HorsesAss.Org

Open Thread 11/7

by — ,

– Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent — a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America’s 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more.

– Zombie Jurnolist

– On high tech lynchings.

– Godden had actually filed the public records request for the performance reviews, and we posted about them to show she was digging for a smear that didn’t exist..

– I’ve never even been to Ohio, and I know don’t say this.

– Parallel Earth Primary.

Comments

  1. 1

    Wow, she’s gotta regret how much she pumped Dan Savage (when he’d just got to town and was going through his nascent transvestite queer phase) in her column in the Times. What goes around comes around!

  4. 4

    North Carolina involuntarily sterilized 7,600 people between 1929 and 1974 under the auspices of a “eugenics board” vested by state law with authority to decide who was fit to have children and who wasn’t. This process, of course, was profoundly sexist and racist.

    “Of those who were sterilized, 85 percent of the victims were female and 40 percent were non-white. … A third … were … girls under the age of 18. Some were as young as nine years old.”

    White male rapists didn’t go under the knife, but their victims did:

    “Elaine Riddick was 13 years old when she got pregnant after being raped by a neighbor in Winfall, N.C., in 1967. The state ordered that immediately after giving birth, she should be sterilized. … Riddick was never told what was happening.” Meanwhile, the perpetrator was never charged.

    And what has the State of North Carolina done about it?

    “In 2002, the state issued an apology to those who had been sterilized, but the victims have yet to receive any financial compensation, medical care or counseling from the state.”

    http://rockcenter.msnbc.msn.co.....and-blacks

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: Rightwingers claim we should fear Big Government because it can get out of control. Here’s a concrete example of Big Government running amok. but this isn’t what wingnuts have in mind when they talk about “government oppression.” Their concept of “government oppression” is collecting taxes from employers to pay for unemployment insurance, or using tax money to pay compensation to those like Elaine Riddell who were harmed by government oppression. Personally, I think she should sue the bastards and let a jury decide how much North Carolina should pay her, instead of waiting for state legislators to decide how much they’re willing to pay her (so far, nothing).

  5. 5

    O’s high speed rail initiative is about to go TU.

    The U.S. had ambitious plans to connect the country with a network of high-speed trains when it inaugurated Amtrak’s Acela Express service between Washington and New York in December 2000. Eleven years later, the Acela remains the nation’s only high-speed line, and it’s not really accurate to call it even that.

    Zotz comment: Building more (replacing what we used to have before big oil tore up the tracks) “regular” rail before we run out of the resources to do it would be just peachy, thanks.

  10. 10

    Liars!

    LIARS AGAINST 1183
    Washington State News
    by pudge, 05:02 PM
    Most of the anti-1083 campaign has been based on lies, but the most recent ad about health professionals is just insanely false. It says that “public health experts speak out against 1183, and then it shows those “public health experts” lying through their teeth.

  11. 11

    http://thinkprogress.org/econo.....ry-tax-no/

    Defense Contractors Pay Little To No Corporate Income Tax While Earning Billions

    By Pat Garofalo on Nov 7, 2011 at 11:50 am

    Last week, Citizens for Tax Justice released a report showing that 30 major corporations have paid no income taxes for the last three years, as they made $160 billion. CTJ looked at 280 companies in the Fortune 500, and found that “while the federal corporate tax code ostensibly requires big corporations to pay a 35 percent corporate income tax rate, on average, the 280 corporations in our study paid only about half that amount.”

    In fact, over the last three years, only two industries — retail and health care — paid an effective tax rate of 30 percent or more. And as the Hill noted today, one industry is doing very well when it comes to tax avoidance — defense contractors:

    American defense manufacturers pay an average annual tax rate of 17.5 percent, placing them in a class with some of the nation’s least-taxed sectors like information technology, telecommunications, financial services and energy, Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy concluded. […]

    Boeing, which also makes commercial aircraft, came in with the lowest tax rate among defense firms at -1.8 percent; SAIC had the highest at 28.7 percent, according to the report.

    Oh. Silly me, I forgot.

    Corporations are PEOPLE. Sorry Boeing if I hurt your feelings.

