Sunday, October 30, 2011

Hard Times During Adolescence Point to Health Problems Later in Life

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111027112517.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — Being hard up socially and financially during adolescence and early adulthood takes its toll on the body, and leads to physiological wear and tear in middle aged men and women, irrespective of how tough things have been in the interim. According to Dr. Per E. Gustafsson from Umeå University in Sweden and colleagues, experience of social and material stressors around the time of transition into adulthood is linked to a rise in disease risk factors in middle age, including higher blood pressure, body weight and cholesterol.

Their work is published online in Springer's journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

The authors looked at the influence of both social factors and material deprivation during adolescence and adulthood on the physiological wear and tear on the body that results from ongoing adaptive efforts to maintain stability in response to stressors. These adaptive efforts are known as 'allostatic load'. Allostatic load is thought to predict various health problems, including declines in physical and cognitive functioning, and cardiovascular disease and mortality.


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High Blood Pressure in Early Pregnancy Raises Risk of Birth Defects, Irrespective of Medication

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111020025652.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — Women with high blood pressure (hypertension) in the early stages of pregnancy are more likely to have babies with birth defects, irrespective of commonly prescribed medicines for their condition, finds new research published online in the British Medical Journal.

The finding suggests that it is the underlying hypertension, rather than the use of antihypertensive drugs in early pregnancy, that increases the risk of birth defects.

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More Evidence That Allergies May Help in Fighting Brain Tumors

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111020025754.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — A study published online Oct. 18 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute provides some new but qualified support for the idea that the immune system's response to allergies may reduce the risk of developing deadly brain tumors.

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — A study published online Oct. 18 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute provides some new but qualified support for the idea that the immune system's response to allergies may reduce the risk of developing deadly brain tumors.

[...]

For example, the researchers found a statistically significant reduction in glioma risk among people with borderline elevated IgE levels (in a range of 25,000 to 100,000 units per liter), but not for people with even higher levels of IgE. Michaud acknowledged that further research would be needed to explain why the protective effect couldn't be measured in people with the highest IgE levels.

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Human-Caused Climate Change Major Factor in More Frequent Mediterranean Droughts

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111028115342.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2011) — Wintertime droughts are increasingly common in the Mediterranean region, and human-caused climate change is partly responsible, according to a new analysis by NOAA scientists and colleagues at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). In the last 20 years, 10 of the driest 12 winters have taken place in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.

"The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone," said Martin Hoerling, Ph.D. of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., lead author of a paper published online in the Journal of Climate this month. "This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region's climate to normal."

[...]

The team also found agreement between the observed increase in winter droughts and in the projections of climate models that include known increases in greenhouse gases. Both observations and model simulations show a sudden shift to drier conditions in the Mediterranean beginning in the 1970s. The analysis began with the year 1902, the first year of a recorded rainfall dataset.

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Saturday, October 29, 2011

Clues to Young Children's Aggressive Behavior Uncovered by New Study

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111026091227.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2011) — Children who are persistently aggressive, defiant, and explosive by the time they're in kindergarten very often have tumultuous relationships with their parents from early on. A new longitudinal study suggests that a cycle involving parenting styles and hostility between mothers and toddlers is at play.

[...]

"Before the study, we thought it was likely the combination of difficult infant temperament and negative parenting that put parent-child pairs most at risk for conflict in the toddler period, and then put the children at risk for conduct problems at school age," according to Michael F. Lorber, a research scientist at New York University and lead author of the paper (Lorber was previously at the University of Minnesota). "However, our findings suggest that it was negative parenting in early infancy that mattered most." Negative parenting occurred when parents expressed negative emotions toward their children, handled them roughly, and so forth.

The researchers also found that it was conflict between moms and their toddlers that predicted later conduct problems in the children -- and not just a high level of conflict, but conflict that worsened over time. And in a cyclical pattern, when moms parented their infants negatively, that resulted in their children showing high levels of anger as toddlers, which in turn caused more hostility from the moms.

By the same token, moms who parented their infants negatively also may have had angrier kids because these moms were more hostile toward their toddlers. Negative parenting in infancy appeared to set the stage for both moms and their kids being more hostile and angry during the toddler years, bringing out the worst in one another.

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Astronomers Discover Complex Organic Matter Exists Throughout the Universe

thttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111026143721.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2011) — Astronomers report in the journal Nature that organic compounds of unexpected complexity exist throughout the Universe. The results suggest that complex organic compounds are not the sole domain of life but can be made naturally by stars.

Prof. Sun Kwok and Dr. Yong Zhang of The University of Hong Kong show that an organic substance commonly found throughout the Universe contains a mixture of aromatic (ring-like) and aliphatic (chain-like) components. The compounds are so complex that their chemical structures resemble those of coal and petroleum. Since coal and oil are remnants of ancient life, this type of organic matter was thought to arise only from living organisms. The team's discovery suggests that complex organic compounds can be synthesized in space even when no life forms are present.

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Regular Aspirin Intake Halves Hereditary Cancer Risk, Study Finds

This is especially interesting because aspirin depresses the immune system, which might be expected to have an adverse effect on the incidence of cancer. If, as it is suggested, aspirin causes the cancer cells to self-destruct, this might explain this.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111028082708.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2011) — Scientists including those from Queen's University have discovered that taking regular aspirin halves the risk of developing hereditary cancers.

Hereditary cancers are those which develop as a result of a gene fault inherited from a parent. Bowel and womb cancers are the most common forms of hereditary cancers. Fifty thousand people in the UK are diagnosed with bowel and womb cancers every year; 10 per cent of these cancers are thought to be hereditary.

The decade-long study, which involved scientists and clinicians from 43 centres in 16 countries and was funded by Cancer Research UK, followed nearly 1,000 patients, in some cases for over 10 years. The study found that those who had been taking a regular dose of aspirin had 50 per cent fewer incidents of hereditary cancer compared with those who were not taking aspirin.

[...]

Those who had taken aspirin still developed the same number of polyps, which are thought to be precursors of cancer, as those who did not take aspirin but they did not go on to develop cancer. It suggests that aspirin could possibly be causing these cells to destruct before they turn cancerous.

Over 1,000 people were diagnosed with bowel cancer in Northern Ireland last year; 400 of these died from the disease. Ten per cent of bowel cancer cases are hereditary and by taking aspirin regularly the number of those dying from the hereditary form of the disease could be halved.

Professor Patrick Morrison from Queen's University in Belfast, who led the Northern Ireland part of the study, said: "The results of this study, which has been ongoing for over a decade, proves that the regular intake of aspirin over a prolonged period halves the risk of developing hereditary cancers. The effects of aspirin in the first five years of the study were not clear but in those who took aspirin for between five and ten years the results were very clear."

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Study Shows Juice Better Than Extracts at Fighting Infections

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111028103725.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2011) — With scientific evidence now supporting the age-old wisdom that cranberries, whether in sauce or as juice, prevent urinary tract infections, people have wondered if there was an element of the berry that, if extracted and condensed, perhaps in pill form, would be as effective as drinking the juice or eating cranberry sauce. A new study from researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute helps to answer that question.

The study tested proanthocyanidins or PACs, a group of flavonoids found in cranberries. Because they were thought to be the ingredient that gives the juice its infection-fighting properties, PACs have been considered a hopeful target for an effective extract. The new WPI report, however, shows that cranberry juice, itself, is far better at preventing biofilm formation, which is the precursor of infection, than PACs alone.


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Glaciers in Southwest China Feel the Brunt of Climate Change

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111025210906.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 25, 2011) — Significant increases in annual temperatures are having a devastating affect on glaciers in the mountainous regions of south-western China, potentially affecting natural habitats, tourism and wider economic development.

[...]

The implications of these changes are far more serious than simply altering the landscape; glaciers are an integral part of thousands of ecosystems and play a crucial role in sustaining human populations.

Continued widespread melting of glaciers, caused by increasing temperatures, could potentially lead to floods, mudflows and rock falls, affecting traffic, tourism and wider economic development.

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Children Suffer Unnecessarily from Chronic Postoperative Pain

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111027150205.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — Are children suffering needlessly after surgery? UC Irvine anesthesiologists who specialize in pediatric care believe so.

