More Endorsements

Posted: October 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, 2012 presidential campaign | Tags: , | 80 Comments

The last legs of  presidential campaigns are filled with major endorsements and last minute polls.  The WAPO editorial board and former Bush SOS General Colin Powell have both endorsed the president.

Powell criticized Romney’s foreign policy as inconsistent and questioned the former Massachusetts governor’s ability to address the deficit and looming defense cuts.

“I’m not quite sure which Governor Romney we’d be getting with respect to foreign policy,” Powell said, calling Romney’s foreign policy “a moving target.”

As for the U.S. budget, he added: “It’s essentially, let’s cut taxes and compensate for that with other things, but that compensation does not cover all the cuts intended or the expenses associated with defense.”

Powell has been critical of Romney’s foreign policy advisers and has taken issue with the former business executive’s stance on countries such asRussia.

A moderate Republican, Powell served under President George W. Bush. Some of Romney’s advisers are more conservative veterans of the Bush administration.

“There’s some very, very strong neo-conservative views that are presented by the governor that I have some trouble with,” Powell said on CBS.

WAPO’s endorsement and the Powell endorsement were really no surprise.

We come to that judgment with eyes open to the disappointments of Mr. Obama’s first term. He did not end, as he promised he would, “our chronic avoidance of tough decisions” on fiscal matters. But Mr. Obama is committed to the only approach that can succeed: a balance of entitlement reform and revenue increases. Mr. Romney, by contrast, has embraced his party’s reality-defying ideology that taxes can always go down but may never go up. Along that road lies a future in which interest payments crowd out everything else a government should do, from defending the nation to caring for its poor and sick to investing in its children. Mr. Romney’s future also is one in which an ever-greater share of the nation’s wealth resides with the nation’s wealthy, at a time when inequality already is growing.

Even granting the importance of the fiscal issue, a case might still be made for Mr. Romney if Mr. Obama’s first term had been a failure; if Mr. Romney were more likely to promote American security and leadership abroad; or if the challenger had shown himself superior in temperament, capacity and character. In fact, not one of these is true.

The Poll Front still shows the President is likely to win the electoral college and thus, the election.  A Time poll shows Obama up 5 points in the important state of Ohio which will probably determine the election result.

Buoyed by early voting in his favor, Barack Obama leads Mitt Romney by five points in the pivotal state of Ohio, according to a new TIME poll.

Counting both Ohioans who say they will head to the polls on November 6, and those who have already cast a ballot, Obama holds a 49% to 44% lead over Romney in a survey taken Monday and Tuesday night.

The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

The poll makes clear that there are really two races underway in Ohio. On one hand, the two candidates are locked in a dead heat among Ohioans who have not yet voted but who say they intend to, with 45% of respondents supporting the President and 45% preferring his Republican challenger.

Even weird ol’ Joe Scarborough says: Two new polls scream ‘advantage Obama’.

Two polls released yesterday show President Obama stubbornly clinging to his electoral advantage. TIME Magazine released a new Ohio poll that has Mitt Romney trailing in the Buckeye State by 5 points. Last week’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist survey also had Romney behind by 5.

TIME’s poll should rattle the nerves of Romney supporters because the results run contrary to Team Romney’s ongoing claim that their internal polls show a dead heat in the Buckeye State. Maybe that’s the case among voters planning to go to the polls on election day but it looks like early voters are tilting dramatically in the president’s direction. If the TIME poll is accurate, it means Mitt Romney will have to grab most of Ohio’s remaining undecided voters if he wants to win this critical battleground state.

PPP released a Nevada survey yesterday that also shows President Obama holding a lead in this key swing state that remains outside the margin of error. Like Ohio, Nevada remains stubbornly in the Obama column. While Mitt Romney has made up ground in the three Southern swing states of Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, voters in Ohio, Nevada and Wisconsin seem do not seem inclined to be easily swept into Romney’s camp.

Obama appears to lead in Virginia also.

A new Public Policy Polling survey in Virginia, conducted on behalf of Health Care for America Now, finds Barack Obama expanding his lead in the aftermath of his debate victory Monday night. He now has 51% to 46% for Mitt Romney, up from a 49/47 advantage last weekend.