  12. 12

    Bah, we don’t need no land use regulations.

    Right on time at 7:30 on a cold, fall morning, two truck-trailers roared into an illegal dump near Bonney Lake.
    As fog lingered, two workers took turns on a loader to fill their rigs with more than 30 tons of broken glass from cars and construction debris. It made a crashing sound as it landed in the trucks.
    In an hour, the dump trucks and trailers were filled and left for a recycling company in Oregon, hauling away more remains from one of Pierce County’s most notorious illegal dumping sites.
    The scene plays out five days a week in the latest stage of the county’s nearly decade-long effort to clean up the 51-acre property.
    Since mid-August, two truckers have been hauling away about 65 tons of glass each weekday, putting a dent in one of the mounds of green-hued glass.
    The cleanup amounts to turning mountains of debris into molehills. With more than 20,000 tons removed so far, the cleanup has cost the county more than $1.05 million.
    The latest stage is actually recovering a little money for Pierce County: $19,000 for a six-month recycling contract.
    Read more: http://www.thenewstribune.com/.....z1d3Bjf7Ws

    How’d you like to live next to that mess?

  13. 13

    Well you knew this was coming….reports of rampant drug and alcohol use by fleabaggers at seattle central cc. Complaints by parents who use the daycare and students are causing a rift between flabaggers and school officials

    More proof that the occupy crowd are just a bunch of losers….why would anybody listen to these idiots?

  14. 14

    @10 From one of the comments left there,

    I’m personally sick to death of being lectured to by sanctimonious cops/firefighters/EMT’s, etc.

    I take it that wingnuts have completely dropped their phoney “first responders are our heroes” bullshit. That shit rang so fucking hallow. Those wingnut asswipes with their Made-in China flag pins will use and abuse anybody.

    A wingnut can lie their ass off with every word spewn and Pudge never says a fucking word. His selective outrage leaves him a piece of shit, and he is clearly too fucking stupid to realize that he’s dumber than a fucking stump. I’m tired of the bullshit outrage spewn by stupid fucking people such as that asswipe. He’s even too fucking stupid to realize that he has absolutely no musical talent – none whatsofuckingever. Gawd! What a stupid fucking bore.

  16. 16

    @14
    They pretty much ran out of people to hate, so they’ve turned their eyes to the working class.

  17. 17

    @6 Many in the business community are no doubt breathing a sigh of relief that the “Move Your Money” push last week, although it put smiles on the faces of some credit-union administrators, was hardly enough to rate even a blip on the megabanks’ radar. Had more depositors made their move, the results could have been, shall we say, “interesting”–considering how little actual cash banks actually keep on hand. BofA’s savings and checking deposits are mostly “covered” by a huge pile of European derivatives which are essentially worthless.

  18. 18

    # 17: A lot of people have expressed frustration at how long it takes to really “move” accounts. They are finding that their paychecks, social security payments, etc. are being automaticially deposited into their bank accounts, so they have to open one first and get it established, receive checks from the printer just so they can send a cancelled check to their employer to change the account. This may take a few weeks.

    Also, with automatic withdrawals for credit card payments, etc., it takes some work to set up the new payment systems.

    I’m thinking we might see the outflow of accounts from banks to credit unions over a two-month time period. We should probably check back at the first of the year.

    But note that I’ve gotten THREE offers from different banks to open up new accounts with them within the past month, all promising to give me between $50 and $150 just to open a checking account. I don’t take the bait – you know they plan on making more than that off me within the first year, one way or another.

  21. 21

    As for the unemployement numbers:

    A good part of the problem is that quite a few human resources managers are rather arbitrarily deciding not to hire people who were actually unemployed or had been unemployed more than just a few weeks. Most don’t give a reason, a handful have said that “we don’t want other people’s rejects”, or “there must be a problem with them that we haven’t discovered yet, why waste the time and resources to interview them and check resources before finding that problem?

    Which just adds to the conclusion I came to some time ago: a majority of human resources managers are (a) idiots, and (b) lazy.

