"The Third Way," Indeed!

If you're a political junkie, you're probably familiar with The Third Way, an allegedly "centrist" group of alleged Democrats.

There's been a hoopla in the past few days about a Third Way op-ed in the hallowed opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, a place where the opinions of Suzanne Somers on the Affordable Care Act are considered worthy of publishing.

The op-ed, which you can read here,  is your basic sky is falling piece about Social Security. In 1980 or 1981 I debated a John Birch Society member on a Christian radio station about the exact same subject. The numbers proved, if I remember her correctly, that Social Security wouldn't be around in 10 years. Today it's not the wacko right I'd have to debate, it's the wacko centrists.

But who are these guys, really?

The most left-wing web site I visit is something called Daily Kos. They did the work, so we don't have to.

Cautionary Tales

First, a story about a "charity," from the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — BY all outward indications, the U.S. Navy Veterans Association was a leader in the charitable community. Founded in 2002 to provide support to Navy veterans in need, the charity recorded astonishing financial success. In its first eight years, it raised around $100 million in charitable contributions, almost all of it through a direct marketing campaign. The organization, headed by Jack L. Nimitz, boasted of 41 state chapters and some 66,000 members.  [My emphasis]

This would be a great story of charitable success, except for the fact that virtually everything about the association turned out to be false: no state chapters, no members, no leader with the name redolent of naval history. Instead, there was one guy: a man calling himself Bobby Thompson who worked from a duplex across the street from the Cuesta-Rey cigar factory in the Ybor City neighborhood of Tampa.

...[T]he money raised was real enough ... [b]ut little ever made it to the intended beneficiaries. In 2010, the scheme was unwound by two reporters for what is now The Tampa Bay Times, but not before Mr. Thompson had fled the state of Florida.

From June 2010, Mr. Thompson was on the run, the search for him hamstrung by the fact that no one had any real idea of who he was. Finally, on April 30, 2012, federal marshals tracked him down in Portland, Ore., finding him with a card to a storage unit containing $981,650 in cash and almost two dozen fake identity cards.

Earlier this month in Ohio, where the charity’s registration documents had been filed, the man arrested as Bobby Thompson was convicted on 23 felony counts, including fraud, theft and money laundering. Authorities have identified him as John Donald Cody, a former Army intelligence officer and Harvard Law graduate.

Read the whole story here. It's fascinating. Did you know there are about 59,000 charities in the country with the word "veteran" in its name?

If you're looking for a good charity where your bucks can make a real difference, consider Omo Child, about which I will write another time.

On another subject, via Kevin Drum I came across what I consider a pretty devastating piece about an outfit called GoldieBlox, by Felix Salmon of Reuters.

The company first came to public attention in September of last year, when it launched a highly-successful Kickstarter campaign which ultimately raised $285,881. Like all successful Kickstarter campaigns, there was a viral video; this one featured a highly-photogenic CEO called Debbie, a recent graduate of — you probably don’t need me to tell you this — Stanford University. And yes, before the Kickstarter campaign, there was “a seed round from friends, family and angel investors”. When the viral video kept on generating pre-orders even after the Kickstarter campaign ended, GoldieBlox looked like a classic Silicon Valley startup: young, exciting, fast-growing, and — of course — disruptive.

Not wanting to mess with a proven formula, GoldieBlox kept on producing those viral videos: “GoldieBlox Breaks into Toys R Us” was based on Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, and got over a million views. But that was nothing compared to their latest video, uploaded only a week ago, and already well on its way to getting ten times that figure. This one was based on an early Beastie Boys song, “Girls”, and deliciously subverted it to turn it into an empowering anthem.

Under what Paul Carr has diagnosed as the rules of the Cult of Disruption, GoldieBlox neither sought nor received permission to create these videos: it never licensed the music it used from the artists who wrote it. That wouldn’t be the Silicon Valley way. First you make your own rules — and then, if anybody tries to slap you down, you don’t apologize, you fight. For your right. To parody.

In a complete inversion of what you might expect to happen in this case, it is GoldieBlox which is suing the Beastie Boys. And they’re doing so in the most aggressive way possible. There’s no respect, here, for the merits of the song which has helped their video go massively viral and which is surely helping to sell a huge number of toys. Instead, there’s just sneering antagonism ....

I smell libertarians.

A Gleaning

Andrew Tobias relates this story, which he admits may be apocryphal:

Shortly after assuming the papacy — or perhaps as he was headed to the swearing in — the Pope was given a tour. A Vatican steward, [sic on that comma, Andy] opened the double doors of an enormous closet and gestured grandly to show his Holiness the raiments he would wear for the various holidays and occasions.  To which the Pope allegedly responded: “Close it up.  Take it away.  The circus is over.”

The Rest of the Story?

Remember the video of the Central Florida sheriff who had a press conference where he shared the names and photos of two early teen girls he charged with cyberbullying a young girl who had jumped off the town water tower?

Polk County prosecutors decided to drop felony charges against two girls in a September cyberbullying case that the police said contributed to the death of 12-year-old Rebecca Ann Sedwick, who jumped from a cement plant tower two months ago.

The decision was made by the Polk County state attorney’s office after weeks of investigation and an analysis of thousands of Facebook messages failed to turn up enough evidence to charge the girls, one 14 and the other 12.

While the messages revealed that the 14-year-old had insulted Rebecca and called her ugly names, the kind of bullying that some children could find emotionally crushing, the posts did not rise to the level of a crime, lawyers for the two girls said.

The rest of the NY Times story is here.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

I'm currently reading Don't Count on It! by John C. Bogle (see sidebar), one of the inventors of the index mutual fund.

The introduction has a quote I really like from a Rudyard Kipling poem. I hope I am not insulting you by mentioning that a copybook was a notebook used to teach penmanship in the 19th century. The student might copy important passages and quotations from classical literature to demonstrate his/her handwriting skills.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through relevant fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place ...
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

 I'm not sure what "relevant fingers" are, but anyone with pretensions of valuing the study of history can understand where Kipling is coming from.