An operation can be one of the most traumatic events children face, and according to a UCI study, many of them experience unnecessary postsurgical pain lasting weeks or months.

Such chronic pain is well understood and treated in adults but has been generally overlooked in pediatric patients, said Dr. Zeev Kain, professor and chair of anesthesiology & perioperative care.

This month, he and his UCI colleagues published in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery the first-ever study of chronic postoperative pain in children. Out of 113 youngsters who had procedures ranging from appendectomies to orthopedic surgery, 13 percent reported pain that lingered for months.

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Governments Must Plan for Migration in Response to Climate Change, Researchers Say

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111027145858.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — Governments around the world must be prepared for mass migrations caused by rising global temperatures or face the possibility of calamitous results, say University of Florida scientists on a research team reporting in the Oct. 28 edition of Science.

If global temperatures increase by only a few of degrees by 2100, as predicted by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, people around the world will be forced to migrate. But transplanting populations from one location to another is a complicated proposition that has left millions of people impoverished in recent years. The researchers say that a word of caution is in order and that governments should take care to understand the ramifications of forced migration.

[...]

"The effects of climate change are likely to be experienced by as many people as disasters," UF anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith said. "More people than ever may be moving in response to intense storms, increased flooding and drought that makes living untenable in their current location."

[...]

"It is a moral imperative," Oliver-Smith said. Also, a simple cost-benefit analysis shows that doing resettlement poorly adds to costs in the future. Wasted resources and the costs of malnutrition, declining health, infant and elder mortality, and the destruction of families and social networks should be included in the total cost of a failed resettlement, he said.

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Celestial Compass Obscured by Urban Light Pollution for Some Nocturnal Animals

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111027112513.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — Urban light pollution has been shown to reduce the visibility of not only the stars, but also of an important navigational signal for some nocturnal animals. During clear moonlit nights, a compass-like pattern of polarized light that is invisible to the human eye stretches across the sky. The nighttime skyglow over major cities renders this celestial compass unobservable over large areas, according to a new study written by a group of physicists and ecologists at Freie Universität Berlin and the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB).

tags: light pollution
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Coalmines And Military Keynesians

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/coalmines-and-military-keynesians/

October 28, 2011, 12:13 pm

Ah, so now we have a new principle of economics: government spending can’t create jobs, but cuts in government spending can destroy jobs — as long as the jobs are in the defense sector

It took months of fighting — the threat of a government shutdown, the graver threat of a default on the national debt, and now a new threat of major, automatic cuts to Medicare and defense programs — but Congress’ deficit obsession has finally exposed the rarest of all species: Republican Keynesians.

With just a under a month until the deficit Super Committee must recommend policies that cut the 10 year deficit by $1.2 trillion, members of the Republican party — the same party that’s been on the war path for deep spending cuts, and that decries President Obama’s “failed stimulus” — are making uncharacteristic arguments against slashing spending. Trim too much, too quickly, they warn, and people will lose their jobs!

[...]

Ah, so now we have a new principle of economics: government spending can’t create jobs, but cuts in government spending can destroy jobs — as long as the jobs are in the defense sector

It took months of fighting — the threat of a government shutdown, the graver threat of a default on the national debt, and now a new threat of major, automatic cuts to Medicare and defense programs — but Congress’ deficit obsession has finally exposed the rarest of all species: Republican Keynesians.

With just a under a month until the deficit Super Committee must recommend policies that cut the 10 year deficit by $1.2 trillion, members of the Republican party — the same party that’s been on the war path for deep spending cuts, and that decries President Obama’s “failed stimulus” — are making uncharacteristic arguments against slashing spending. Trim too much, too quickly, they warn, and people will lose their jobs!

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Friday, October 28, 2011

Curiosity Is Critical to Academic Performance

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111027150211.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it's good for the student. That's the conclusion of a new study published in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors show that curiosity is a big part of academic performance. In fact, personality traits like curiosity seem to be as important as intelligence in determining how well students do in school.

Intelligence is important to academic performance, but it's not the whole story. Everyone knows a brilliant kid who failed school, or someone with mediocre smarts who made up for it with hard work. So psychological scientists have started looking at factors other than intelligence that make some students do better than others.

One of those is conscientiousness -- basically, the inclination to go to class and do your homework. People who score high on this personality trait tend to do well in school. "It's not a huge surprise if you think of it, that hard work would be a predictor of academic performance," says Sophie von Stumm of the University of Edinburgh in the UK. She co-wrote the new paper with Benedikt Hell of the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic of Goldsmiths University of London.

[...]

When put together, conscientiousness and curiosity had as big an effect on performance as intelligence.

[...]

Employers may also want to take note: a curious person who likes to read books, travel the world, and go to museums may also enjoy and engage in learning new tasks on the job. "It's easy to hire someone who has the done the job before and hence, knows how to work the role," von Stumm says. "But it's far more interesting to identify those people who have the greatest potential for development, i.e. the curious ones."

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How women defused population bomb

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/28/opinion/pearce-population-fertility/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9

By Fred Pearce, Special to CNN
updated 3:03 PM EST, Fri October 28, 2011

Editor's note: Fred Pearce is a London-based environment journalist, who has reported from 67 countries in the past 25 years. His most recent book is "Peoplequake: Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash," published in the US as "The Coming Population Crash."

(CNN) -- This week the world will reach 7 billion people. Understandably that raises concern about a soaring world population. But there is a good news story from the demographic data that is not often told. We -- or rather the poor women of the world -- are defusing the population bomb.

Women today are having half as many children as their mothers and grandmothers. The global average is now down to 2.5 children per woman, and it continues to fall.

This is not just a rich-world phenomenon. Much of Asia now has fertility rates below two, from Japan and Korea to China, with its one-child policy, through Taiwan, Vietnam, Burma, Singapore and much of southern India and parts of the Middle East. Behind the veil, the women of Iran have cut their fertility from eight to less than two in a generation.

The young people out on the streets demanding democracy during the Arab Spring are arguably far more politically active because they are not at home raising large families.

Falling fertility happens faster if countries get richer and if women are better educated. Similarly urbanization helps a lot. While even young children can be an economic asset on an African peasant farm, they are an economic liability in cities, where they require education before they can get a job. The teeming megacities of the poor world may look like symbols of overpopulation, but they are part of the solution, too.

[...]

The reason, I believe, is very simple. Women are having smaller families because for the first time in history they can. In the 20th century, the world largely eradicated the diseases that used to kill off most children. Today, most kids get to grow up. Mothers no longer need to have five or six children to ensure the next generation. Two or three is enough, and that is what they are choosing to have.

There are holdouts, of course. In much of Africa, rural women still typically have five children or more. But if Africa follows Asia, then we can see an end to population growth. We are, I believe, likely to see "peak population" by about mid-century. Perhaps at around 9 billion people.

After that, on current trends of fertility falling to below replacement levels, we will see a falling world population.

[...]

What does this mean for the environment? Well, peak population is good news, of course. But don't hang the flags. It is a pervasive myth that it is all those extra people that are wrecking the planet. That's no longer the case.

Rising consumption today is a far bigger threat to the environment than a rising head-count. And most of that extra consumption is still happening in rich countries that have long since given up growing their populations.

According to Stephen Pacala, the director of the Princeton Environmental Institute, the world's richest half billion people -- that's about 7 % of the global population -- are responsible for half the world's carbon dioxide emissions, the primary cause of man-made climate change. Meanwhile the poorest 50 % of the world are responsible for just 7 % of emissions. So there is no way halting population growth in the poor world today would have more than a very marginal effect on climate change.

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Large quantities of black licorice can harm heart

As in most things, moderation is best.

http://vitals.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/28/8509131-scary-treat-black-licorice-can-harm-heart-warns-the-fda

By Linda Carroll
Oct. 28, 2011

While indulging our sweet-tooth may be a time-honored Halloween tradition, there’s one tasty morsel that could turn out to be more of a trick than a treat for some of us, the Food and Drug Administration warns.

Black licorice can lead to heart arrhythmias and other health problems when consumed by adults in large quantities, the FDA noted in its pre-holiday alert.

Experts say that consuming 2 ounces of black licorice per day for two weeks can set the heart stuttering in susceptible individuals. The culprit is a compound called glycyrrhizin, which is what gives licorice its sweet flavor.

