Yes, the Pulitzer Prize continues to pay off

HuffPo's right-column goes paleolithic!

The Chart that shows it all

Via ThinkProgress, the comparison of the Republican House's efforts on health care reform repeal and the business that is actually vital:

That's it

(by Steve Sack, from here)

Priorities

When we last heard the Texas-imbibed triumphalism of Rick Perry just this Monday, he was declaring there's no way he'd take part in a federal government sponsored program to keep Texas non-GOP base members alive:

Perry’s announcement is an especially harmful move because Texas will benefit more from the Affordable Care Act than any other state. Texas was recently ranked worst in the country for health care delivery by the federal Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, scoring “weak” or “very weak” in nine of 12 categories...

More than 25 percent of Texans – 6,234,900 people – are uninsured, the highest rate in the nation. After five years of health reform, Texas would be able to insure 1,798,314 more Americans under the Medicaid expansion alone – more than any state in the nation. Setting up a state health insurance exchange would enable the remaining millions of uninsured Texans to purchase affordable health insurance. Thus, despite Perry’s claims, implementing the law would result in better patient protection and greater access to coverage.

We cannot have government spending money on keeping people who probably won't vote for Rick Perry alive.  We have to spend it to make the very much alive Rick Perry have a life even more worth living:

Texas Governor Rick Perry is getting set to return to his official residence in downtown Austin after a $25 million rebuilding, even as he asks state agencies to say how they can cut spending 10 percent in the next budget.

Perry, the former Republican presidential candidate who in 2011 signed a two-year plan that reduced school funding by $5 billion, will decamp this month from a rental home to resume life in the high-security governor’s mansion.

Who needs health care and education for others -- when Rick Perry is now ready for C-Span Cribs?

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

Well this will be full of awkward

Mitt Romney to speak at the NAACP convention -- or as George Bush knows it, the group that handles college sports.

Willard just better stick the script because his efforts at ad lib are not too luminescent.
Although I do need something newer than this...

And I was right (like I was the only one to do so AND that it took a lot of courage to predict it)

Bam/Slam/Boof

Joe Biden get's a few good lines off on Mittens:

The Obama campaign just blasted out advance excerpts of Joe Biden's speech this afternoon to the National Council of La Raza, which features a haymaker of an attack on Romney's taxes and his position on immigration:

“When his father, George Romney, was a candidate was for President in 1968, he released 12 years of tax returns because, as he said, ‘One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show.’

“His son has released one year of his tax returns.

“Making a lie of the old adage: Like father, like son.

“Mitt Romney wants you to show your papers, but he won’t show us his.

Of course he opposes so-called 'Death Panels'

That's his ACT!

Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.) said on Monday evening that he didn't believe highly expensive health care should be provided to uninsured patients with pre-existing conditions.

Effect and Cause

On the one hand the science has improved to this point:

Climate change researchers have been able to attribute recent examples of extreme weather to the effects of human activity on the planet's climate systems for the first time, marking a major step forward in climate research...

Last year's record warm November in the UK – the second hottest since records began in 1659 – was at least 60 times more likely to happen because of climate change than owing to natural variations in the earth's weather systems, according to the peer-reviewed studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, and the Met Office in the UK. The devastating heatwave that blighted farmers in Texas in the US last year, destroying crop yields in another record "extreme weather event", was about 20 times more likely to have happened owing to climate change than to natural variation.

Studies showing the clear effect humanities abuse of the planet will naturally not cause regulations leading to less pollution but rather more of this:

The ultra-conservative American Tradition Institute has expanded its legal pursuit of climate scientists, using transparency laws to try to flush out potentially damaging emails...Now for the first time the media is being drawn in as well, with ATI seeking the release of scientists' communications with specific journalists. The list of news organisations targeted by the request includes the New York Times, the Associated Press, Frontline and the Guardian.

