Sunday, December 31, 2023

Neanderthals were morning people



https://www.science.org/content/article/neanderthals-were-morning-people

15 DEC 2023 5:30 PM ET
BY PHIE JACOBS




Are you a morning person? If so, you might have inherited that trait from a Neanderthal ancestor, researchers report this week in Genome Biology and Evolution.

-----

Tuesday, December 26, 2023

Rationalizing

 

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Monday, December 25, 2023

Lead-tainted cinnamon fruit puree



I those who are against government regulations expect us all to test all of our own food.




https://apnews.com/article/apple-cinnamon-fruit-pouch-wanabana-lead-contamination-1927a5be53ba6d557ec8e17804e06d9f




U.S. food inspectors found “extremely high” levels of lead in cinnamon at a plant in Ecuador that made applesauce pouches tainted with the metal, the FDA said Monday. The recalled pouches have been linked to dozens of illnesses in U.S. kids.

Cinnamon tested from the plant had lead levels more than 2,000 times higher than a maximum level proposed by the FDA, officials said.

The samples came from ground or powdered cinnamon from Negasmart, an Ecuadorian company that supplied the spice to Austrofoods, which made the pouches. The applesauce pouches were sold under three brands — WanaBana, Schnucks and Weis.

FDA said lead has not been detected in WanaBana products made without cinnamon and sold in the U.S.

Sunday, December 24, 2023

DOL looking for people owed back wages

 

The Dept of Labor has money for unclaimed wages from Investigations where they couldn't locate workers. After 3 yrs it is turned over to US Treasury. See their web site for directions on how to check if you are owed money.


https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/wow


Saturday, December 16, 2023

Billionaires Are Bankrolling Judges’ Luxury Travel


And how many more didn't report their gifts, like some supreme court justices.

https://www.levernews.com/billionaires-are-bankrolling-judges-luxury-travel/

 

Dec 15, 2023

 In 2021 and 2022, two conservative, billionaire-funded legal interests sent more than 100 federal judges on 251 trips to conferences and seminars in cushy locations around the country and overseas, according to a Lever review of hundreds of federal financial disclosure forms. 


Friday, December 15, 2023

Alarms raised over missing classified Russian intel file last seen with Trump: report

 

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-russian-documents/

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-russia-intelligence-trump-dg/

 

Tom Boggioni
December 15, 2023 8:41AM ET

 

  According to a report from CNN, U.S. intelligence officials are searching for a missing file containing highly sensitive information about Russia as well as information about Russian interference in the 2016 election.

 -----

According to CNN, "The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top-secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe."

"The binder was last seen at the White House during Trump’s final days in office.

-----

 


 

Thursday, December 07, 2023

10 Reasons Why Societies Fail to Respond to Their Greatest Threats

I suggest reading the whole article


https://www.okdoomer.io/you-arent-the-one-panicking-they-are/


Jessica Wildfire
Dec.7, 2023




Let's face it, we're a mess.


Most of us know we're not doing enough to deal with our greatest threats. Every day, we witness the dumbest behavior, things that seem to fly in the face of our most basic survival instincts.


We ask, "Why???"


The human brain evolved over millions of years. Most psychologists agree, it's good at responding to immediate threats.


It's terrible at responding to slow, gradual threats, even when they're far more important. As Brian Merchant writes in Vice, "Humans have, historically, proven absolutely awful, even incapable, of comprehending the large, looming... slow burn threats facing their societies." In Collapse, Jared Diamond chronicles how leaders of past civilizations failed to address clear dangers because it was easier to shrug them off and downplay them.


As it turns out, there's a lot wrong with the human brain. It's full of contradictory impulses that fight against our better reasoning.


Here's a list:


1) People don't take invisible threats seriously.


Our biggest threats now are invisible.


2) Everyone thinks, "It won't happen to me."


3) People get high off ignoring threats.



It feels good to blow off warnings.

For a lot of people, it delivers a dopamine boost. It gives them a sense of power and control, however fleeting it might be.




4) People shoot the messenger.




People tend to get punished for delivering bad news. Instead of being listened to, they're gaslit and pathologized. They're demonized.




5) People trust their gut too much.




6) People want to forget collective trauma.




7) People can adjust to almost anything.




