Saturday: Hey Girl…get your geek on!
Posted: February 11, 2012 Filed under: morning reads 91 Comments
Click for more "Neuroscientist Ryan Gosling"...
Hello news junkies… the political scene is bumming me out even more than usual. See the top story on memeorandum as of 2:35 AM Friday night/Sat. morning…or go directly to the Think Progress piece, entitled “GOP Ups The Ante, Introduces Legislation To Allow Any Employer To Deny Any Preventive Health Service.” (Also, stay tuned because later this weekend the one & only Minkoff Minx will have a barn-burner on all the mass hysteria over free Magdalene pills!) It’s not even just that alone, though. Don’t even get me started on the rest of the current event stories that are dominating the headlines in general–not only are they bumming me out, but they are boring the daylights out of me–Wonk the Vote, a bona fide news junkie. That is, if they aren’t making me want to cry my eyes out first (see bombings in Syria, via Reuters). I guess you could say I have a case of Political Affective Disorder, though that’s nothing new. I’ve been dreading the 2012 cycle for the last four years anyway. Perhaps my condition is just reaching a tipping point, because I am utterly depressed by the fact that–during a week when American women have had to fight tooth and nail for their basic autonomous, civil rights and health care not to be torn asunder by C-Street– “One Million” Moms finally mobilize…to try to defeat the… Evil Dancing Ellen?!? Gahhhh. This is the moment “one million moms” have been waiting for? What, is Ellen’s association with JC Penny going to mean the onesies they sell are going to have some kind of gayish-cooties and turn America’s babies into adult RuPauls big giant day-glo orange crying John Boehners or something? Come on, don’t these “activists” already have enough supermarket freezer cases across the country to protect from Ben and Jerry’s Schweddy Balls?
Though–thanks to the karma chameleon–these busy-bodies have fallen flat on their grizzly mama arses, handing Ellen an even more loyal fanbase than ever called “1 Million People who Support Ellen for JC Penny”! (I’m one of those growing millions, btw…if you haven’t joined already, Sky Dancers, please check the Millions for Ellen page out on Facebook.)
All this to say…it definitely smells like manufactured political theatre across BOTH aisles at work to me (and we’re not even officially into the general election yet.) I’m deeply cynical about this. Wedge issues during an election year and all that. Sorry, I’m not all Woo-Hoo President Oprecious over his fake-saving of our rights–which never were in contradiction with the constitution anyway. From right to left, it all seems calculated for emotional-political effect on some oligarch’s part. Plus, I’m still waiting on someone to make sure none of my oh-so-fungible tax dollars never go to war, torture, or capital punishment. Just my… ya know… very humble, girly-wonk two-pieces-of-copper.
At any rate, I’m super-duper-dejected by all the news leeching off of the body politic’s oxygen tank at present, so I’m going to focus the rest of this round-up on a few links this week that either left me a) happy, b) intrigued, or c) thoroughly entertained.
Click for more "Neuroscientist Ryan Gosling"...
Oh, and also on Ryan Gosling.
If you’re like me, and you love the “Hey Girl” flashcards all over the internet, both for the eyecandy quotient and the sheer hilarity+nerdy-girl-utility of it all…You’re welcome. If you’re with Historiann and you don’t understand what’s so appealing about Mr. “baby goose,” then my apologies. It’s only one Saturday morning. You’ll live. 😉
So here’s the happiest link I read all week, via Sci Am:
A PET scan's bright areas reveal the concentration of amyloid beta, a protein that forms a plaque in Alzheimer's patients. The scan compares the brains of a healthy patient (left) and a patient suffering from Alzheimer's (right). Image: Alzheimer's Disease Education and Referral Center, NIH
Cracks in the Plaques: Mysteries of Alzheimer’s Slowly Yielding to New Research
Science is bringing some understanding of the heritability, prevalence and inner workings of one of the most devastating diseases
By Daisy Yuhas | February 6, 2012 |This has been a big week in Alzheimer’s news as scientists put together a clearer picture than ever before of how the disease affects the brain. Three recently published studies have detected the disease with new technologies, hinted at its prevalence, and described at last how it makes its lethal progress through the brain.
