hear about neighbors shooting over loud music, aggravating each other and being terrible all the time.  Good neighbors do exist.  As we get more crowded and live longer, we may do well to find some and stay put.

StupdiNews! Celebrity Medical Edition

Jack Osbourne has been diagnosed with MS.  The son of Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne just recently got married and has one child, a daughter.  He is surprisingly eloquent in the face of what must be devastating news.  He is in the normal age group to start showing symptoms.  That is sad news, no matter who hears it.

However, there have been advances with some medicines, and as young as he is, perhaps he will be able to stay on top of the effects for a long time.  The disease can go into remission for spells, and can vary widely from one patient to another.

Max Page, the pint-sized Darth Vader, is doing well after his surgery.  According to reports from his mother, he is up walking around a little, and is setting small goals and steps to pass the time.  He's in good spirits, and seems to be out of the immediate danger.  His valve is expected to last up to fifteen years, which will seem like forever to the seven-year-old.

Los Panta-Looneys

Greg Sargent points out at least one GOP strategist is freely admitting that the Republicans got caught sans pants on the President's immigration enforcement directive.

So claims GOP strategist Ed Rollins in an interview with me about Obama’s new policy blocking deportations of DREAM-eligible youth.

“They should not have been caught with their pants down,” Rollins said of Republicans, adding that they were caught “flat-footed” by the announcement. “They needed to be better prepared.”

“The hardest thing [for Republicans] about the immigration debate is that it’s a question of fairness,” continued Rollins, who was chief strategist for Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign and ran Ronald Reagan’s reelection effort in 1984. “A lot of people know a lot of good people who came into this country illegally and are trying to buy into the American Dream.”

“If we ever lose the Hispanic vote the way we’ve lost the African American vote, there’s no way we’ll win in presidential politics,” Rollins concluded.

Amazing.  A Republican strategist who isn't a complete moron.  Granted, Ed Rollins is the Dick Morris of the GOP, but he's at least under no illusions that the GOP can win now and in the future without the African-American and Latino vote.

Not that the Latino vote is monolithic, any more than the African-American vote is.  But let's face it, the GOP has demonized the Latino community so much that even the Latino voters who are apt to agree with Republicans on some issues are going to blow them off.  Even Ed Rollins can figure this out, and he's got the political acumen of a bowl of rancid fish guts (Way to back a winner like Bachmann, Ed.)

Still, it doesn't change the fact that Rollins is correct, and the fact that Republicans as a whole will continue to bleed voters until they get it.  Which is never, because they've decided to go for broke on being the Last Bastion Of White Male Privilege Party and they're pretty much okay with that.

All Hail Our New Austerity Overlords

Niall Ferguson takes to the BBC to lecture the Millenials on the "benefits" of austerity and why they should buy into now.

"Society," says Burke, "is indeed a contract. The state is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

In the enormous inter-generational transfers implied by current fiscal policies we see a shocking and perhaps unparalleled breach of precisely that partnership.

I want to suggest that the biggest challenge facing mature democracies is how to restore the social contract between the generations.

But I recognise that the obstacles to doing so are daunting. Not the least of these is that the young find it quite hard to compute their own long-term economic interests. 

It is surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies that would ultimately make matters even worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees.

If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.

To an extent, Ferguson is correct:  Americans under 40 should buy into the notion of Austerity Uber Alles because that's what the Boomers are going to inflict upon them anyway as they approach retirement.  The only way this works is if the Boomers vote for it, and any vote of that nature will of course not change anything for ten years or so, meaning anyone born up to 1955 or earlier will get full benefits.  Anyone after?  Well, hope you enjoy the Tea Party and squabbling over if roads, schools, public safety, and government should even exist.  Boomer voters still hold an outsized chunk of the electorate, so they'll vote themselves the spoils and leave the rest of us the check and a brave new world of "privatized" care at the tender mercies of insurance corporations and their profit margins.  Meanwhile, the savings on this will all go to tax cuts for the "job creators" of course, necessitating further cuts down the road as deficits fail to close...