Key findings from the survey include:

-Obama’s seen a 7 point net improvement in his favorability rating among Virginia voters from a -3 spread last week (48/51) to now +4 at 51/47. Romney’s numbers have headed in the other direction. He’s dropped 7 points from a +2 spread on our last poll (49/47) to now -5 at 46/51.

-Voters trust Obama more than Romney on several major issues in the election. Those include who voters think will stand up for the middle class (52/44) and who they think will do more to protect Medicare (50/46).

-Obama leads 57/41 with women, 88/8 with African Americans, and 53/42 with young voters. Romney has a 50/45 advantage with men, a 57/41 one with whites, and a 57/41 edge with seniors. Obama’s moved from being slightly behind with independents last week at 45/44 to now slightly ahead at 47/45.

One of the weirdest observations that I’ve seen in awhile is how the US election maps seem to reflect the same kind of boundary lines we saw when we were fighting over the issue of slavery. Even actual Confederate hold outs see this. Steve Pinker has some interesting thoughts on the redness and blueness of some states.  I can tell you, it’s not pleasant to live in a red state if you’re a woman, a child, or a minority.  There’s an emphasis on a plantation style economy, education goals that are out of step with modernity, and ensuring the primacy of white, christian, men.  Abortion and birth control restrictions, ensuring the taxes don’t impact the rich, and enacting radical religious views on all kinds of things have been their priorities. Your only hope is to stay in a red state’s biggest city or move.

 Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family. Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality.

So, this election is important.  We can’t afford to have these extremist religious agendas dictating our national policy.  I say that as I listen to many of my friends who are rape survivors being traumatized all over again by troglodyte white, extremist christian, men who identify more with a fertilized eggs than women and children.   We need to send the entire Republican agenda and its goosestepping arm of religious freaks into oblivion.  PERIOD.

Monday Afternoon Coffee Break

Posted: October 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, open thread, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Voter Ignorance | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 50 Comments

Afternoon Coffee Break, by Merle Keller

I’m having trouble focusing enough to write a real post, so I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve been reading this afternoon. I’ll begin with some very good news from Reuters: Shot Pakistani girl can recover, UK doctors say

A Pakistani schoolgirl shot in the head by the Taliban has every chance of making a “good recovery”, British doctors said on Monday as 14-year-old Malala Yousufzai arrived at a hospital in central England for treatment of her severe wounds.

Yousufzai, who was shot for advocating education for girls, was flown from Pakistan to receive specialist treatment at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital at a unit expert in dealing with complex trauma cases that has treated hundreds of soldiers wounded in Afghanistan.

“Doctors…believe she has a chance of making a good recovery on every level,” said Dr Dave Rosser, the hospital’s medical director, adding that her treatment and rehabilitation could take months.

The article says the doctors haven’t actually evaluated Malala yet; but they are nevertheless confidence she can recover because she has made it through “the removal of the bullet and the very critical 48-hour window after surgery.”

Treatment for the schoolgirl is likely to include repairing damaged bones in her skull and complex follow-up neurological treatment.

“Injuries to bones in the skull can be treated very successfully by the neurosurgeons and the plastic surgeons, but it is the damage to the blood supply to the brain that will determine long-term disability,” said Duncan Bew, consultant trauma surgeon at Barts Health NHS Trust in London.

Malala’s youth increases her chances for full recovery, because young brains are more plastic than older ones.

Mitt Romney has chickened out on his scheduled appearance with the “sharp-tongued women” of The View

One of the nuggets overshadowed by the 47 percent dis in the secret Mitt Romney fund-raiser video had the candidate telling his wealthy donors how he picked his television appearances, and why he shunned the likes of SNL and Letterman. The View was “high risk,” he said, because “of the five women on it, only one is conservative, and four are sharp-tongued and not conservative. Whoopi Goldberg in particular.” To make amends, the Romney campaign said both Mitt and Ann would come on the show in October, and a summit was planned for this Thursday. But as Barbara Walters announced on today’s program, the appearance has been canceled, and Ann will have to do.

