StupidiNews

• The second day of UN General Assembly meetings finds speeches by the presidents of Iran, Egypt, and Yemen.
• Hong Kong real estate tycoon Cecil Chao has reportedly offered $65 million to any man who can "win the heart" of his married lesbian daughter, Gigi.
• The US Supreme Court will hear arguments on how much of a share the state of North Carolina should get of a multimillion dollar malpractice award.
• Spainish PM Mariano Rajoy may be delaying a bailout request for the country in order to see what kind of terms Italy may be receiving from European Union officials.
• California Dem Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a measure that legalizes robot-driven cars, at a ceremony at Google's Mountain View HQ.

Last Call

The mask slips, and Republicans accidentally tell the truth about what they will do to the 99% once they get back into complete power.  Today's contestant:  Wisconsin GOP Senate candidate Tommy Thompson as we find another secret video unearthed from the May primary season.

Declaring that he wants to “change Medicare and Medicaid like I did welfare,” Thompson asked a May gathering of the Lake Country Area Defenders Of Liberty in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin: “Who better to and who better than me, who’s already finished one of the entitlement programs, to come up with programs to do away with Medicaid and Medicare?”

The video has only now surfaced and its a blockbuster—especially in the aftermath of the release last week of a similar video that saw Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney dismissing 47 percent of Americans as a "dependent" class unworthy of Republican consideration.

Just to repeat: a top Republican Senate candidate has been caught on video talking about how he would “DO AWAY WITH MEDICAID, AND MEDICARE.”

Just to repeat: “DO AWAY WITH MEDICAID, AND MEDICARE.”

As it was, Democratic candidate Tammy Baldwin has a pretty healthy lead right now, but this is Tommy Thompson's game over moment.  Let's not forget however that Thompson is considered a moderate and a bi-partisan diplomat, being the former governor of a swing state like Wisconsin.

Republican moderates wanting to do away with Medicaid and Medicare.  G'night, folks.

Ebb And Flow, You Know

President Obama is losing veterans, he's doomed, it's over!  Veterans don't like Pentagon cuts, kids.

President Barack Obama is trying hard to win veterans, but it looks like they’d prefer a new commander in chief.

The Obama campaign had been hoping that veterans and their families — especially among the post-Sept. 11 generation that served in Iraq and Afghanistan — would be part of their path to victory: They’re a high turn-out demographic and concentrated in battleground states, with nearly 1 million each in North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, and 1.6 million in Florida.

But recent polls make clear that the president’s campaign is losing the battle. Even as Obama leads in Colorado, Florida, Ohio and Virginia, Mitt Romney is up by double digits among veterans in those states. Nationwide, he’s got a commanding 20-percentage-point lead over Obama and has even overtaken the president with younger veterans.

DOOOOOOOOOM...except for the fact that Mitt Romney is losing the far more numerous and far more likely to vote senior citizens crowd.

A poll released Monday by Reuters and Ipsos proves the obvious: if a candidate talks tough on Medicare and other social welfare programs of use to senior citizens, the elderly will return the favor by deserting his campaign in droves.

The latest unfortunate politician to learn this lesson is Republican nominee for president Mitt Romney, who has seen his support collapse by 20 percent among men and women over the age of 60 in the few weeks since the Democratic National Convention.

If you wonder where President Obama's lead is coming from, ask your grandmother.   Seniors don't like Vouchercare and Medicaid cuts, kids.  In the long run, Romney's in way more trouble here.

Three Out Of Four Ain't Good

A new Sunlight Foundation study on money in politics finds that so far through the 2012 election cycle, some 78% of the money spent though 9/21 on election ads has come from the "Citizens United effect", meaning that three out of four ad dollars this year are new thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling that outside groups can contribute unlimited dollars to super PACs.

But it's where that money is going that should worry you.  Sure, a lot of it is going to help Mitt Romney.  But far more is going to bury Democrats in Congress.

The money spent by Super Pacs, unions, corporations and non-profit groups is more than double what those groups spent in 2010, the first campaign in which the supreme court judgment had taken effect. Although Super Pacs are usually thought of being aligned with presidential candidates, the Sunlight Foundation found that much of these groups' recent spending has been focussed on more localised electoral battles.

"A deeper dive into the data shows that the latest uptick in outside spending is focused on congressional races: even in presidential battleground states, almost all the spending by outside groups is focused on House and Senate candidates," [Sunlight Foundation managing editor Kathy] Kiely wrote.

Recent expenditure includes Crossroads GPS spending $400,000 in Nevada against Democratic Senate candidate Shelley Berkley; Workers Voice, an AFL-CIO Super Pac, logged hundreds of expenditures in the $25-60 range in Florida, indicating a get-out-the-vote effort for senator Bill Nelson, according to the Sunlight Foundation.

