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Good morning, everyone. There's an election on Tuesday in the United States. Voting, even for the most cynical of all of us, provides a limited method of expressing our discontent with the way the rich run the country. Go for it, especially in places where the state government party in power wants to make sure as few people vote as possible. And will be happier for their chances the more people can't vote. (Burning the mother-[REDACTED] down in response optional.) Furthermore, go vote your conscience and your beliefs, even if your employer is indirectly threatening your job if you don't vote for their preferred candidate. Or put anti-Democratic political views as part of their "civics course" about being the management in their company.
If the two major parties aren't floating your boat, you can see a limited amount of the debate that happened between the non-Democrat, non-Republican candidates for the Presidency.
There's one other major thing in the United States other than the election-as-planned - a hurricane that went through the most densely-populated locations on the east coast and left destruction in its wake. Millions are without power, and there have been fatalities. Sparing blood and money to help get the waters receded and the people there fed, sheltered, alive, and warm is always a good idea - the Red Cross wants those things, not hastily-rebranded campaign events that asked for donations of the wrong types of goods, then sought photo-ops of the candidate accepting those goods, using a pile bought by the campaign if they hadn't brought their own. Perhaps the shortened timeframe produced these basic errors, but perhaps it would have been better to not try and deliberately gather political capital from a disaster?
The Ali Forney Center, a space for LGBT youth, also needs donations to rebuild their space destroyed by the storm.
Survivors of Hurricane Katrina have messages for the survivors of Hurricane Sandy.
And finally, putting the safety, security, and well-being of the people in your state above partisan politics will get your party demanding you show loyalty to them or be declared a turncoat.
Speaking of politics, The Congressional Research Service published a report looking at the sixty-year trend of lowering marginal tax rates and concludes that lowering taxes for the rich does not create jobs and economic growth. [PDF] Or, at least, the data does not support that conclusion. Because it seriously impugns on the Republican talking point that trickle-down economics works, Republicans demanded and forced the CRS to remove the report. There are other problems, as well - please do understand what you are saying when you insist that tax breaks for the wealthy are more important than social assistance for the poor - and when this commenter says that unemployment is as an all-time low, they mean "relative to how bad it was before". It would be nice, of course, if someone would talk about the basic failure of the employer-based insurance system to cover people, and to point out that the "Death Panels" are currently situated in insurance companies, but that would require actual liberalism somewhere...
Let me also mention that this attempt to kill anything that doesn't fit with the ideology is not a new thing - Republicans stopped publishing an annual terrorism report when the data started showing things that weren't in accord with their ideology, (like, terrorism on the rise in the previous administrator's tenure), cutting data about charter schools after the data started to show that charter school students lagged behind public school students (in 2004), and dropping a report about mass layoffs after people started noticing that a lot of people were being laid off, and started to complain that they wouldn't be able to track which industries were getting it the worst.
Ah, yes, and there's how Mitt Romney benefits from a tax vehicle where he donates money to a church, then draws money from it tax-free. Which allows him to take the deduction for charitable donations, and then eventually get the money back without paying taxes on it. Heaven help you if you point out that the Romney tax plan does raise taxes on the middle class, though, or the campaign will come after you viciously, claiming your nonpartisan research are lies. Do you really want to believe that, though, from the campaign that has not told the truth 917 times to this point in the year?
So, during last week, The Economist endorsed Barack Obama by anti-endorsing Mitt Romney (not a liberal magazine) and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsed Obama (not exactly a flaming liberal, himself.) In light of these two events, where conservatives and centrists are giving Barack Obama their very hesitant thumbs up? A National Review columnisst dismisses them as part of the "liberal establishment". I wonder if they think other endorsements like the one from Salt Lake City for Mr. Obama are also part of the liberal establishment.
Roy Moore, the judge most famous for displaying a large Ten Commandments monument outside his courtroom, which eventually led to his removal from the bench, is running for his seat again. It's been long enough for people to have forgotten about him...
More locally, the brazen-ness of the Republican Party on issues like rape and abortion translates into some candidates talking about "the rape thing". And, apparently, they feel they don't have to be ashamed of being trivial and casual about traumatic events like that.
Last out of this section, a graphic regarding the makeup of the United States Congress, with points of interesting reference.
And then, a program claiming to try and get the truth about the Hmong experience during a secret war...failed miserably, and then refused to correct the record.
Much more happily, superheroes visited a hospital and rappeled down the side of the hospital for the children's ward. Also, in images, several ways to make life easier using ordinary objects.
In technology, looking into how the gene that allows for lactose tolerance has helped shape the evolution of Western civilization.
A story of network diagnostics that were able to pinpoint a failure in the infrastructure of the Internet. And it's accessible to the layperson to follow, even if the actual stuff is all techie.