What Ferguson is advocating is surrender and grim resignation to the fact that it's very likely that my generation and anyone younger than myself is going to get thrown in the incinerator, so we might as well get used to the economic conditions of 2012 and assume they will continue for the next 40 or 50 years or so.

Have a nice day.

StupidiNews!

• Microsoft will enter the hardware business with the Surface tablet this fall, running a version of Windows 8.
• President Obama's pick for ambassador to Iraq, Brett McGurk, has withdrawn after racy emails surfaced from 2008 to now wife Gina Chon of the Washington Post.
• A new poll finds swing state Latino voters are very receptive to the President's new immigration directive.
• European leaders continue to discuss the growing eurozone financial crisis at Mexico's G-20 summit this week, but doubts are surfacing as to being able to solve the problem.
• A former AT&T executive has admitted to leaking insider sales info on the Apple iPhone to investors as the federal government continues to investigate insider trading allegations.

Last Call

And baseball's Rocket Man, pitcher Roger Clemens, has been acquitted of all charges related to his testimony to Congress in 2008.

The case against Clemens involved one count of obstruction of Congress, three counts of making false statements and two counts of perjury. He was not charged with illicit use of performance-enhancing drugs, but his denial of such use was part of the case against him.

A jury found him not guilty on all six counts.

Federal prosecutor Courtney Saleski, in closing arguments, told jurors Clemens "wanted to protect his brand, he wanted to protect his livelihood," in denying the use of steroids during a 2008 investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives into the problem.

The Clemens defense team disputed whether the government had made its case, telling the jury all the evidence came through a former personal trainer, Brian McNamee, who had incentive to lie.

"You saw Brian McNamee, the only witness in the history of the world who says he gave or saw an injection of that man," said defense attorney Michael Attanasio. "One person in the entire world." During closing arguments, the defense cited the lack of corroborating witnesses.

Not that it's hard to find 12 Americans who thought Congress was even less credible than Roger Clemens.  Easiest trial defense ever if you ask me.  Clearly the jury saw it that way.  Looks like Roger is going to skate, steroids or not.

A no-hitter for Clemens in the double header, I'd say.

Through The Wringer

This Sunday, senior White House adviser David Plouffe had a bit of a message for the Pundits Of Perpetual Disappointment and the ex-Clintonite Crew that has never seen fit to support Barack Obama:  Shut it.

But the Obama team isn’t fazed. On “Fox News Sunday,” Plouffe argued that Carville and his chorus of Democrats are wrong.

“Those other Democrats are not paying attention to what the president is saying,” Plouffe told host Chris Wallace. “Which is every day, not just in what he says but what he does, he understands our economy is not as strong as it needs to be, that this didn’t happen overnight, it’s going to take us a long time to recover, there’s a lot of people out there hurting. So we are making progress and we need to make a lot more.”

Plouffe’s retort did exactly what the critics warn the campaign not to do: focus on the president’s economic record for his first term, rather than what he would do in a second term.

On “Meet The Press,” Plouffe denied that Democrats were panicking after a few rough weeks and poor economic news. But he called on Democrats to quit the “hand wringing” and focus on winning the election. What Democrats and any other supporters of the president need to do, Plouffe said, “is work like heck to win this election. That’s where we need our energy focused. Not on kind of some of the hand wringing that sometimes occurs in our party.”

Gosh, pretty much everyone here has been making the various cases on that strategy for months now, relentlessly pointing out the differences between the President at Mittens, at nearly every aspect of policy:  women’s rights, civil rights, economic inequality, foreign policy, marriage equality, job creation, the preservation of the safety net, infrastructure repair, food and drug safety, collective bargaining rights, and much, much more.

And at every turn we’ve said “knock off the self-flagellation and get with it.”  Look, effective dissent is not binary by any means.  VOTING FOR PRESIDENT EFFECTIVELY IS.  Your President is either going to be Mitt Romney or Barack Obama.  You get to choose, and it’s clear that for some Democrats, this is a hard choice.  Those of us that keep laying down the evidence here of what Mitt ROmney would do like to note that in every instance of policy that progressives care about, Mitt Romney will make things worse.