Of $465m of outside money spent so far in 2012 $460.8m comes from Super Pacs, corporations and other groups which do not have to register as political groups. An additional $4.1m comes from "electioneering communications": advertisements or political activities that focus on issues and policies – the oil industry, for example – and encourage voters to support a candidate without mentioning any politicians by name.

The big GOP PACs are putting those unlimited hundreds of millions where they can do the most damage, by buying Congressional races.   It's the single reason I think the GOP will actually gain seats in the House, and I think even Nate Silver is badly underestimating their chances of taking the Senate.  These last six weeks will see unprecedented spending on political ads all but locking up the airwaves.  Negative ads work, and endless streams of negative ads work very well.  I wouldn't be surprised if all these ads depressed turnout in battleground states, which is exactly what the GOP wants, too.

We'll see how much damage they will end up doing.

Jackassenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger says his estranged wife Maria Shriver confronted him about his secret love child during a couple's therapy session and that she'd suspected for years ... according to his new book ... but the good news -- Arnold assured Maria he was still "turned on" by her.

In the book, obtained by the New York Daily News, Arnold says Maria took him to couple's therapy in 2011 -- the day after her left the California governorship.   He believed he was there for routine marriage counseling -- instead, Maria asked him point blank if he slept with the maid and spawned a love child years before. 

What a jerk.  What an absolute rotten, clueless son of a bitch.

"So yeah, you caught me, I'm sorry I devastated you and broke your heart, and embarrassed you again in front of the entire nation.  But hey, I still think you're hot so that makes us cool, right?"

Women Growing In Government

More women are running for Congress this year than ever before. The 18 women running for the Senate break the previous record of 14, set two years ago. Also, there are 163 female candidates for House seats, more than the 141 who ran in 2004.

That gives this election season a Year-of-the-Woman ring to it, says The Center for American Women and Politics. The center's director, Debbie Walsh, offered some reasons in a press release:

"... The crucial first election after reapportionment and redistricting, news events underscoring the need for women's voices in policymaking, and a presidential election year generating political excitement."

Great news to hear.  Women make up half the population, yet don't get nearly what they deserve in compensation or representation.

First, we need the year of the woman candidate, but we also need to coincide with the year of the woman voter.

Ladies, get off your rumps and use your voice.  If not for you, for the women who need fairness in government.

Just Plane Ignorant

Rachel Maddow notes just how bad Mitt Romney rambles on when he's nervous, and that his filters tend to turn off and he says whatever pops into his head.  The latest example, Romney's comments on his wife Ann's recent airplane incident with smoke filling the cabin forcing the craft to make an emergency landing.

At a fundraising event in Beverly Hills over the weekend, Romney noted that a plane carrying his wife, Ann, was forced to land because of a small fire.

“I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were,” the Republican presidential nominee said. “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go exactly. And you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. But it’s a real problem.”

Well, yeah, OK.  His wife was never in any real danger, but even Mitt the robot cares about her and was glad no one was harmed.  But you don't know why windows don't open in an airplane?  Even given as much time as Mitt Romney has spent in aircraft, he's never asked?  Hoboy.  Rachel was pretty ruthless:

“It’s a real problem that windows don’t roll down on airplanes?” she asked. “Is it also a problem that guns don’t shoot backwards through the barrel? Or that diving boards are only mounted over very deep water? Why don’t the windows roll down?”

“I don’t think he was joking because he couldn’t possibly be joking about his wife almost being in a plane crash,” Maddow added. “You can’t joke about that, especially with her standing right there.”

Do watch.

 

Number Crunching, September Edition

With 6 weeks to go until Election Day, Nate Silver runs the numbers on September poll leads and finds with the exceptions of "Dewey beats Truman!" and the Supremes screwing over Al Gore, the poll average leader at the 45 day mark went on to win 17 of the last 19 Presidential races.

Our polling database contains surveys going back to 1936. The data is quite thin (essentially just the Gallup national poll and nothing else) through about 1968, but it’s nevertheless worth a look.

In the table below, I’ve averaged the polls that were conducted 40 to 50 days before the election in each year — the time period that we find ourselves in now. (In years when there were no polls in this precise time window, I used the nearest available survey.)

The table considers the race from the standpoint of the incumbent party (designated with the color purple) and the challenging party (wearing the orange jerseys), without worrying about whether they were Democrats or Republicans. Mr. Obama’s position, for instance, is probably more analogous to that of the Republican incumbent George W. Bush in 2004 than it is to the candidate from his own party that year, John Kerry.


 

As you can see, President Obama's nearly 4 point lead is a larger one than he had in 2008.  It is however the smallest of the incumbent leads of a winner since FDR in 1944.  Six weeks is still enough to win, but by this point, the race appears to be very much decided.