    In the first catagory (idiots), let’s include the H.R. Manager of a large company who bragged to her colleagues at a conference that she would never hire anybody who is, or who has ever been, in the military because it’s too much of a hassle if they are called up for service. When one of her colleagues pointed out that such conduct was illegal, she proudly responded that “I can always find some justification for NOT hiring someone”.

    In my own career over the years, I’ve had to explain to perplexed H.R. managers why

    (a) a 401(K) is a desirable benefit and you can’t just shrug off forgetting to set it up for some employees and put it off to the next year;

    (b) that putting someone “on call” on weekends or holidays is something for which that employee must be reimbursed in some manner;

    (c) that a foreign company doing business in the U.S. can’t lay off all it’s local U.S. employees and hire only people from it’s nationality instead; and

    (d) from the same company, that the H.R. Director can’t go around the office and comment about how nice it is to hear his native language spoken exclusivly through the office.

    As for them being “lazy”, the above rule (to arbitrarily exclude anyone already unemployed or unemployed for more than a few weeks) is simply a way to avoid having to look through the applications.

    The human resources offices already use software which cuts down on their job by pushing “key word” references within online applications & resumes to the front of the stack – excluding quite a few who might actually be good choices, and favoring those who simply sprinkle the words liberally in their resumes.

    Then facing still 1,000 plus applications, they don’t want to bother putting in the time and effort to read them, they just want to cut them down further. Other searches may arbitrarily exclude people based on impermissible protected classes, including: having the computer penalize those with more than three prior employers (thereby excluding 55+ people disproportionately), excluding people who attended certain colleges (thereby cutting from consideration those who attended traditionally black universities), etc.

  22. 22

    Guilty Verdict In Michael Jackson Case

    A California jury has convicted Dr. Conrad Murray of involuntary manslaughter in the death of pop singer Michael Jackson.

  23. 23

    Speaking of “parallel universes” (last item on the post);

    Over the weekend Rush Limbaugh and O’Reily both proclaimed that they had single-handedly crushed Politico with their wisdom and razor-sharp dissection of the claims, proving them false.

    In the real world, all reports have confirmed the initial Politico story; attempts to blame it on the “left-wing media” were short-circuted when Cain’s own camp blamed the Perry campaign; Cain’s own “I don’t know anything about those women” deconstructed within hours, forcing him to make several “corrections”; and now new victims are coming forward.

    So Limbaugh and O’Reilly’s new tactic is to complain that the liberal news media “refused to cover” the allegations against Clinton in the 1990’s, so they should ignore the allegations against Cain.

    These guys really do count on their listeners to be completely ignorant with extremely short-term memories, don’t they?

  24. 24

    So Limbaugh and O’Reilly’s new tactic is to complain that the liberal news media “refused to cover” the allegations against Clinton in the 1990’s,

    They must have been getting different channels on their TV’s than what I was seeing.

  25. 25

    Here’s one way to save some money on your transportation budget.

    LANSING, Iowa — In the rolling countryside along the Minnesota border, the lonesome, dusty roads seemingly outnumber the people. So when Tony and Gertie Monat were looking for a place to live 14 years ago, they were happy to find a house with the bonus of a paved surface in front of it.

    Now that pavement has been pulverized. The county government couldn’t afford to resurface it, and the road in front of the Monats’ white rambler is back to soft gravel. Amid the regular swirl of dust and flying stones, they can’t help but feel they’ve lost a piece of modern life.

    “We definitely miss the hard surface,” Gertie Monat said. “I’m like, ‘How can you take that away now?’ ”

    The paved roads that finally brought rural America into the 20th century are starting to disappear across the Midwest in the 21st. Local officials, facing rising pavement prices, shrinking budgets and fewer residents, are making tough decisions to regress. In some places, they have even eliminated small stretches of gravel road altogether.
    http://www.bendbulletin.com/ar.....104160304/

  27. 27

    After losing her job, Bialek allegedly turned to Cain for help. Allred said on Monday, “Mr. Cain instead decided to try to provide her with his idea of a stimulus package.”

    According to Bialek, the alleged incident occurred at a bar in the nation’s capital in 1997. She said Cain worked to arrange a “palatial suite” for her at a hotel and told her, “I upgraded you.”