The first study strengthens the body of evidence that says early-onset and late-onset Alzheimer’s should be classified as the same disease. The other two studies shed light on how the tau protein–the buildup of which causes the protein to tangle and kill brain cells–spreads through different brain regions.
As the adage goes, knowledge is power…can’t wait until these “cracks in the plaques” build up to a critical mass of findings that inevitably breaks the myelin-implicated mystery wide open and points the way to the cure!
Ok, this next one didn’t make me happy per se, but it made for some pretty stimulating geek-grist… it’s another one from SciAm (guess Bostonboomer–who did a Science-y post last night–and I have been on similar wavelengths!):
Click to go to the Nature article... The current continents (left) are set one day to merge into the supercontinent Amasia (right), centred over the Arctic. Mitchell et al, Nature
Next Supercontinent ‘Amasia’ Will Take North Pole Position
Next supercontinent will form over the Arctic Ocean.
February 8, 2012 |
By Kerri Smith of Nature magazine
In 50 million to 200 million years’ time, all of Earth’s current continents will be pushed together into a single landmass around the North Pole. That is the conclusion of an effort, detailed in the February 9 issue of Nature, to model the slow movements of the continents over the next tens of millions of years. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
One World, One Continent, One Love after all! So maybe in about 50 million to 200 million years, the military-industrial complex will finally wane a little? Hey, a satyagraha-loving Wonk can dream… 😉
Until then, we have plenty of idiocrats to keep us entertained…especially everybody’s least favorite body politic fluid, Rick santorum! Speaking of whom–my last “read” is a “political” link that just made me laugh my heineken off, via a blog called “Tyranny of Tradition” (this is satire–or is it? Hard to tell the way Rick santorum oozes his crazy for all to see these days):
February 10, 2012Rick Santorum Declares War On Heavy Metal
Rick Santorum has been on the offensive lately, but his target has not been Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney or even President Barack Obama. For the past week, Santorum has been using his campaign to take aim at an issue he feels to be the single most dangerous force in America today: Satanism in heavy metal. “If you listen to the radio today, many of these brand new, so-called heavy metal music bands like Black Sabbath, Venom, The WASP and Iron Maiden use satanic imagery to corrupt the minds of young people,” announced Santorum at a 10,000 dollar a plate sock-hop in Valdosta, Georgia on Thursday.
To which my very first automatic response was…Inert Gasses Declare Non-Reactive War on Rick Santorum! And, I had the perfect Lolcat in mind when I thought it too:
Alright, well that’s all I’ve got… turning this over to y’all in the comments. What’s on your reading lists this weekend? Anything extra nerdy? This is the place to share!
Friday Reads: Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire Edition
Posted: February 10, 2012 Filed under: Environmental Protection, morning reads, unemployment | Tags: fracking, taxing the rich 31 Comments
Bonjour!
I think the season of the political lie is upon us. I have never seen so many tired old tropes being trotted out on TV in all my years of fascination with the bloodsport of politics. I’m going to try to concentrate on folks out there fighting the memes and lies with facts. My first selection is from Baseline Scenario. Simon Johnson explains that unemployment insurance isn’t around to keep lazy people on extended vacations. In the process he takes on the lie that our government is broke.
Fire insurance is mostly sold by the private sector; unemployment insurance is “sold” by the government – because the private sector never performed this role adequately. The original legislative intent, reaffirmed over the years, is clear: Help people to help themselves in the face of shocks beyond their control.
But the severity and depth of our current recession raise an issue on a scale that we have literally not had to confront since the 1930s. What should we do when large numbers of people run out of standard unemployment benefits, much of which are provided at the state level, but still cannot find a job? At the moment, the federal government steps in to provide extended benefits.
In negotiations currently under way, House Republicans propose to cut back dramatically on these benefits, asserting that this will push people back to work and speed the recovery. Does this make sense, or is it bad economics, as well as being mean-spirited?
(For details on the current benefit situation, see this information from California, as well as this on the political background. After a two-month extension of benefits at the end of last year, the terms of continuing it are currently before a House-Senate conference committee.)
The United States has lost more jobs than in any other recession in the last 70 years – and jobs have been slower to return, as this chart shows.
