Archive for February, 2012
GOP Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney emerged from an expensive and bruising campaign in Michigan, the state of his birth, with a narrow three percent victory over his current chief rival, Rick Santorum, in the overall vote counts. He tied with Rick Santorum, however, in the delegate count. Michigan is not a winner-take-all primary state. Santorum and Romney each won seven of Michigan’s 14 Congressional districts. So each man gets 14 delegate votes for the convention.
On election night the Detroit Free Press produced an interactive county by county map of the primary results. It shows Romney did well in southeast Michigan, the more densely populated Saginaw Bay area and the tip of the mitt. Santorum scored better on the state’s west side and in less populated areas with strong Christian fundamentalists and in much of the Upper Peninsula. The cult charge against the Mormon Romney likely helped.
CBS political war horse and commentator Bob Schieffer made some insightful comments about Romney’s traction problem on the network’s morning news show Wednesday. Full story »
 So, the Susan Komen Foundation has hired a big-hitter PR firm. And not just any PR firm, either.
Now, Komen is assessing the damage, and it’s using a consulting firm founded by two former Democratic strategists. Penn Schoen Berland (PSB), the firm Komen hired to help determine how badly the crisis hurt its reputation, is founded by former Democratic strategists Mark Penn and Doug Schoen.
The goal here seems obvious. Komen’s recent bout of ballistic podiatry cost it massive amounts of support among people who believe that women’s health shouldn’t be held captive to a reactionary, partisan social conservative agenda. The foundation has accurately understood that this means it needs people from the center and points left in order to thrive. Or, at this point, survive. So they go out and hire … Mark Penn.
Wait, what? Full story »
Southern Indiana, 5:30 a.m.
My wife and I each schedule one drill per month, and do not tell each other when it will be. On this cold, February morning, the alarm goes off and she sits straight up in bed, confused.
“It’s time,” I say, “Plan B. Go.” Full story »
 Caveat emptor: you may find what follows heretical.
As you are likely aware, there is (and has long been) a strident outcry from certain quarters in Christianity against homosexuality as a behavior and, in the worst cases, against homosexual men and women (pick/choose/mix liberally, as you will) themselves. To my chagrin, the religious voices from those quarters make a great many references to the Old Testament of their holy book and generally opt to leave out references to the New Testament. When they do choose to include the New Testament as part of their attack ideology, they keep flipping right past the Gospels, right past Acts, and on to Paul. That’s interesting to me, because as I understand the Bible, Paul wasn’t the one born of Mary. Full story »
“American officials who have assessed the likely Iranian responses to any attack by Israel on its nuclear program believe that Iran would retaliate by” not only firing missiles at Israel, but, write Thom Shanker, Helene Cooper, and Ethan Bronner in a New York Times articles titled U.S. Sees Iran Attacks as Likely if Israel Strikes, “terrorist-style attacks on United States civilian and military personnel overseas.”
Gen. James E. Cartwright, former commander of U.S. Strategic Command (which includes nuclear weapons) told the authors:
The Iranians have been pretty good masters of escalation control. … The balance [they] will try to strike is doing damage that is sufficiently significant, but just short of what it would take for America to invade. Full story »
 I’m sure everyone in Alfond Arena wondered who the hell I was that I rated a handshake from the senator. It was May 1995, and I was graduating from the University of Maine with my master’s degree in English. Olympia Snowe, long-time member of the House of Representatives, recently elected to the U.S. Senate, stood up from her seat on the speaker’s platform, took a few steps forward, and shook my hand.
Olympia was the Commencement speaker that afternoon. As a member of the local media, I’d interviewed her during a press availability prior to the ceremony. As the news director for a radio station in Bangor/Ellsworth, I’d covered Olympia a lot, and we’d become friendly over the years.
Full story »
Pity, that. This one may be far more apt.
 Full story »
 by Anonymous
The situation is Chardon is all too familiar: a bullied outcast with a troubled home life snaps. If TJ Lane had broken in the usual manner, he might have committed suicide. But TJ snapped differently and took a gun to his tormenters. In an instant, any sympathy for his situation is gone and he’s just a thug, maybe a psycho, and the words “Columbine,” “Goth,” and “Dark Side” start getting thrown around.
Bullying has always been a fact of life in the US–now it’s commercialized and glorified as entertainment. A lot of people turn in to American Idol and other reality shows not for the great performances, but for the truly dreadful ones and the cruelty that follows. The losers tuck their tails between their legs, cry for the camera and their supporters and go home to face down the humiliation.
That’s what the victims of bullying are supposed to do: suck it up.
But victims fall into three categories: the A Victims, those who put up with it until they can get away from it; the B Victims, those who break and turn on themselves; and the C Victims, those who go all Carrie on the world. Full story »
 “From a dramatic standpoint, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombies. From a factual anthropological, religious, or historic standpoint, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombie.”