Pufferfish

The real political junkies out there shouldn't miss The Hunt for Pufferfish, the story of the Romney campaign's vice presidential candidate decision-making. Pufferfish was the campaign's code name for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Based on their junk-food-saturated vetting diet, they called their undertaking Project Goldfish (after the crackers)—ultimately giving each of the VP finalists an aquatic code name. Myers’ plan was to have Project Goldfish completed by Memorial Day. In April she presented Romney with a list of two dozen names, which he whittled down to 11: Kelly Ayotte, John Cornyn, Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Bill Frist, Mike Huckabee, Bob McDonnell, Tim Pawlenty, Rob Portman, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan. 

Within a month, the vetters had assembled preliminary research books on the 11, which Romney perused and then rendered his short list: Christie (Pufferfish), Pawlenty (Lakefish), Portman (Filet o Fish), Rubio (Pescado) and Ryan (Fishconsin).

In the nine months since Christie’s endorsement of Romney in October 2011, Boston had formed a mixed view of the governor who George W. Bush had once nicknamed Big Boy.

Hate to say it (no, really, I do) but, if true, the code name thing is a pretty good indication of a low level of professionalism on Romney's staff.  Surprise, surprise.

Turns out Christie has a lot of baggage.

Worth Repeating

Krugman:

Has anyone else noticed how much the GOP position on Obamacare resembles the classic borscht belt joke about the two ladies at a Catskills resort? Lady #1: “The food here is so terrible, it’s inedible!” Lady #2: “And the portions are so small!” Republican #1: “Obamacare is slavery!” Republican #2: “And it’s so hard to sign up!”

Give 'Em Hell, Bill

Well, Obama seems to have cashed out on his second term. All his life he's been a compromiser, and the times call for a fighter. It's not bad to be a compromiser, but it's the wrong time, wrong place.

There are some people who understand this. One of them is a Congressman from New Jersey (!), Bill Pascrell, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. His district covers a good part of Bergen County (Teaneck and Tenafly, but not Bergenfield or Hackensack), and parts of Passaic and Hudson Counties.

Yesterday he ripped a new one in the House Republicans:



I like this guy!

Why isn't Obama talking like this? [Obvious answer: "Because he's not from New Jersey."]

Reparations

God, I love the New York Times.

Today there's an op-ed piece called "Confronting the Legacies of Slavery," in which the author, a history professor at Duke, advocates providing reparations to Haiti and the Caribbean islands for the effects of slavery on those nations.

Now, this is a delicate issue, and "the right thing to do" is far from obvious, from my point of view. Whatever the merits for the Caribbean, the discussion obviously leads to the question of reparations for slavery in the United States. I was impressed with the thoughtfulness of many responses to the article, and the wide range of opinions. Some examples:

Oddly, the article never gets around to revealing how much Haiti actually paid France [to compensate slave holders for the loss of their "property"]. It was 90 million francs. While Haiti was paying France its 90 million francs, the international banking community was loaning Haiti billions of dollars, much of which the Duvaliers stole. In addition to the loans, Haiti has consumed billions in foreign aid over the past three decades. The United States has been servicing Haiti’s IDB debt since 2005. The world has contributed $2.4 billion of aid to Haiti since the 2010 earthquake.
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You don't hear the Jews asking for reparations from the Egyptians, but Holocaust survivors and their children have demanded and received various forms of reparations from Germany. The fact that expropriation of Jewish property was legal under the Nazis doesn't mean that it was "rewriting history" for the Jews to demand it back. And slavery in the Caribbean is much closer in time to the Holocaust than it is to slavery in ancient Egypt or Rome.
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Should the Romans pay the Brits because they took over the Isles way back when? How far back are you willing to go? People have misbehaved for centuries... should Germany start paying reparations to Israel, to the French, to the Russians,to... the Italians? Should the mostly black slavers in Africa pay reparations? Should Japan pay reparations to China? What about the European nations, and the US, that fought over China at the end of the 19th century.... The historical ledger can never be made even. Sometimes it's better to face the future. I agree Haiti needs help, but let's base it on today's world.
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Most Germans would agree that paying reparations to Israel, as the representative of the murdered Jewish people, was good for Germany. It could not erase the crimes, of course. But an attempt at their recognition was made, an attempt at penance and at a symbolic reconstitution of what was destroyed.

Of course money cannot restore a life taken, whether taken by murder or taken by slavery. But to pay it, and acknowledge and shoulder the guilt or responsibility (in the case of later generations), is the first step towards alleviation.
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I think the Caribbean slavery issue comes up because it is the closest chronologically to our current time, where we have the moral and economic space to consider the issue of reparations. This wasn't a conversation that would have been possible, or even contemplated, in any previous era.

So it's progress in a way that this issue is taken seriously; which ever way it falls out, I doubt it's going to materially hurt or help any of the countries in question.
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This all occurred a very long time ago. Isn't it time to let it go? Dredging up this sad situation constantly only deepens the wound and supports the hurt. In addition to exacerbating the problem it deepens the rift between races creating an us and them mentality. When will we realize that our ancestors all did reprehensible things and acted in their own best interest. I would hope we have grown from their examples and applied these lessons.

Obviously Not! Someone somewhere is bent on perpetuation of this stain on our history. Where will it stop? Even if every black in these "slave" states received a million dollars, it would be in the hands of the slick carpetbaggers in a matter of a few month. Things would return to the present state - only worse for the loss of that money.
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The reparations argument never goes anywhere because it's intellectually incoherent. The claims are ridiculously time-barred, to begin with. They are also hopelessly remote. Caribbean descendants of slaves shouldn't get reparations for the same reason Americans of Irish descent, or of Korean descent, shouldn't. The slowly evolving norms of a society are not the same as a compensable injury.

Dr. Dubois' argument about "undoing the divisions created by colonialism" and "ending racial discrimination" are especially ironic since none of her supposed "victims" are actually indigenous to the Caribbean. Whether African or European or Asian, the human beings living in the Caribbean today are newcomers. The native people were wiped out -- they're the ones who have a claim, if anyone does. This is just a terrible fact of history. But if you start awarding reparations to one group or another for their injuries, then you necessarily bring this fact into contemporary light. 

An Expert is Anybody Who Agrees with ME!

Guess who the Wall Street Journal considers an expert in health care policy!

Here's a hint for those old enough to remember:

Don't miss the "Corrections and Amplifications" at the end of the article.

Har, har, har! Har, har, har!

I'd say that about does it for the WSJ, now to be called the Wall Street Fox News. [Or is it the Wall Street Onion?]