In raw numbers, we lost more than eight million jobs, most of which have not returned. Paul Solman of the PBS NewsHour prefers a measure he calls U-7, which includes “the underemployed and those who want a job but have been out of work so long that the government no longer counts them; this currently stands at 16.9 percent of the workforce (see this story and also, for background, a discussion Paul and I had in the fall on the “shape” of the recovery, in which we rely on the B.L.S. data.)
However you want to count it, the financial crisis of 2008 brought on a jobs disaster — and the scale of this disaster is still with us. We like to say that the recession is “over,” but this just means that the economy is growing again. In no meaningful sense is the jobs crisis over.
Typically in the United States, most people are unemployed for relatively short periods of time, with a lot of movement in and out of unemployment. The fraction of long-term unemployed as a percentage of all unemployed is usually 10 to 15 percent. In the early 1980s, it briefly reached almost 25 percent.
Again, however, our experience since 2008 has been dramatically different – the share of long-term unemployed in total unemployed is close to 45 percent. And it appears to be staying at or near that level for the foreseeable future.
The House Republicans now propose to change many rules under which the federal government provides “extended benefits” to people who have exhausted their state benefits.
In most countries, unemployment insurance is managed primarily by the central government and its agencies – in our federal structure we have preferred, as with other kinds of emergencies (such as natural disasters) to have the states provide the first line of defense, with the federal government providing back-up. It is the federal government that has the strongest ability to borrow at low interest rates; most states are much more strapped for cash.
Do not be deceived by claims that the federal government is “broke,” in the sense that it cannot afford to provide additional support to states and people at this level. This is a myth, pure and simple.
Paul Krugman takes on Charles Murray’s new whine about declining morality in the poor down trodden white folks and how it’s hurting our country. Krugman shows that one of the traditional measures of social problems is teenage pregnancy and it’s way down. So, is violent crime. So what is it that Murray is really complaining about?
Reading Charles Murray and all the commentary about the sources of moral collapse among working-class whites, I’ve had a nagging question: is it really all that bad?
I mean, yes, marriage rates are way down, and labor force participation is down among prime-age men (although not as much as some of the rhetoric might imply), But it’s generally left as an implication that these trends must be causing huge social ills. Are they?
Well, one thing oddly missing in Murray is any discussion of that traditional indicator of social breakdown, teenage pregnancy. You can see why — because it has actually been falling like a stone:
So, is economic stagnation really the result of less church going? I doubt it.
Jonathan Chait takes on another right wing lie. That’s the one about how the job creators pay so much in taxes they are really down trodden billionaires! Veronique de Rugy doesn’t stand a chance.
De Rugy wrote a column centered around the claim that the United States has a more progressive tax system than any other advanced country, and as her sole piece of evidence cited the fact that rich people pay a higher share of the tax burden in the U.S. than in other countries. I wrote a response, noting that this reasoning is completely idiotic. Rich Americans pay a bigger share of the tax burden because they earn a bigger share of the income, not because the U.S. tax code is more progressive.
De Rugy’s reply is an incoherent collection of hand-waving that does not come close to addressing this very simple and fatal flaw with her claim. She introduces a series of other fallacies, like conflating the marginal tax rate (the percentage tax you pay on your last dollar) with the total tax rate (the overall percentage of your income paid in tax), using “income tax” as a stand-in for total taxes, and trying to broaden the debate into a bigger philosophical dispute. But it’s not a philosophical dispute. It’s a simple case of her making up false claims based on extremely elementary errors.
And this is why I am forced to be so mean. There are just a lot of people out there exerting significant influence over the political debate who are totally unqualified. The dilemma is especially acute in the political economic field, where wealthy right-wingers have pumped so much money to subsidize the field of pro-rich people polemics that the demand for competent defenders of letting rich people keep as much of their money as possible vastly outstrips the supply. Hence the intellectual marketplace for arguments that we should tax rich people less is glutted with hackery.
No discussion of reprehensible lies would be complete with out Santorum and without the numerous conspiracy theories and untruths told about the concerns of environmentalists. Don’t you know, science professors just want to get rich so they make up shit about climate change and fracking?