“We were looking forward to it,” explained Walters. “Over the weekend, his people said that he had scheduling problems and would not be coming on with us. Nor at this point did he feel that he could reschedule.” She added, “He can change his mind and we hope he does. It would be our pleasure to have him on the program.” (“It was no longer going to work in the campaign schedule but Mrs. Romney is very excited to join the ladies of The View,” a Romney spokesperson confirmed.)

What a wimp!

There’s a lengthy article at by John Boher at BuzzFeed that explodes a number of myths about George Romney’s political career, and it is well worth the read.

Everyone agrees: Mitt Romney is not like his father.

The late Michigan governor and 1968 presidential candidate George Romney is remembered as a principled man of spontaneity and candor. His example is regularly invoked by both admirers of his son’s disciplined campaign style and critics of Mitt’s back-and-forth pandering. George, it is said, told the truth about the Vietnam War before it was popular to do so, with an unfortunately worded comment about “brainwashing” by U.S. government officials that cost him the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. “Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills,” historian Rick Perlstein wrote in Rolling Stone earlier this year. “Heeding the lesson of his father’s fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician.”

This rejection of his father’s example, the thinking goes, is what has made Mitt a more successful presidential candidate — self-controlled but hard to pin down, flipping from moderate to conservative to moderate once again. It is observed that Mitt would never draw a line in the sand like his father did in 1964, when George dramatically “charged out of the 1964 Republican National Convention over the party’s foot-dragging on civil rights,” as the Boston Globe’s authoritative biography, “The Real Romney,” put it earlier this year. Outlets from the New York Times to the New Republic have recalled this story of the elder Romney’s stand against Goldwater’s hard-line conservatives. Frontline’s documentary “The Choice 2012” reported it as a formative event: “when Goldwater received the nomination, Mitt saw his father angrily storm out.” A Google search for the incident produces hundreds of pages of results. In August, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne cited the episode to write that Mitt “has seemed more a politician who would do whatever it took to close a deal than a leader driven by conviction and commitment. This is a problem George Romney never had.”

Except that none of it is true. George Romney was known by his political peers and by journalists as a flip-flopper with no real ideological core. He never stormed out of the 1964 Convention.

He stayed until the very end, formally seconding Goldwater’s eventual nomination and later standing by while an actual walkout took place. He left the convention holding open the possibility of endorsing Goldwater and then, after a unity summit in Hershey, Pennsylvania, momentarily endorsed the Arizona senator. Then he changed his mind while his top aides polled “all-white and race-conscious” Michigan communities for a “secret” white backlash vote against LBJ’s civil rights advances — a backlash that might have made a Goldwater endorsement palatable at home. Finding the Republican label even more unpopular than civil rights in Michigan, Romney ultimately distanced himself from the entire party, including his own moderate Republican allies

No one knows how that story got started, but it was Mitt who repeatedly spread it around once he began running for office. George Romney never marched with Martin Luther King either. There’s much much more, and it’s really interesting. Mitt may just be a chip off the old block after all.

There a little bit of good news for Obama in today’s polls. Reuters/Ipsos shows Obama leading by two points

President Barack Obama retained a slim lead over Republican challenger Mitt Romney in the Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll on Monday, as he appeared to have stemmed the bleeding from his poor first debate.

Three weeks before the November 6 U.S. election, Obama leads Romney by 2 percentage points, with 47 percent support from likely voters in the national online poll, to 45 percent support for Romney.

The margin was small enough to be a virtual tie, but Obama’s slight edge broadened from Sunday, when he went ahead of Romney by 1 point after falling behind in the wake of Romney’s decisive victory in their first presidential debate on October 3.

“Romney received a bump from that first debate, but the very nature of a bump is it recedes again,” Ipsos vice president Julia Clark said. “We’re now seeing Obama regaining a little bit of a foothold as we go into the second debate. They go into the debate on equal footing.”

The Washington Post-ABC poll released overnight had Obama with a 3 point lead, 49-46 percent. Chris Cillizza has some “deep(ish) thoughts” about the results. For some crazy reason, more people still think Mitt Romney would handle the economy better than Obama, but not by much, and everyone is anxious about the future no matter which candidate gets elected. Obama is still seen as far more likable than Romney, 60-30 among registered voters and 58-32 among likely voters.