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....80056.html

  28. 28

    On NPR this morning, some Iowa Political Science professor was saying that if Romney wins the Iowa Caucus, he has all but wrapped up the nomination.

    I’d like to argue with him, pointing to the number of candidates who won the Republican caucus and then didn’t win the nomination. But I realized that this year, it is irrelevent. Given the choice of Romney or the other candidates, Romney is the only one without big negatives to be overcome and with enough cash to make it through to the end.

    But that won’t stop the “Anybody but Romney” coalition from trying to draft somebody – anybody – to show up as a viable alternative.

    I hear there are plans to dig Reagan up again – they are going to market him as a zombie-in-progress.

  29. 29

    Wow what “family values”!

    A majority of Republican voters — and nearly six in 10 GOP Tea Party supporters — say they aren’t concerned about the sexual-harassment allegations directed at Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

    http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com.....epublicans

    “Family values” – just more right wing bullshit.

  31. 31

    Thomas Hoenig for President?

    With the righties all a flutter about the evils of The Fed, that might be a fun one to watch. With Cain crashing and burning the ABR crowd’s going to need a new hopeful contender.

    Oops, like he’s got The Stain Of Obama on him, kinda like that guy from Utah. What was his name again?

  32. 32

    13. the umpire spews:

    Well you knew this was coming….reports of rampant drug and alcohol use by fleabaggers at seattle central cc. Complaints by parents who use the daycare and students are causing a rift between flabaggers and school officials

    More proof that the occupy crowd are just a bunch of losers….why would anybody listen to these idiots?

    11/07/2011 at 11:44 am

    http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/201.....and-pills/

    August 20, 2010, 12:30 PM ET.Wall Street Drug Use: Employees Giving Up Cocaine for Pot and Pills.

    By Kyle Stock

    The credit crisis appears to have sobered up Wall Street in more ways than one.

    A review of drug-test data compiled by drug testing firm Sterling Infosystems Inc., shows that cocaine is losing its favor among investment professionals. What drug is their choice? Marijuana.

    Last year, cocaine showed up in 7% of the positive tests at Wall Street firms, down from 16% in 2007, according to Sterling, a New York-based firm that screens about 5,900 employees a year for some 270 finance shops.

    Hah.

  33. 33

    @11 Yeah, the tax system sucks; but I know a good thing when I see it, and I own shares of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. How can you NOT own shares of companies that get away with charging taxpayers 25 thousand bucks for a toilet seat?

  35. 35

    @InjusticeFacts Injustice Facts
    650,000 African American males are in prison because of drugs; 0 Wall Street cocaine-addicts are in prison because of drugs.

  36. 36

    @12 Guy buys 51 acres of agricultural land. Rakes in $$$ by charging dumpers below-market rates to illegally dump “150,000 tons of waste glass, gypsum, household garbage and construction-demolition debris.” Guy pockets money and walks away. Slippery bank “defers foreclosure” and stops paying taxes to “pass the property off” to the county. Taxpayers get stuck with $1 million+ cleanup bill.

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: The county can’t sue the law-breaking landowner, because he’s dead. But the county sure as hell can sue the bank — and ought to. Also, prosecutors should throw the bank in jail.

  37. 37

    http://www.cutimes.com/2011/11.....iews-boost

    November 7, 2011

    Bank Transfer Day: Trades Report Page Views Boost

    By Claude R. Marx

    Bank Transfer Day was a boon for CUNA’s and NAFCU’s websites that help people find a credit union to join and help credit unions gain more members, the trade groups said Monday.

    CUNA’s asmarterchoice.org received 61,000 hits on Saturday and 30,000 Sunday. It usually gets about 3,000 hits per day. It previously reported 71,000 hits on Friday, an all-time record for the site.

    NAFCU said its CULookup website had a record number of page views on Saturday but declined to reveal a number.

    The additional Web traffic has helped fuel an increase in membership for the trade association’s’ member credit unions, the trade groups said.

    NAFCU said a survey of its members found that 54% reported an increase in share growth and/or fees because of Bank Transfer Day. The survey also found that 41.7% of respondents have experienced a share growth increase of more than 20% over last month.