Thursday Reads: Male Politicians and Pundits should Worry about their “Erectile Dysfunction” and STFU about Women’s Health (and Other News)
Posted: February 9, 2012 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, morning reads, religious extremists, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics, Team Obama, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: autonomy, Birth Control, chastity belt, Chris Matthews, contraception, EJ Dionne, history of birth control, Mark Shields, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, privacy, Rick Santorum, sponges, Tim Kaine 50 Comments
Morning News by Ellen Day Hale (1855-1940)
Good Morning!
I thought this painting was appropriate, since we are being dragged back into the 19th Century by both Democrats and Republicans these days. We all know about the war on women being waged by Willard “Mitt” Romney, Rick “the Dick” Santorum, Nasty Newt Gingrich and Ron “White Power” Paul. But Democrats have now been empowered the Catholic Church’s attack on Obama’s attempt to protect women’s health care.
But now “liberal” pundits like Chris Matthews, Mark Shields, and E.J. Dionne have joined the battle to remove any semblance of privacy and autonomy from women.
Today former DNC Chairman and Governor of VA–and likely Senate candidate Tim Kaine came out against the requirement that contraception be included in health insurance policies.
Pat J is right. We need a women’s freedom party. Aren’t any of these dinosaurs aware that birth control (and abortion) have been with us during most of recorded history? Check out this series of photos in Newsweek drawn from the history of birth control.
Did you know that Aristotle recommended birth control methods for women in the 4th Century BC?
The philosopher recommended that women “anoint that part of the womb on which the seed falls” with olive oil in order to prevent pregnancy. His other top picks for spermicides included cedar oil, lead ointment, or frankincense oil. If the lips of the cervix were smooth, he noted, then conception would be difficult.
Sponges used for contraception
Ancient Egyptian women used sponges.
Long before Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes weighed the merits of a man to determine his spongeworthiness, women were using sponges as a method of preventing pregnancy. The sponge has its roots in early Egyptian civilization, and this photo depicts the variety of models available in the early 20th century. Those sponges were made of a variety of materials, and were sometimes drenched in lemon juice or vinegar to act as a spermicide. Today’s sponges (called, in fact, Today’s Sponge) are synthetic, and use a chemical spermicide.
Another early method was the chastity belt. Perhaps religious nuts like Rick Santorum and Mark Shields would find that one acceptable?
At Wonkblog, Sarah Kliff thinks the Obama administration “sees political opportunity in the contraception battle,” because of the data shown in this chart:
(Public Religion Research Institute)
Kliff writes:
while Catholic leadership has blasted the new regulation, polls show that a majority of Catholics are actually more supportive of the provision than the rest of the country. A poll out Tuesday from the Public Religion Research Institute finds 52 percent of Catholic voters agreed with the statement, “employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost.” That’s pretty much in line with overall support for the provision, which hovers at 55 percent – likely because Catholics use contraceptives at rates similar to the rest of Americans.
A majority of Catholics – 52 percent – also agree with the Obama administration’s decision to not exempt religious hospitals and universities from the provision. “Outside the political punditry, most Catholics agree with the administration on the issue,” says one Obama campaign official, explaining the view that this could be a political win.
And a lot of this likely isn’t about Catholic voters at all.
Rather, it may well be about the demographics that are most supportive of this particular health reform provision: young voters and women. In the PRRI poll, both groups register support above 60 percent for the provision.
Those two demographics are important here for a key reason: they were crucial to Obama’s victory in 2008. Third Way crunched the numbers earlier this month and found that the “Obama Independents” — the swing group that proved crucial to his 2008 victory — are, as Ryan Lizza put it, “disproportionately young, female and secular.”
Let’s hope Obama keeps all that in mind instead of bending to the will of the old gray white male Catholic Bishops and the elderly male fake-liberal pundits who won’t STFU and let women make their own choices.
Even some of the saner folks in the GOP are warning their wingnut colleagues that a fight against contraception would be a “disaster” for their party.
Tuesday Reads: More Caucuses and a Beauty Contest; Dems Support Anti-Union Bill; and Protecting Children vs. Parents’ Rights
Posted: February 7, 2012 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, Mitt Romney, morning reads, Newt Gingrich, Reproductive Rights, Republican presidential politics, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: Braden and Charlie Powell, breast cancer, Colorado caucuses, Josh Powell, Komen Foundation, Maine caucuses, Minnesota caucuses, Missouri primary, Nancy Brinker, NEGATIVE campaigning, Rick Santorum, Susan Powell 51 Comments
Good Morning!!