Glycyrrhizin causes the kidneys to excrete potassium. And low levels of potassium can make the heart beat dangerously fast or out of sync, says Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine.

The compound also leads to salt and water retention which can be a problem for people with heart failure or high blood pressure, Fonarow said.

[...]

“Licorice can be a problem for people taking diuretics, digoxin and laxatives,” Fonarow said, explaining that the combination of the candy with these medications can also drive potassium down to dangerously low levels. “It can also interfere with normal cortisol metabolism.”

Some studies have suggested that licorice can drive up blood pressure in women taking oral contraceptives because of the potassium effect.

The FDA suggests that everyone, young and old, be careful about how much black licorice they consume at one time.

And if you’re one of the unlucky ones who develops an irregular heart rhythm or muscle weakness after eating a lot of licorice, the agency suggests you “stop eating it immediately and contact your healthcare provider.

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Study: Ga. pre-k improves student performance

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2011/10/28/1796150/study-ga-pre-k-improves-student.html

Oct. 28, 2011

ATLANTA -- A new study shows that Georgia's lottery-funded prekindergarten program helps improve students' academic achievement, particularly those from poor families.

The study by the University of Georgia's College of Education shows that low income children who attended pre-k outperformed their peers who did not throughout elementary school in both reading and math. Scores were six to 10 points higher in some cases.

The study also found that students who were in pre-k repeated fewer grades.

The findings came from a 10-year study of about 500 students who attended pre-k in Clarke County schools in 1999. They were followed up through ninth grade.

The study reflects findings in research on pre-k in other states.

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Support is one thing, access is another

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_10/support_is_one_thing_access_is033148.php

October 28, 2011 11:25 AM
By Steve Benen

For all the scuttlebutt that African-American voters are abandoning President Obama, the New York Times reports that this just isn’t true. “Despite a school of thought in Washington that Mr. Obama’s support among blacks has weakened because of the poor economy and a sense of unmet expectations,” the NYT noted, “interviews and public opinion surveys show that his standing remains remarkably strong among African-Americans.”

That is, to be sure, interesting and important. But I’d argue that Obama for America should be worried less about whether African-American voters will support them, and more about whether African-American voters will be able to participate in the first place.

An elderly black woman in Tennessee can’t vote because she can’t produce her marriage certificate. Threatening letters blanket black neighborhoods warning that creditors and police officers will check would-be voters at the polls, or that elections are taking place on the wrong day. Thirty-eight states have instituted new rules prohibiting same-day registration and early voting on Sundays. All of this is happening as part of an effort to eradicate a problem that is statistically rarer than heavy-metal bands with exploding drummers: vote fraud.

Many commentators have remarked on the unavoidable historical memories these images provoke: They are so clearly reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. So why shouldn’t the proponents of draconian new voting laws have to answer for their ugly history?

Proponents of reforming the voting process seem blind to the fact that all of these seemingly neutral reforms hit poor and minority voters out of all proportion. (The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that while about 12 percent of Americans don’t have a government-issued photo ID, the figure for African-Americans is closer to 25 percent, and in some Southern states perhaps higher.)

[No, they aren't blind to this. This is an intended result.]

Risa Goluboff and Dahlia Lithwick added that the Republican efforts to restricting voting rights in 2012 — efforts generally known as the GOP’s “war on voting” — look “an awful lot like methods pioneered by the white supremacists from another era that achieved the similar results.”

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Can the rich wage class warfare against themselves?

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_10/can_the_rich_wage_class_warfar033119.php

October 27, 2011 12:35 PM
By Steve Benen

As part of his pitch to the public in support of his jobs agenda, President Obama has a pretty standard argument when it comes to asking the very wealthy to pay a little more in taxes.

“Whenever I talk about revenue, people start complaining about, ‘Well, is he engaging in class warfare,’ or ‘Why is he going after the wealthiest?’ Look, because I’ve been fortunate and people bought a bunch of my books, I’m in that category now. And in a perfect world with unlimited resources, nobody would have to pay any taxes. That’s not the world we live in. We live in a world where we’ve got to make choices. […]

“This is a matter of priorities. And it’s a matter of shared sacrifice. And, by the way, if you ask most wealthy Americans, they’ll tell you they’re willing to do more. They’re willing to do their fair share to help this country that they love.” [emphasis added]

As it turns out, Obama’s assessment is accurate. Warren Buffett isn’t the only rich guy willing to pay more in taxes.

A new survey from Spectrem Group found that 68% of millionaires (those with investments of $1 million or more) support raising taxes on those with $1 million or more in income. Fully 61% of those with net worths of $5 million or more support the tax on million-plus earners. […]

Explains George Walper of Spectrem: “What this tells us is that there are a number of wealthy folks who said: ‘Gee, we need to increase taxes to stimulate the economy. No one likes to be taxed more, but the reality is maybe it has to be done.’”

Ordinarily, this is about the time that Republicans start arguing that if some wealthy Americans want to pay more, they should just pick up their checkbooks and voluntarily contribute more to the treasury. No need to change tax rates, the right argues, when the government will just accept donations.

[...]

============================================================

Voluntary donations would result in the greedy who don't donate being better off than the decent folk.


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Internet blacklist proposed in Congress

Well, since they have solved the economic problems, I guess they have plenty of time for something like this.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-segal/stop-the-internet-blackli_b_739836.html

By David Segal (RI State Representative) and Aaron Swartz
September 27, 2010 09:40 AM

When it really matters to them, Congressmembers can come together -- with a panache and wry wit you didn't know they had. As banned books week gets underway, and President Obama admonishes oppressive regimes for their censorship of the Internet, a group of powerful Senators -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- have signed onto a bill that would vastly expand the government's power to censor the Internet.

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) was introduced just one week ago, but it's greased and ready to move, with a hearing in front of the Judiciary Committee this Thursday. If people don't speak out, US citizens could soon find themselves joining Iranians and Chinese in being blocked from accessing broad chunks of the public Internet.

Help us stop this bill in its tracks! Click here to sign our petition. [click link to original article to get to this link]

COICA creates two blacklists of Internet domain names. Courts could add sites to the first list; the Attorney General would have control over the second. Internet service providers and others (everyone from Comcast to PayPal to Google AdSense) would be required to block any domains on the first list. They would also receive immunity (and presumably the good favor of the government) if they block domains on the second list.

The lists are for sites "dedicated to infringing activity," but that's defined very broadly -- any domain name where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are "central to the activity of the Internet site" could be blocked.

One example of what this means in practice: sites like YouTube could be censored in the US. Copyright holders like Viacom often argue copyrighted material is central to the activity of YouTube, but under current US law, YouTube is perfectly legal as long as they take down copyrighted material when they're informed about it -- which is why Viacom lost to YouTube in court.

But if COICA passes, Viacom wouldn't even need to prove YouTube is doing anything illegal to get it shut down -- as long as they can persuade the courts that enough other people are using it for copyright infringement, the whole site could be censored.

Perhaps even more disturbing: Even if Viacom couldn't get a court to compel censorship of a YouTube or a similar site, the DOJ could put it on the second blacklist and encourage ISPs to block it even without a court order. (ISPs have ample reason to abide the will of the powerful DOJ, even if the law doesn't formally require them to do so.)


[...]

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Just Three Corporate Front Groups Spent 13 Times As Much As The Entire Labor Movement To Buy Judicial Elections

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/10/27/355090/just-three-corporate-front-groups-spent-13-times-as-much-as-the-entire-labor-movement-to-buy-judicial-elections/

By Ian Millhiser on Oct 27, 2011 at 3:50 pm

After the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate money in American elections, the decision’s defenders claimed this wasn’t such a big deal because unions could also take advantage of the decision. A new report by three leading voting rights and judicial independence groups gives the lie to this claim. According to the report, just three corporate interest groups — The Ohio Chamber of Commerce, the Business aCouncil of Alabama, and the Illinois Civil Justice League spent more than 13 times as much trying to influence state supreme court elections as the entire labor movement:

[...]