He will not magically stand up to the Teabillies.  He will not develop spinal fortitude.  He will not make things better.  Like Bush before him, he will be a nothing more than a puppet of all the awful influences in the country:  obscenly rich mega-billionaires and massive corporate giants who will continue to strip mine the middle class into non-existence.  Unions are all but gone.  The middle class is trapped with no upward mobility.  We’re in the new gilded age, with anything close to centrist policy, let alone progressive, relentlessly blocked by the GOP time and time again.

Barack Obama has done a hell of a lot.  He has not solved these massive structural problems.  For that, we’d have to give him a true progressive majority.  Instead he’s been forced to work within the structure itself, as rotten as it is.  We gave him that structure in 2010, electing 62 more Republican assholes to the House and seven more to the Senate, and then we have folks who wonder why things haven’t improved in the last 18 months, why jobs bills and legislation hasn’t passed, and why President Obama has been forced to turn to less-effective executive branch measures to give only temporary justice to the people, rather than through more permanent legislative means.

And when he did have decent majority power, it was limited by time and Republicans blocking Al Franken’s seat for nearly a year, and then Ted Kennedy’s death brought us Scott Brown.  Our brilliant plan in 2010?  Teach Barack Obama a lesson.  The lesson:  Democrats are afraid of the hard road.  Much easier to abdicate your responsibilities as a voter and not vote, right?  Then you can say “all this isn’t my fault, he wasn’t good enough to earn my vote.”  Then you can remain above the fray and wait for things to get so bad, we have no choice but to join you in your revolution, because you were right all along.

Meanwhile, the massive damage that the rest of us take from GOP policies and the fact you’re okay with the Teabillies controlling everything in the meantime?  That doesn’t matter in the face of your piousness. So sorry.  Plouffe understands, he’s playing to win.  We have to play to win too.  Those of us who say the only path to winning is through total defeat?

Shut it.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

And the Ni-CLANG! clock moves closer to midnight.  Don Hamel at Addicting Info:

Did you ever wonder what in the Hell Tea Baggers were talking about when they were all shrieking about how they wanted to ‘take our country back?’ After all, our country was never run by illiterates, and the Confederates did lose the Civil War. Well, now we can be reasonably certain that what they wanted was to ‘take the country back’ to a time when no matter how intellectually inferior, or how unfit you were to be among decent people, you could still loudly pretend that you were a person of status, based solely on your pigmentation.

Meet the latest braying right-wing jackass to absolutely prove that sad little pretension wrong, wrong, wrong; Barbara Espinoza, an Arizona radio host who loudly proclaimed on the air, that she refers to Barack Obama as “the first monkey president.” In fact, she was so proud of this inventive piece of witticism, that she loudly interrupted the obviously confused elderly caller, who was either uncertain of the name of the (Arizona Senator) who was the Republican candidate in 2008, or was saying he voted for Herman Cain (who wasn’t on the ballot in the Arizona primaries). He also called Obama “Rabbit Ears,” so you understand, this was some in-depth political conversation.

You can listen to this cankerous sore on the nation’s brain-stem here.

Awesome.  We're not far now from the President being called the n-word on a radio or TV show, and then the floodgates open.  Still 4.5 months to go, too.

But don't you dare call them racist.

To set the record straight I did use the word monkey and Obama in the same sentence. Yes I did say I voted for the white guy. Unless there has been a takeover of America and free speech is no longer allowed and I can be put to death for making a remark, I refuse to take the fifth.

Tens of millions out there feel the same way in Post-Racial America.  They've hated him...and by extension all minorities...for a very long time.  America's history is rife with hatred, death and more hatred.

It's just another sad chapter in our country's awesome (if you're white) history.  Oh, but it gets worse if the Montana GOP convention is any sign.

There was less laughter – although plenty of picture-taking – of an outhouse labeled “Obama Presidential Library” parked outside Missoula’s Hilton Garden Inn, where the convention took place.

Nothing on the outhouse indicated who was responsible for it, although it made an appearance in the Memorial Day parade in Corvallis in Ravalli County.

The outhouse was painted to look as though it had been riddled by bullets.

Inside, a fake birth certificate for Barack Hussein Obama made reference to the disproven controversy over the president’s origins. It was stamped “Bull––.” A graffito advised “For a Good Time call 800-Michelle (crossed out), Hillary (crossed out) and Pelosi (circled in red.)”