There are four more Republican caucuses and one “primary” coming up this week. Tomorrow, Minnesota and Colorado will hold caucuses and Missouri has a beauty contest, a non-binding primary (actual delegates will be apportioned by the Missouri Republican party on March 17). Maine holds it’s caucuses on Saturday. After that, we get a two-week respite with no primaries. Won’t that be great?
Right now, Rick Santorum is leading in the polls in Minnesota, and Mitt Romney has wasted no time in turning his mean-spirited attacks on the new upstart. Wall Street Journal:
In a radio interview in Minnesota on Monday, Mr. Romney criticized Mr. Santorum for voting to raise the country’s borrowing limit, allowing earmark spending to proliferate and letting government spending explode.
“His approach was not effective and, frankly, I happen to believe if we’re going to change Washington we can’t just keep on sending the same people there in different chairs,” he said in an interview on WCCO.
The Romney camp also circulated a research memo to challenge Mr. Santorum’s contention that Mr. Romney imposed a “top-down, government-run” health-care system in Massachusetts that led to higher costs and longer wait times. For good measure, the Romney team rereleased Mr. Santorum’s endorsement of Mr. Romney in the 2008 race.
Romney is currently leading in Colorado, but there are suggestions that Santorum could do well there too–maybe even take first place. From CNN:
Could Rick Santorum pull off a surprise victory in this week’s caucuses? Newt Gingrich thinks so.
“I think that Santorum’s going to have a pretty good day tomorrow and he will have earned it. He targeted differently than I did,” Gingrich told reporters gathered outside an energy forum in Golden, Colorado….
Speaking to reporters after the same forum, Santorum opted against setting any expectations for the caucuses. But he questioned Mitt Romney’s ability to close the deal with Republican voters, noting the former Massachusetts governor has failed to attract as many voters as he did in 2008 in some previous contests.
“He’s underperformed from four years ago. And I suspect he will again,” Santorum said about Tuesday’s caucuses.
Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum has spent the past few days shuttling among Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado hoping that a good showing in one or all Tuesday would show the conservative electorate was not solidly behind former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
“Our hope is conservatives are stepping back and looking at the race and making the same calculations that I’ve just made that a Romney nomination will not be in the best interest of us winning the general election,” Santorum told reporters here Monday. “We need to have a conservative alternative and my feeling is that Speaker Gingrich has sort of had his chance in the arena and came up short in Florida and Nevada, and now it’s our turn.”
Santorum has spent a great deal of time in Missouri while the other candidates were competing in Nevada. He apparently thinks the “show me” state will help him launch a comeback in the race.
Tomorrow’s primary in Missouri is the staging ground for Rick Santorum’s latest campaign message—that he is the real conservative alternative to Mitt Romney and that he is the person who can best compete with Barack Obama.
A win in Missouri would be absolutely crucial in keeping Santorum’s campaign afloat. His chances look good there because Newt Gingrich—whose campaign has been plagued by logistical missteps such as failing to get on the ballot in Virginia—decided not to sign up for tomorrow’s primary.
Unfortunately for Santorum, a win won’t get him any delegates.
Yesterday, Democrats in the Senate joined their right-wing colleagues in passing an anti-union FAA bill.
The Senate passed a Federal Aviation Administration bill on Monday that includes an anti-union measure bitterly opposed by labor groups.
The bill, which modernizes America’s air traffic control system and funds the FAA through 2014, was fought over for four years, leading to a partial shutdown of the FAA last summer because of anti-union measures added by the Republican-controlled House.
It passed 75 to 20, with a majority of Democrats backing it.
Among the controversial provisions were changes to labor law for rail and airline workers — backed by the airline industry — that would count anyone who did not vote in an election for a union as voting against it, making it much more difficult to certify attempts to organize new unions.
What’s the point of voting for Democrats if they’re no different from Republicans?
Braden and Charlie Powell
This story makes me so sad that I had to share it with you. It demonstrates one of the worst thing about U.S. family courts–they care more about parents rights than they do children’s safety and well-being. Yesterday, the husband of a missing Utah woman, Susan Powell, committed suicide and chose to take his two sons along with him.