The report focuses on the 2009-10 cycle, so it does not include the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race where incumbent Justice David Prosser narrowly defeated a progressive challenger after corporate front groups rode to his rescue with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of funds.


tags: campaign contributions, election contributions
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House GOP’s ‘Job Creating’ Spending Cuts Destroyed 370,000 Jobs

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/27/355181/report-house-gops-budget-cuts-370k-jobs/

By Travis Waldron on Oct 27, 2011 at 4:25 pm

House Republicans took the government to the brink of shutdown last spring by demanding across-the-board budget cuts to many vital programs. Instead of focusing on job creation, as Americans wanted them to, the GOP turned its attention to slashing funds for programs that funded assistance for women and children, local law enforcement, the social safety net, environmental protections, and many other programs they deemed as either too expensive or unnecessary. Worse, when challenged on why they hadn’t made the effort to tackle high unemployment, Republicans insisted that their slash-and-burn budget cuts were meant to create jobs.

Not all of those cuts made it through, but the GOP succeeded in passing massive spending reductions as part of a continuing resolution that kept the government operating. According to a new report from the Center for American Progress’ Scott Lilly, those cuts didn’t result in the job creating boon Republicans insisted would follow. Instead, it has done just the opposite, as those cuts will result in the destruction of roughly 370,000 jobs.

Lilly’s report focuses on three major areas where Republicans insisted on spending cuts: funding for local law enforcement, environmental cleanup of sites where nuclear weapons were disabled and destroyed, and investments into construction, repair, and maintenance of government buildings. Cuts to just those three areas will result in the loss of 90,000 jobs, the report found — 60,000 from direct cuts, and 30,000 additional jobs lost from the secondary impacts of job losses in each community.

[...]

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Thursday, October 27, 2011

With A Stroke Of His Pen Obama Strikes Back At Citizens United

http://www.politicususa.com/en/obama-citizens-united

April 21, 2011

A little over a year ago the Supreme Court of the United States made a controversial ruling that says corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited. The case known as Citizens United v Federal Election Commission allows corporations to use their general funds to buy campaign ads that was prohibited under federal law, and opened the door for unlimited contributions by corporations as well as unions. The high court cited the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of the right of free speech, and it was the first time a corporate entity was treated like a person. Detractors of the ruling cried foul and correctly pointed out that, “The Supreme Court has handed lobbyists a new weapon. A lobbyist can now tell any elected official: if you vote wrong, my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election.” The ruling also opened the door for foreign governments to affect the outcome of United States elections.

There was an attempt to assuage the damage from Citizens United in the form of the Disclose Act that passed in the Democratic controlled House last year but failed in the Senate because Democrats couldn’t muster the super majority needed to overcome Republican’s filibuster threat. The failed legislation provided tough new disclosure rules for groups that invest in the election process. President Obama summed up the necessity of the Disclose Act calling it “a critical piece of legislation to control the flood of special interest money into our elections,” and, “that it mandates unprecedented transparency in campaign spending, and it ensures that corporations who spend money on American elections are accountable first and foremost to the American people.” Since Republicans are enamored with the notion of unlimited special interest money without transparency or accountability, it was not surprising they threatened to filibuster the measure. The 2010 midterm elections confirmed Americans’ fears with money from special interest groups and corporations flooding the airwaves with fallacious assertions and inaccurate characterizations of everything from the health law to socialist tendencies of Democratic candidates. It appeared that since the Disclose Act failed, elections would be bought by the highest bidder for years to come, but a report today gives some hope that democracy is not dead in America; yet.

On Wednesday it was reported that President Obama was drafting an executive order that would require companies pursuing federal contracts to disclose political contributions that have been secret under the Citizen’s United ruling. A senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Hans A. von Spakovsky, lambasted the proposed executive order saying that, “The draft order tries to interfere with the First Amendment rights of contractors.” Mr. von Spakovsky dutifully made all the right-wing, neo-con arguments including bringing Planned Parenthood and unions into the discussion. The draft order did not exempt any entity from disclosure rules and presents a reasonable requirement on contractors seeking government contracts. Several states have similar “pay to play” laws to prevent businesses from using unlimited donations to buy lucrative state contracts from slimy legislators. Thus far the only legislator who has railed against the proposed order was Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). McConnell called the proposal an “outrageous and anti-Democratic abuse of executive branch authority,” and went on to say, “Just last year, the Senate rejected a cynical effort to muzzle critics of this administration and its allies in Congress.”

McConnell is working under the assumption that the draft order is an attempt to restrict free speech, but there is nothing in the order remotely resembling free speech violations. The exact wording of the president’s executive order says, “The Federal Government prohibits federal contractors from making certain contributions during the course of negotiation and performance of a contract.” There is no free speech issue and the order applies to union contractors as well as non-union contractors. There is no special dispensation of muzzles or prohibitions on political support; only certain contributions during negotiations and performance. Republicans must hate the idea of corporations like Halliburton or Koch Industries losing the ability to contribute unlimited money to legislators for special treatment in securing government contracts, especially no-bid contracts like the ones Dick Cheney’s company’s received in Iraq and Afghanistan. In lieu of veracity, McConnell accuses President Obama of muzzling critics and suppressing free speech when in fact, the order will bring increased transparency and accountability to the process of awarding contracts. Republicans made it their goal to increase transparency and accountability in government in the lead up to the midterm elections, so McConnell should be thrilled that President Obama is helping them achieve their goal.

The real objection Republicans and the Heritage Foundation have with the order is that it removes the possibility of corporate money influencing government more than it already does. The Citizens’ United ruling was a gift to Republicans who do the bidding of corporations in exchange for campaign contributions and it became obvious after reports that two Supreme Court Justices attended a secret Koch Industries strategy meeting prior to voting to extend free speech rights to corporations just in time for the 2010 midterm campaigns.

The midterm elections saw a record amount of campaign contributions from anonymous sources that were illegal for years until the high court broke with precedent and gave personhood to corporations. The rash of Republican governors’ victories and subsequent corporate favoritism and tax cuts at the expense of poor and working class Americans is evidence that there is a serious need for accountability and transparency in campaign financing.


[...]

..

Climate-change skeptic: ‘You should not be a skeptic.’

http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2011/10/24/climate-change-skeptic-you-should-not-be-a-skeptic/

12:51 pm October 24, 2011, by Jay

Richard Muller, a physics professor at Cal-Berkeley, has been a celebrated skeptic about the true extent of climate change.

[...]

So Muller, acting in the best traditions of science, decided to redo that work. He put together a top-notch team that included Saul Perlmutter, who just recently won the Nobel Prize in physics, and Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, another noted scientist who has been critical of some of the work of some of her peers. Their project — funded in part by a grant from the Charles M. Koch Foundation — just completed its two-year work.

Last week, Muller and the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team released its findings (the results have yet to undergo peer review). As Muller described it:

Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK. This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.

As he wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

“When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.”

Here’s a chart produced by Muller’s team, documenting the findings of three other research teams as well as the BEST team. Note how closely the findings track each other.



..

Police find secret phone at centerof Murdoch's "News International" phone hacking

News International is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox "News".

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/exclusive-met-finds-secret-phone-at-centre-of-ni-hacking-2375996.html

James Cusick and Cahal Milmo
Wednesday, 26 October 2011

Specialist detectives from the Metropolitan Police have discovered the existence of a secret mobile phone within News International's east London headquarters that was used in more than 1,000 incidents of illegal hacking.

The Independent has established that the phone, nicknamed "the hub", was registered to News International and located on the News of the World's news desk. Operation Weeting, the Metropolitan Police's hacking inquiry, has evidence that it was used illegally to access 1,150 numbers between 2004 and 2006.

Weeting officers regard the extensive use of the phone over two years as significant new evidence, showing that phone hacking was carried out within the paper's newsroom.

[...]

A former journalist on the NOTW confirmed the existence of the "hub phone" saying that, inside his former newspaper's offices, it was controlled by a nucleus of individuals on the newsdesk, leaving reporters to operate "like IRA cells who were assigned stories, given precise information, but never told where this information actually came from".

The former reporter claimed that the newsdesk executives at the tabloid "kept their cards close to their chests". He said reporters "would be told precisely where a person would be at a given time, so we could go and intercept, photograph and question them. That person would be surprised at how we had discovered their whereabouts. In retrospect the obvious explanation is that a voicemail was left somewhere in which the person had declared their intention to be at a specific location at a specific time." The "hub" was described by the ex-reporter as being "at the heart of the NOTW newsroom". He said that it had been used to conduct hacking "on an industrial scale".