8) People defend what they consider normal.




Once someone adjusts to a horrible normal, they prefer it.

Change scares them.




9) Most people just want to fit in.

Our desire for social acceptance often overrides our survival instincts, short-circuiting our normal threat response.




10) The elites always panic.

The super rich seem to grasp all of these glitches, at least on an intuitive level. They exploit them for their personal gain.

The corporate media has fallen into a predictable pattern over the last several years, downplaying and dismissing threats instead of giving the public reliable and accurate information. The super rich don't care about saving people. Instead, they obsess over protecting their property from looters and securing the most resources for themselves. They don't want ordinary people to take action, because that threatens their own interests.

Wednesday, December 06, 2023

Woman who spent life in iron lung dies at 61

 

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2008/may/29/woman-who-spent-life-in-iron-lung-dies-at-61/


Woody Baird, AP

May 29, 2008


-----

Odell, 61, died Wednesday when a power failure shut off electricity and stopped the pump drawing air into her lungs.

Family members were unable to get an emergency generator working after a power failure knocked out electricity to the Odell family’s residence.

-----

Odell, who contracted polio when she was 3 years old, lived with her parents, Freeman and Geneva Odell, and their house was equipped with an emergency generator designed to fire up immediately in a power failure.

-----


Saturday, December 02, 2023

Mathematicians may have found an answer to the longstanding puzzle as to why we have evolved to cooperate

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-07/uob-rda071916.php

Public Release: 19-Jul-2016
Researchers discover altruism is favored by chance
Mathematicians may have found an answer to the longstanding puzzle as to why we have evolved to cooperate
University of Bath

•••••

An international team of researchers, publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that altruism is favoured by random fluctuations in nature, offering an explanation to the mystery as to why this seemingly disadvantageous trait has evolved.

The researchers, from the Universities of Bath, Manchester and Princeton (USA), developed a mathematical model to predict the path of evolution when altruistic "cooperators" live alongside "cheats" who use up resources but do not themselves contribute.

•••••

"What we are lacking is an explanation of how these behaviours could have evolved in organisms as basic as yeast. Our research proposes a simple answer - it turns out that cooperation is favoured by chance."

The key insight is that the total size of population that can be supported depends on the proportion of cooperators: more cooperation means more food for all and a larger population. If, due to chance, there is a random increase in the number of cheats then there is not enough food to go around and total population size will decrease. Conversely, a random decrease in the number of cheats will allow the population to grow to a larger size, disproportionally benefitting the cooperators. In this way, the cooperators are favoured by chance, and are more likely to win in the long term.

Dr George Constable, soon to join the University of Bath from Princeton, uses the analogy of flipping a coin, where heads wins £20 but tails loses £10:

"Although the odds winning or losing are the same, winning is more good than losing is bad. Random fluctuations in cheat numbers are exploited by the cooperators, who benefit more then they lose out."

Friday, December 01, 2023

Santos expulsion

 Dec. 1, 2023

Does anybody else think it is warped that stealing donors' credit card info and stealing from them didn't get Santos expelled, but using campaign funds for personal use did. He is hardly the only one to use campaign funds for personal use, including Trump.


Thursday, November 30, 2023

Don't be afraid to change your mind

 

If you never change your mind, it shows you aren't learning




Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Abuse of corpse charge after miscarriage

 This kind of thing was predicted because it has happened at other times & places.


https://www.tribtoday.com/news/local-news/2023/11/womans-abuse-of-corpse-case-heads-to-grand-jury/


Nov. 4, 2023


Brittany Watts, 33, of Tod Avenue NW, faces a single charge of abuse of corpse, a fifth-degree felony. During an arraignment in Warren Municipal Court earlier this month, Watts pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Warren Assistant Prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri said the police investigation found that Watts miscarried the baby while using the restroom and tried to plunge and flush the remains down the toilet, where it got stuck in the pipes

-----

The fetus was about 22 weeks old when the incident took place on Sept. 22

-----

Timko [her lawyer] argues that no law requires a mother suffering from a miscarriage of a non-viable fetus to bury or cremate the remains.

“Women miscarry into toilets everyday. If the state of Ohio expects these women to fish those remains from the toilet and deliver them to a hospital, funeral home or crematorium, the laws need changed,” Timko said, adding that “we aren’t there yet.”