    In addition, 21.7% of those surveyed said share growth in October was more than 20% greater than in October 2010. The trade association also reported that 63.9% of all responding credit unions reported an increase in membership in October.

    CUNA said it hasn’t received all the data yet from its credit unions. However, CUNA Chief Economist Bill Hampel said the growth from Bank Transfer Day and the events leading up to it could cause the credit union system to now have more than $1 trillion in total assets.

    The industry had $942.5 billion in assets as of June 30, according to the NCUA.

    That’s a (hmmmm $1 TRILLION less $942.5 billion = uhhhh) $60 BILLION {so} tranferred from “Too-Big-To-Give-A-Fuck” Banks.

    That’s pretty good for a movement with “no message”.

  38. 38

    @markos Markos Moulitsas
    by aravosis
    Romney better start groping women if he wants to remain competitive in the GOP primary.

    Yuk-yuk!

  39. 39

    @25 I can hardly wait until that trend catches up with the Teabag Freeloaders in eastern Washington. When they have to drive dozens of miles on dirt roads to get to a grocery store or gas pump, maybe they’ll appreciate the road subsidies they used to get from Seattle motorists.

  40. 40

    @9 I don’t understand why the stock market is up today — on the same day we see Italy start to come apart.

  41. 41

    @32
    Rich people are the ones that have the leisure time and the money to do drugs. You should have seen Gig Harbor in the 80’s, the place was awash in pot and cocaine.

  42. 42

    @36

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: The county can’t sue the law-breaking landowner, because he’s dead. But the county sure as hell can sue the bank — and ought to. Also, prosecutors should throw the bank in jail.

    Yep. Too bad it will never happen.

    I’m generally not a fan of John Ladenburg, but it was Ladenburg that cracked down on illegal dumping and started getting the junk piles in eastern Pierce county cleaned up. He deserves a hell of a lot of thanks for that one.

  43. 43

    I buy my honey from local bee keepers at farmers markets and from a couple folks I met through Craig’s List. I’ve always bought from them simply because I thought it tasted better. Now I know why, the stuff from the store has been processed so much that it isn’t honey anymore.

    More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn’t exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done exclusively for Food Safety News.

    The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled “honey.”
    The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world’s food safety agencies.

    The food safety divisions of the World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others also have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources.

    In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration says that any product that’s been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn’t honey. However, the FDA isn’t checking honey sold here to see if it contains pollen.

    Ultra filtering is a high-tech procedure where honey is heated, sometimes watered down and then forced at high pressure through extremely small filters to remove pollen, which is the only foolproof sign identifying the source of the honey. It is a spin-off of a technique refined by the Chinese, who have illegally dumped tons of their honey – some containing illegal antibiotics – on the U.S. market for years.

    Why Remove the Pollen?

    Removal of all pollen from honey “makes no sense” and is completely contrary to marketing the highest quality product possible, Mark Jensen, president of the American Honey Producers Association, told Food Safety News.

    “I don’t know of any U.S. producer that would want to do that. Elimination of all pollen can only be achieved by ultra-filtering and this filtration process does nothing but cost money and diminish the quality of the honey,” Jensen said.

    “In my judgment, it is pretty safe to assume that any ultra-filtered honey on store shelves is Chinese honey and it’s even safer to assume that it entered the country uninspected and in violation of federal law,” he added.

    Richard Adee, whose 80,000 hives in multiple states produce 7 million pounds of honey each year, told Food Safety News that “honey has been valued by millions for centuries for its flavor and nutritional value and that is precisely what is completely removed by the ultra-filtration process.”

    “There is only one reason to ultra-filter honey and there’s nothing good about it,” he says.

    “It’s no secret to anyone in the business that the only reason all the pollen is filtered out is to hide where it initially came from and the fact is that in almost all cases, that is China,” Adee added.
    http://www.foodsafetynews.com/.....snt-honey/

  45. 45

    Anyone want bet on the likely hood of Bank Of America, the presumed sponsor of the 2012 Democratic convention, still being around when it’s convention time?

  46. 46

    One year out Obama is still winning:

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45.....sion_2012/

    Winning ugly is still winning.