The bad news for Obama, if the USA Today/Gallup poll of the swing states can be trusted, is that Romney has made huge gains with women voters.

Mitt Romney leads President Obama by five percentage points among likely voters in the nation’s top battlegrounds, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, and he has growing enthusiasm among women to thank.

As the presidential campaign heads into its final weeks, the survey of voters in 12 crucial swing states finds female voters much more engaged in the election and increasingly concerned about the deficit and debt issues that favor Romney. The Republican nominee now ties the president among women who are likely voters, 48%-48%, while he leads by 12 points among men.

Why those issues would favor Romney is a mystery, since all the experts say his tax cuts would explode the deficit.

The battle for women, which was apparent in the speakers spotlighted at both political conventions this summer, is likely to help define messages the candidates deliver at the presidential debate Tuesday night and in the TV ads they air during the final 21 days of the campaign. As a group, women tend to start paying attention to election contests later and remain more open to persuasion by the candidates and their ads.

That makes women, especially blue-collar “waitress moms” whose families have been hard-hit by the nation’s economic woes, the quintessential swing voters in 2012’s close race.

Ugh.

Ralph posted a couple of very interesting poll-related links in the previous thread:

Sam Wang: The Passing Storm

In national polls, the race has swung back three points since the Presidential debate to a narrow Obama lead. This return has been steady over time, and so the role of the VP debate is unclear. Combined with state polls, the data suggest that the effect of Mitt Romney’s performance was an instantaneous jump of 5.5 points, which has now subsided back to where polls were in August. The decline in the state poll meta-analysis has been blocked by Ohio. Today, President Obama’s November re-elect probability is 84% – still a Russian-roulette situation for the Democrats.

And and “exclusive” at Democratic Underground: Gravis Marketing exposed as a fraud Part I. Very interesting and creepy too.

Everyone has advice for President Obama for tomorrow night’s debate. Lanny Davis offers some ridiculous suggestions at The Hill

1) Be respectful and gracious to Romney — look at him while he is talking and listen to what he is saying — not because it is better than the appearance of disrespect you conveyed in the first debate by looking down and taking notes, but because he is a good man, a good dad, a good husband and a successful businessman and politician who is deserving of respect.

2) Be firm and strong when you challenge him on his policy positions — but don’t interrupt or raise your voice, and concede him the merits once in a while (since it is neither true nor politically effective to declare that he is 100 percent wrong and you are 100 percent right).

3) Most heretical of all — concede a little when you can when the truth requires that you made some mistakes in your first term — and aver that will make you a better president in the second term.

For example, you could say you regret not making a greater effort to break the logjam of the supercommittee on dealing with the then $15 trillion debt. You could say you wished you had done more to reach out to the Senate and House Republicans on the committee and intend to do so in your next term — and to do a better job seeking the counsel of senior Republicans who are, in fact, interested in achieving solutions and bipartisan consensus, particularly on making real progress on reducing the nation’s unsustainable national debt, such as Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Saxby Chambliss (Ga.) and Orrin Hatch (Utah).

I think he’s actually serious too!!

Greg Sargent wants to make sure President Obama reads David Stockman’s smackdown of Romney’s economic policies so he can “unmask” Romney “as an economic sham.”

Howard Fineman has a column on the many “fans” who are now second-guessing the Obama campaign strategies.

What are you hearing? This is an open thread, of course.

Of Polls and Pols

Posted: September 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections | Tags: , , | 50 Comments

Recent polls show Obama leading in his bid for reelection by an increasingly larger number.

For weeks, Republicans in Ohio have been watching with worry that the state’s vital 18 electoral votes were trending away from Mitt Romney. The anxiety has been similar in Florida, where Republicans are concerned that President Obama is gaining the upper hand in the fight for the state’s 29 electoral votes.

Those fears are affirmed in the findings of the latest Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News polls of likely voters in both states, which show that Mr. Obama has widened his lead over Mr. Romney and is outperforming him on nearly every major campaign issue, even though about half said they were disappointed in Mr. Obama’s presidency.