-----


Experts give you permission to stop raking your leaves this fall

 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/to-rake-or-not-to-rake-expert-tips-for-eco-friendly-autumnal-lawn-care


Oct 20, 2023 5:15 PM EST


A pile of golden autumn leaves in front and a wheelbarrow with rake leaning on it in the back

Experts give you permission to stop raking your leaves this fall. Here’s why

 

Autumn is in full swing in communities across the United States, making your sidewalk stroll or mountain hike a little more colorful.

But some view fallen foliage as a mess to be conquered rather than a source of crunchy delight.

READ MORE: The science behind the aroma of fall

Experts say the hallmark of autumnal lawn care — attempting to do away with each leaf that falls on a person’s property — comes with an ecological price.

“Leaves are often thrown out — they’re treated as trash,” said Matthew Shepherd, director of outreach and education at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. By raking and bagging them all up, “we are inadvertently impoverishing our landscapes.”

-----

there are plenty of ways to put an abundance of leaves to good use if homeowners opt to work with nature rather than against it, advocates say.

-----

As temperatures drop, fallen leaves and the soil underneath offer crucial habitat for all kinds of creatures, including salamanders, frogs and rodents. Shepherd noted that this shelter is especially important for the smallest animals, mainly insects and other invertebrates. That list includes cocooned moths and bumblebee queens, as well as those that might be less eye-catching to humans.

-----

Leaf litter is also a destination for non-migrating birds like cardinals, who hop around feasting on the sheltering bugs below.

-----

In Shepherd’s garden, he leaves flower stems and seed heads standing, providing both extra groundcover and food options for wildlife. He gets the benefit of watching the birds over the fall and winter, an entertaining show from the warm indoors.

-----

Dead leaves play a major role in infusing soil with new nutrients. The invertebrates that come along to munch on the leaves start the process of breaking them down before microbes help finish the job.

-----




Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Entitlements

 

Nov. 28, 2023

Irritating to see people saying social security is not an entitlement, as if that were bad.

https://www.britannica.com/money/entitlement

entitlement, generally, any government-provided or government-managed benefit or service to which some or all individuals are entitled by law. 

We need trees

 


Saturday, November 25, 2023

Voting advice

 


Friday, November 24, 2023

Jerry Falwell Jr. lobs attacks that will 'will rock' Liberty U 'to its core'

 

https://www.rawstory.com/jerry-falwell-jr-2666333522/


Nov. 22, 2023


Axios reports that journalist Tim Alberta is coming out with a new book in which Falwell Jr. candidly admits that his late father, Jerry Falwell, Sr., founded the university solely to be an institutional arm of the Republican Party and not to be a Christian university aimed at spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ.


Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Feed and Freeze

 

I wrote this song after reading a few years ago that there are children in our country who routinely lose weight in the winter because their families cannot afford both enough food and heat. And of course people need more food when they are cold.

Feed and Freeze
copyright 2001 Patricia M. Shannon

(chorus)
If I feed my my children, they will freeze
'cause the gas bill is so high.
When they say "Mama, mama, can I have some food",
sometimes I just break down and cry,
sometimes I just break down and cry.

(verse)
They don't understand that I don't have enough food
for them to have their fill.
I have to pay the heating bill
'cause it's cold enough to kill;
it's cold enough to kill;

We turn the thermostat way down
and wear a lot of clothes.
We hang out at the Waffle House,
but the heating bill just grows and grows,
the heating bill just grows.

(chorus)

They say you'll be a big success
if you work really hard.
But I slave all day at the fast food place
and the minimum wage is my reward,
the minimum's my reward

They say they can't pay anymore,
the economy's too slow;
Profits are down, but they gave a raise
and a bonus to the CEO;
a big bonus to the CEO.

(chorus)

Stand together

 

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-intended-for-delivery-the-texas-democratic-state-committee-the-municipal


“Let us not be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our Nation's future is at stake. Let us stand together with renewed confidence in our cause.” – JFK in an undelivered speech intended for Austin, Texas, 11/22/63 presidency.