The deaths of a Washington man and his two sons in what authorities believe was a murder-suicide may mean the 2009 disappearance of the children’s mother may never be solved.
Josh Powell, a suspect in the disappearance of Susan Cox-Powell, died Sunday along with his two sons, 5-year-old Braden and 7-year-old Charlie, in what police believe was an intentionally set fire in Powell’s Puyallup, Washington, home.
It was a tragic development in a puzzling case that began two years ago in the Salt Lake City suburb of West Valley City, Utah, when Susan Cox-Powell, 28, went missing.
Josh Powell was never charged in her disappearance, and was embroiled in a bitter custody dispute with his wife’s parents.
Why was this man allowed access to his children? If the court believed he had the right to see them, why not arrange for the meeting to take place in a neutral location? Not only was this man a strong suspect in the murder of the children’s mother, but also he had allowed the boys to live with his father who was arrested awhile ago for possession of child pornography. The arrest led to Powell’s in-laws getting custody of the two boys. Powell apparently had been planning the murder suicide for some time.
Authorities say Josh Powell planned the deadly house fire that killed him and his young sons for some time, dropping toys at charities and sending final emails to multiple acquaintances.
Powell, the husband of missing Utah woman Susan Powell, died along with his children Sunday.
Authorities say they found 10 gallons of gasoline inside the home. A five-gallon can was spread throughout the house and used as an accelerant in the huge blaze. Another can was found by the bodies.
They say Josh Powell did send longer emails to some people, including his cousin and pastor, with instructions such as where to find his money and how to shut off his utilities
The motive for killing the boys might have been the fact that once they were away from their father, they began talking about the night their mom disappeared.
The children of missing woman Susan Cox Powell have said for years that “Mommy’s in the mine,” an attorney representing the Cox family said on Monday….adding the boys mentioned their mother may have been looking for crystals in the mine.
Another lawyer representing the Cox family said the children had started talking to their grandparents about things they remembered from the night their mother vanished.
“They were beginning to verbalize more,” said attorney Steve Downing. “The oldest boy talked about that they went camping and that Mommy was in the trunk. Mom and Dad got out of the car and Mom disappeared.”
The attorney said Charlie Powell drew a disturbing picture as a part of a school assignment several months ago. The drawing depicted the boy’s father driving the van with Charlie and Braden sitting in the backseat, and their mother in the trunk.
“There was a subsequent question with regard to, ‘Why is your mother in the trunk?’ And his response was simply that he didn’t know, but his mother and father had gotten out of the van, and his mother then got lost,” said Downing.
So why was the man allowed access to his children? A psychologist quoted in an article in the Christian Science Monitor seems troubled by the decision.
Joy Silberg, a psychologist who specializes in child protection and abuse cases, says courts often place more value on parental rights than a child’s safety – or see them as equal concerns, when in her view, the parental rights should be secondary.
“I have situations where the child has disclosed very clear disclosures about a parent, or terror at being near a parent … and the judge still orders a child to go [to visitation] because the parental right is seen as having so much more power,” says Dr. Silberg.
While she doesn’t know all the facts of the Powell case, she adds, “it’s hard for me to believe that this was completely out of the blue and that no one knew he was this destructive. People usually leave clues.”
In fact, Powell was named a “person of interest” by the authorities when his wife, Susan Cox-Powell, disappeared two years ago. But he was never officially charged with any crime, and no details have ever been made public linking him with the case.
I don’t like to end with an utterly heartbreaking story like that, so I’ll add this one from The Daily Beast on Nancy Brinker and her really really bad decision to defund Planned Parenthood. Apparently Brinker is real meanie when it comes to competition with other groups raising funds for breast cancer.
“Komen plays hardball and is determined to stay on top,” says a member of another cancer organization, who declined to be identified. “Let’s be honest about all this: people think of breast cancer as a charity, but it’s really a major business.”
I’m going to keep that in mind the next time I get a request for funds for breast cancer. I’ll especially want to find out what each group’s attitude is toward women’s autonomy. More from the article:
…in the early ’80s, she [Nancy] met and married multimillionaire restaurateur Norman Brinker, a major Republican donor. He had previously been married to Grand Slam tennis star Maureen “Little Mo” Connnelly, who had died from ovarian cancer.