State GOP Chairman Will Deschamps of Missoula said he didn’t know who’d brought the outhouse, but dismissed it as “a sideshow.”

“It’s not something I’m going to agonize over,” he said. “Some of that stuff is not real good taste. We do have a president of the United States, and we have to honor that.”

We have to honor it.  We don't have to respect it or like it.  We certainly don't have to put up with one of them as President, right Will?

Won't be long now, folks.

Short And Sweet: Romney's Two Faces Shine

Romney refuses to actually go on record to say he'd overturn Obama's immigration order, but sits in the corner sniping and taking swipes at it.  What bravado!

This man is a coward, a two-faced chickenshit who will say what it takes to satisfy his short-term need. He doesn't give a damn about anything but his legacy, and he's too blind and stupid to see his legacy will be that of a lame duck who was blindsided by his own ignorance.

I'm starting to think he has no convictions.  No principles allow you to sell them out for your own happiness, that's why they are principles.  If you don't honor them when it matters, you're just... well, you're Mitt Romney.  Even Mitt doesn't want to be Mitt.  He wants to be Obama, but without the pesky responsibility of making the hard choices and taking responsibility for them.

Political Cartoon Of The Day

Talk about getting right to the root of the matter.  

Parks And Wreck Creation

Lost in the debate over how deeply California will have to slice its state budget yet again is the Golden State's many parks and nature areas, dozens of which are scheduled to close this year and the land sold off to developers as the state can no longer afford to operate them.  This is what happens when it takes a state referendum to raise a single dime of tax revenues, and supporters like Ernest Chung in Marin County are turning to California's wealthy to save the parks like China Camp Park near San Rafael.

"This is a brave new world," said Chung, standing outside a San Rafael library where he was scheduled to meet with a potential donor.

Supporters have pooled $200,000 to keep China Camp solvent and need $50,000 more. Chung noted that even if they are successful, they will have to start over next year: "If we tell people that we are going to be successful every year, we'd be fooling ourselves, because we haven't done it yet."

China Camp boosters at least have a stable of potential donors in wealthy Marin County. In less fortunate locales, the prospects of quickly raising tens of thousands of dollars is dim.

Officials and supporters in Whittier are struggling to scrape together $80,000 to save the historic home of Pio Pico, California's last Mexican governor - even as the preserved rancho at Los Encinos State Historic Park 35 miles away has been spared from closure thanks to a $150,000 check from a single anonymous donor.

"In some of the richer areas, someone steps forward and writes a check for the full amount," said Whittier Assistant City Manager Nancy Mendez. "That's not the case here. They're getting $5 donations."

Some parks will make it for another year or two.  A lot won't.  Either way, Republicans across the country have assured that government of the people and for the people will fail, and that the rest of us have to beg the job creators and the one percent for scraps just to save state parks.

Much more cost-effective to give a billion to the GOP, right?

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/06/17/152620/supporters-struggle-to-buy-time.html#storylink=cp

Greek Fire, Part 63

Elections yesterday in Greece and France portend serious trouble ahead for the euro.  First in Greece, conservative New Democracy has won the most seats in parliamentary elections, followed by centrist PASOK, and together they could form a government without leftist Syriza.  The problem is that PASOK won't play ball without Syriza in the fold.

...the Greek PASOK party of former PM G-Pap may have thrown a grenade into coalition discussion, following an announcement by Katerina Diamantopoulou that Pasok will not join into a coalition government with ND unless Syriza also joins said coalition. Which Syriza stated moments ago it would not do. The question then comes whether ND can form a government (150+ seats) with any of the other remaining parties (up to and including neo-nazi New Dawn or the communists... why is there no Pirate party in Greece?). The answer is most likely not, but not before some serious horse trading shows that the second Greek elections has achieved nothing, and the world now has to look forward to a 3rd Greek election round, some time in August...

In other words, still no government in Greece, as expected.   PASOK has correctly determined that if New Democracy and PASOK form a government now with Syriza, the two of them will be destroyed in the next elections as they take all the blame.  Syriza would win an outright majority in the following elections (which would be sooner rather than later ar more than 75% of Greece is now against austerity).  No Syriza to take their part of the blame, no government...and we're now stuck in the exact same boat as in May.  Nothing has changed.  There will be no Greek government.