Rupert Murdoch, take your bow.

Well, This is Unexpected ...

A recent poll in Kansas shows Governor Sam Brownback losing to Democratic challenger Paul Davis, 43 percent to 39 percent.

Of those who voted for Brownback when he ran for Governor in 2010, just 59% stick with him in 2014, and 25% defect to the Democrats. Though today Brownback leads 2:1 among Republicans, he trails 11:1 among Democrats. Independents split. Northeast and Southeast Kansas both favor the Democratic ticket; Western Kansas favors the Republican ticket.

Of those voting for Brownback today, 65% say their mind is made up, compared to 29% who say they may change their mind. Of those voting for Davis today, 69% say their mind is made up, compared to 26% who say they may change their mind.

Okay, the election is still a year off, and that's a long, long time in politics. But this is Kansas!

Addendum:

Though there have been lots of stories about future Tea Party challenges to Republican Congressmen who voted to end the shut-down, don't miss the stories about how the folks back home in Tea Party Congressional districts are disgusted with their Congressional representatives.

Don't Cry for JPMorgan

Jon Stewart – the best news analyst in America today – covers the JPMorgan settlement.

Taylor was Popular in North Dakota in 1994

The Washington Post brings us six decades of the most popular girls' names in the United States, state-by-state. It's really interesting to watch – sort of an attack of the zombie Jennifers.

Hat tip to Andrew Tobias for the link.

Crazy Is the New Normal

Have you seen this week's cover on Bloomberg Businessweek, with Ted Cruz as the Mad Hatter?

The cover says: "The Tea Party Won. Ted Cruz and his band of deadenders took the U.S. through the lookingglass. Now crazy is the new normal."

The guy really is creepy.

Krugman Reads Sempringham

Ah, would that it were so.

Perhaps you remember this post, in which I quoted Kevin Drum's observations about a Sean Hannity/Fox News hilarity.

Paul Krugman was as amused as Kevin:

The other day Sean Hannity featured some Real Americans telling tales of how they have been hurt by Obamacare. So Eric Stern, who used to work for Brian Schweitzer, had a bright idea: he actually called Hannity’s guests, to get the details.

Sure enough, the businessman who claimed that Obamacare was driving up his costs, forcing him to lay off workers, only has four employees — meaning that Obamacare has no effect whatsoever on his business. The two families complaining about soaring premiums haven’t actually checked out what’s on offer, and Stern estimates that they would in fact see major savings.

You have to wonder about the mindset of people who go on national TV to complain about how they’re suffering from a program based on nothing but what they think they heard somewhere. You might also wonder about what kind of alleged news show features such people without any check on their bona fides. But then again, consider the network.

Consider the network, indeed!

Maybe I'm wrong, but am I detecting a new willingness to take on the Tea Party zombies? Certainly not from the likes of Chuck Todd, of course, but maybe real newsmen/women? These clowns almost sent the country into default, and they're determined try again!

Tea Party Funders Freaking Out

‘Desperate’ donors tighten purse strings on right-wing groups and ‘self-immolating’ GOP (via Raw Story )

Hard times have arrived for the Republican Party and particularly for right-wing pressure groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, Heritage Action and the one-time lavishly funded tea party PAC, FreedomWorks. According to a report in Politico, heavyweight…

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Why Are the Democrats So Silent?

When you talk to people these days (I try not to, but sometimes I have to), you're very likely to hear the "government is too big" statement. More often than not, it's couched in something that sounds serious and thoughtful, like concern about entitlements. It's now conventional wisdom: government needs to be smaller.

This kind of stuff makes me want to scream. It's like people have some kind of fantasy that in the 21st century we can live like the pioneers. Or that left to their unregulated ways Exxon, Bank of America, the Koch Brothers, and all the rest would behave honorably, with the best interests of everyone in mind.

Come on. Let's get serious folks. We need a government that's big enough to do what we want and need it to do. No bigger, but just that big. And what the first three-quarters of the 20th century show is that putting our government to work on things has had some really good results.

Bill Moyers recently interviewed Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for Financial Times. The whole interview is worth listening to, and I recommend it, but I wanted to highlight the concluding comments.

BILL MOYERS: Would you agree that despite what happened this week and the political victory that President Obama seems to have won, would you agree that the conservatives have really won the argument about government?

MARTIN WOLF: I think that is true. What has surprised me is how little pushback there has been from the Democrat side in arguing that the government really did have a very strong role in supporting the economy during the post crisis recession, almost depression, that the stimulus argument was completely lost though the economics of it were quite clearly right, they needed a bigger stimulus, not a smaller one.

It helped, but it didn't help enough because it wasn't big enough. And they're not making the argument that government has essential functions which everybody needs in the short run. Well, we can see that with the national parks. But also in the long run the strength of America has been built, in my perspective, particularly in the post war period, since the Second World War on the way that actually the public and private sectors have worked together with the government providing enormous support for research and development.

It's been the basic support of America's unique position in scientific research. You look at the National Institutes of Health which are the most important medical research institutions in the world, these are all products of the willingness of the United States to invest in the long term interest. Then there's the infrastructure, think of the highway program, which was the most important infrastructure project under the Republicans interestingly.

And those arguments seem to have been lost. So I am concerned that the government that I think Grover Norquist once said he wants to drown in the bath. If you drown your government in the bath in the modern world, we don't live in the early 19th century, it's a different world, that the long term health of the United States will be very badly affected.

It's strange to me that a government which has obviously achieved very important things, think of the role of the Defense Department in the internet, has achieved such important things, that's just one of many examples, it should be now regarded as nothing more than a complete nuisance. And the only thing you need to do is to cut it back to nothing.

And it does seem to me that the Democrats have, for reasons I don't fully understand, basically given up on making this argument. And so in a way the conservatives, the extreme conservative position has won, because nobody is actually combating it. So it's only a question of how much you cut and how you cut it rather than, "Well, what do we want government for? What are the good things about it? What are the bad things about it? How do we make it effective? And how do we ensure that it's properly financed?"

The Moyers web quotes a citation of Martin Wolf as “the premier financial and economics writer in the world.” He certainly seems sane to me.

Speaking of Disintermediation ...

... as we did in the post below, here's a good example of how it works.

