Republicans May Have Trouble Passing Budget
Resolution by September 30

post from Firedoglake on 17 July 2012 10:06:09 PM. © Firedoglake

Stan Collender, one of Washington's major budget guru, reports that even getting the basic business of Congress done by pre-election deadlines could prove impossible. The basic issue here is that the current budget runs out on September 30. Given the[...]

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Mitt Romney's NAACP Speech Is Littered With
Criticism

post from Crooks and Liars on 17 July 2012 10:00:33 PM. © Crooks and Liars

So Mitt Romney went to the NAACP to give a speech and received a "unpleasant" response. Later that evening he lashed out at them, accusing them of wanting handouts. Then this cat got disgusted and made a video response, that was then posted on Upworthy.

Of course I'll take any reason to post kittens!

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The worst use of a time machine ever

post from Daily Kos on 17 July 2012 10:00:07 PM. © Daily Kos

If Mitt Romney really has a time machine good enough to allow him to retroactively retire, then, says Jon Stewart, he should have used it to kill Hitler.

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It Was a Magic Time for W: Eight years was
awesome, and I was famous and I was powerful

post from Firedoglake on 17 July 2012 09:12:49 PM. © Firedoglake

On the release of his book, full of economy advice on how to achieve a recovery from the catastrophe he presided over, former President George W. Bush remembers how wonderful it was -- for him -- during those eight years. What a guy. Let's have a beer.[...]

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Blue America Contest: Pick A Candidate To Win A
Month Of Free Ads

post from Crooks and Liars on 17 July 2012 09:00:44 PM. © Crooks and Liars

On Friday we explained a Facebook ad campaign Blue America embarked on to remind 18-26 year olds in 8 congressional districts that their congressmembers voted to kick them off their parents' health insurance plan-- and without even caring enough to come up with an alternative for their healthcare. As of this morning there had been over 3 million impressions in Wisconsin, New Hampshire, California, North Carolina, Florida and New York, where our targets are, respectively, Paul Ryan, Frank Guinta & Charlie Bass, Buck McKeon, Patrick McHenry, John Mica & Sandy Adams, and Tom Reed-- 8 dirtbags. Have you been to our DefeatDirtBags page?

I'll tell you why I want you to take a look at it. We turned the whole ad campaign into a kind of competition. And you pick the winner. Each of the opponents to the anti-healthcare dirtbags is getting a week of free Facebook ads from Blue America. But we want to give one of the campaigns a full month of ads. You tell us who-- Patsy Keever (NC-10), Ann Kuster (NH-2), Lee Rogers (CA-25), Nick Ruiz (FL-7), Carol Shea-Porter (NH-1), Nate Shinagawa (NY-23) or Rob Zerban (WI-1). And the way to vote is by contributing-- any amount, even just one dollar-- to the candidate of your choice on this page. And you can vote as many times as you'd like-- and tell you're friends to vote too. No ID required!

Will this change America? These are 7 independent-minded grassroots progressives, none of whom owe squat to the corrupt Inside-the-Beltway party establishments. Electing men and women like these is probably the only peaceful way to change America. Electing more Republicans or more corrupt DCCC party hacks isn't going to change a thing. Let's make sure when we replace Boehner as Speaker, it isn't to install something almost as bad-- at least in terms of corruption-- like Hoyer, Israel or Wasserman-Schultz. Remember, this guy, despite what Issa's report says about him taking bribes from Countrywide, is being protected by the Beltway Establishment (especially Issa) of both corrupt political parties:

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Rush Limbaugh flunked out of college after just
two semesters

post from US Politics | AMERICAblog News on 17 July 2012 09:00:24 PM. © US Politics | AMERICAblog News

The more you know.Limbaugh graduated from high school in 1969 and enrolled at Southeast Missouri State University. He dropped out after two semesters and one summer after "he flunked everything," his mother said. "He just didn't seem interested in anything except radio."

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Only TWO free samples before buying gelato or ice
cream Have we succumbed to the barbarians

post from DownWithTyranny! on 17 July 2012 09:00:24 PM. © DownWithTyranny!

DNAinfo.com caption: Il Laboratorio del Gelato has more than 200 flavors of gelato, with 48 on display at any given time.

[A]s ice-cream and gelato flavors [are] becoming more adventurous, confused customers often ask for multiple samples before they invest in a scoop of icey relief. But for stores and patrons, the time it takes to dole out samples can mean a longer wait for service.

Susan Pecot, who was vacationing in New York from California, made the most of the two-test limit at at Il Laboratorio del Gelato, knocking back the Blackberry Port after a sample before settling on an even more outlandish flavor.