Last for tonight, Old Spice - a brand originally for women, successfully transformed into a campaign as a men's deodorant and pictures of winter, which is fast approaching.
If for nothing else, it will be nice to get back to the usual amount of politicking and obstructionism. Which is to say that the situation will not improve at all.
If the two major parties aren't floating your boat, you can see a limited amount of the debate that happened between the non-Democrat, non-Republican candidates for the Presidency.
There's one other major thing in the United States other than the election-as-planned - a hurricane that went through the most densely-populated locations on the east coast and left destruction in its wake. Millions are without power, and there have been fatalities. Sparing blood and money to help get the waters receded and the people there fed, sheltered, alive, and warm is always a good idea - the Red Cross wants those things, not hastily-rebranded campaign events that asked for donations of the wrong types of goods, then sought photo-ops of the candidate accepting those goods, using a pile bought by the campaign if they hadn't brought their own. Perhaps the shortened timeframe produced these basic errors, but perhaps it would have been better to not try and deliberately gather political capital from a disaster?
The Ali Forney Center, a space for LGBT youth, also needs donations to rebuild their space destroyed by the storm.
Survivors of Hurricane Katrina have messages for the survivors of Hurricane Sandy.
And finally, putting the safety, security, and well-being of the people in your state above partisan politics will get your party demanding you show loyalty to them or be declared a turncoat.
Speaking of politics, The Congressional Research Service published a report looking at the sixty-year trend of lowering marginal tax rates and concludes that lowering taxes for the rich does not create jobs and economic growth. [PDF] Or, at least, the data does not support that conclusion. Because it seriously impugns on the Republican talking point that trickle-down economics works, Republicans demanded and forced the CRS to remove the report. There are other problems, as well - please do understand what you are saying when you insist that tax breaks for the wealthy are more important than social assistance for the poor - and when this commenter says that unemployment is as an all-time low, they mean "relative to how bad it was before". It would be nice, of course, if someone would talk about the basic failure of the employer-based insurance system to cover people, and to point out that the "Death Panels" are currently situated in insurance companies, but that would require actual liberalism somewhere...
Let me also mention that this attempt to kill anything that doesn't fit with the ideology is not a new thing - Republicans stopped publishing an annual terrorism report when the data started showing things that weren't in accord with their ideology, (like, terrorism on the rise in the previous administrator's tenure), cutting data about charter schools after the data started to show that charter school students lagged behind public school students (in 2004), and dropping a report about mass layoffs after people started noticing that a lot of people were being laid off, and started to complain that they wouldn't be able to track which industries were getting it the worst.
Ah, yes, and there's how Mitt Romney benefits from a tax vehicle where he donates money to a church, then draws money from it tax-free. Which allows him to take the deduction for charitable donations, and then eventually get the money back without paying taxes on it. Heaven help you if you point out that the Romney tax plan does raise taxes on the middle class, though, or the campaign will come after you viciously, claiming your nonpartisan research are lies. Do you really want to believe that, though, from the campaign that has not told the truth 917 times to this point in the year?
So, during last week, The Economist endorsed Barack Obama by anti-endorsing Mitt Romney (not a liberal magazine) and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsed Obama (not exactly a flaming liberal, himself.) In light of these two events, where conservatives and centrists are giving Barack Obama their very hesitant thumbs up? A National Review columnisst dismisses them as part of the "liberal establishment". I wonder if they think other endorsements like the one from Salt Lake City for Mr. Obama are also part of the liberal establishment.
Roy Moore, the judge most famous for displaying a large Ten Commandments monument outside his courtroom, which eventually led to his removal from the bench, is running for his seat again. It's been long enough for people to have forgotten about him...
More locally, the brazen-ness of the Republican Party on issues like rape and abortion translates into some candidates talking about "the rape thing". And, apparently, they feel they don't have to be ashamed of being trivial and casual about traumatic events like that.
Last out of this section, a graphic regarding the makeup of the United States Congress, with points of interesting reference.
And then, a program claiming to try and get the truth about the Hmong experience during a secret war...failed miserably, and then refused to correct the record.
Much more happily, superheroes visited a hospital and rappeled down the side of the hospital for the children's ward. Also, in images, several ways to make life easier using ordinary objects.
In technology, looking into how the gene that allows for lactose tolerance has helped shape the evolution of Western civilization.
A story of network diagnostics that were able to pinpoint a failure in the infrastructure of the Internet. And it's accessible to the layperson to follow, even if the actual stuff is all techie.
Last for tonight, Old Spice - a brand originally for women, successfully transformed into a campaign as a men's deodorant and pictures of winter, which is fast approaching.
If for nothing else, it will be nice to get back to the usual amount of politicking and obstructionism. Which is to say that the situation will not improve at all.