[...]

..

Typical Hourly Wage Went Up Just $1.23 In The Last 36 Years

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/27/355082/chart-hourly-wage-36-years/

By Laura Pereyra on Oct 27, 2011 at 1:55 pm

[...]

As noted by the Half in Ten Campaign’s new report, “Restoring Shared Prosperity: Strategies to Cut Poverty and Expand Economic Growth,” the hourly wage of a typical worker grew from $14.73 in 1973 to $15.96 in 2009, for a raise in real terms (after accounting for inflation) of $1.23 over 36 years. Yes, you read that right. Only $1.23, an 8.4 percent increase over the last 36 years.

Top earners, meanwhile, saw a gain of $12.70 per hour gain (30 percent) over the same time frame. The growing gaps between the wealthy and everyone else could not be more stark.

tags: income inequality
..

EPA chief encourages college activists in campaign against coal Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/27/128523/epa-chief-encourages-college-activists.html#ixzz1c1tIcQ00

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/27/128523/epa-chief-encourages-college-activists.html

Posted on Thursday, October 27, 2011
By Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — College environmental activists met Thursday with Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson to tell her what they're doing at their schools to try to shut down campus coal-fired heating plants.

"It's so important that your voices are heard, that campuses that are supposed to be teaching people aren't meanwhile polluting the surrounding community with mercury and costing the children a few IQ points because of the need to generate power. It's simply not fair," Jackson said.

The three dozen student activists from coal-consuming states such as Georgia, Kentucky and Indiana included leaders of Sierra Club campus groups that have been pushing to switch from coal to cleaner forms of energy.

"Make sure we don't lose what we have already in trying to keep stretching forward," Jackson told them. "Because it would be tragic if we take one step forward and then we end up taking five or six steps back."

Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, have held 168 roll-call votes so far this year on measures that would reduce the EPA's authority under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, waste-disposal laws and other national laws.

"None of them are safe right now," Jackson said of those environmental-protection statutes. "It was my generation and a generation before who advocated in the '60s until 1970, and finally they created the EPA in 1970. You would think all that's behind us? We're talking about losing all that."

[...]

..

#OccupySickDay: America is Serving Notice on the 1% with a Nationwide Strike

http://www.politicususa.com/en/occupy-sick-day

Circulating the Internet were rumors of a nationwide strike which have now been confirmed. There was a consensus among the General Assembly with an overwhelming majority supporting a strike right at the heart of the 1%.

[...]

Mother Jones tweets:

From our reporter at #occupyoakland General Assembly just now MT @timmcdonnell: General strike passes with 1184 votes of approval

Occupiers plan to shut down the 1% on November 2nd. In addition, they are calling for students to walk out of school

[...]


tags: Occupy Wall Street, OWS
..
Last week on Facebook, there was a photo of a young man who claimed he works long hours at two jobs, and doesn't need any help, so why should anybody else.

I wonder, if he is telling the truth, how did he find enough time to make a sign and hang out at the protest?

And I didn't see anybody mention that if he is working two jobs, that means a job that is not available for someone who is out of work.



..

Occupy Earth: Nature Is the 99%, Too

Please read the whole article at this link. Excellent.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/27-4

Published on Thursday, October 27, 2011 by TomDispatch.com
by Chip Ward

What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems -- its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere -- goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?

Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.

In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.

Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.

And here’s another formula: when there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.

The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.

Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By “externalizing” such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar “superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.

[...]

In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbors and I learned this simple truth: decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily experience.

[...]

Poll after poll shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds fracked until they are flammable by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the “magic” of the marketplace and unchecked capital.

[...]

Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop the hill, while the 99% will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris, or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.

[...]

Nature’s 99% is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.

When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like climate, ecosystems, immune systems, or fetal development, we are only beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we’re losing them at an accelerating rate. Forests are dying, fisheries are going, extinction is on steroids.

Degrading the planet’s operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it’s unfair. The 1% profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.

After Occupy Wall Street, isn’t it time for Occupy Earth?

..

As Oil Companies Announce $24B in Profits, Rep. Stearns Says, “When Somebody Is Successful Then You Give Them Subsidies”

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/10/27/355251/cliff-stearns-subsidies/

By Stephen Lacey on Oct 27, 2011 at 4:47 pm

So far this week, four the world’s top five oil companies have announced more than $24 billion in third quarter profits. And by the logic of Florida Congressman Cliff Stearns, that should mean those oil companies deserve more subsidies, not less.

Speaking at a town hall meeting last weekend in his home state of Florida, Stearns displayed a very sketchy grasp on how subsidies should work, explaining to Climate Progress that incentives should be given to mature companies, not early-stage companies.

“When somebody is successful, then you give them the subsidies and the tax credit,” explained Stearns, talking to Climate Progress. In short, the rich get richer. This is how the 1% operate. No wonder income inequality is growing in this country.

Stearns has backed that up with hearty government rewards to the most profitable, successful companies on the planet — voting multiple times to continue billions in tax breaks to oil companies while voting against shifting those incentives to the nascent clean energy industry.

As Chairman of one of the House subcommittees investigating the Solyndra loan, Stearns has railed against government loan guarantees, saying they “pick winners and losers.” But when talking to Climate Progress about the topic of loan guarantees, Stearns completely misunderstood how the policy works, saying it’s “where the government gives you money outright.”

In fact, a loan guarantee is exactly the opposite. It is simply an agreement with private lenders that the government will back a loan in case of default. The government is not actually giving any money outright — it only provides federal funds through a loan guarantee in a worst-case scenario. In order to qualify for the program, recipients must prove that they’ve raised adequate private capital. And in the case of power-plant developments, companies must have a long-term agreement to sell the energy.

To round out his mind-bending logic on subsidies, Stearns calls for more federal support of nuclear, an industry he admits has gotten “a huge amount of subsidies.” However, no nuclear power plants have been built in the U.S. in more than 30 years — and none would likely get built in this country without government-backed insurance and loan guarantees.

[...]

Putting aside the fact that new solar PV plants can be cheaper than new nuclear plants, Stearns seems to think that nuclear is a domestic industry. Actually, most of the equipment manufactured for power plants would be coming from international companies — in some cases financed by national governments.

Stearns’ stance on government involvement is one long series of contradictions that inherently favors subsidies for oil, gas and nuclear, while disadvantaging renewables. That’s something to keep that in mind during the Solyndra investigation, as he continues to rail against government investments in clean energy.



[...]

..

ABC And CBS News Both Cut Away Due To "Technical Difficulties" At Onset Of Oakland Police Violence

ABC And CBS News Both Cut Away Due To Technical Difficulties At Onset Of Oakland Police Violence

Posted by JacobSloan on October 27, 2011

In more on the mainstream media’s bizarre coverage of Tuesday night’s police brutality in Oakland, a number of blogs have commented on this — both ABC and CBS local affiliates had helicopters providing live feeds as events unfolded in front of Oakland’s City Hall. Allegedly, both television channels cut their transmissions when the police began attacking protesters, and both said it was due to their helicopters’ needing refueling. That’s right — both the ABC and CBS helicopters ran out of fuel at the same moment. The moment when the newsworthy events began to occur. One can only say, wow.

[...]

..

Shooting Of Marine Veteran In Oakland Sparks Ire Of Occupy Navy, Police, Army, And Marines; Vow To Protect Innocent Protesters

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/10/27/shooting-of-marine-veteran-in-oakland-sparks-ire-of-occupy-navy-police-army-and-marines-vow-to-protect-innocent-protesters/

October 27, 2011
By Stephen D. Foster Jr.

In response to this violent act committed by police against an innocent protester and fellow serviceman, Occupy Marines, Occupy Police, Occupy Navy, and Occupy Army are vowing to protect the protesters from those who would commit violence against them.

Occupy Marines tweeted the following message.

“WHEN YOU SHOOT ONE MARINE, YOU SHOOT AT ALL OF US. OORAH. Do It Peacefully Occupy We Stand In Solidarity”


[...]

..

