Cheers and Jeers: Tuesday

post from Daily Kos on 08 May 2012 08:22:33 AM. © Daily Kos

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From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE?

BREAKING

Solar Disaster Disrupts 5 Minutes of Man's Life
A Gopher Ridge man is being credited for taking decisive action during what is being described as a "harrowing incident" involving his rooftop solar array.
Dexter P. Magill, 53, says he was backing out of the driveway at around 7:30am Monday when he was confronted by a worst-case scenario: a patch of white bird excrement had landed on one of his solar panels. Relying on the emergency plan he had rehearsed for months, Magill stopped the car, killed the ignition, and walked briskly toward the garden hose coiled neatly next to his garage door.
What happened next, says Magill, was a combination of instinct and adrenaline. "I turned on the hose---counter-clockwise, just like I practiced---and put my thumb over the nozzle," he said. "Then I directed the stream toward the bird poop and washed it off."
Witnesses say Magill's preparedness and split-second reflexes prevented the situation from spiraling out of control.
"I saw the whole thing," said neighbor Sarah Buellinger. "We were all scared. His bathroom is right under that solar panel and we could see the window was open. He could've easily squirted water right smack into it. I don?t even want to imagine the cleanup involved with that. What if his wife was in there?"
"We could tell that time was running out fast," said paper carrier Jeremy Sutton, who was delivering the Gopher Ridge Gazette when the incident occurred. "If he hadn't acted as fast as he did it could've been disastrous---he could've been late for work." When contacted for this story, Magill's manager, John Bronsen of Bronsen Bottlers, Inc., said his employee arrived on time that morning. "But it was close."
The episode is believed to be the worst residential solar power disaster ever recorded. There were no injuries. No police or emergency services were called.
Magill says everyone who owns a solar array should be prepared for the worst. "It was a pretty eventful five minutes. If it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody."

Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

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Many Dem Voters Fleeing to Falk after Walker Head
Feint

post from MAL Contends . . . on 08 May 2012 08:00:54 AM. © MAL Contends . . .

Kathleen FalkAs Scott Walker floods the airwaves with anti-Tom Barrett ads, many are wondering why he presumes to know the will of Wisconsin voters he deceived last year.

No one knows who is going to show up today at the polls, or for whom voters are casting their lot.

But many, out of concern of electing the strongest general-election candidate to knock off Walker, are seeing the anti-Barrett commercials [unfair and inaccurate though they be] and considering if a 14-year executive like Kathleen Falk might be the tougher Walker foe. Maybe this is what the GOP wants.

After living as a constituent for all of Falk's tenure, I can tell you that when addressing Falk with policy disagreements, few walk away without feeling they have encourntered a mind able to repeat back objections to the satisfaction of the speaker.

Policy is made from there. And the results lead the state in every category voters care about.

Republicans may think they are being clever, but if the GOP wants Falk as a general election foe, the Party proudly off-the-bend will regret getting what it wished for.

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-to-falk-after.html

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A Problem for Obama

post from Talking Points Memo on 08 May 2012 08:00:49 AM. © Talking Points Memo

Big question for November: will big drop offs in black and Hispanic voter registration doom Obama? Maybe not as much as the numbers suggest.[...]

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Obama Slams George W. Bush Economic Legacy in New
Ad

post from TaylorMarsh.com on 08 May 2012 08:00:45 AM. © TaylorMarsh.com

With the Occupy protesters resuming battle stations, and Mitt Romney in place as the presumptive Republican nominee, President Obama has begun to fashion his campaign as a crusade for the 99 percent–a fight against, as one Obama ad puts it, “a guy who had a Swiss bank account.” Casting Romney as a plutocrat will be easy enough. But the president’s claim as avenging populist may prove trickier, given his own deeply complicated, even conflicted, relationship with Big Finance. – Why Can’t Obama Bring Wall Street to Justice?

?We?re certainly running on our record.? – David Axelrod, senior Obama strategist on ABC?s ?This Week.?

CANDIDATE OBAMA is always so much better than elected Obama. It’s the cross the Democratic Party has had to bear.

Candidate Obama didn’t show up in 2010, so there was an avalanche of Republican wins across the country, which revved up the war on women like we haven’t seen since the early days of Ronald Reagan.

It’s important to remember that Barack Obama came into office with a Democratic House and Senate. Instead of doing the job of a partisan leader, which is implementing why you were elected, president-elect Obama decided to play nice with Republicans, which played into the right’s hands. It allowed his first term narrative to get well out of his control.

Now that his presidency is on the line Obama’s locked and loaded, with Republican economic policies the target. With the Paul Ryan budget the template of the Republican party in 2012, it makes team Obama’s job so much easier.

Women are the vote to rock this year. Single women and younger females don’t respond well to negative ads. They also don’t trust them. Positive ads of comparison that also show what you’ve done is what works for them. Reminding them of where the country was when George W. Bush left office is a good thing. Because whether you like Pres. Obama or not, he was handed a crap sandwich on multiple fronts, sometimes screwing things up, but we are on the mend and every economist worth his or her credentials knows or has seen from the examples around the world that austerity won’t work, because it simply hasn’t.

But whether it’s Obama or Romney we’re still going to get some sort of entitlement “grand bargain” once 2013 hits.

For some reason elite politicians don’t understand that today’s blue collar worker has the same back breaking job that people like my husband do every day. Anyone who thinks new workers should have their retirement age pushed, which goes for waitresses and others in grueling jobs, is as out of touch as our political elite.