"I never would have ordered the pink pepper with tarragon" without the help of a sample, she said, of the $4 small serving she bought.
-- from Serena Solomon's DNAinfo.com report today

by Ken

It could be that my perpspective on this is hopelessly skewed by the fact that the day I contemplated spending $4 for a scoop of gelato would be the day hell freezes over with the stuff. But apparently the free sampling has created a bottleneck in the city's chic gelato and ice-cream dispensaries, where people waiting endlessly in line behind customers engaged in sky's-the-limit free sampling are routinely having to be Medevac-ed to the already-overcrowded emergency ice-cream deprivation units of our major medical centers.

As Serena Solomon points out in her DNAinfo.com report today, "Lower East Side Ice Cream Stores Crack Down on Sample Hogs," even the two-free-sample-per-comer limit being imposed by a growing number of Lower East Side purveyors of "icey relief" isn't a panacea.

"If a group of eight people come in, that is still 16 samples," said Jon Snyder, the founder of Il Laboratorio del Gelato on Ludlow and East Houston streets, who has a strict two-sample rule for customers.

"If any of my staff break it, I flip out," added Snyder, whose store has over 200 flavors of gelato and sorbet, ranging from avocado to tangy lemon basil.

"I want to be fair to everyone," he said. "I don't want someone to say, 'Well, I had more than two samples the other day.'"

Even Snyder acknowledges that today's "icey relief" customers face challenges unknown to the customers his grandparents served in their "Carnival ice-cream store" (you don't suppose that could be Carvel, do you?), where the roster of flavors consisted of vanilla and chocolate.

At Chinatown Ice Cream Factory on Bayard Street, which "also has a two-test limit to keep lines moving," 21-year-old store assistant Yu Chung, acknowledges that "ice cream is a little bit of a commitment." He "scoops out such peculiar flavors as black sesame and red bean," and notes, "Some people are really shocked by some of the flavors," said Yu Chung.

I dare say. And I suppose it's just my habitual crotchetiness that leads me to suspect that this explosion of ice-cream and gelato flavors has much less to do with flavors than with people desperate to plug a boredom gap in their lives -- for which purpose $4 per minuscule serving may seem an affordable price, especially to people who can, you know, afford it.

But not blindly, of course. Just think of visiting Californian Susan Pecot and how, admittedly within the controversial two-sample limit, she found her way to pink-pepper-with-tarragon gelato after head-to-head sampling against the blackberry port. This is a story that has the sort of happy ending from which I think we can all draw inspiration and hope.

Again, though, my perspective is different -- though perhaps not as stark as that of Jon Snyder's vanilla-and-chocolate grandparents. My life experience, after all, includes not just the old Howard Johnson's with its much-ballyhooed however-many flavors and then the era of Baskin-Robbins. Certainly the B-R list, with both its regulars and short-term specials, frequently contained flavors that clearly deserved, even demanded to be sampled. Only I accomplished it by buying a single-scoop cone. It wasn't a lifetime commitment, after all. It was a damned scoop of ice cream!

Like I said, this mode of thinking may be obsolete in the era of $4 scoop and flavors like blackberry port and pink peppercorn with tarragon -- although, again, within the two-sample system, customer Pecot was presumably anticipating committing to one or the other of these frozen treats.

Or maybe not. At Stogo, on East 10th Street and Second Avenue, where owner Junie Ishimori allows unlimited sampling of the 48 vegan flavors made with soy, coconut or hemp ("We want people to be happy with what they get"), customer Julie Schneider, a student from Long Island,

said customers should be policing their own taste-testing limits by employing a simple practice.

"You should try two, and if you can't make a decision," she said, "then go with something normal."

Il Laboratorio de Gelato's Jon Snyder points out to Serena Solomon that apart from wine-buyers, ice-cream customers are the only prospective purchasers he knows of who expect as a matter of right free samples -- and I have to say that I'm not aware of wine merchants generally offering the same, with customers contemplating spending significantly more even than the frozen-treats crowd.

I guess those ice-cream customers need to feel they're getting something by way of "consideration," something for free. Just imagine if the poor dears were forced to choose between vanilla and chocolate.
#

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George W. Bush Institute publishes book on how to
fix the economy, perhaps on a dare

post from Daily Kos on 17 July 2012 09:00:07 PM. © Daily Kos

George W. Bush speaking at the National Institutes of Health Here's George Bush speaking at another Institute. (National Institutes of Health)George W. Bush will long be remembered as the polio of American economic policy. Keeping that in mind, here's a bunch of words that really don't go together:

The George W. Bush Institute is launching its first book, which features experts weighing in on ways for the U.S. to jumpstart the economy toward 4 percent gross domestic product growth.