Right-Wing Filmmaker Gives Away Bongs And Che Guevara Rolling Papers At Occupy Wall Street

www.addictinginfo.org/2011/10/26/right-wing-filmmaker-gives-away-bongs-and-che-guevara-rolling-papers-at-ows/

October 26, 2011
By Wendy Gittleson

Evan Coyne Maloney, who’s been called the conservative answer to Michael Moore, occupied Occupy Wall Street with his film crew, a bunch of ‘gotcha’ questions and some ‘hippie pothead’ bling.

Maloney is apparently best known for a film about political correctness in education, called “IndoctrinateU.” According to Crooks and Liars, Maloney is marketed by Donor’s Trust, a non-profit which is funded by the Koch Brothers along with other conservative operatives.

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Right-Wing Filmmaker Gives Away Bongs And Che Guevara Rolling Papers At Occupy Wall Street
October 26, 2011
By Wendy Gittleson

Evan Coyne Maloney, who’s been called the conservative answer to Michael Moore, occupied Occupy Wall Street with his film crew, a bunch of ‘gotcha’ questions and some ‘hippie pothead’ bling.

Maloney is apparently best known for a film about political correctness in education, called “IndoctrinateU.” According to Crooks and Liars, Maloney is marketed by Donor’s Trust, a non-profit which is funded by the Koch Brothers along with other conservative operatives.


The video below is kind of all over the place, especially in the beginning, but around the 4:40 mark, a protester confronts Maloney about the fact that he is handing out bongs and rolling papers instead of things the protesters can actually use, like blankets and food. The protester accuses Maloney of essentially planting the paraphernalia in an attempt to show the protesters in a bad light on Fox News. Maloney replies, “I don’t know if they’ll pick it up. Maybe you’ll see it on CNN.”

[...] [See linked article for video]

The right-wing discredits those who scare them, so obviously, OWS is making its impact. The bad news is that their attempts to discredit often work. Just ask Van Jones, Acorn, NPR, Planned Parenthood and Shirley Sherrod.

[...]

..

Steve Jobs Called Fox News ‘Destructive’ And Called On Jon Stewart To Help Change Direction Of Fox

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/10/27/steve-jobs-called-fox-news-destructive-and-called-on-jon-stewart-to-help-change-direction-of-fox/

A long-awaited biography of Steve Jobs sort of bounced off bookstore shelves this week. Walter Isaacson’s book, entitled simply, “Steve Jobs,” has been greeted with great reviews and stellar sales.

According to Isaacson’s book, Jobs, a Democrat, told Rupert Murdoch that Fox News was “an incredibly destructive force in our society,” and that he planned to ask Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” to create a montage of Fox News clips for Murdoch to watch. According to the book, Jobs told Murdoch:

“The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is conservative-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. FOX has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.”

[...]

..

Protests info

https://occupywallst.org/

http://www.occupytogether.org/

This has a list of links to Occupy groups around the country.





tags: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Together, OWS
..

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Congressional approval has reached a new low at 9 percent

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/25/us/politics/approval-of-congress-drops-to-single-digits.html?ref=politics

Published: October 25, 2011
THE NEW YORK TIMES/CBS NEWS POLL

The number of people who approve of Congress has dropped to 9%.

=============================================================

I
n the following article, I noticed they put the low ratings of Republicans way down below results about President Obama.

www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/us/politics/poll-finds-anxiety-on-the-economy-fuels-volatility-in-the-2012-race.html?_r=1&ref=us

New Poll Finds a Deep Distrust of Government

By JEFF ZELENY and MEGAN THEE-BRENAN
Published: October 25, 2011

With Election Day just over a year away, a deep sense of economic anxiety and doubt about the future hangs over the nation, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, with Americans’ distrust of government at its highest level ever.

[...]

Almost half of the public thinks the sentiment at the root of the Occupy movement generally reflects the views of most Americans.

With nearly all Americans remaining fearful that the economy is stagnating or deteriorating further, two-thirds of the public said that wealth should be distributed more evenly in the country. Seven in 10 Americans think the policies of Congressional Republicans favor the rich. Two-thirds object to tax cuts for corporations and a similar number prefer increasing income taxes on millionaires.

[...]

Not only do 89 percent of Americans say they distrust government to do the right thing, but 74 percent say the country is on the wrong track and 84 percent disapprove of Congress — warnings for Democrats and Republicans alike.

[...]

The approval rating for Mr. Obama, 46 percent, appears to be elevated by positions he has taken on foreign affairs. Sixty percent of those questioned said they approve of his handling of Iraq, a question added to the poll after his announcement last Friday that American troops would come home by the end of the year.

But the president, whose disapproval rating is also 46 percent, also faces mixed signals from the public about his latest job-creation proposals. While the poll found substantial support for the plan’s individual components, more than half of the public say he lacks a clear plan for creating jobs, despite his extensive travels around the country over the last six weeks selling his proposals.

[...]

Congressional Republicans are viewed even worse than the president, with 71 percent of the public saying the party does not have a clear plan for creating jobs. And support for several other Republican proposals is more tepid than for Mr. Obama’s initiatives to lift the economy.

Only about a quarter of the public said that lowering taxes on large corporations or repealing the entire national health care law was a good idea. But half of the public favors reducing or repealing regulations on businesses in the United States.

[...]


In February, a CBS News poll found that 27 percent of the public said the views of the Tea Party movement reflected the sentiment of most Americans. In the current poll, 46 percent of the public said the same of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

..

Iraq vet in critical condition after Oakland protest

Something that is a certainty, based on past experience, is that there are some people being paid to make the protests look bad. (Of course, any large group will have people who are not rational.)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/26/BAE71LMH3C.DTL

San Francisco Chronicle
Will Kane,Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 26, 2011


tags: Occupy Wall Street, OWS
[...]

Several hours after the raid on the camp, a march turned into a protracted street confrontation between protesters and police officers, who set off tear gas and used shotguns to fire projectiles designed to inflict pain but not kill.

Police said they had to protect themselves from protesters who hurled rocks, bottles and paint, and ignored orders to disperse.

Authorities have not released information on injuries from the clash. However, officials at Highland Hospital in Oakland said today that one protester, Scott Olsen of Daly City, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, was in critical condition.

The antiwar group said Olsen, a systems network administrator, suffered a skull fracture when he was hit by a "blunt object." Olsen joined the U.S. Marines in 2006, served two tours in Iraq, and was discharged in 2010, the group said.

Video footage widely distributed on the Internet shows a protester - identified by the antiwar group as Olsen - being carried away by others with a wound to his face. While he lay wounded, the footage appears to show an officer tossing a tear gas canister toward people trying to help him.

[...]

..

Annual Screening With Chest X-Ray Does Not Reduce Rate of Lung Cancer Deaths Much, Study Finds

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111026143717.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2011) — In a trial that included more than 150,000 participants, those who underwent annual chest radiographic screening for up to 4 years did not have a significantly lower rate of death from lung cancer compared to participants who were not screened, according to a study in the November 2 issue of JAMA. The study is being published early online to coincide with its presentation at the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST 2011).

[...]

During the entire 13 year study period, there were 1,696 lung cancers detected in the intervention group and 1,620 lung cancers in the usual care group. Of participants diagnosed with lung cancer during the follow-up, stage and histology was similar by group, with about 41 percent being adenocarcinoma, 20 percent squamous cell carcinoma, 14 percent small cell carcinoma, 5 percent large cell carcinoma, and 20 percent other non-small cell lung cancer.

Regarding the effect on mortality, the researchers found that annual chest radiographic screening for up to 4 years did not significantly decrease lung cancer mortality compared with usual care: for the total 13-year follow-up period, 1,213 lung cancer deaths were observed in the intervention group vs. 1,230 in the usual care group.
[...]
..

Culture in Humans and Apes Has the Same Evolutionary Roots, Researchers Show

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111020122313.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — Culture is not a trait that is unique to humans. By studying orangutan populations, a team of researchers headed by anthropologist Michael Krützen from the University of Zurich has demonstrated that great apes also have the ability to learn socially and pass them down through a great many generations. The researchers provide the first evidence that culture in humans and great apes has the same evolutionary roots, thus answering the contentious question as to whether variation in behavioral patterns in orangutans are culturally driven, or caused by genetic factors and environmental influences.

[...]

..