    Obama’s got my vote but it’s for his Supreme Court nominees. Beyond that? Not even worth discussing it.

    The more critical vote for the country will be the Congress. Will the Tea Baggers be sent packing? Will the Dems hold the Senate?

  48. 48

    # 36: If they can show that any of that stuff is hazardous waste, then it’s still an open issue as to whether they can go against the Banks.

    They were discussing this back in the early 1990’s. Banks have been taking the position that as long as they don’t foreclose and become “possessors” of the property, they aren’t liable. But as someone with a property interest, they might still be held liable – the rise in property values in the later 1990’s made it more profitable to clean up and re-sell most properties than to try to abandon them.

    Unfortuatly, I haven’t kept up on the issue since then. But I do know that’s a big reason why Boeing decided not to sell a big portion of it’s Renton and Duwamish facilities – heavy metals and fluids leaching into the ground there have made cleanup costs astronomic and nobody wants to take on the liability by buying the property before the DOE signs off on it as a completed cleanup.

  49. 49

    http://thinkprogress.org/econo.....subsidies/

    Financial Industry Collects The Most Government Tax Subsidies | A new Citizens for Tax Justice report detailing how little corporations pay in federal corporate income tax also noted that financial firms receive the highest percentage of federal tax subsidies, collecting nearly 17 percent of the tax largesse that the government hands out. The largest single recipient of federal tax subsidies over the last three years was mega-bank Wells Fargo.

    Really. NOT Acorn, huh?

  50. 50

    Obama is doing lousy in polls, but the GOP’s candidates are doing even worse.

    “Obama continues to run ahead of the Republican presidential front-runners … leading former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by six points and former businessman Herman Cain by 15 points.”

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45.....sion_2012/

  51. 51

    Zotz and Rujax! @ 6, 7, 8

    What did you guys do to get deleted from an open thread?!

  52. 52

    @51 I wondered about that. Hmm, this being Carl’s open thread, maybe they were dissing bicycles and praising the automobile, pleading for more roads, and are now paying dearly for their transgressions. Nah. It’s got to be something else.

  53. 53

    6 – 8: How the hell can anyone get deleted from an Open Thread?

    Oops – 51 beat me to it.

  56. 56

    @54
    As I read that, I had a flashback, ahem, to the first Lord of the Rings movie – where Gandalf, busting the two troublemakering Hobbits for stealing his fireworks says, restraining them by their ears, “Meriadoc Brandybuck, and Peregrin Took. I might have known.”

  58. 58

    Crime Pays Dep’t

    This is the kind of settlement that gives class-action lawsuits a bad name.

    “A federal judge on Monday gave final approval to a $410 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit affecting more than 13 million Bank of America customers who had debit card overdrafts …. Senior U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King said the agreement was fair and reasonable ….

    “Barry Himmelstein, an attorney for customers who objected to the deal, said … the bank … raked in $4.5 billion through the overdraft fees and was repaying less than 10 percent. He said the average customer in the case had $300 in overdraft fees, making them eligible for a $27 award — less than one overdraft charge — from the lawsuit. …

    “The lawsuit claimed that Bank of America processed its debit card transactions in the order of highest to lowest dollar amount so it could maximize the overdraft fees customers paid. … Similar lawsuits have been filed against more than 30 other banks.”

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45....._business/

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: The lawyers who sued the bank will get $123 million in fees. The people they represented will get an average of $27 each — less than 10% of what the bank stole from them. Class action lawsuits are bullshit. They’re nothing but cash machines for a tiny number of boutique law firms that specialize in suing big companies. The lawyers collect obscene fees, the corporations get to settle for 9 or 10 cents on the dollar, the “clients” get next to nothing, and a Nixon-appointed judge calls it “fair.” Bullshit. That’s what it is, bullshit. We need a better system for compensating victims of corporate wrongdoing — one that makes the victims whole, not one that makes corporations and lawyers rich at the expense of victims.

