(Like Obama) Chevy Volt is All-American, Cool

post from The Paragraph on 08 May 2012 10:32:03 PM. © The Paragraph

When President Obama won his office, many felt cheered and relieved that a savvy, well-spoken –"cool" – man of the people had replaced an incurious,inarticulate – embarrassing – aristocrat as "leaderof the free[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheParagraph/~3/YbCG7N7oT8U/

Add to del.icio.us

Digg this

Post to Furl

Add to reddit

Add to myYahoo!

Republicans' filibuster addiction continues
unabated

post from Daily Kos on 08 May 2012 10:30:05 PM. © Daily Kos

one lone figure outweighs the rest on an imbalanced scale By now you've heard that Republicans filibustered the motion to proceed to the student loan bill. And yes, I could have used shorthand there and just said that they had filibustered the student loan bill, without noting that it was actually the motion to proceed. But there's a reason I point that out. Remember the "gentleman's agreement" that emerged from the filibuster reform fight at the beginning of the 112th Congress, back in January 2011? That deal was supposed to mean a cutback in the number of filibusters on motions to proceed. Of course, Republicans will say that the other side of the deal was to cut back on the number of times amendments have been blocked by "filling the amendment tree," and since that number hasn't gone to zero ... well, there you go.

Not that this wasn't predictable. After all, what leverage did Senate Democrats leave themselves for enforcing the agreement, given that they renounced the use of the "constitutional option" as part of the larger deal? And yet, as with so much else, the response seems to have been asymmetrical.

How asymmetrical? Get this: From the time of the invention of the cloture rule, during World War I, until the end of the Reagan administration, there were a total of 385 cloture motions filed. That's a span of about 70 years. But in the five and a half years since Republicans lost control of the Senate after the 2006 elections, there have been 359 cloture motions filed.

In fact, today's cloture vote was on the 83rd cloture motion filed in the 112th Congress. That's the third all-time highest number of cloture motions ever filed, and it's only May. And what two Congresses are the only ones ever to see more cloture motions filed? Well, it's the last two: the 110th and 111th. The two immediately following the Republicans' loss of control of the chamber.

Just something to keep in mind.

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/Esp_b6WyV8Q/-Republican-s-filibust
er-addiction-continues-unabated

Digg this

Disappointing

post from Where Is The Outrage? on 08 May 2012 10:27:52 PM. © Where Is The Outrage?

Amendment One is one of worst pieces of legislation that I've read in a long time. It will take years to undo the damage that has been done today. In my opinion, I don't think that we need to add discrimination to our state constitution. Unfortunately a majority of North Carolinians disagreed with me. They

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WheresTheOutrage/~3/3g7SxrAAO7Y/

Digg this

Fake Newspaper Faked Out by Faker News Source

post from Firedoglake on 08 May 2012 10:20:52 PM. © Firedoglake

Dave Boyer of the Washington Unification End-Times Church Newsletter read this thing on Bill Kristol's dumb son-in-law's internet hobby blog about how Barack Obama was personally transvaginal wanding lady visitors at the White Hizzouse to see if they[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firedoglake/fdl/~3/4KQPE1Nn0fw/

Digg this

Tom Barrett wins Wisconsin Democratic
gubernatorial primary, will face Scott Walker in June

post from Daily Kos on 08 May 2012 10:09:56 PM. © Daily Kos

Wisconsin Democrats have made their choice:

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who lost by five points to Republican Gov. Scott Walker in the GOP landslide year of 2010, will face him again in a rematch just a month away. Democrats must now unite behind Barrett and focus on our singular goal: removing Walker from office and undoing the damage he's done. Let's do this thing!

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/muRuEFnJtb0/-Tom-Barrett-wins-Wisc
onsin-Democratic-gubernatorial-primary-will-face-Scott-Walker-in-June

Digg this

ACLU, NAACP To Sue PA On Behalf Of Woman, 95,
Over Voter ID Laws

post from Crooks and Liars on 08 May 2012 10:00:52 PM. © Crooks and Liars

When I went to vote last week, the person working behind the table asked if I was voting Republican. I said no, I wouldn't ever vote for the party that was trying to keep people from voting. While I was in the booth, I heard some of the workers discussing what I said. One of them said, "You have to have something with these people, they all look alike. They could vote six, seven times and you wouldn't be able to tell." (I wish she'd said it to my face, so I could have confronted her. Not that it would have done any good...)

But yes, the right wing has done a very good job of making voter ID seem "reasonable" to people who now believe the danger to voter integrity comes from brown people voting multiple times, and not from election officials who suddenly find additional votes out of thin air, or angry mobs that storm an election office and demand they stop counting ballots.

Hopefully, the case of Viviette Applewhite will get through to at least some of those idiots:

The first time Viviette Applewhite went to the polls, she cast her vote for John F. Kennedy. But this year, a strict new voter identification law will likely prevent the now-93-year old woman and many others in Pennsylvania from participating in their country?s democratic process. And Applewhite won?t stand for it.
She will be the plaintiff in the voter identification lawsuit being filed by the ACLU and the NAACP in the state, which claims that ?the state?s voter photo ID law violates the Pennsylvania Constitution by depriving citizens of their most fundamental constitutional right ? the right to vote.?
Applewhite no longer has a copy of her birth certificate, and she does not have a drivers? license. Without either of these things, the new Pennsylvania restrictions say that she is ineligible to vote.
But her circumstances are not at all uncommon. African Americans, especially elderly African Americans, are disproportionately less likely to have a birth certificate.