Production of Biofuel from Forests Will Increase Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Study Finds

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111023135657.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 23, 2011) — The largest and most comprehensive study yet done on the effect of biofuel production from West Coast forests has concluded that an emphasis on bioenergy would increase carbon dioxide emissions from these forests at least 14 percent, if the efficiency of such operations is optimal.

The findings are contrary to assumptions and some previous studies that suggest biofuels from this source would be carbon-neutral or even reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In this research, that wasn't true in any scenario.

[...]

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More Time Outdoors May Reduce Kids' Risk for Nearsightedness, Research Suggests

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111024084639.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2011) — A new analysis of recent eye health studies shows that more time spent outdoors is related to reduced rates of nearsightedness, also known as myopia, in children and adolescents. Myopia is much more common today in the United States and many other countries than it was in the 1970s. In parts of Asia, more than 80 percent of the population is nearsighted. The analysis suggests that more exposure to natural light and/or time spent looking at distant objects may be key factors.

[...]

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Recycling Thermal Cash Register Receipts Contaminates Paper Products With BPA

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111026122406.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2011) — Bisphenol A (BPA) -- a substance that may have harmful health effects -- occurs in 94 percent of thermal cash register receipts, scientists are reporting. The recycling of those receipts, they add, is a source of BPA contamination of paper napkins, toilet paper, food packaging and other paper products.

The report, which could have special implications for cashiers and other people who routinely handle thermal paper receipts, appears in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology.

[...]

the researchers analyzed hundreds of samples of thermal cash register receipts and 14 other types of paper products from the U.S., Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

They found BPA on 94 percent of the receipts. The only receipts with that were BPA-free were those from Japan, which phased out this use of BPA in 2001. BPA was in most of the other types of paper products, with tickets, newspapers and flyers having the highest concentrations. But these levels still paled in comparison to BPA on receipts, which the study said are responsible for more than 98 percent of consumer exposure to BPA from paper. The researchers estimate that receipts contribute about 33.5 tons of BPA to the environment every year in the U.S. and Canada. They note that handling of paper products can contribute up to 2 percent of the total daily BPA exposures in the general population, and that fraction can be much higher in occupationally exposed individuals.

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Environmental Toxin Bisphenol A (BPA) Can Affect Newborn Brain, Mouse Study Shows

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111026094203.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2011) — Newborn mice that are exposed to bisphenol A develop changes in their spontaneous behavior and evince poorer adaptation to new environments, as well hyperactivity as young adults, according to researchers at Uppsala University. Their study also revealed that one of the brain's most important signal systems, the cholinergic signal system, is affected by bisphenol A and that the effect persisted into adulthood.

Our environment contains a number of pollutants, including bisphenol A, which is used in plastics in a number of different applications. When plastic products are used, bisphenol A can leak out, which is especially problematic as it is used in baby bottles, tin cans, plastic containers, plastic mugs, which are used by people of all ages. Both in Sweden and globally, bisphenol A is widely used, and the substance has been found in human placentas, fetuses, and breast milk.

[...]

"We have previously seen this type of effect from several other environmental toxins that are still prevalent in both indoor and outdoor environments. As these effects are similar to each other, it's possible that several different environmental toxins, including bisphenol A, may work together in causing disturbances during brain development. This in turn may mean that the individual dosages of the various environmental toxins that are required to cause disturbances may be lower than those we examined in our studies of, for example, Bisphenol and brominated flame-retardants," says Henrik Viberg.


tags: pollution
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Gap between U.S. rich, poor is widest in Atlanta

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45052935/ns/us_news-life/#.TqiP4HIzC8s

Oct. 26, 2011

Atlanta has widest income gap between rich and poor of all the major U.S. cities, the U.S. Census reported on Wednesday. New Orleans ranked second, followed by the U.S. capital, Washington, D.C.

Areas with the highest income inequality "tend to be found in cities, with older housing on average, while the most income-segregated areas ... tend to be found in the suburbs," the census reported.

Rounding out the list of 10 big cities with the largest gaps between high and low income are Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Gainesville, all in Florida; Athens, Ga.; New York; Dallas; and Baton Rouge, La.

The major cities with the lowest income inequality were almost all in the West, and all had much smaller populations.

[...]

The U.S. recession that began in 2007 took a steep toll across the country, with only a few places spared from a rise in jobless rates and a decline in incomes. Nearly two years after the recession officially ended in 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate remains above 9 percent, and the poverty rate tops 15 percent.

Income levels have taken a dip for families nationwide. For example, median household income dipped to $49,445 in 2010 — the lowest since 1996, census figures showed.

[...]

The agency also pulled back to look at the states. New York has the widest gap between rich and poor, followed by Connecticut and Louisiana. Using three separate measures, the Census found those states, along with Mississippi, Texas, Alabama and California, have greater income inequality than the nation as a whole.

Utah, Alaska and New Hampshire have the smallest gaps.

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Tennessee Agency Charges 86-Year Old Veteran An Unconstitutional Poll Tax To Obtain Voter ID

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/10/26/353712/tennessee-veteran-voter-id-pay/

By Tanya Somanader on Oct 26, 2011 at 12:20 pm

Pointing to a problem that doesn’t exist, Tennessee Republicans created a voter ID law this year which, they say, will ensure that only those eligible to vote can do so. As predicted, the law is disenfranchising the poor, elderly, and minority voters, including a 96-year-old African-American woman, a 91-year old woman, and now, a 86-year old veteran.

World War II veteran Darwin Spinks went to a testing center last month to get a photo ID for voting purposes. Under the law, any resident without a photo ID is supposed to get one free of charge. But when Spinks asked for an ID, he was told he had to pay an $8 fee:

Spinks said Tuesday he needed the photo because when his driver’s license with a photo expired the last time, the driver testing center issued him a new license without a photo on it. State law allows people over 60 to get a non-photo driver’s license.

The retired print shop worker who moved here 17 years ago said he told people at the driver center he wanted an ID for voting purposes. He was sent from one line to another to have a picture taken, then was charged.

“I said, ‘You mean I’ve got to pay again?’ She says, ‘Yes,’” explained Spinks, a resident of County Farm Road, who was stationed on the USS Goshen in World War II and was called to duty again for the Korean War.

Forcing an American citizen to pay in order to vote is a clear violation of the constitution’s 24th Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or the other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.” The amendment was specifically enacted in 1962 to end the poll tax, a fee that was used to prevent the black population from voting.

The Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security said it will send Spinks a letter and an affidavit to sign which states that he does not have a valid government-issued photo ID. Only then will they refund his $8. “If he came in for a photo ID for voting purposes, he should not have been charged,” the department stated.

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Oakland Police Toss Flash Grenade At Protesters Helping Injured Person

http://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/10/26/353890/video-oakland-police-toss-flash-grenades-at-protesters-helping-injured-person/

Despite initial denials, Oakland-area police deliberately fired and tossed flash-bang grenades at Occupy Oakland protesters last night, even ones who had been visibly harmed by the police assault. Video shot by KTVU shows flash-bang grenades fired by riot police deep into the protesting crowd. Near the barricades where a Veteran for Peace holds his flag amid tear gas, a protester is knocked down by a flash-bang grenade. After a crowd surrounds the victim, riot police toss more flash-bang grenades into their midst. The police initially denied that officers had used flash-bang grenades. “The loud noises that were heard originated from M-80 explosives thrown at police by protesters,” a statement from the department falsely claimed.


tags: social justice, police brutality, Occupy Wallstreet, OWS
[...]

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Life Without Stimulus — The U.S. vs. The U.K.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/26/354460/chart-stimulus-us-u/

At Tax.com, Martin Sullivan rebuts those who claim that the 2009 Recovery Act (i.e. the stimulus) did nothing to boost the economy. “Republicans constantly remind us that the Obama stimulus — the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — did not work. They voted against it. In the United Kingdom the government is led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. His government did not adopt stimulus,” Sullivan noted. “After three and a half years, U.S. GDP is just about returning to the pre-recession peak. That’s awful. But it’s far better than the U.K. where GDP is still five percent ($750 billion in US terms) below its pre-recession peak.”