In France, there's the opposite problem:  French parliamentary elections have given an outright majority of Francois Hollande's Socialists.

The Socialist bloc secured between 296 and 320 seats in the parliamentary election runoff, according to reliable projections from a partial vote count, comfortably more than the 289 needed for a majority in the 577-seat National Assembly.

The result means Hollande won't need to rely on the environmentalist Greens, projected to win 20 seats, or the Communist-dominated Left Front, likely to have just 10 deputies, to pass laws. The centre-left already controls the upper house of parliament, the Senate. 

Now things get interesting.  The French have completely rejected the center-right and now the country is dominated by the left.  We'll see what Hollande can do with it...and Germany is going to be pissed.

The Greek Fire continues scorching the world.

[UPDATE]  And I see Spain's interest rates have now breached the 7% danger zone this morning.  Hold on to your crapola, people.

StupidiNews!

• As the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt announces their candidate has won the presidential election, Egypt's ruling military council has now stripped the office of almost all power.
• The end of the 50,000 strong "silent march" protest of the NYPD's controversial "stop and frisk" policy Sunday night was disrupted by police breaking up protestors.
• As UN observers flee the war zone in Syria, rebel forces are pushing troops loyal to the al-Assad regime out of the city of Homs and the surrounding area.
• EU leaders are indicating that Greece will be allowed to renegotiate austerity terms as long as the country can "swiftly" form a new government in the wake of Sunday's elections.
• The US has retaken the "World's Fastest Supercomputer" lead with "Sequoia", a new 1.6 million CPU monster at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Last Call

Did anyone actually think cowardly Mitt Romney would take a stand on President Obama's new immigration directive?  You're a fool if you did.

Mitt Romney refuses to say whether he’d repeal the Obama administration’s decision to stop deporting certain undocumented immigrants.

In an interview with Bob Schieffer aired Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee five different times declined to answer whether he would conduct the same policy President Barack Obama on Friday announced his Department of Homeland Security will now pursue.

Instead of answering the question posed, Romney called for a permanent solution.

“With regards to these kids who were brought in by their parents through no fault of their own, there needs to be a long-term solution so they know what their status is,” Romney said. “This is something Congress has been working on, and I thought we were about to see some proposals brought forward by Sen. Marco Rubio and by Democrat senators, but the president jumped in and said I'm going to take this action, he called it a stop-gap measure. I don't know why he feels stop-gap measures are the right way to go.”

After Schieffer asked, directly, four additional times if Romney would repeal the policy without receiving an answer, Romney called the move political.

“I think the timing is pretty clear, if he really wanted to make a solution that dealt with these kids or with illegal immigration in America, than this is something he would have taken up in his first three and a half years, not in his last few months,” he said.

Except for the fact that a permanent solution, the DREAM Act, was offered, Mitt.  And your side killed it because they don't want a permanent solution.  He knows the second he stakes out a choice here, it's over and he's done.  If he decides he has to reverse the policy, he's done with Latino voters.  If he doesn't reverse it, his base will turn on him.  Either way he takes the least damage by not taking a stand.

What a hero making the tough calls.  How can this spineless twit be President?

A Life Of Conflict

Los Angeles police officials confirm Rodney King is dead at the age of 47.

Rodney King, whose beating by Los Angeles police in 1991 was caught on camera and sparked riots after the acquittal of the four officers involved, was found dead in his swimming pool Sunday, authorities and his fiancee said. He was 47.

Police in Rialto, California, received a 911 call from King's fiancee, Cynthia Kelly, about 5:25 a.m., said Capt. Randy DeAnda. Responding officers found King at the bottom of the pool, removed him and attempted to revive him. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital, DeAnda said.

There were no preliminary signs of foul play, he said, and no obvious injuries on King's body. Police are conducting a drowning investigation, DeAnda said, and King's body would be autopsied.

"His fiancee heard him in the rear yard," he said, and found King in the pool when she went outside.