The polls, along with interviews with supporters and advisers in the nation’s two largest battleground states, lay bare an increasingly urgent challenge facing Mr. Romney as he prepares for his next chance to move the race in his favor, at the first debate with Mr. Obama next week.

Mr. Romney’s burden is no longer to win over undecided voters, but also to woo back the voters who seem to be growing a little comfortable with the idea of a second term for Mr. Obama.

Romney is losing key constituencies.

Women in Ohio prefer Barack Obama to Mitt Romney by a margin of 25 points, according to a new poll. In Pennsylvania, it’s 21 points and in Florida, another swing state, women gave the president a 19-point edge.

It appears the so-called war on women has taken its toll. In Ohio, Romney is actually winning with men by 8 points, but the gap among women is so wide that Obama leads the state by 10 points, according to the Quinnipiac University/CBS News/New York Times poll of likely voters.

In other bad news for Romney, those polled gave Obama the edge on the economy.

Ohio appears totally out of reach for Romney.

But Romney appears to be in deeper trouble in Ohio than elsewhere, an alarming development for Republicans who know that the candidate’s White House chances begin and end with the kind of middle-class voters who reside in places such as Akron, Cincinnati and Zanesville.

So why exactly is Romney trailing?

Two surveys released in recent days, one from the Ohio Newspaper Association and another from The Washington Post, crystallized the challenge facing Romney as he embarks on his second straight day of campaigning in the Buckeye State.

The topline numbers — Obama led by 5 points among likely voters in the Ohio poll, and a startling 8 points in the Post poll — only tell part of the story.

Fresh polls give Obama advantage in four battleground states

Romney’s favorable rating is underwater. Almost two-thirds of voters approve of Obama’s decision to bail out the auto industry, a staple of Ohio’s manufacturing economy. The president leads Romney by a wide margin on the question of who would do more to help the middle class.

Republicans–in an attempt to overcome their deep-seated need to live in the land of surreality–are calling the pols skewed and untrue.  Rush Limbaugh is calling it a liberal media conspiracy to depress Republicans.  (Warning: the links go to the sources.)

RUSH:  The purpose of the people right now, most of them doing these polls, they’re trying to make news, not reflect it, they’re advancing an agenda.  They’re all Democrats.  They’re all liberals.  They just have different jobs.  The polls are the replacement refs.  They see certain things. They don’t see other things.  They don’t call certain things, and other things go by.  In this case, what they’re trying to do is exactly what they’ve done in your case:  frustrate you, make you pull your hair out, say, what the hell’s happening to the country?  They want you thinking the country’s lost. They want you thinking your side’s lost. They want you thinking it’s over for what you believe.  And that makes you stay home and not vote.  That’s what they’re hoping.  That’s why you have to fight it every day, Stephanie.

CALLER:  I do; I do.  And it’s so frustrating.  You know, I wish somebody could say, “Hey, this is what’s gonna happen on Election Day.”

RUSH:  Well, I know, I would love to be able to tell you, but see, nobody knows.  Nobody knows.  Not even the pollsters will predict that their poll is right, right now.

Notice that Rush conveniently ignores the FOX news poll that shows the same results.  But, Fox is playing the same game.  It’s a “Democratic” Skew and not the response of the electorate to the Romney Ryan agenda and incompetency.

Conservatives and the Romney campaign may say that the swing state polls which shows a widening lead for Obama are out of whack, but the trend is unmistakable. A month ago in must-win Ohio, Romney trailed in the Quinnipiac University poll commissioned by the New York Times and CBS News by 6 points. It’s now 10 points.

Polls may not be predictive, but even a poll that doesn’t reflect the actual condition of the electorate can still show you the trend line. And right now, there aren’t any indications that Romney is closing the gap. Romney may be closer than a double-digit deficit, but he’s sure not where he needs to be.

Romney’s attack slogan on President Obama has been “Obama isn’t working,” but it’s clear that Romney’s strategy hasn’t been working.

Romney’s even lost seniors.  He only has a clear advantage with one group.  That would be White Men. So what does the Quinnipiac Poll indicate?