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Bush created more regulations than Obama

Some regulation is desirable.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/26/353942/bush-more-regulations-than-obama/

By Tanya Somanader on Oct 26, 2011 at 1:45 pm

Republican lawmakers have been raking President Obama over the coals due to what they call a “tsunami” of new government regulations. “Business owners are reluctant to create jobs today if they’re going to need to pay more tomorrow to comply with onerous new regulations,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). Obama’s “excessive regulations that unnecessarily increase costs” just “make it harder for our economy to create jobs,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

As with most GOP talking points, the facts tell a different story. A Bloomberg analysis of regulations reveals that Obama has approved fewer regulations than President George W. Bush “at this same point in their tenures, and the estimated costs of those rules haven’t reached the annual peak set in fiscal 1992 under Bush’s father.” Indeed, the record for the most expensive regulations still belongs to the GOP:

Obama’s White House approved 613 federal rules during the first 33 months of his term, 4.7 percent fewer than the 643 cleared by President George W. Bush’s administration in the same time frame, according to an Office of Management and Budget statistical database reviewed by Bloomberg. [...]

In the last 12 months through the end of September, the cost range of new regulations is estimated to be $8 billion to $9 billion, a decrease from 2010, according to non-partisan Government Accountability Office reports analyzed by Bloomberg…The record [cost of regulations] came in 1992 under George H.W. Bush when that total hit $20.9 billion in current dollars. In the last year of Ronald Reagan’s term it was $16 billion in today’s dollars.

We certainly don’t remember Republicans crying about the “excessive” Bush regulations.

More of Obama’s regulations may cost more than $100 million as compared to previous administrations. But many of them help prevent outcomes that would cost exponentially more. For instance, the Department of Interior’s new controls on deep-water oil drilling may cost the industry $180 million, but one oil spill like that caused by Deepwater Horizon could cost the industry $16.3 billion. Some of the administration’s rules, like those governing coal ash, will actually help create thousands of jobs.

The impact of these regulations on small businesses is incredibly minimal. In fact, of the 10,361 mass layoffs last year, only 61 were attributed to regulations. When McClatchy asked small business owners why they have been hesitant to hire, “none of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it.”

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Tuesday, October 25, 2011

CBO: Income Of The Top 1 Percent Exploded Over The Last Three Decades

See the link for an illustrating graph. It would certainly be even more astounding if it showed the very top incomes broken out, like for the top .01%

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/25/353359/cbo-income-one-percent-explode/

Congressional Budget Office today released a new report on the growth in income that’s occurred in the U.S. over the last three decades. CBO found that, “for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007,” while it grew by just 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent of the income scale. “As a result of that uneven income growth, the distribution of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979,” CBO said.

[...]

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NPR dumps opera show over D.C. protest

This is crazy. It's an opera show, not a news program.

Some of NPR's reasons that listeners should donate to them are really farcical. Eg., this morning, they mentioned a program they did on why some people don't believe in global warming' it was because of lack of information. Of course, they didn't mention that NPR had a blackout for years on any mention of global warming or negative effects from warm weather. They only started mentioning it after their oil company sponsors finally admitted that man-made global warming is real, although some continue to fund denialist organizations.
Also this morning, WABE, a local NPR radio station touted "growing local coverage". I have heard little if anything on WABE about Occupy Atlanta.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-20124068/npr-dumps-opera-show-over-dc-protest/

October 21, 2011 9:02 PM
(AP)

WASHINGTON - NPR will no longer distribute the affiliate-produced program "World of Opera" to about 60 stations across the country because the show host helped organize an ongoing Washington protest, a network official said Friday evening.

Instead, North Carolina-based classical music station WDAV, which produces the show, said it will distribute the nationally syndicated program on its own beginning Nov. 11. The station said it plans to keep Lisa Simeone as host and has said her involvement in a political protest does not affect her job as a music program host.

[...]


http://warisacrime.org/content/npr-gets-producer-fired-occupying

[...]

Simeone told me: "I find it puzzling that NPR objects to my exercising my rights as an American citizen -- the right to free speech, the right to peaceable assembly -- on my own time in my own life. I'm not an NPR employee. I'm a freelancer. NPR doesn't pay me. I'm also not a news reporter. I don't cover politics. I've never brought a whiff of my political activities into the work I've done for NPR World of Opera. What is NPR afraid I'll do -- insert a seditious comment into a synopsis of Madame Butterfly?

"This sudden concern with my political activities is also surprising in light of the fact that Mara Liaason reports on politics for NPR yet appears as a commentator on FoxTV, Scott Simon hosts an NPR news show yet writes political op-eds for national newspapers, Cokie Roberts reports on politics for NPR yet accepts large speaking fees from businesses. Does NPR also send out 'Communications Alerts' about their activities?"

[...]

=============================================================

[From my observation, I believe that Cokie Roberts is certainly Republican.]

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If only GOP lawmakers were more like GOP voters

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_10/if_only_gop_lawmakers_were_mor033072.php

October 25, 2011 2:15 PM
By Steve Benen

I imagine everyone has seen the bumper sticker that says, “Lord, protect us from your followers.” I have an idea for a related sticker that reads, “Republicans, protect us from your elected officials.”

In the existing political landscape, the real problem is not with GOP voters; it’s with GOP policymakers. This isn’t to let the party’s supporters off the hook entirely — they’re the ones who supported and elected the officeholders — but it’s hard to overstate how much more constructive the political process would be if Republican lawmakers in any way reflected the priorities of their own supporters.

Last week, a national poll found that Republican voters broadly support the Democratic jobs agenda — a payroll tax cut, jobs for teachers/first responders, infrastructure investments, and increased taxes on millionaires and billionaires — in some cases by wide margins. This week, Tim Noah noticed this observation can be applied even further.

I’m liking rank-and-file Republicans better and better. Earlier this month we learned that they favor Obama’s plan to tax the rich. Now we learn that a 55 percent majority of them think Wall Street bankers and brokers are “dishonest,” 69 percent think they’re “overpaid,” and 72 percent think they’re “greedy.” Fewer than half (47 percent) have an unfavorable view of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Thirty-three percent either favor them or have no opinion, and 20 percent haven’t heard of them. Also, a majority favor getting rid of the Electoral College and replacing it with a popular vote. After the 2000 election only 41 percent did. Now 53 percent do. How cool is that?

Every one of these positions puts the GOP rank-and-file at odds with their congressional leadership and field of presidential candidates.

I don’t want to exaggerate this too much. The fact remains that the Republican Party is dominated by conservative voters, especially those who participate in primaries and caucuses. I’m not suggesting for a moment that the party’s rank-and-file members are moving to the left.

But the recent poll results are also hard to miss — many if not most GOP voters are perfectly comfortable with plenty of progressive ideas, including tax increases on millionaires and billionaires. It’s starting to look like the party’s rank and file is made up of mainstream conservatives who want their party to help move the country forward.

And yet, when we look to Republican officials in Washington, how many GOP members of Congress are willing to endorse any of these popular measures? Zero. Literally, not even one Republican lawmaker has offered even tacit support for ideas that most GOP voters actually like. In the Senate, a united Republican caucus won’t even allow a vote — won’t even allow a debate — on popular job-creation ideas during a jobs crisis.
[...]

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Tax breaks, incentives for companies in Florida haven't produced promised jobs Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/25/128212/tax-breaks-incentives-for-companies.html#ixzz1bq8xrlX4

Not surprising, since Georgia is also friendly to business, and has had a higher unemployment rate than the U.S. average, every month for more than 4 years.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/25/128212/tax-breaks-incentives-for-companies.html

Posted on Tuesday, October 25, 2011

By Michael C. Bender | The Miami Herald

TALLAHASSEE — Florida has given tax breaks and other cash incentives to some of the world’s biggest companies in return for creating jobs.

But even Wal-Mart, Publix, Kraft Foods and other corporate giants have had trouble meeting job goals.

New data shows Florida has signed contracts worth $1.7 billion since 1995 in return for promises of 225,000 new jobs. But only about one-third of those jobs have been filled while the state has paid out 43 percent of the contracts.

That averages out to $10,237 per job.

[...]

Information on the performance of Florida’s incentive programs comes as Gov. Rick Scott prepares his budget request for new tax incentives next year. At least $125 million will be available in a fund lawmakers created for incentives.

State data shows at least 327 incentive contracts came up short, producing nearly 35,000 fewer jobs than promised. That includes 33 companies that cut jobs instead of adding work.

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