At this point serious attention needs to be paid to shoring up the down ballot races as motivation to get people to the polls.  We'll see what happens.

StupidiNews!

• The US Supreme Court could decide as early as today that they will take up a case challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act.
• Syria's raging civil war is taking a toll not only on its citizens, but also on some of the most ancient architecture in world history.
• President Obama will speak before world leaders today at the United Nations, but he will forgo the traditional one-on-one meetings with many heads of state.
• After a massive riot at its plant in Taiyuan, China, that involved thousands of workers and police, Foxconn says it will resume production of mobile devices.
• Sony says it will continue to support the PlayStation 3 through 2015, giving the console a ten-year life cycle.

Last Call

How Ann Coulter remains on television as a "serious pundit" baffles me when she's allowed to say nonsense like this:

Former Clinton Labor secretary Robert Reich argued that Romney has failed to appeal to Latinos on key immigration issues, from calling for self-deportation to threatening to veto the DREAM Act.

“We have Governor Romney who is basically taking a position that is anti a large and the fastest growing segment of the electorate,” Reich said on the “This Week” roundtable.

While criticizing President Obama for failing to aggressively pursue immigration reform in his first term, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos said that “if Republicans don’t do something with immigration … they’re going to lose not only this election, they might lose the White House for a generation.”

Coulter quickly interjected, “That’s why the Democrats are dropping the blacks and moving on to the Hispanics, because they’re a larger group of Hispanics now” — seeming to claim that Democrats are more aggressively courting the growing Latino population than the African American vote, which polls show is firmly behind President Obama.

Coulter, author of the new book “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama,” also argued that groups on the left, from feminists to gay rights groups to those defending immigrants, have commandeered the black civil rights experience.

Coulter could give a damn about the "black civil rights experience" but if she can start a race war between African-American voters and Latino voters or LGBTQ voters or all of the above, the GOP united in its hatred of all three groups wins, doesn't it?  Seems a pretty obvious strategy to me.  Question is why she's allowed away from the FOX Noise kid's table.

If Coulter had an ounce of common sense, she'd realize that civil rights transcends the black experience and must be applied to all minority groups, which is what everyone from Dr. King to Rep. John Lewis today is still fighting for.  Republicans may be partial to "I got mine, screw you" as a strategy, but all that has done is increasingly driven the Latino vote into the hands of a black President.

She realizes that of course, which is why we're seeing this boulder-fisted attempt to break up the coalition of Dem voters with squabbling and infighting.  It's not working, of course...because as concern troll Ann here admits, African-American voters like myself really are smart enough to see what's going on here.

Cows Eating Cake, GOP Impressed That Someone Got Their Message

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - Mike Yoder's herd of dairy cattle are living the sweet life. With corn feed scarcer and costlier than ever, Yoder increasingly is looking for cheaper alternatives -- and this summer he found a good deal on ice cream sprinkles.

"It's a pretty colorful load," said Yoder, who operates about 450 dairy cows on his farm in northern Indiana. "Anything that keeps the feed costs down."

As the worst drought in half a century has ravaged this year's U.S. corn crop and driven corn prices sky high, the market for alternative feed rations for beef and dairy cows has also skyrocketed. Brokers are gathering up discarded food products and putting them out for the highest bid to feed lot operators and dairy producers, who are scrambling to keep their animals fed.

In the mix are cookies, gummy worms, marshmallows, fruit loops, orange peels, even dried cranberries. Cattlemen are feeding virtually anything they can get their hands on that will replace the starchy sugar content traditionally delivered to the animals through corn.

So, just like poor families, cows are eating junk food because it is cheaper and in better supply than grain products.  The drought isn't easing up, in fact it may get worse next year.  Healthy foods will become harder to obtain, while gummy bears and sprinkles are everywhere.

Bitterness aside, I am very glad to see less food waste and a creative solution keep the cows alive and families eating.  In certain amounts there is nothing wrong with this, as long as owners supplement the diet and make sure it doesn't shift too far towards an all-sugar diet.

It's an interesting solution, and it will be further interesting to see what, if any, results it has on the animals or the meat product.  In the meantime, if it's good enough for Bessie, I guess it's good enough for me.

Scott Peterson Doing Just Great In Prison

Joking with others, shooting hoops and scoring baskets – to look at Scott Peterson, one would hardly imagine he's incarcerated on San Quentin's Death Row. 

And yet, that is how journalist Nancy Mullane found the former fertilizer salesman when she visited the California state penitentiary where Peterson is confined to a solitary 7-by-9-ft. cell for the Christmas Eve 2002 killings of his wife Laci and their unborn son, and then dumping their remains into San Francisco Bay. 