I always expected George W. Bush's name would eventually hang above the door of an Institute. Or a Clinic. That aside, has there really been a screaming need to hear what George W. Bush would do in the event of an economic catastrophe? I think we already found out the answer to that. It's like asking opinions on what color your house should be from a fellow you find huffing paint in a supermarket parking lot. Sure, he's an expert, but not in any way that's going to appreciably help.

Luckily, the president's own offered wisdom will be inconsequential:

The former president writes the foreword for "The 4 Percent Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs," which will be released Tuesday. He is set to give brief remarks at an event Tuesday evening in Dallas featuring several of those who contributed to the book.

Thank God for that, but the real heavy lifting is done by others, including "five Nobel Prize winners," which sounds promising. Less promising is the brilliant solution being offered, which can best be summed up as that shit we already did, to disastrous effect, but screw you because we're an Institute.

[Institute executive director James K.] Glassman said ideas in the book for stimulating the economy include broad tax reform that would keep taxes low ? extending the Bush-era tax cuts, broadening the tax base by getting rid of special exemptions and loopholes, taxing consumption rather than income and lowering corporate taxes.

That's almost awe-inspiring in its non-originality. Apparently the Nobel Prize winners involved won for their work in developing new classes of hallucinogens and/or time travel.

I suppose it would be too much to ask that anything George W. Bush was involved with be a serious endeavor. I realize we cannot all build homes for the homeless or raise awareness for this or that disease, but it somehow seems both fitting and depressing that the George W. Bush contribution to American discourse will continue as an oblivious homage to asinine, long-discredited ideas. He started out as a hollow-headed cheerleader, and now he is finishing up as one.

As exhibit A of our former president's supreme and utter disregard for anything resembling actual thinkery, I present to you this, from a recent interview with the deciderer himself.

?Eight years was awesome and I was famous and I was powerful,? Bush told the Hoover Institute?s Peter Robinson. ?But I have no desire for fame and power anymore. ? I crawled out of the swamp and I?m not crawling back in.?

Case effing closed.

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‘The Dust Bowl of 2012′: Drought
Covers Majority Of U.S. And ‘Might Be A $50 Billion Event For The Economy’

This year’s drought ranks as one of the top 10 worst U.S. droughts for the last century. With more than half the country (54 percent) experiencing drought conditions, it’s the single worst drought since the 1950s.

It is hot all over. NOAA said in its June “State of the Climate Global Analysis“:

This is the second month in a row that the global land temperature was the warmest on record for that month.

While it has been hotter than the 1930s in many places in this country, the drought hasn’t been quite as bad as the worst of the original Dust Bowl. But if we don’t act soon to slash greenhouse gas emissions, we are on our way to far worse as climate change fuels more frequent and more extreme droughts across the U.S. (see “We?re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temps ? Imagine What?ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming“).

Climate Progress has documented how unrestrained fossil fuel pollution is leading to worsening droughts. Texas’ severe drought of the past memory was made 20 times more likely from global warming, as one study explained. The Nature article last year, ?The Next Dust Bowl,? explained, “warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun?s energy goes into baking the soil.”

Climatologist Jonathan Overpeck at Arizona University told the AP:

This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level. The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.

This drought is hitting farmers hard — and ranchers, too. As Reuters put it:

Ravaged by fires, Western ranchers face “scary” summer
… recent wildfires in states such as Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming have displaced thousands of cows from federal rangelands which may not be fit for grazing for years. Where range has not been destroyed, drought has lessened forage.
“We’re going to run out of grass. It’s shaping up to be scary,” University of Idaho Extension Agent Rauhn Panting said.

The next to be hit is the American consumer.The Agriculture Department has declared the largest federal disaster zone in its history for 26 states, as corn and grain crops dry up, particularly in the midwest where 63 percent of the midwest has moderate to extreme drought. Corn production shrunk 7 percent in the last week, according to a Reuters poll: “What began the season as a potentially record corn crop as farmers planted the biggest area since 1937, may now be the smallest in at least five years.”

Consumers will feel the drought’s burden through rising food prices:

“For sure, the full effect of this drought will not be until 2013. It’ll be 2013 when we see it and its in the whole supermarket,” Richard Volpe, an economist with the USDA’s Economic Research Service said. ”But if the price of corn shoots up, we?d see this effect within about two to three months. That doesn?t mean we?ll see a complete jump into food prices. It’s just that we should start to see the effects.”

Michael Swanson, agricultural economist at the largest commercial agriculture lender, said:

?It might be a $50 billion event for the economy as it blends into everything over the next four quarters.?

Will The Epic Drought “Darken Obama Reelection Prospects”?

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HSBC Executive Resigns During Senate Hearing

We got something that looks suspiciously like accountability today in a Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing. Earlier today I previewed this hearing, based on a damning report detailing House Senate Banking Committee's propensity to[...]

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