Isn't that the point?

According to the Brennan Center for Justice:
Twenty-five percent of African-American voting-age citizens have no current government-issued photo ID, compared to eight percent of white voting-age citizens.
Harsh voter ID laws, which former President Bill Clinton characterized as the most serious threat of disenfranchisement since Jim Crow laws, have been passed in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.

And 24 other states are trying to pass them now.

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/aclu-naacp-sue-pa-behalf-woman-95-ove

Digg this

Amendment One Blowout

post from Talking Points Memo on 08 May 2012 10:00:43 PM. © Talking Points Memo

It looks like North Carolina Amendment One will pass handily in North Carolina. Much of metropolitan Wake County is already in, with other urban centers in Durham and Mecklenburg counties to come, but the margins at this point seem pretty insurmountable.[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Talking-Points-Memo/~3/46kaEU87atg/amendment_one_b
lowout.php

Digg this

Amendment 1 Passes In North Carolina

Big setback for the gay rights movement in North Carolina, where Amendment 1 is now projected to pass, and probably by a landslide. [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Talking-Points-Memo/~3/seieAYM9pyI/amendment_1_pas
ses_in_north_carolina.php

Digg this

Richard Lugar Deserved to Lose and Does

Republican foreign policy elder statesman Sen. Richard Lugar, 80, first elected to the Senate in 1976, was defeated in the Indiana primary Tuesday by state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who was backed by conservatives ranging from the National Rifle Association to local Tea Party activists to the Washington-based fiscal conservative group the Club for Growth. Mourdock appeared to be headed for a landslide victory. – Six-term Senate veteran Lugar defeated in Indiana primary

SEN. LUGAR’S LOSS will be lamented by the bipartisan, insider crowd, but how anyone can think anything other than he deserved to lose is beyond me. Richard Lugar didn’t even have an Indiana residence to call his own. It doesn’t get more out of touch than that.

For his foes, the fact that Lugar did not maintain an Indiana residence came to symbolize his disconnection from the state he had represented in the Senate since Jimmy Carter was president. Democrats mocked him in February for telling Indiana reporters that he was unsure what address was on his Indiana driver’s license.

Sen. Lugar was an odd one, helping Democrats pass the DREAM Act while voting against re-authorizing money for the Violence Against Women Act recently.

But not having residency in the state where you are representing the people? I guess he figured his good service, which he delivered for decades and for which Indianans should be grateful, made living in the actual state where he was senator irrelevant.

That’s just clueless.

Read The Full Article:
http://taylormarsh.com/blog/2012/05/richard-lugar-deserved-to-lose-and-does/

Digg this

Putting the brakes on obesity, and catching the
world's fastest man.

I wonder if my right wing friends who make fun of Michelle Obama (Rush even called her a "big fat hypocrite") for pushing a an anti obesity message realize that we could save a lot of money in health care costs if A-merry-cans would just push away that extra slice of pizza, and get off the damn sofa?

"Even if the skyrocketing rates of obesity level off, 42 percent of Americans will be obese and 11 percent will be severely obese by the year 2030, a new report predicts.

That means 32 million more people will be tipping the scales in the wrong direction, costing the country billions, according to the study, appearing online May 7 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The (slightly) good news is that the number of people becoming obese may not be increasing as much as previously thought.

"There's some evidence that the curves of increase in obesity may have changed and, at best, may be a plateau," Dr. William Dietz, director of the division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during a Monday news conference. "[But] we still have a very serious problem."

The computer model devised by report author Eric Finkelstein and his colleagues also predicted that the prevalence of severe obesity would more than double from 5 percent to 11 percent.

If these new estimates prove true, obesity will cost the country some $550 billion, the report stated. [Source]

Weight Watchers supposedly wants to pay Jessica Simpson millions to get with their program. Maybe they could do us all a favor and pitch a deal to
Rush as well. I am sure that he would try to set a good example to all of his followers if the price was right.

Finally, I love my man Usain Bolt, he seems like good people, and I know for a fact that he is doing some good things on the rock.

But yawdie yu pun yu own wit dis ya one ya.

"His arm around her waist, sprinter Usain Bolt and his latest girlfriend are the picture of togetherness.
The world?s fastest man has been dating fashion designer Lubica Slovak for six months and the relationship is described as ?very serious?.
A friend of 28-year-old Miss Slovak declared: ?Love has no race ? it?s a heart to heart connection.

But 25-year-old Bolt has come in for criticism from fellow black Jamaicans unhappy that he has chosen a white partner. " tipping slowly away* [Source]

Read The Full Article:
http://field-negro.blogspot.com/2012/05/putting-brakes-on-obesity-and-catching.ht
ml