People who watch Fox News aren't particularly interested in facts; they're interested in hearing things that confirm their opinions and prejudices.

Which is convenient for Fox News, because they're not interested in facts at all; they're interested in advancing the zombie political agenda.

So we have things like this, highlighted by Kevin Drum:

This is hilarious in a pathetic kind of way: last Friday, Sean Hannity invited three "regular families" onto his show to relate their horror stories about premium hikes and business-killing regulations under Obamacare. Eric Stern decided to call all three of them to find out what was really going on.

Answer: nothing. One of them was apparently just lying, and the other two hadn't even checked the exchanges, where they would have found that they could get better coverage for considerably less than they're paying now.

That's just sad. Hannity runs a big-time show with well-paid producers, but they apparently couldn't find even a single true example of someone who got screwed by Obamacare. How hard can that be? Even liberals acknowledge that some people will end up worse off. But Hannity's staff couldn't be bothered. I guess he figures his audience doesn't really deserve any better.

 Personally, I think Drum gives Hannity far too much credit.

Whither the GOP?

I was going to write a thoughtful essay about where American politics may be going, but let's face it: I'm not all that thoughtful.  So here are three interesting takes on things.

Felix Salmon at Reuters:

The problem is that, pace Weisenthal, you can’t just kill someone’s revolutionary nihilism. The Ted Cruz “filibuster” is a great example: it served no actual legislative purpose, and at the end of his idiotically long speech, Cruz ended up voting yes on the very bill he was trying to kill. That’s zombie politics, and the problem with zombies is that — being dead already — they’re incredibly hard to kill.
The point here is that the zombie army, a/k/a the Tea Party, is a movement, not a person — and it’s an aggressively anti-logical movement, at that. You can’t negotiate with a zombie — and neither can you wheel out some kind of clever syllogism which will convince a group of revolutionary nihilists that it’s a bad idea to get into a fight if you’re reasonably convinced that you’re going to lose it.

[snip]

Yes, the President has won an important battle against the zombies. But while it’s possible to win a zombie battle, it’s never possible to win a zombie war. No matter how many individual zombies you dispatch, there will always be ten more where they came from. The Tea Party doesn’t take legislative defeat as a signal that it’s doing something wrong: it takes it as a signal that nothing has really changed in Washington and that they therefore need to redouble their nihilistic efforts. Take it from me: come February, or March, or whenever we end up having to have this idiotic debt-ceiling fight all over again, the Tea Party will still be there, and will still be as crazy as ever. A bruised zombie, ultimately, is just a scarier zombie.

From a Talking Points Memo piece, FreedomWorks chief zombie, Matt Kibbe:

During an apperance (sic) on CSPAN, the tea party leader [i.e., Kibbe] responded to a piece in The Washington Times indcating (sic) that some "prominent Republicans are saying that if the GOP loses the 2016 presidential elections, the party will go the way of the Whigs — or formally split into a moderate party and a conservative party."

"I think that's a real possibility because you're seeing this clash between the new generation and — to me, it's not just the old wing of the Republican Party versus the new wing —you're really seeing a disintermediation  in politics. It's already happened with the Democratic Party," Kibbe said. "It's happening with the Republican Party now. And grassroots activists have an ability to self-organize, to fund candidates they're more interested in, going right around the Republican National Committee and senatorial committee."

"That's the new reality," he continued. "Everything's more democratized and Republicans should come to terms with that. They still wanna control things from the top down and if they do that, there will absolutely be a split. But my prediction would be that we take over the Republican Party and they go the way of the whigs."

The "disintermediation" comment is pretty interesting. There are middle men being cut out all over the place: in politics AND in news. That's not necessarily a good thing. In fact, it could be a very bad thing.

Finally, from the bedrock of the old Grand Old Party, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce:

A battle for control of the Republican Party has erupted as an emboldened Tea Party moved to oust senators who voted to reopen the government while business groups mobilized to defeat allies of the small-government movement. 

“We are going to get engaged,” said Scott Reed, senior political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “The need is now more than ever to elect people who understand the free market and not silliness.” The chamber spent $35.7 million on federal elections in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based group that tracks campaign spending.

Meanwhile, two Washington-based groups that finance Tea Party-backed candidates said yesterday they’re supporting efforts to defeat Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, who voted this week for the measure ending the 16-day shutdown and avoiding a government debt default. Cochran, a Republican seeking a seventh term next year, faces a challenge in his party’s primary from Chris McDaniel, a state senator.

Privateers

From Agence France-Presse:

Indian police Friday arrested and questioned 33 people aboard a ship operated by a U.S. anti-piracy firm for carrying guns and ammunition in Indian waters without proper permits, reports said.

India’s coastguard stopped and detained the ship off the Indian coast on October 12 after discovering the cache of weapons and ammunition, before escorting it to the southern port of Tuticorin.

Police then launched an investigation into the 10 crew and 25 security guards of the Seaman Guard Ohio which is registered in Sierra Leone and belongs to the U.S.-based maritime security firm AdvanFort.

The 35, who include British, Estonian, Ukrainian and Indian nationals, were detained on Friday over the stash of some 35 assault rifles and around 5,600 rounds of ammunition, according to the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency.

[snip]

The incident comes after a furore erupted in India last year over the shooting deaths of two Indian fishermen allegedly by two Italian marines off the coast of the southwestern Indian state of Kerala.

I suppose this is the equivalent of a bank hiring armed guards, but it surprised me anyway.

Malala Yousafzai

Sempringham readers are intelligent and well-read, so there's no need to explain this young lady's background. But I had to keep reminding myself that she is saying these things even though the scum of the earth shot her in the face.

Not only that, but she would strongly object to my calling them the scum of the earth.

And the Fur Flies

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Don't miss McCain's reaction to Congressman Louis Gohmert (R-TX) saying McCain supported Al Qaeda.

Something Different

You may have heard the story about a young Florida girl in named Rebecca Ann Sedwick, who was harassed and bullied by other girls to the point that she committed suicide by jumping off a water tower.

Two arrests have been made in the case. I thought this press conference was remarkable. I have to say I share the sheriff's disgust with the girls' parents.

Now THAT's a Storm!