  62. 62

    Thought Of The Day

    “Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with. So I don’t think it’s a triumph, but it’s the best option we have found.” — Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist and author

    http://www.economist.com/blogs.....n-pinker-0

  63. 63

    So You Want To Be A Writer …

    Number of new novels published annual: 250,000
    Number published in English: 100,000
    Percent of manuscripts submitted by authors to agents accepted for representation: 1 of 10
    Percent of manuscripts submitted by agents to publishers accepted for publication: 1 of 4
    Chances of having a manuscripted submitted to an agent accepted for publication: 1 of 40

    http://moreintelligentlife.com.....;page=full

  64. 64

    Random Thought Of The Day

    I just ate an ear of corn on the cob; and because I did some poor bastard in Minnesota is gonna run out of gas 10 feet from his driveway.

  65. 65

    Smokin’ Joe. R.I.P.

    I believe that the Thrilla in Manila had to be the greatest fight in the history of boxing. And as a cultural event, the first fight was absolutely fucking huge.

  66. 66

    Pure hilarity reading what the wingnuts over at Stafan’s sucky little blog have to say about Herman Cain…

    5. It’s too bad we have so little of value to choose from. Basically, everybody who is running for the Presidency is seriously wanting at various levels. Yeah, it’s too bad that Sarah Palin is not in the game.

    Posted by Daniel at November 7, 2011 08:01 PM
    [Ed. Emphasis mine]

  67. 67

    And out friend pudgey’s very very concrete thinking:

    15. I completely ignore any personal allegations that can’t be independently verified in some way. So as far as I am concerned, no allegations against Cain have been made at all.

    And yes, I treat allegations against Democrats the same way.
    Posted by pudge at November 8, 2011 06:38 AM
    [Ed. Emphsis mine]

  68. 68

    # 57: That’s the funniest thing Puddy’ said in years. I wish I could see him trying to keep a straight face when he said it.

  69. 69

    Cities Where 50%+ Of Homes Are Underwater

    “In several cities, more than half of all homes with mortgages are underwater, including Phoenix (66.2 percent), Atlanta (58.7 percent), Riverside, Calif. (51.4 percent), Tampa (56.5 percent) and Sacramento (50.9 percent).

    “Other big metro areas with a high percentage of underwater homes include Miami-Fort Lauderdale (46.7 percent), Chicago (46.2 pecent), Cleveland (41.5 percent) and Denver (38.5 percent).”

    8687925-nearly-29-of-mortgaged-homes-underwater-report-finds

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: This article says that nationally 28.6% — more than one of four — of homes are underwater. Makes my burrow, which is paid off, look like the solitary island sticking above the sea (“Dry Land”) in Waterworld.

  70. 70

    51. Liberal Scientist thinks that concentrated power and wealth should be met with suspicion, not adoration spews:

    Zotz and Rujax! @ 6, 7, 8

    What did you guys do to get deleted from an open thread?!

    11/07/2011 at 6:01 pm

    52. Steve spews:

    @51 I wondered about that. Hmm, this being Carl’s open thread, maybe they were dissing bicycles and praising the automobile, pleading for more roads, and are now paying dearly for their transgressions. Nah. It’s got to be something else.

    11/07/2011 at 6:37 pm

    53. Roger Rabbit spews:

    6 – 8: How the hell can anyone get deleted from an Open Thread?

    Oops – 51 beat me to it.

    11/07/2011 at 6:38 pm

    54. proud leftist spews:

    Zotz and Rujax
    Indeed, do tell.

    11/07/2011 at 6:44 pm

    Could we get some direction please Carl?

  71. 71

    D.C. Appeals Court Upholds Obamacare

    More bad news for righties …

    “A conservative-leaning appeals court panel on Tuesday upheld the constitutionality of President Barack Obama’s health care law, as the Supreme Court prepares to consider this week whether to resolve conflicting rulings over the law’s requirement that all Americans buy health care insurance.”

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45....._politics/

  72. 72

    http://motherjones.com/politic.....wsuit-2012

    Herman Cain’s Enron-esque Disaster

    The story the GOP presidential candidate won’t tell you about his years in corporate America.