Monday, November 20, 2023

DEFENSE DEPARTMENT SPENT NEARLY $1 MILLION AT TRUMP PROPERTIES FROM JULY 2017 TO NOVEMBER 2019

 

https://www.americanoversight.org/defense-department-spent-nearly-1-million-at-trump-properties-from-july-2017-to-november-2019-records-obtained-by-american-oversight-reveal


June 8, 2023


Records recently obtained by American Oversight and reported on by Forbes reveal that the Department of Defense spent nearly $1 million at properties owned by former President Donald Trump between July 2017 and November 2019. 

-----

As Everson noted in Forbes, “There’s no full public accounting of how much taxpayers shelled out to the Trump Organization during the Trump administration.”As Everson noted in Forbes, “There’s no full public accounting of how much taxpayers shelled out to the Trump Organization during the Trump administration.”


Friday, November 17, 2023

Climate change is hastening the demise of Pacific Northwest forests



By NATHAN GILLES, Columbia Insight
Nov. 16, 2023

Last year, Buhl and colleagues reported that red cedars were dying throughout the tree’s growing range not because of a fungus or insect attack, but due to the region’s “climate change-induced drought.”

Red cedars aren’t alone.

In recent years, at least 15 native Pacific Northwest tree species have experienced growth declines and die-offs, 10 of which have been linked to drought and warming temperatures, according to recent studies and reports.

-----

Thursday, November 16, 2023

Global decline in male fertility linked to common pesticides

 

Not a surprise.


https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/global-decline-in-male-fertility-linked-to-common-pesticides/3357293/


Nov. 16, 2023


A prolonged decline in male fertility in the form of sperm concentrations appears to be connected to the use of pesticides, according to a study published Wednesday.

Researchers compiled, rated and reviewed the results of 25 studies of certain pesticides and male fertility and found that men who had been exposed to certain classes of pesticides had significantly lower sperm concentrations. The study, published Wednesday in Environmental Health Perspectives, included data from more than 1,700 men and spanned several decades.

“No matter how we looked at the analysis and results, we saw a persistent association between increasing levels of insecticide and decreases in sperm concentration,” said study author Melissa Perry, who is an environmental epidemiologist and the dean of the College of Public Health at George Mason University.

-----



It could happen to us

 From Facebook:

Something to think about....

What if you were a single parent with a child . You work full time for $14.00 hr. You bring home roughly $800 .00 per paycheck (bi-weekly). 


Your bills:

 $1, 000 . 00 / rent 

 $150 .00 / electrical 

 $250 .00 / car payment

 $150 .00 / car insurance


So let’s do the math : 

You bring home about 

$1,600 .00 a month & your bills average about $1,550.00 (give or take).


You’re making it, but barely. 

This doesn't even include groceries, internet, cable, cell phone, etc .

(nor does it include child tax credit, or child support)


Now, it’s a really cold December and you get a power bill for $600 .00

How do you pay that? 

To put it simply , you don’t. 

Because you can’t. 


So your power gets shut off.

But you know what your lease says? 

It says you get evicted if your utilities are terminated.


So now you’re in court crying to a judge who doesn’t care, & you have 10 days to get out. 


Well you’re in luck, because you found somewhere with 3 days to spare & it’s only $650.00 a month! 

But to get in, you must pass a background & credit check. Which you can’t because you just got evicted. 


You’ve never been a criminal, but even if you could pass it, you’re looking at $1300 to move in, after paying the deposit & first month’s rent. 


Time’s up ....

Landlord shows up at 7am with the police & changed your locks. 


So, now you’re living in your car with your 7 year old son & everything you need to get by. 


You tried to get a storage unit, but you don’t have a billing address so they won’t sell one to you. So you could only take what would fit in your backseat.


You pay to shower at local truck stops & eat whatever can be cooked in a gas station microwave.Someone sees you & your son living like this & calls C.P.S; guess what happens next ? ? ? 


They remove your child from your care. 

As if this isn’t devastating enough, you lose your job too. (Because “an employee losing their child reflects poorly on this company .”) 


So now, you apply for an apartment with the region where the waiting list is 3-7 years.

Then you go into Wal-Mart to put in an application.


When you get back to your car you see that your back window has been smashed & someone helped themselves to your belongings. Remember that it is December & really cold. Now you have damage to your only shelter.