I'm glad we're getting to the bottom of the real crisis.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

That Blind Trust has incredible vision

Mitt Romney's "It's a blind trust for pete's sake" defense just happened to be run by Mitten's personal lawyer and invested a freaking ton in his son's company.

Funny how that worked -- I'm sure it's all just a coincidence.

You have to admit the guy knows how to run aground

Oh boy, another day another lack of oxygen to the brain:

Rick Perry: Medicaid Expansion Is Like 'Adding 1,000 People to the Titanic'

Of course, if we are actually using ACCURATE Titanic analogies, Rick Perry is the guy who bars the doors for the 3rd Class passengers so they cannot get to the lifeboat of medical coverage.

Little do they know...

Christian Crazies have gotten to the point they are going to inadvertently write-in a hispanic guy for President:

http://www.votingforjesus.com/

You cannot make this stuff up -- well, at least I can't because I wish I would have thought of this.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church

Took 350 years to get around to apologizing to Galileo about that whole earth around the sun thing (and many Protestant faiths believe Jesus rode a dinosaur, let alone what some Islamic countries due to women and gays):

Episcopalians continue to out-progressive many other religious groups with two LGBT-friendly votes at the Episcopal General Convention in Indianapolis.

The first vote, which passed 111-41, was for an official prayer service for same-sex unions. This is a provisional rite for the next three years, and it still has to be approved by the convention's deputies, but it does represent a significant step forward.

Time for another Conservative edition of covering their ears and

...shouting "la la la la, I can't hear you":

The mainland United States, which was largely recovering Monday from a near-nationwide heat wave, has experienced the warmest 12 months since record-keeping began in 1895, a top government science and weather agency announced Monday.

The report from the National Climatic Data Center, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, does not take into account blistering heat from this month, with 2,116 high temperature marks either broken or tied between July 2 and July 8 in communities nationwide.

You wanted Lex Luthor, congrats you got him

Nobody could have predicted, ad infinitum:

[O]n April 5...Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed the bill that shrank the Department of Health and required the closure of the A.G. Holley State Hospital in Lantana, where tough tuberculosis cases have been treated for more than 60 years.

Nine days later...

A tuberculosis outbreak in Jacksonville was one of the worst his group had investigated in 20 years. Linked to 13 deaths and 99 illnesses, including six children, it would require concerted action to stop.

Naturally the TB epidemic started among the homeless and indigent population of Jacksonville (an ever growing but still neglected underclass), and nobody gave a damn, until it started hitting the rest of the population. It's a case study of how Randian-based politics kills people...but cannot itself be killed.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

What he says

This from Charles Pierce's place (but written by Tom Junod which I missed earlier) should be read by everyone and make you feel ashamed...real ashamed -- this is a long excerpt so I apologize in advance.

He was just a boy.

Let's start there.

He was an American boy, born in America. Though he'd lived in Yemen since he was about seven, he was still an American citizen, which should have made it harder for the United States to kill him.

It didn't. It should at the very least have made it necessary for the United States to say why it killed him.

It didn't.

His name was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and he was 16 years old when he died — when he was killed by a drone strike in Yemen, by the light of the moon. He was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was also born in America, who was also an American citizen, and who was killed by drone two weeks before his son was, along with another American citizen named Samir Khan. Of course, both Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were, at the very least, traitors to their country — they had both gone to Yemen and taken up with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Awlaki had proven himself an expert inciter of those with murderous designs against America and Americans: the rare man of words who could be said to have a body count. When he was killed, on September 30, 2011, President Obama made a speech about it; a few months later, when the Obama administraton's public-relations campaign about its embrace of what has come to be called “targeted killing” reached its climax in a front-page story in the New York Times that presented the President of the United States as the last word in deciding who lives and who dies, he was quoted as saying that the decision to put Anwar al-Awlaki on the kill list — and then to kill him — was "an easy one."