"He didn’t look depressed. He looked like someone you'd see on the street playing basketball. He had his shirt off and his boxer shorts up," says Mullane, who was given an unprecedented level of media access to the prison for her book about the rehabilitation of condemned killers, Life After Murder: Five Men In Search of Redemption. "He wasn't ripped, but he looked healthy." 

You know who isn't ripped and healthy?  His wife and unborn child.  You know, the folks he threw in a trash bag to wash up on the shore.

With the exception of a gullible few, the entire world came to learn that this man committed murder.  Even those who truly did not want to believe that a man could kill his unborn baby, even the people who were too racist of classist to believe that someone "of his means" could stoop so low, those people came to learn it too.  If you don't believe that was a topic, check crime message boards of the day.  I remember being appalled that the reason some people refused to believe his guilt was because he was white and well off.

Our disgraceful fertilizer salesman who sold one load too many is in prison, but he's got his life, for now and for several years.  Which is more than his wife and unborn son were given.

And now I will utter a phrase that I never thought would pass my lips: this story doesn't include nearly enough brutal prison scenes to satisfy me.

Florida Cop Amused By Trayvon Martin's Skittle Purchase

Nobody is perfect. I have a tendency to insert a giggle when I don't mean one.  Primarily because I'm a happy person, but it's also a verbal tic that I have fought since junior high.  So when I saw this story, I was skeptical.   Was this cop amused, or just unsure of how to proceed and made the wrong sound?

Listen for yourself.  The Smoking Gun was kind enough to put it up for us to hear.

The Smoking Gun plays the audio, and there is no quick giggle-sound.  There is "hahahaha" laughing about this man being the one who sold the "famous Skittles" to Martin.  By a policeman who should have been showing the proper gravity for the death of a young man under suspicious circumstances.  A policeman who had no reason to be making light of why he was speaking with the clerk in the first place.

During the interview, the clerk was asked about the sale of the "famous Skittles" by an investigator named David, who chuckled upon finishing his question. The question was met by laughs by several other individuals present for the interview (a group that included two of the clerk’s family members and a second investigator). The 7-Eleven clerk, however, apparently was not among the group chortling.

That's because the clerk has more class and good taste than a freaking cop.

I'm pissed off all over again.

When All Other Answers Fail

Perhaps you should look at the obvious one.

Instead of eating in ways that stress our body, we should eat in ways that are healthy.  Our diet-obsessed culture has spawned eating disorders and new and exciting health problems because it relies too heavily on what we don't eat.  It escalates it to delicious forbidden fruit as well as deprives us of a diverse diet.

Here is a really good article about looking at food from a healthy perspective, not just trying to lose weight.  It sums up something my physical therapist told me once.  If you eat like a 200 pound person, you will be a 200 pound person.  If you eat like a 150 pound person, your body will follow suit.  Then he asked me why I was working so hard to maintain my then 275 pound status, and I realized that's what I was doing.  I was actually putting effort into keeping my body the way I hated it.  Now I have a healthy relationship with fruits, vegetables, and working different foods into my diet.  I have a healthy relationship with my body too, and have seen amazing improvements in my diabetes and blood pressure.

This article is dead on.  Being thin and being healthy are not necessarily related.

Perhaps the biggest misconception is that as long as you lose weight, it doesn’t matter what you eat. But it does. Yet being thin and being healthy are not at all the same thing. Being overweight is not necessarily linked with disease or premature death. What you eat affects which diseases you may develop, regardless of whether you’re thin or fat. Some diets that may help you lose weight may be harmful to your health over time.

A widely publicized study earlier this year showed that a low-carb Atkins-type diet might be a faster way to lose weight. That may have given many people the idea that eating meat and butter is the route to thinness and thus health.

You People Have Done It Again

Well now You People have done it.  Queen Anne Romney doesn't want to talk to You People anymore because You People hurt her feelings.  Don't you know how hard it is to have $250,000,000 and multiple homes across the country?  You People are heartless.

In Omaha for a closed to the press fundraiser for her husband Friday, Mrs. Romney was supposed to give interviews to several reporters but canceled due to the controversy over her blow up at Republicans on a radio interview, in which she ordered Mitt’s Republican critics to “stop it.”

Omaha.com reported:

She had scheduled interviews with The World-Herald and other reporters but canceled after controversy erupted this week over her comments to a public radio station in Iowa about her husband’s Republican critics.

She appeared at the luncheon, $250-per-plate fundraiser at the Embassy Suites and La Vista Conference Center. The event was closed to reporters.

Looks like Ann is being taken off the shelf.  America's no longer in love with Her Imperial Highness, it seems.  Can you imagine how Michelle Obama would be treated if she made those statements and later canceled a presser with reporters?

Sorry Ann.  You chose to play this game.  Hire a body double or something.  You have the money.