You call your car insurance, who says your deductible is $1,000.00 

~ AND ~ they’re going to increase your monthly rate since you’re now 

“ high risk .” 


You call the homeless shelter as a last resort & all their beds are full. 


I’ll stop here .....

Because I think you get the point . 

The people we work with everyday are these people . 

WE ARE THESE PEOPLE .


We are all so close to homelessness & don’t even realize it . 


All it takes is : 

* one unexpected bill📃~

* one fender bender🚙💥🚗~

* one lay-off 📊~

* one house fire 🏠🔥 , etc. 


Instead of talking trash about people who are poor , homeless , or need assistance , why don’t you try being grateful that you’re not in their shoes ...... YET ! 


This is about staying humble & being kind . 


BE THANKFUL FOR WHAT YOU HAVESomething to think about....

What if you were a single parent with a child . You work full time for $14.00 hr. You bring home roughly $800 .00 per paycheck (bi-weekly). 


Your bills:

 $1, 000 . 00 / rent 

 $150 .00 / electrical 

 $250 .00 / car payment

 $150 .00 / car insurance


So let’s do the math : 

You bring home about 

$1,600 .00 a month & your bills average about $1,550.00 (give or take).


You’re making it, but barely. 

This doesn't even include groceries, internet, cable, cell phone, etc .

(nor does it include child tax credit, or child support)


Now, it’s a really cold December and you get a power bill for $600 .00

How do you pay that? 

To put it simply , you don’t. 

Because you can’t. 


So your power gets shut off.

But you know what your lease says? 

It says you get evicted if your utilities are terminated.


So now you’re in court crying to a judge who doesn’t care, & you have 10 days to get out. 


Well you’re in luck, because you found somewhere with 3 days to spare & it’s only $650.00 a month! 

But to get in, you must pass a background & credit check. Which you can’t because you just got evicted. 


You’ve never been a criminal, but even if you could pass it, you’re looking at $1300 to move in, after paying the deposit & first month’s rent. 


Time’s up ....

Landlord shows up at 7am with the police & changed your locks. 


So, now you’re living in your car with your 7 year old son & everything you need to get by. 


You tried to get a storage unit, but you don’t have a billing address so they won’t sell one to you. So you could only take what would fit in your backseat.


You pay to shower at local truck stops & eat whatever can be cooked in a gas station microwave.Someone sees you & your son living like this & calls C.P.S; guess what happens next ? ? ? 


They remove your child from your care. 

As if this isn’t devastating enough, you lose your job too. (Because “an employee losing their child reflects poorly on this company .”) 


So now, you apply for an apartment with the region where the waiting list is 3-7 years.

Then you go into Wal-Mart to put in an application.


When you get back to your car you see that your back window has been smashed & someone helped themselves to your belongings. Remember that it is December & really cold. Now you have damage to your only shelter.


You call your car insurance, who says your deductible is $1,000.00 

~ AND ~ they’re going to increase your monthly rate since you’re now 

“ high risk .” 


You call the homeless shelter as a last resort & all their beds are full. 


I’ll stop here .....

Because I think you get the point . 

The people we work with everyday are these people . 

WE ARE THESE PEOPLE .


We are all so close to homelessness & don’t even realize it . 


All it takes is : 

* one unexpected bill📃~

* one fender bender🚙💥🚗~

* one lay-off 📊~

* one house fire 🏠🔥 , etc. 


Instead of talking trash about people who are poor , homeless , or need assistance , why don’t you try being grateful that you’re not in their shoes ...... YET ! 


This is about staying humble & being kind . 


BE THANKFUL FOR WHAT YOU HAVE ❤ (copied)


We Are All Struggling In Different Ways.. 😭😩 ❤ (copied)


We Are All Struggling In Different Ways.. 😭😩

Saturday, November 11, 2023

UN says up to 40% of world’s land now degraded

 More than a year old. Must be worse now.

I suggest reading the whole article.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/27/united-nations-40-per-cent-planet-land-degraded

Fiona Harvey

Wed 27 Apr 2022 09.00 EDT


Human damage to the planet’s land is accelerating, with up to 40% now classed as degraded, while half of the world’s people are suffering the impacts, UN data has shown.