When they tied the knot, the union provided Nancy with a network of A-list political connections and friends, plus the funds to lead a luxurious lifestyle and create the Komen Foundation, now the Susan G. Komen for the Cure with affiliates in 170 communities in 50 nations. (Interesting note: the largest Race for the Cure, a three-day run, is held in Rome, Italy.)In 1993 Norman Brinker suffered severe head injuries during a polo match and remained on crutches for the rest of his life. Several years later the couple divorced and with a hefty settlement, formidable drive, and her chum George W. Bush in the White House, Nancy was ready to step onto the world stage. First the [resident appointed her ambassador to Hungary and then U.S. chief of protocol.
Did Nancy dump her rich hubby because his health problems were a pain in the a$$. Inquiring minds want to know. There’s more gossipy stuff in the article if you’re interested.
Now what are you reading and blogging about today?
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Monday Reads: Lots of Outrage to Pass Around
Posted: February 13, 2012 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: New Hampshire removes labor laws, pedophila priesthood, racist Fox comments, Santorum and voodoo economics, Scott Walk steals mortgage settlement money | 56 CommentsI had thought about writing about all the incredibly outrageous things happening at the CPAC hatefest this weekend but figured it would take me more time than I wanted to spend in crazy land. No matter what they say, they do not want to conserve anything and they really seem to hate the constitution. Maybe I will work on something later this week. Besides, searching the usual news sources brought me enough outrage to fill the morning reads. Take a sip of coffee and prepare to be drop your jaw a few times.
Just when you think the Red Beanie set can’t ignore our laws and constitution any more than they already have, you find this one. A rapist priest told his victim that sexual assault is basically how god’s love feels. Watch the story from an NBC affiliate in Los Angeles and feel heartsick and mad simultaneously. Yes folks, these are the zygote zealots who are so concerned about the sanctity of sperm and egg as to hope the US government will outlaw birth control. It seems that little boys are just priestly love receptacles the way women are sperm storage units.
Evidently the KKK and white supremacists freely blog on Fox News. You would think that the death of pop singer Whitney Houston would give us a chance to think about drug abuse and the pressures of fame, but not loyal Fox Watchers. LGF has documented some of the most insidiously racist remarks I’ve ever seen. Fox obviously doesn’t screen for threats to the President or Haters. I won’t reprint them here but let me tell you, they are JAW Dropping.
We’ve learned that hatred of women and racial and religious minorities seems to be rampant in this country. What on earth is wrong with people?
If you live in New Hampshire, I hope you don’t work and need to eat. Think all those labor laws giving you time to eat and go to the bathroom are reasonable and unlikely to disappear? Think again. Just hold it in and starve if these Republicans get their law passed.
Yes, job creators should only give you the right to lunch and potty breaks if they want to. And, if you happen to get taken by the bank in mortgage fraud, Scott Walker wants your part of the settlement to help those hapless, persecuted job creators. So, you think the dribs and drabs of that big mortgage settlement are supposed to go to give homeowners some justice right? Not in Wisconsin where Scott Walker intends to put the settlement to other uses. Have they recalled him yet? Yes, it’s from Charles Pierce, so all you New Hampshire folks will just have to cross your legs harder.
Think Progress has the less glib explanation.
A post by your friendly economist just wouldn’t be complete with the la la land, voodoo explanation of what caused the last recession by your favorite idiot Rick Santorum. Rick Santorum thinks the recession was caused by Gas Prices. A mind is a terrible thing to waste unless you never had one to begin with …
I would say that the man just says what ever dribbles from the top of his mind if I thought he had one. So enough of serious economic issues. What exactly does Rick Santorum think of masturbation? Does he make certain that every sacred sperm winds up in the Santorum approved location?
My question of the day is how far back in time do these guys want to travel? What on earth is next? As far as I can see, all these things wouldn’t stand up in court. Something tells me however, that’s exactly what these guys want because rather than see their obvious problems passing constitutional muster, they can scream “Judicial OVERRREAAACHHHH”. What a bunch of maroons …. too bad we can’t ship them up there to the moon colony with Newt and Calista. Meanwhile, as they say in the Star War Series, May diVorce be with you!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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