    —By Andy Kroll

    Mon May. 23, 2011 2:00 AM PDT

    What GOP presidential contender Herman Cain lacks in political experience, he likes to say, he makes up for with decades’ worth of success in corporate America. He climbed the corporate ladder at the Pillsbury Company, chaired the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and rescued the failing Godfather’s Pizza franchise. That business-centric message has won Cain his share of admirers: a focus group convened after a recent Fox News presidential debate overwhelmingly declared Cain the winner.

    “I think that over 40 years of business experience is resonating a lot more with people than simply having political experience,” he said on a recent Iowa visit. “Knowing how Washington works isn’t necessarily an advantage. As a businessman going in, I don’t want to know how Washington works. I want to change Washington D.C. and so by not knowing how it is supposed to work I can ask tough questions that will help change the culture.”

    Cain clearly believes that his pro-business message is what GOP voters want to hear. So much so, in fact, that on Saturday he officially unveiled his candidacy for the 2012 GOP nomination. But scrubbed from Cain’s official story is his long tenure as a director at a Midwest energy corporation named Aquila that, like the infamous Enron Corporation, recklessly dove into the wild west of energy trading and speculation—and ultimately screwed its employees out of tens of millions of dollars.

  73. 73

    Cain’s campaign is now attacking accuser Sharon Bialek for “two personal bankruptcies, an Internal Revenue Service tax lien, and a civil judgment against her last year for an unpaid loan that is still outstanding.”

    An unemployed single mom with a young child whose father who didn’t pay child support had financial difficulties?? Imagine that!!

    Oh, btw, the deadbeat dad is a marketing executive for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. who disputed paternity and contested paying child support — and lost. “Court records show that [he] was ordered to pay child support that in 2010 was $66,700 a year.”

    http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com.....r-scrutiny

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: Herman isn’t very politically savvy — I suspect he just blew the single-mother vote.

  74. 74

    News stories about falling home prices and more “underwater” mortgages just jolted me into realizing how our lying gummint gets away with telling us there’s no inflation. Here’s how it works:

    Housing price deflation (which is bad for homeowners who can’t pay their mortgages) offsets food inflation (which also is bad for homeowners who can’t pay their mortgages) and cancel each other out when gummint statisticians calculate the CPI.

    In other words, the fact you get less for your home if you try to sell it cancels out the fact you pay more for food … if you’re forced to sell your home because you can’t afford to pay the mortgage and eat at the same time.

    Ergo, magically, there’s no inflation … so the gummint doesn’t have to give COLAs to social security recipients, federal employees, and military retirees (although I’m pretty sure congress critters will still get theirs). This legerdemain is called Government Math.

  75. 75

    Uh oh! Mittens spent TWO YEARS in France proselytizing the hated Frogs. This is big trouble for his campaign — remember “Freedom Fries”? Why France of all places? Why not Israel? Mitts is toast. This means Obama will have to run against a candidate named Write In.

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45.....sion_2012/

  77. 77

    # 74: Back during the Bush years, the Bush administration tried to get personal computers added to the “shopping cart” of things considered for the CPI. Their argument is that since you can buy a computer new for $1,000, and a year later the same computer is worth $500 when the new models come out, that the price of computers has dropped by 50% – offsetting housing, oil, and food inflation.

    Yes, it’s a ridiculous argument, but that one came from the same party that argued that ketsup was a vegitable when it came to funding school lunches for the poor. (In their view, a lunch consisting of chicken nuggets, tater tots, and ketsup had one protean portion, and two vegitables).

  78. 78

    Cain’s campaign is now attacking accuser Sharon Bialek for “two personal bankruptcies, an Internal Revenue Service tax lien, and a civil judgment against her last year for an unpaid loan that is still outstanding.”

    She could have horns and a tail, that wouldn’t mean she did didn’t get harassed.

  79. 79

    By the way, I’m going to have to reduce my time posting on this site. I’ve received notice from my day job that I *may* be sent overseas on a job assignment lasting several weeks, or perhaps up to three months. Somehow I have to transform my minimal understanding of the language into fluency in both verbal and written forms of business communication “in my spare time”.

  82. 82

    @81 Cyrillic isn’t too bad. Even I learned enough Russian to (barely) pass a college language requirement, once upon a time. Not that I remember any of it now.

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