June 2011
“If they [the Republicans] said, look, that now is not the time for big tax...”
– Bill Clinton, in an interview with ABC News, proposing a possible deal on the debt ceiling talks.
Forecast Average Predicts Obama Re-Election
Polly Vote averages three presidential election forecasting components — polls, index models, and econometric models — to come up with a prediction about the 2012 presidential race.
The current forecast suggests President Obama will win 51.9% of the popular vote.
The more people get to know the Republican candidates, the bigger Obama’s lead will grow.
Texts Are Marked Up 7314%
Verizon and other cellphone companies mark up the cost of text messages by at least 7314% when compared to their rates for data transfer services.
Verizon’s max text message size is 160 characters. At 7 bits per character, that’s 1120 bits or 140 bytes. Without a text messaging plan, those 140 bytes run you $.15 (fifteen cents), according to Verizon’s website.
Compare...
WatchA Reuters investigation has discovered that over 2,000 business are registered at a single-family home in Wyoming.
The house at 2710 Thomes Avenue serves as a little Cayman Island on the Great Plains. It is the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services, a business-incorporation specialist that establishes firms which can be used as “shell” companies, paper entities able to hide...
Price Of U.S. Wars: $4.4 Trillion?
The final bill for U.S. military involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan could be as high as $4.4 trillion, according to a comprehensive new report Tuesday.
In the 10 years since American troops were sent into Afghanistan, the federal government has already spent between $2.3 trillion and $2.7 trillion, say the authors of the study by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International...
New York Approves Same Sex Marriage
“Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born,” the New York Times reports.
“The marriage bill, whose fate was uncertain until moments before the vote, was approved 33 to 29 in a packed but...
Republicans and Gay Marriage
David Remnick: “One of the most striking aspects of the recent Republican Party Presidential debate was the way the candidates, each in his own way, tried to out-do each other in their disdain for gay marriage and their willingness — nay, their ardent vows! — to do everything possible to make sure that homosexual couples never gain the right to matrimony. One day soon,...
1 tag
“Nobody yet has stood out that I’d like to get behind.”
– — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), in an interview with Jennifer Rubin, on the Republican presidential field.
The fatman sums it up.
Yet Another Thing Palin Can't Finish
It appears Sarah Palin’s “One Nation” bus tour has taken an “extended pit stop,” according to Real Clear Politics. “Though Palin and her staff never announced a timeline for the remaining legs of her trip, aides had drafted preliminary itineraries that would have taken her through the Midwest and Southeast at some point this month. But those travel...
“I wish [Republican presidential candidate Jon] Huntsman luck in this noble...”
– Dana Milbank
The pragmatic Huntsman does not stand a chance in the me-first, “let’s dismantle all safeguards” modern GOP.
WatchJon Stewart takes down Fox News. This is the part when Jon says “I drink your milkshake.”
Andrew Sullivan: “The point here is not the untruths — although they are embarrassing for a news channel — but the lack of any correction. Which is to say that a comedy channel has more dedication to accountability for factual errors than a putative news network. Which tells you almost...
Is Bachmann A Secret Democratic Weapon?
“Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader...
Indiana Officially Evil: Cuts Medicaid/Closes...
The first to defund Planned Parenthood, Indiana passed a law that cuts state and Medicaid funding to the organization’s 28 clinics in the state (only four of which provide abortion services). In effect since May 10, the law not only eliminates the clinics’ $1.3 million a year in Medicaid funds but also strips them of “roughly $150,000 in funding for prevention of sexually transmitted...
Leon Panetta In As Sec of Def
In an exceedingly rare display of bipartisanship, the Senate confirmed Leon Panetta as the new Secretary of Defense today. The final vote was 100 to 0.
Mind In The Forest →
THOSE WHO FANCY that humans are superior to the rest of nature often use “tree-hugger” as a term of ridicule, as if to feel the allure of trees were a perverted form of sensuality or a throwback to our simian ancestry. Of course, many who decry tree-hugging don’t believe we have a simian ancestry, and so perhaps what they fear is a reversion to paganism. And they may have a point. The religions...
“Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution is pretty simple. It says, ‘Raise an...”
– Sgt. Maj. Michael Barrett, the top non-commissioned officer of the Marine Corps, on the repeal of DADT.
Executions Cost 20 Times More? You Know...
California has rarely executed convicts since the death penalty was reinstated there in 1978, but the state has managed to spend $4 billion taxpayer dollars on capital punishment since then, according to a new cost analysis.
The study, conducted over three years by a senior federal judge and a law professor, estimates that the 13 executions California has carried out in the past three...
Chris Hayes Show On MSNBC?
From the article about Obermann on Current:
“Now MSNBC is developing a show for Mr. Hayes.”
Huntsman A Stranger Among Republicans
Huntsman believes “health care is a right,” and Republicans believe the opposite. He believes climate change is real and endorsed a cap-and-trade plan to address is, and Republicans believe the opposite. He supported an individual mandate as part of health care reform, and Republicans believe the opposite. Huntsman wanted a bigger stimulus in 2009 with fewer tax cuts, expressed...
“What you see isn’t a recovering economy that may be stumbling; you see an...”
– Paul Krugman, commenting on Our Lost Decade. Thanks GOP.
That is something we have to come to grips with as a country: the 2000’s were a lost decade thanks to Republican policies by President Cheney and monkey boy Bush running the country into the ground for the benefit of corporations and...
'Death Tax' Deception →
cognitivedissonance:
But the estate tax was meant to do more than bolster budgets and aid charities. From its inception, it was meant to ward off the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy in the United States. Established in 1916, the tax was a populist response to the excesses of the Gilded Age. President Theodore Roosevelt justified it by arguing that society has a claim upon the fortunes of...
The GOP's Failed Tax Fundamentalism
“The Ryan plan answers a narrow Republican concern: how do we push taxes even lower in the face of the impending retirement of the baby boom. It disregards the broader national concern: how can we sustain and enhance the standard of living of the American middle class against the downward trend in middle-class incomes of the past dozen years? The Ryan plan tragically abdicates this...
McConnell: Standing In The Way Of Recovery
On CBS’s “Face the Nation” yesterday, host Bob Schieffer asked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) yesterday, “Do Republicans have any plans to do anything on the unemployment front or are you just going to let things take their course?” It seemed like a good question.
McConnell replied, “No, I — I think — what — what we’re doing is encouraging the president to — to quit doing...
“I support intelligent design. What I support is putting all science on the table...”
– — Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), quoted by CNN.
“Reasonable doubt” on both sides? What the fuck is she talking about?