Tropical Cyclone Phailin, currently in the Bay of Bengal, will make landfall in northeast India tomorrow. Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog tells the story:

Very dangerous Tropical Cyclone Phailin, in the North Indian Ocean's Bay of Bengal, has put on an impressive burst of rapid intensification, going from a tropical storm with 65 mph winds to a formidable Category 3 storm with 115 mph winds in just twelve hours. Satellite estimates of Phailin's strength at 8 am EDT ranged as high as 135 mph. Satellite images show that Phailin, whose name means "a sapphire" in Thai, continues to intensify. The cloud tops of the very intense thunderstorms in the eyewall are expanding and cooling, showing that their updrafts are growing stronger and pushing the clouds higher into the atmosphere. Water temperatures are warm, 28 - 29°C, and the ocean heat content is very high, 80 - 100 kJ/cm^2--a level often associated with rapid intensification. With wind shear low, Phailin should be able to continue to intensify until an eyewall replacement cycle begins. It is very difficult for a tropical cyclone to maintain an eye diameter less than ten miles across before the inner core grows unstable and the eyewall collapses, with a new, larger-diameter eyewall forming from an outer spiral band. This process typically weakens the top winds of a tropical cyclone by 5 - 15 mph, but spreads hurricane-force winds over a larger area of ocean, resulting a larger storm surge, but less wind damage. With Phailin's eye diameter already down to a tiny 9 miles, an eyewall replacement cycle is likely to occur by Friday morning.

The models are in tight agreement that Phailin will track northwest into the northeast coast of India, with landfall expected to occur between 06 - 12 UTC on Saturday. The 11 am EDT Thursday forecast from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center predicts that Phailin will peak as a top-end Category 4 storm with 155 mph winds 12 hours before landfall. 

Dr. Masters provides a list of the 35 Deadliest Tropical Cyclones in World History.  So far, only one has been in the 21st century.

Just the Crazies Like Them Now

Kevin Drum, in a post titled Nobody Sane Likes the Republican Party Anymore:

I've been reading all day that Republican favorability ratings plummeted in the latest Gallup poll, but I didn't think much of it. After all, favorability ratings for both parties have been pretty low for a while. But when I finally clicked through to look at the actual numbers, it was a lot more dramatic than I thought:

Wow. Republican favorability ratings have been hovering within a few points of 40 percent ever since 2006. Then Ted Cruz mounted his filibuster, Republicans starting threatening to crash the economy, and their favorability crashed ten points to 28 percent, the lowest in history. As we all know, the Crazification Factor is 27 percent, which means that literally nobody sane approves of the Republican Party any longer.

This demonstrates a surprising amount of common sense among average Americans. In a way, I'm heartened.

This really is amazing. I almost hope they keep it up.

Jon Stewart

Chicago Ted says he often doesn't get a chance to see The Daily Show, so this one's for him, especially considering Ripley's digestive issues.

Here it is.

How the GOP Lost the 2016 Election, According to Bruce Bartlett

Bruce Bartlett is a man without a party.

His Republican credentials are impeccable. An aide to Ron Paul in 1976, he went to work for Jack Kemp the next year. Later he was an aide to Iowa Senator Roger Jepsen. When Jepsen became chairman of the Joint Economic Committee in 1983, Bartlett became it's Executive Director.

He was big in the 1980's supply-sider circles, publishing two books on the subject. In 1987 he became a senior policy advisor in the Reagan White House, and the next year was a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at George H.W. Bush's Treasury Department.

But since then he's been something of a gadfly for the Republicans. In 2005, the National Center for Policy Analysis – a right-wing "think tank" [tee-hee, snicker, snicker] fired him for being critical of George W. Bush's economic policies. The next year he published a book called, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, which compared Bush to Richard Nixon, claiming they both abandoned conservative principles.

By the end of the George W. Bush Administration, it was clear that his mind had opened to "new" ideas. In The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward, Bartlett defended his dalliance in supply-side economics, but – in the depths of GWB's Great Recession – he found reasons to praise Keynsians. This year he wrote in The American Conservative that "no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy's problems than Paul Krugman."

So Bruce Bartlett is a liberal's favorite conservative: one whose opinions can be influenced by empirical evidence (a/k/a: the facts).

Why all this run-up? Because Bartlett has recently written a very interesting series of articles on the history of the Republican Party since World War II. In order, they are:

The 1963 March on Washington Changed Politics Forever

How the March on Washington Flipped the Southern Vote

How the South Won the GOP and Lost the 2016 Election 

I would quibble with much of it, but having a coherent Republican perspective is refreshing.

If you can get interested in this sort of thing, I recommend them highly. If you can't, I don't.

BULLETIN! BULLETIN! BULLETIN!

Washington, D.C. – A Grey-Haired Sane Republican (Sanus Republicanus), a species not seen in years, and which most Americans had assumed to be extinct, has been sighted in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Experts across the country were skeptical of early reports of the sighting, intimating that uneducated amateurs were behind them. Sanus Republicanus shares some characteristics with Tertio Modo Democratus (popularly known as Third-Way Democrats), they argued, and an untrained eye could easily confuse them.

The arguments ended, however, when this video of a Sanus Republicanus in its natural habitat was presented at this year's annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA).



Although the specimen is undeniably a Grey-Haired Sane Republican, experts are no less concerned about the viability of the species. This is, after all, only one. A special committee of the APSA is formulating plans for a breeding program, should a female of the species ever appear.

And In Other News ...

President Barack Obama is apparently a direct descendant of John Punch, "the first documented African enslaved for life in American history."

"How can this be," you ask? "His father was Kenyan, not an African-American with 400 years of family history in this country."

And you're right. He's related through his mother!

This really is quite a country.

What Hath Reagan Wrought?

Kevin Drum on default:

How do you get across how insurrectionary this is? Raising the debt ceiling isn't a concession from Republicans that deserves a corresponding concession from Democrats. It's the financial equivalent of a nuclear bomb: both sides will go up in smoke if it's triggered. Ditto for the government shutdown. And ditto again for the piecemeal spending bills, which are basically a way for Republicans to fund only the parts of government they like but not anything else.
 
You can't govern a country this way. You can't allow a minority party to make relentless demands not through the political system, but by threatening Armageddon if they don't get what they want. It's not what the Constitution intended; it's not something any president could countenance; and it's reckless almost beyond imagining.