And I remember exactly where I was when the verdict came down and the LA riots began.  I was a high school senior in Durham, NC at the time.  The verdict sparked much soul-searching among my classmates and the faculty, and eventually an all-school assembly where we openly talked about race and differences between us...and the similarities.

Rodney King had a life of conflict and pain, ups and downs.  Maybe now he'll finally find the peace that long eluded him.

The Tomb Raider Reboot

Emma Gray writes about the latest Tomb Raider "Crossroads" reboot.  She glosses through some details, and focuses on an attempted rape scene that offended her highly.

And according to Schreier, the way the producers plan to make gamers harness these protective instincts is to make Croft suffer through her friend getting kidnapped, being taken prisoner by "island scavengers" ... and an attempted rape. (The studio has since issued a statement saying that the scene in question has been "incorrectly referred to" as attempted sexual assault, but I agree with Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams that "there's an unmistakable sense of sexual menace in the scene." Click here to view the clip.) Some human suffering is par for the course when it comes to heroes' "how they became how they are" narratives (one classic example is Spider-Man losing his Uncle Ben). However, do kickass female characters really need to endure attempted sexual violence to be sympathetic?

As it turns out, it's not awful.  It's from 2:15 to 2:30, if you want to skip ahead.  For those who don't want to see the whole trailer, a man turns around and caresses her arm, then her hip.  Lara promptly knees him in the balls savagely.  He kisses her, and terrified she ends up with the gun.  Gray isn't wrong so much as overselling the scene and its drama / impact.  It was a completely unsuccessful attack and something unbelievably dramatic had to provoke her to kill.  This was a girl who apologized to a deer she had to kill for food.  This reeks of a slow news week trying to turn a molehill into a mountain.  The official Tomb Raider site says they have shown all there is to see, there is no lurking rape scene to stumble across.  Based on what I saw, it wasn't pleasant but it wasn't graphic, either.

It looks like a hell of an origin story.  For those old farts out there (like me) you probably remember the last time Lara appeared as a little girl.  She was cocky, obnoxious and hadn't earned her dues.  It was really cool to find "the" backpack, but even dedicated fans were a bit turned off by the snoot she was.  This gritty beginning is more realistic for a woman who travels the world and fights mummies for sport.  A person like that is forged, not born. Her story has to be gritty, and it has to be harsh.  She's a survivor, a lifetime of knitting and charity work would not have made sense.

Any woman who travels the world knows the real dangers that are out there.  Most from personal experience.  The rest read headlines where women are sold as property and given virginity checks by crowds of men.  This touch of reality is horror all right, but kept to a very basic minimum.  There is far more graphic violence out there, this pales in comparison to even a second of shoot 'em ups or military adventures.  Or even when compared to real headlines.

I hadn't heard about this yet, so my joy at the upcoming chapter is not ruined by what I saw.  Diminished a little, maybe, but as a storyteller I see the need they faced, and think they justified her behavior well.  It's a drop in a bucket of the overall story, told in fifteen seconds of real time.  

I just think the article on HuffPo tries to make it into something it's not.

 

Why Bon May Never Sleep Again: The Hairy-Legged Sequel

Victoria Jean Harrah sat down around noon Wednesday to eat a freshly grilled ham and cheese sandwich with her fiance when she decided to warm up a plate of her favorite canned ravioli.

But instead of saucy goodness, the 48-year-old Mims, Fla., woman said she got a crunchy mouthful of what she described as a hairy-legged spider tucked into a pocket of pasta.

"I spit it up…I screamed, rinsed my mouth out and I must have brushed my teeth till my teeth hurt," said Harrah, who claims to have found the surprise in a can of Chef Boyardee Mini Ravioli.

By the end you want to tell her that she's overreacting.  At least, I did.  "I'm so afraid," she says.  However horrifying, surely one must grasp that this is so rare it would surely never happen again.

But I'm terrified of spiders.  I know what she means when she says she couldn't sleep after being bitten by a brown recluse.  I wasn't bitten, but I can easily freak myself out thinking about spiders, and knowing it was in my mouth would drive me to the very edge of sanity.

And now you have a story to gross out Dad with at the dinner table.  You're welcome.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there!