But Abdulrahman al-Awlaki wasn't on an American kill list. Nor was he a member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusla. Nor was he "an inspiration," as his father styled himself, for those determined to draw American blood; nor had he gone "operational," as American authorities said his father had, in drawing up plots against Americans and American interests. He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him.

He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.

The fact is that Mitt Romney would probably take this program ever further. But it is morally repugnant as it is.

The fact that it is so little discussed and brings no real shame, let along second thoughts to us, as Americans just compounds the shame.

Austerity continues to be a constant kick in the bollocks?

That's a British saying right?

The number of new permanent and temporary roles declined at the fastest rate since July 2009, the latest survey of recruitment consultants by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) and KPMG Report on Jobs shows.

The sudden slump has led the accountants to predict a return to levels of unemployment last seen in the early 1990s.

KPMG partner Bernard Brown said: "The latest recruitment data comes as a sobering reminder that we're far away from a confident economic situation.

And, of course, The tories are as determined to keep this up as the GOP is to bring them here.

TOTALLY connected to reality

More on the Romney fundraiser in the Hamptons...about as embarrassing as you'd think:

A woman in a blue chiffon dress poked her head out of a black Range Rover here on Sunday afternoon and yelled to an aide to Mitt Romney, “Is there a V.I.P. entrance. We are V.I.P.”

Laura R. Schwartz of New Jersey, the woman inside the Range Rover, complained that Mr. Obama had not visited Israel as president, a slight to the country, in her eyes. “I don’t think he is good for Israel,” she said. Mr. Romney, she said, “is a fresh face.”

A few cars back, Ted Conklin, the owner of the American Hotel in Sag Habor, N.Y., long a favorite of the well-off and well-known in the Hamptons, could barely contain his displeasure with Mr. Obama. “He is a socialist. His idea is find a problem that doesn’t exist and get government to intervene,” Mr. Conklin said from inside a gold-colored Mercedes as his wife, Carol Simmons, nodded in agreement.

Ms. Simmons paused to highlight what she said was her husband’s generous spirit: “Tell them who’s on your yacht this weekend! Tell him!”

Over Mr. Conklin’s objections, Ms. Simmons disclosed that a major executive from Miramax, the movie company, was on the 75-foot yacht, because, she said, there were no rooms left at the hotel.

"Hey, let's redo that whole Potato famine thing...that was fun"

Via Thers writing at Eschaton this is a depressing, holy shit! moment:

IRISH PEOPLE’S finances are continuing to deteriorate with the number who say they have less than €25 to spend each week once all essential bills have been paid increasing sharply over the last three months, according to research published by the Irish League of Credit Unions (ILCU).

Its second What’s Left tracker survey of the year found that 1.82 million adults say they have less than €100 a month to spend after bills are paid. This compares with a figure of 1.64 million it recorded in April.

Among the most bleak findings in the report are those that suggest 17 per cent of adults – which equates to 602,000 people – say they have absolutely nothing left for discretionary spending once all bills are paid.

Oh austerity, cutting spending and making sure the people cannot spend...and soon may start to go hungry. What a tremendously short-sighted policy...except of course in the short-term it sucks too.

Well what a surprise

"Bin Laden Bob Diamond determined to strike U.S. it rich"

A former senior Barclays employee has claimed that the bank's ex-chief executive Bob Diamond would have known that his traders were involved in the interest rate rigging scandal.

Cause and Effect

Some interesting bloviating from the Obama Campaign this weekend:

The Obama campaign has called on Mitt Romney to release years of tax returns to prove he did not break the law following claims that the Republican presidential candidate held secret accounts in foreign tax havens.

Old school aggressive politics...from a Democrat. How 1830 to 1980 of them.
Oh, and some populism:

Obama Adviser Says President Will Not Extend Bush Tax Cuts, Even Temporarily: ’100% Committed’

Hmmm, seems familiar.

And naturally, this is causing the most stereotypical response imaginable:

Romney Donors Out in Force in Hamptons

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]