And most important of all, it's not something that should get written about as if it's just a modest escalation of normal political disagreements. It's not normal. At all. But how do you get this across? How do you get across just how non-normal it is that we're even talking about it?

Here goes your IRA:

Source: NY Times

If U.S. Government debt isn't secure, nothing is secure. Hold on to your hats, folks. Happy landing.

Articles Worth Reading

There have been some worthwhile articles about why we shouldn't be playing footsie with default:

• Roger Parloff in Fortune writes about Why the 14th Amendment Matters in the Debt-Ceiling Crisis. The 14th Amendment states that "the validity of the public debt of the United States ... shall not be questioned." A snippet:

Yale's Balkin explained on his Balkinization blog in June 2011: "Section 4 targets the worry that, once fully readmitted to the Union, senators and representatives from Southern states ... would deliberately refuse to repay debts incurred in suppressing the confederate rebellion." Still, he continued, the provision "was stated in broad terms in order to prevent future majorities in Congress from repudiating the federal debt to gain political advantage, to seek political revenge, or to try to disavow previous financial obligations because of changed policy priorities."

If you're particularly interested in the legislative history of this part of the 14th Amendment, the Balkin blog post Parloff links to will satisfy you.

•  Joe Nocera's column on Why the Debt Ceiling Matters tries to touch all the bases, one of which is:

[A] point worth making is that U.S. government debt is the only risk-free asset in the world. That debt undergirds the entire world financial system — precisely because the whole world has such faith in it. There is always demand for U.S. government debt. Almost every other asset you can think of is in some way measured against it. A default would destabilize the market for Treasuries. And that, in turn, would likely destabilize every other asset. 

The stock market would fall. Interest rates would rise — meaning, for instance, mortgages would become more expensive just as the housing market is starting to revive. Treasuries themselves would likely have to pay higher interest to investors, which would create a rather sad irony: a default would exacerbate the country’s long-term debt (the very problem the Republicans claim to care about).

 There are more points worth making, and Nocera's column touches on them.

•  The New York Times offers an editorial, The International Fallout, that outlines the damage the GOP has already caused to American interests overseas. A snippet:

The biggest foreign policy casualty, so far, may be the cancellation last week of President Obama’s trip to Asia, which the president’s press secretary said was necessary so he could deal with the shutdown and the political stalemate in Congress. Even though he sent Secretary of State John Kerry in his place, this was the third time that Mr. Obama had canceled or postponed a trip to Asia, further hampering his efforts to make the region a centerpiece of his foreign policy.

In Mr. Obama’s absence, China was able to grab the spotlight. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, who became the first foreigner to address the Indonesian Parliament, offered billions of dollars in trade to that country. Mr. Xi then visited Malaysia (another stop President Obama had planned) and announced a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” including an upgrade in military ties. Mr. Obama should reschedule his trip as soon as he comfortably can.

The fiscal chaos has also given China, America’s largest creditor, an opportunity to scold the United States.

Think about that for a while: a President of the United States is unable to leave the country because the opposition party has the country in turmoil.

 

I Can Hardly Wait!

[Sorry, I decided to delete this post. It was supposed to be funny, but the longer it was there, the less funny it got.]

On the Importance of Commas

Thanks to Dave for sending on this gem:

Adding only one comma still doesn't work.

OMG! I Agree with Scalia!

Much is being made across the liberal blogs today of Justice Antonin Scalia's interview in New York Magazine. I didn't find a thing surprising about it.

The Raw Story summarizes:

When asked about his morning media consumption, he claimed to “skim” The Wall Street Journal and Washington Times, but that he had given up on the Washington Post because it “became so shrilly, shrilly liberal.”

He told Senior that the Internet has “coarsened” people. “You can’t go to a movie—or watch a television show for that matter—without hearing the constant use of the F-word—including, you know, ladies using it,” he said. “People that I know don’t talk like that! But if you portray it a lot, the society’s going to become that way.”

On the topic of homosexuality and his judicial opinions on it, he said that “I have friends that I know, or very much suspect, are homosexual,” but that none have ever come out to him, possibly because of his strident belief in Catholic doctrine. He then taunted Senior, leaning in and telling her “I even believe in the Devil.”

When she expressed shock at his literal belief in Biblical text, Scalia responded, “he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.” He then volunteered that while the Devil no longer “mak[es] pigs run off cliff,” he’s still quite active: “What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way.” [Shades of The Screwtape Letters – Semp.]

“You’re looking at me as though I’m weird,” he continued. “My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.”

Nothing surprising about any of that. For years, Scalia has been rumored to be a member of Opus Dei, for the love of Francisco Franco!

In liberal blogosphere articles about the interview, the fact that Scalia objects to vulgar language in Hollywood movies (see paragraph two in the above quote) is repeatedly held up as evidence of how wacko he is.

Well, I'm on that wacko bus, too. I'm not a Puritan; I know that in some movies it's important to have the characters talk like the guys in Cook County Jail. But it's so prevalent now, even in movies that are presumably aimed at children, that I'd say Mr. and Mrs. Cornfed in Nebraska are perfectly justified to be resentful of those weird, liberal Hollywood people ("Do they talk like that around their own children?"), and be considering home schooling.

Being liberal doesn't mean you have to have the vocabulary of a sailor. [Sorry, Mike.]

Here and There

• A group called House Majority PAC is running ads in the districts of "at risk" Republicans, making sure their constituents know where their Congressman stands in regards to the shutdown. You can find samples of them here.

• You might remember Wendy Davis, the photogenic state senator from Fort Worth, who filibustered the Texas legislature right up to its constitutional closing time to prevent an anti-abortion bill from passing. Davis got such a name recognition boost out of it that she's decided to run for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. She'd be a long-shot even if she got it, though. Her Republican opponent has money out the wazoo.



• From Politico [yech], a hint that Texas Senator Ted Cruz will not be named Most Popular by his Senate class:

... [A]s the government shutdown heads into day three, a number of Republican senators privately blame the Texas freshman for contributing to the mess their party finds itself in. And now that they’re in it, they say it’s up to Cruz to help find a solution.

“It was very evident to everyone in the room that Cruz doesn’t have a strategy – he never had a strategy, and could never answer a question about what the end-game was,” said one senator who attended the meeting. “I just wish the 35 House members that have bought the snake oil that was sold could witness what was witnessed today at lunch.” [My emphasis]

• I've written before that I am convinced the core principle of the post-1964 Republican Party is racism. Everything else – "smaller government," opposition to Obamacare, taxation issues – has its roots in that.