Who’s fighting for the new blue collar workers in November?

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America is getting sicker, and fatter, and
blinder

post from US Politics | AMERICAblog News on 08 May 2012 08:00:26 AM. © US Politics | AMERICAblog News

Sicker, because they can't afford health care: More than one in five adults had an unmet medical need in 2010, almost 20 percent hadn't seen a doctor within a year, and more than 60 percent hadn't seen a dentist. The proportion of people who went without health care because of cost increased from 8.8 percent in 2000 to 13.7 percent a decade later. Even Americans with health insurance reported...

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Your casino, your loan shark

post from Occasional Planet on 08 May 2012 08:00:19 AM. © Occasional Planet

Ever since casinos became legal in Missouri in 1992, we?ve seen one broken promise after another, and now the gambling-industrial complex is doing it again. They?ve convinced at least one Missouri legislator [I wonder how they did that?] to sponsor a bill that would let them loan money to tapped-out gamblers. Missouri is not the [...]Related posts:

November 2012: What’s on your ballot?

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Morning CheckUp: May 8, 2012

post from ThinkProgress on 08 May 2012 08:00:04 AM. © ThinkProgress

High uninsured rates can kill you: “There are many health policy studies that link uninsurance to worse health outcomes. A forthcoming paper in the Journal of Health Economics adds an important layer to that relationship: It finds that high rates of uninsurance mean worse outcomes even for those with coverage.” [Washington Post]

HSA plans tied to savings: “Market-driven health plans could help the U.S. healthcare system save up to $57 billion annually if they were more widely adopted, according to a new study from RAND Corp. Study authors cautioned, however, that the reduction in enrollees’ use of preventive services under the plans could lead to poorer health in the future.” [The Hill]

Health policy dogs that won’t hunt: “You’ve heard it before. Let’s deep six ObamaCare and replace it with a trio of sure-fire free-market solutions to the problems that plague our health care system. All that’s really needed, we’re told, is to pass tort reform, allow insurance companies to sell policies across state lines and encourage people to set up health savings accounts. Here’s the problem: There is mounting evidence that all three of these strategies not only are ineffective but may actually be making matters worse.” [Wendell Potter]

Millions in federal money goes to abstinence and anti-abortion programs: “Records obtained by The American Independent show that the government is paying for abstinence programs run by centers that promote dubious medical information.” [American Independent]

Kansas to approve another anti-abortion bill: “The bill was adopted by an 88-31 vote on Monday in the House. It would prohibit Kansas taxpayers from claiming abortion expenses under a deduction for medical costs when filing their income taxes.” [Kakeland]

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Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: Two stories
which sum up Dick Lugar's campaign perfectly

post from Daily Kos on 08 May 2012 08:00:04 AM. © Daily Kos

Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. Sign up here.Leading Off:

? IN-Sen: I'm having a hard time deciding which last-minute vignette is most emblematic of Dick Lugar's failing bid for renomination. Either this one:

In the closing days of the campaign, Lugar has focused on what might happen if he's no longer in the Senate.
He said his signature program, the nuclear threat reduction program he co-sponsored with former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, would fall by the wayside.
"I'm the only one that can convince people, regardless of administration, regardless of Congress, that it's still important that there are 5,000 nuclear warheads aimed at us, and I'm determined in my lifetime to try to remedy that," he said.

Or this one:

Sen. Dick Lugar is accusing tea party members of trespassing on his family farm and erecting 'Retire Lugar' signs on the eve of the Senate primary.
The six-term Republican incumbent said Monday he was alerted by his son that members of the Owen County tea party climbed over a fence at his Marion County farm to take down his campaign signs and put up their own.
"[They] had their pictures taken in front of a sign that said, 'Dick Lugar, tree farmer of the year, 2003,'" Lugar said during a stop at an assisted living facility, speaking from notes to recount the episode to reporters. "Then they had the audacity to put this on their Twitter accounts and Twitter it out? so that everybody would know that these people had trespassed our farm."

The first is a perfect distillation of how incapable Lugar has been of addressing the main concerns of Republican primary voters: the economy and sticking it to Barack Obama. Do you think they really want to hear about bi-partisan efforts to stem nuclear proliferation? Only Dick Lugar does.

Meanwhile, in the second, Lugar is almost literally reduced to crying out, "Hey you kids, get off my lawn!" (The tea partiers claim ~~it wasn't their baseball that shattered Lugar's window~~ they didn't trespass and merely "place[d] signs in the public easement.") Either example showcases just how disconnected and out-of-touch Lugar's entire campaign has been, and tonight, voters will render the final verdict.

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Justiceline: May 8, 2012

Ted Nugent

Welcome to Justiceline, ThinkProgress Justice?s morning round-up of the latest legal news and developments. Remember to follow us on Twitter at @TPJustice

A man who is likely to be mentally ill was arrested last week for threatening to kill President Obama. The man sent emails to various media outlets containing the threats, one of which read “[Obama] is the one that is destroying patriotism in the U.S.A. Ted Nugent is right.”
The drug company Abbott Laboratories agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement after it aggressively marketed a drug for off-label use by certain mentally ill patients in nursing homes even after it conducted studies which showed the drug was not effective for this use.
If you live in North Carolina, don’t forget to vote against the anti-gay ballot initiative being decided today.
The city of Pinole, California formally banned home gun sales.
Retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor gets into the video game business.
And, finally, thanks to Josh Israel for manning the fort here at TP Justice while I was off attending this thing.