The world’s ability to feed a growing population is being put at risk by the rising damage, most of which is caused by food production. Women in the developing world are particularly badly affected as they often lack legal titles to land and can be thrown off it if conditions are tough.

-----


Monday, November 06, 2023

Does New Speaker of the House Mike Johnson Have a Bank Account?

I'm not happy that Mikme Johnson is speaker of the House, but I care about truth & fairness. There are a lot of posts on Twitted about the fact he didn't show any bank accounts on his financial disclosure forms. At first I found it suspicious. But looking into it further, it is not necessarily a problem.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/does-new-speaker-of-the-house-mike-johnson-have-a-bank-account


Of course, it’s unlikely Johnson doesn’t actually have a bank account. What’s more likely is Johnson lives paycheck to paycheck—so much so that he doesn’t have enough money in his bank account to trigger the checking account disclosure rules for members of Congress.

-----

House Ethics Committee filing guidelines state that members must disclose bank accounts they have at every financial institution, as long as the account holds at least $1,000 and the combined value of all accounts—including those belonging to their spouse and dependent children—exceeds $5,000.

-----


Sunday, November 05, 2023

When science showed in the 1970s that gas stoves produced harmful indoor air pollution, the industry reached for tobacco’s PR playbook

https://theconversation.com/when-science-showed-in-the-1970s-that-gas-stoves-produced-harmful-indoor-air-pollution-the-industry-reached-for-tobaccos-pr-playbook-21

Nov. 3, 2023

In 1976, beloved chef, cookbook author and television personality Julia Child returned to WGBH-TV’s studios in Boston for a new cooking show, “Julia Child & Company,” following her hit series “The French Chef.” Viewers probably didn’t know that Child’s new and improved kitchen studio, outfitted with gas stoves, was paid for by the American Gas Association.

While this may seem like any corporate sponsorship, we now know it was a part of a calculated campaign by gas industry executives to increase use of gas stoves across the United States. And stoves weren’t the only objective. The gas industry wanted to grow its residential market, and homes that used gas for cooking were likely also to use it for heat and hot water.

-----

The industry’s efforts went well beyond careful product placement, according to new research from the nonprofit Climate Investigations Center, which analyzes corporate efforts to undermine climate science and slow the ongoing transition away from fossil fuels. As the center’s study and a National Public Radio investigation show, when evidence emerged in the early 1970s about the health effects of indoor nitrogen dioxide exposure from gas stove use, the American Gas Association launched a campaign designed to manufacture doubt about the existing science.

-----

the multipronged strategy related to gas stoves directly mirrored tactics that the tobacco industry used to undermine and distort scientific evidence of health risks associated with smoking starting in the 1950s

-----

The commercial interests of many industries, including alcohol, tobacco and fossil fuels, aren’t always compatible with the public interest or human health. In my view, exposing the tactics that vested interests use to manipulate the public can make consumers and regulators savvier and help deter other industries from using their playbook.


Lies, Damn Lies, and Polls

When Reagan was president, the published polls didn't even have a choice for those of us with very negative ratings of him. Same thing for a poll a few months after he left office. So I finally wrote Gallup and complained. Of course, they defended the validity of their polls. But a few months after that they came out with a poll on Reagan and Carter, with a full range of choices. Reagan and Carter got about the same number of favorable ratings. But while few people disliked Carter very much, many people disliked Reagan a whole lot. But we weren't allowed to know that while Reagan was president.

http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2011/07/judis-wrong-on-reagan-bush-popularity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BrendanNyhan+%28Brendan+Nyhan%29

Judis wrong on Reagan, Bush popularity

July 30, 2011

John Judis writes in The New Republic that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush "enjoyed great popularity even though polls showed that the public disliked some of their initiatives" because they provided "leadership and not mediation"

[...]

In reality, Bush's popularity shot up to stratospheric levels immediately after the 9/11 attacks (86% in a September 13 ABC News poll) before he'd even had time to show much leadership. It was a classic rally-around-the-flag response -- exactly what you'd expect given the magnitude of the attacks. The rest of his presidency was a slow decline toward the highest disapproval ratings ever recorded by an American president.