Kevin Drum has an interesting post that does not support my thesis, though it doesn't refute it either. It turns out that a unifying fear of the loons that listen to right-wing radio is: being called a racist.

• Not far of that mark, a new book called Change They Can't Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America reports:

We also ask if people think Obama is destroying the country. We asked this question of all self-identified conservatives. If you look at all conservatives, 35 percent believe that. If you look at tea party conservatives and non-tea party conservatives, only six percent of non-tea party conservatives believe that vs. 71 percent of tea party conservatives.

To which Ed Kilgore responds:

71% think Obama is “destroying the country.” Wow. So is it any great surprise that these same people, and the House members who identify with them, are willing to go to dangerous lengths to mess up Obama’s signature policy achievement and force a significant change in the federal government’s direction? Who cares about the risk of destroying the economy if the destruction of the country itself is the current trajectory?

The Report from Bull**** Mountain

Jon Stewart keeps an eye on Fox News so we don't have to. Also because, like Anthony Weiner, it's a never-ending source of comic chutzpah.

Sorry, can't get the video to post correctly, so why don't you mosey on over to Talking Points Memo and have a laugh.

Where Do These Bozos Come From?

Cruz, Gohmert, and now this "profile in courage,"  Randy Neugebauer, who confronts a Park Service Ranger and tells her she should be ashamed of herself for enforcing the shutdown he has helped cause.  The purpose of this is what? A photo op? Film to show back home of him single-handedly taking on the Gummint?



This, my friends, is about the level of the Republican Party right now. It's really sad. There used to be a time when respectable people could be Republicans, too.

Addendum: Vice President Biden called the Park Ranger and told her he was proud of her. So am I. She handled it perfectly.

Food for Fox Fantasies

It appears that the unfortunate woman whose erratic behavior (to put it mildly) in Washington D.C., resulted in her death yesterday was suffering from post-partum depression.

Talking Points Memo reports that she "had begun to suspect she was under government surveillance and that President Obama was stalking her."

How long do you think it will be before Fox reports this as though it might have been true? When will Darrell Issa hold hearings?

The Connection Between Boehner and Fargo

Jonathan Chait is more and more convinced that 80 wacko Tea Partiers in Congress will force the U.S. Government, for the first time in history, to default on the national debt.

[House Speaker John] Boehner does not seem to share his party’s sociopathic embrace of hostage tactics. Boehner resembles William H. Macy’s character in Fargo, who concocts a simple plan to have his wife kidnapped and skim the proceeds, failing to think a step forward about what happens once she’s actually seized by violent criminals. He doesn’t intend for her to be harmed, but also has no ability to control the plan once he’s set it in motion. In the end, Boehner's Speakership is likely to end up in the wood chipper, anyway.

If there really are any Republicans left who are not stark, raving mad, they don't have much time to get control of their party back. It will be ugly, but it's gotta be done. There are, after all, some things more important than being reelected.

Jon Stewart Does the Shutdown

Most galling is the claim that "no Republican" ever supported a shutdown. If you think that might be true, 1) you need to pay more attention to current events, and 2) take a look at the Maddow video three posts down.

Smoke It if You've Got It

Oh, to hell with the Banana Republicans. There's always this:

Madness

The Tea Party buffoons are going "Tra-la-la, Tee-hee-hee, Hooray! We've shut down the Gummint! "

Meanwhile, Digby at Hullabaloo offers this:

The WSJ reports, via The Atlantic which calls it the saddest paragraph you will read all day:

At the National Institutes of Health, nearly three-quarters of the staff was furloughed. One result: director Francis Collins said about 200 patients who otherwise would be admitted to the NIH Clinical Center into clinical trials each week will be turned away. This includes about 30 children, most of them cancer patients, he said.

 To which I offer:

This.

And this: The blood dripping from John Boehner's hands on today's NY Daily News cover is not hyperbole.

The Purpose of the Shutdown

Rachel Maddow gets what most television news folks don't:  For the Banana Republicans, the government shutdown was an end in itself.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Mitch McConnell: “The President’s more than willing to negotiate with Iranians, I don’t know why he wouldn’t be willing to negotiate with us.”

Jon Stewart: “If it turns out that President Barack Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent, hard-lined, unreasonable totalitarian mullahs in the world, but not the Republicans, maybe he’s not the problem.”

God Has Answered My Prayer about the GOP

"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one:

'O Lord, Make my enemies ridiculous.'

And God granted it."

– Voltaire

Does History Repeat Itself?

The year was 1975, and New York City was in dire financial straits. Mayor Abe Beame had a plan, but what the city needed was a $1 billion line of credit. Congress passed a bill authorizing such, but President Gerald Ford, under pressure from Republican Party conservatives, promised to veto the bill. The New York Daily News' headline is still talked about:

 

At the time it was considered a hard-hitting headline.  Today, not so much . . . especially when you consider this morning's Daily News front page:

 

Oh, my!

 

What the Shutdown is All About

Kevin Drum is absolutely correct:

The Republican Party is bending its entire will, staking its very soul, fighting to its last breath, in service of a crusade to....

Make sure that the working poor don't have access to affordable health care. I just thought I'd mention that in plain language, since it seems to get lost in the fog fairly often. But that's it. That's what's happening. They have been driven mad by the thought that rich people will see their taxes go up slightly in order to help non-rich people get decent access to medical care.

That's a pretty stirring animating principle, no?

I wish Obama could be as clear about it when he talks to the press.

Update (10/1/13):

Obama says, "I know it is strange that one party would make keeping people uninsured the centerpiece of the agenda, but that apparently is what it is."

It's going in the right direction, Barack, but really needs to be pounded, again and again.

Thank you, Texas

Talking Points Memo offers excepts from Ted Cruz's marvelous not-a-filibuster.

Working Our Way Back to Feudalism

Paul Krugman has a thought-provoking post on his blog today that touches on the increasing economic inequality in America. Here it is, in full:

Mark Thoma has an excellent column at the Fiscal Times linking the fight over the debt ceiling to the larger issue of extreme inequality. (By the way, I start my day, every day, with a quick skim of the Times followed by Thoma’s blog Economist’s View, which is the best place by far to keep up with the latest in economic discourse.) I’d like, however, to suggest that the reality is even worse than Thoma suggests.