So writes author Matt Mogk in Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies. As a professional zombie expert—he’s president of the Zombie Research Society—Mogk has written the bible on zombies. If my task was to trace the connection between voodoo zombies and flesh-eating movie monsters, I figured this was the book to check out. And indeed, it answered my question: There is no connection.
But as Mogk’s book warns, “The scientific study of zombies is largely an exploration of all that is strange and disturbing in our natural world and often leads to more questions than answers.” The same could be said of his zombie bible: it answered one question and posed a hundred others. Full story »
 I greatly enjoy dissecting the news and tearing it apart. Unfortunately, there is such a vast wealth of poorly presented news that it’s often like shooting fish in a barrel. I also enjoy shredding the statements of public and private officials. If the wealth of poor journalism is merely unfortunate, the dicta of officials is a treasure trove of calamitous proportions. Put the two together and we get not a gilded lily, but far too frequently a sugar-coated cyanide capsule.
My general rule of thumb is simply this, “first, doubt.” A healthy skepticism is necessary if we are to avoid being utterly and completely manipulated on every front by hired opinion brokers. If someone goes to the great trouble of presenting “information” (a description of the content which is debatable from the start, as it’s rather likely to be mere noise), especially if that someone has a budget to do it, it’s a safe bet there’s an agenda behind the presentation and a sincere desire to persuade the audience. Full story »
Lucy pushed her finger into the tear in Blue Bear’s stomach and pulled the cotton out. It was nasty to make a slit with her Biro, but she needed a place to hide her mums ring. The ring had a green stone in the centre, her mum said it reminded her of Lucy’s eyes. Lucy put the ring on every finger and thumb. It slid off every time. Why couldn’t she have fat fingers like Jenny? She gathered the cotton and stuffed the ring back into Blue’s stomach, kissed his navy blue nose and put him back under the bed.
Jenny’s shoes echoed in the hallway. She poked her head around the corner.
‘What are you doing up here?’
‘I wanted to get my certificate to show Mum.’
‘That’s a really nice idea.’
Lucy pulled the yellow gymnastics certificate out of her bedside table and handed it to Jenny. Full story »
Oh, the horror…. Full story »
 On February 24, The Heartland Institute published a press release from Heartland’s president Joseph Bast announcing that they’d published screen captures of several emails. While I’ll have more to say about the emails themselves in the next day or so, I wanted to briefly focus on a different point.
Toward the end of the release, Bast writes
We repeat our request that the fake climate change strategy memo be removed from Web sites and blogs such as DeSmog Blog, Think Progress, and the Huffington Post, along with documents that were stolen from Heartland. It is the ethical thing to do. [emphasis added]
Given The Heartland Institute’s history of unethical behavior, calling on others to behave ethically is the height of chutzpah. Full story »
 I began my career as an engineer in a large Illinois manufacturing plant. Chuck, the only African-American engineer in the company, was comically paranoid—he rarely spoke above a whisper, refused to say anything over the phone, and before every meeting would check outside his door to see if anyone was lurking in the hallway. When Chuck was passed over for a promotion, he left the company. A year later I heard the head of engineering explain why Chuck had not gotten the job, “Reinhardt (the plant manager) was never going to promote a n…..r.” The moral of the story, obviously enough, is that Chuck’s paranoia was justified. Gas prices are predicted to go up to $5 in the summer. The timing smells. I may be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean I am wrong.
Full story »
 On Friday, in a move aimed at solidifying his American-made bona fides in the heart of domestic auto manufacturing country, GOP candidate Mitt Romney told a crowd that his wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs.” Yep, here’s a man with his finger on the pulse of the working class.
Earlier today, EveryMitt struck again – this time south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Romney: I have friends who own NASCAR teams Full story »
 This nugget of a sentence—one of the best sentences I’ve ever come across, I believe—was contained in an exhibit at Stampex yesterday called Parachuting with Dolly Shepherd, a clever history of parachuting as told by real parachuting pioneer Dolly Shepherd through the usual tools of stamp collectors—stamps, envelopes, letters, buttressed by photos and newspaper clippings. This is one of the cool things about stamp shows—the exhibits, which are often a delight. Dolly Shepherd’s life, intertwined with a history of parachuting, was very cleverly done. But it wasn’t even the best one—that kudo goes to Denmark’s Internment Camps in WWII, which held both British and American civilians after it was occupied by Germany. And you learn so much—who knew the Danish Police were so uncooperative that the entire Police Force was replaced by the occupying government in one fell swoop, sending 2000 Danish police to Buchenwald? I do now.
This is why I love stamp shows, and keep going, even though their attendance keeps declining, and I still manage to bring the average age down at each one I go to. Full story »
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