While Reagan also enjoyed high levels of approval at times (most notably, when he was shot, when the economy was booming before Iran-Contra, and when he was about to leave office), he was actually not especially popular either -- his average Gallup approval ratings in office were lower than those of Kennedy, Clinton, Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and George H.W. Bush.

[...]


..

Effective altruism

 


Voting is not marriage

 I don't know anybody who is perfect, but they still expect other people to be their idea of perfect.



Friday, November 03, 2023

No! Obama Did Not Control Congress His First Two Years!

http://cjonline.com/blog-post/lucinda/2012-06-01/no-obama-did-not-control-congress-his-first-two-years

Posted June 1, 2012 12:05 am - Updated June 1, 2012 01:39 am
No! Obama Did Not Control Congress His First Two Years!

•••••

Let’s take a trip back to 2008.

And let’s brush up on some basics. First, did you forget that the President needed 60 votes to pass legislation? The healthcare bill is a good example of that. There were NOT 60 Democrats in the Senate. Remember that? So there had to be reconciliation.

What about the Stimulus? Again, there was NOT 60 Democratic votes to pass it. Reconciliation did not work. It was blocked by the Republicans, and Obama traded job-creating for tax cuts. Remember those tax cuts he let go on? Yep, traded for job creation - which it did accomplish as much as the baby stimulus that he was able to get would allow.

Is it all coming back to you now? How about this: It was Obama’s inaugural dinner. Senator Kennedy suffered a seizure. It’s kind of hard to work when you’ve had a seizure. He went back to Massachusetts.

Old news is so much fun to go back and read about. Here’s one I had forgotten, too. Al Franken had not yet been seated because the previous senator had challenged the election. Mein Gott, that went on forever with no way for him to vote in the Senate.

With Kennedy in Massachusetts and Franken in purgatory, awaiting his chance in the hell that is Congress, that left just 58 votes in the Senate. Memory Refresher: It took 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate. The Republicans were already playing dirty politics and would not work across the aisle with the Democrats.

By the way, that was 56 Democrats and 2 Democratically-minded Independents. Not 58 Democrats.

Then, in April 2009 – good news. Republican Arlen Spector switched to Democrat. That gave the Democrats 60 seats with which to discourage a Republican filibuster (their most prized procedure at the time). But… oh no… we forgot, Al Franken was still in Purgatory out there in election recount turmoil. So… back to 59 votes.

We can pause here to lovingly remember the filibuster I just mentioned. Republicans made history during that time by using it more than any time ever before. Reminder (because this can get confusing): It takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. The Democrats only had 59 at this point… technically. One of those votes was the very ill, Senator Kennedy. He did cast one vote during that time.

Then, Senator Byrd was admitted to the hospital.

Then Al Franken was sworn in but Byrd was still in the hospital and Kennedy was too sick to ever vote again.

Senator Byrd finally returned, but Kennedy did not.

It wasn’t until August- 2009 that Senator Kirk was appointed to Kennedy’s seat, and finally they had the 60 votes.

That filibuster-proof 60 votes lasted exactly 4 months – Not 2 years. Not 1 year. Not 6 months.

Just 4 months – from August 2009 to February 2010 - when Scott Brown was sworn in.

But here’s a fact that nobody can deny:

Republicans had the presidency, the House, and the Senate from 2001 – 2007.

For six years, Republicans had total and complete and undeniably absolute control over everything.

And how did that work out in the final analysis?

It doesn’t bear repeating. You know the answer to that as well as I do. Six years to screw up the whole country – nay, the entire damned world!

And you whine because Obama could not fix it all in four months?

Alright, I expect you to whine. But from this point on there is no excuse for lying. Not now that you know the truth.

tags: obstructionism, control of congress

Thursday, November 02, 2023

Storm Ciarán whips Western Europe, blowing record winds in France and leaving millions without power

 https://apnews.com/article/storm-ciaran-uk-france-winds-climate-61b722101874e7f0610961c03c509229 


Nov. 2, 2023


Record-breaking winds in France and across much of Western Europe left at least seven people dead and injured others as Storm Ciarán swept through the continent Thursday. The storm devastated homes, causing travel mayhem and cut power to a vast number of people.

Winds of more than 190 kph (118 mph) slammed the northern tip of France’s Atlantic coast overnight, uprooting trees and blowing out windows.

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