Here’s how Thoma puts it:

Rising inequality and differential exposure to economic risk has caused one group to see themselves as the “makers” in society who provide for the rest and pay most of the bills, and the other group as “takers” who get all the benefits. The upper strata wonders, “Why should we pay for social insurance when we get little or none of the benefits?” and this leads to an attack on these programs.

So he links the debt ceiling fight to the influence of the wealthy, who want to dismantle the welfare state because it’s nothing to them, and they want lower taxes. One could add that the very inequality that distances the rich from ordinary concerns gives them increased power, and so makes their anti-welfare-state views far more influential.

How, then, are things even worse than he says? Because many of the rich are selective in their opposition to government helping the unlucky. They’re against stuff like food stamps and unemployment benefits; but bailing out Wall Street? Yay!

Seriously. Charlie Munger says that we should “thank God” for the bailouts, but that ordinary people fallen on hard times should “suck it in and cope.” AIG’s CEO — the CEO of a bailed out firm! — says that complaints about bonuses to executives at such firms are just as bad as lynchings (I am not making this up.)

The point is that the superrich have not gone Galt on us — not really, even if they imagine they have. It’s much closer to pure class warfare, a defense of the right of the privileged to keep and extend their privileges. It’s not Ayn Rand, it’s Ancien Régime.

 Emily pointed out to me this morning that 87 percent of Chicago public school children – 87 percent! – come from low income families. "Well," you say, "everybody knows that Chicago is the next Detroit, so that's not out of line with what I'd expect."

Okay, how about this: "45.4 percent [of Illinois schoolchildren] qualified for a free or discounted school meal, the highest rate in decades." [My emphasis.]

Good-bye, middle class.

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz and Mario Whatever are doing their best to make sure millions of children don't get health insurance.

Health Care

We've been getting good links pertaining to health care from our vast readership, and will be passing them along as we wait for the Republican Tea Party to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States next week, just to make sure nobody gets health insurance.

The first link is a video provided by Emily. "OK, the guy's style is a bit annoying," she writes, "but there are some interesting tidbits in here." Well, he's a little intense, but we enjoyed it here at Sempringham. Don't miss the reference to the PBS program, Sherlock.

What Are the Chances?

Three and a half years ago Sempringham pointed you to some photographs of fighting in Afghanistan by NY Times photographer Tyler Hicks.

Tyler Hicks

Hicks is an American, but was born in São Paulo, Brazil. According to Wikipedia, he has worked as a photojournalist in "Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Russia, Bosnia, Lebanon, Israel, Gaza, Chechnya and many countries in Africa including South Sudan," not to mention Ohio and North Carolina.

In 2011, Hicks and three colleagues were captured by pro-Qaddafi troops and held for six days. Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Shadid was one of the three colleagues. In 2012, in a story you might remember,  Shadid (a Lebanese American born in Oklahoma City) died of an asthma attack while running behind camels (to which he was allergic) as he was trying to escape from Syria.

Tyler Hicks carried his body across the border to Turkey.

Yesterday, terrorist gunmen opened fire in a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, killing (at last count) 68 people. Tyler Hicks was shopping nearby.

I was at a framing shop in an adjacent mall picking up some photographs that had been given to me as gifts by photojournalists who attended my wedding. I was very close. I didn’t have all of my equipment, just had a small camera that I always have with me in case something happens. [My guess: a Canon G12. - Semp.]

I ran over to the mall and I was able to photograph until my wife [Nichole Sobecki], who is also a photojournalist and was at our house, was able to collect my Kevlar helmet and professional cameras before she came to cover the news herself.

When I left the framing shop, I could see right away that there was something serious going on, because there were lots of people running away from the mall. I ran over there and within minutes I could see people who had been shot in the leg or stomach from what appeared to be small arms fire being helped by other civilians. This went on for about 30 minutes.

[Snip]

From the beginning I wanted to get with some security forces inside the mall.

We managed to find an entrance where people who were hiding inside the mall were coming out. We ran into that service entrance and we hooked up with some police who let us stay with them as they did security sweeps clearing different stores — very much like what you see when the military enters a village. Shop to shop and aisle to aisle, looking for the shooters who were still inside.

You can find his pictures here.

Among literate folks, you will find many who've heard of the bozos we are regularly offered on the Sunday blather programs. But not many who've heard of Tyler Hicks.

Evidence that We Are in the End Times

BBC headline:

Venezuela seizes toilet paper factory to avoid shortage

 

Louis C.K. on Smart Phones and Raising Kids

Being a good parent means having the strength to say "no" when all the other parents are saying "yes," and they're wrong.

Louis C.K. has it down.

Anybody notice how quickly I've become an expert on child raising? Nothin' to it.

I Am Liking This Guy More and More

From the NY Times, in an article headlined "Pope Bluntly Faults Church's Focus on Gays and Abortion":

"Pope Francis, in the first extensive interview of his six-month-old papacy, said that the Roman Catholic Church had grown “obsessed” with preaching about abortion, gay marriage and contraception, and that he has chosen not to speak of those issues despite recriminations from some critics.

In remarkably blunt language, Francis sought to set a new tone for the church, saying it should be a “home for all” and not a “small chapel” focused on doctrine, orthodoxy and a limited agenda of moral teachings. 

“It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time,” the pope told the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a fellow Jesuit and editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit journal whose content is routinely approved by the Vatican. “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.

How, in a church whose crusty hierarchy has been beating the congregation over the head with dogma for 50 years, did this guy even survive – let alone become Pope?

Anybody Surprised by This?

Two Michigan men shot each other dead in a road rage incident. They both held concealed carry permits.

A Smile for You

This woman was waiting for a bus in England, listening to music on her iPod (presumably). A passerby saw her and recorded her dance. It went viral, and the woman and song were eventually identified. The video adds the music, a song called Knock Down sung by Alesha Dixon. Enjoy.



Before the woman and song were identified, several attempts were made to identify the music. It works pretty well to Abba:



And as an added bonus: Ukraine's Got Talent! [Who knew?] You'll want to move the slider past the talking part at the beginning.