Gov. Mitt Romney had a bad week in the media and it shows in these key swing states,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “The furor over his 47 percent remark almost certainly is a major factor in the roughly double-digit leads President Barack Obama has in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The debates may be Romney’s best chance to reverse the trend in his favor.”

“The wide difference between the two candidates is not just a result of Romney’s bad week. In Ohio and Florida votes are basically split down the middle on whether the county and they and their families are worse or better off than they were four years ago. If voters don’t think they are worse off, it is difficult to see them throwing out an incumbent whose personal ratings with voters remains quite high,” Brown added.
“The president’s strength results from the fact that for the first time in the entire campaign, he is seen as better able to fix the economy than is Romney, the issue that has been the Republican’s calling card since the general election campaign began. And the economy remains the overwhelming choice as the most important issue to voters’ presidential choice.”

TP just published a list of six prominent reactionaries that think the media are manipulating the polls. Republicans appear to be delusional.  Dave Wiegel is calling them “Poll sample Truthers”.  They simply refuse to believe reality.

Nicknamed “poll sample truthers” by Dave Weigel, the skeptics are falling over each other to explain how the numbers are lying:

Erick Erickson
Erickson, Editor-in-Chief of RedState.com and CNN political contributor, accuses the media of a “confirmation bias” that makes them conform their data to what they want: “The polls are confirming what the press thinks and that they have a larger than 2008 Democratic turnout is of no consequence to them.”

John McLaughlin
The Republican pollster explains the poll conspiracy: “The Democrats want to convince [these anti-Obama voters] falsely that Romney will lose to discourage them from voting. So they lobby the pollsters to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models. They are lobbying them now to affect early voting. IVR [Interactive Voice Response] polls are heavily weighted. You can weight to whatever result you want.”

Hugh Hewitt
Radio host Hugh Hewitt thinks the CBS/Quinnipiac/NYT poll is “junk”, choosing instead to focus on Rasmussen and Gallup’s daily polls, which have Obama leading by a smaller margin. These polls, he says, amounts to “lots of evidence this morning that their campaign is in terrific shape.”

Dick Morris
Tea Party icon Dick Morris insists if the election were held today Romney would win by “4 or 5 points,” carrying Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania — leading Sean Hannity to exclaim, “Oh, come on!” Morris later declares, “The polling this year is the worst it’s ever been.”

The question is will Republican just blame Romney for this when they eventually wake up to reality or will they see that entire swatches of the voting populace reject their agenda?

Tuesday Reads: Natural and Human-Made Fireworks, the God Particle, and More

Posted: July 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable Care Act (ACA), Health care reform, Media, morning reads, religion, Religious Conscience, the GOP, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 50 Comments

Good Morning!

Someone in my neighborhood has begun celebrating Independence Day already, so I’m writing this with the sound of firecrackers in the background.

That may soon be followed by thunder and lightening, so I shouldn’t have any trouble staying awake long enough to finish this post. As long as my power doesn’t go out, everything should be fine!

That’s downtown Boston in a thunderstorm.  Isn’t it gorgeous?   Now let’s see what the morning papers have in store for us.

Everyone is agog about physicists’ discovery of a new particle–is it the “god particle?”

Physicists in Europe will present evidence of an entirely new particle on Wednesday, Nature has learned.

But more data will be needed to officially confirm whether it is indeed the long-awaited Higgs boson — the particle thought to be behind the mass of all the others.

Even as rumours fly in the popular media, physicists have begun quietly cheering at CERN, the European particle-physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland. “Without a doubt, we have a discovery,” says one member of the team working on the ATLAS experiment, who wished to remain anonymous. “It is pure elation!”

For nearly half a century, physicists have predicted the existence of a particle that helps to endow others with mass. Named after theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, the boson is the upshot of a mathematical trick that unites the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces into a single ‘electroweak’ interaction. It is considered the final, crucial piece of the standard model of particle physics.

I’m fascinated by physics, but this thing is beyond my comprehension. From what I can figure out it has something to do with an energy field that permeates the universe; so to me it sounds like confirmation of something that has been talked about by mystics for centuries.

“We think the Higgs boson really gets at the center of some physics that is responsible for why the universe is here in the first place and what the ultimate structure of matter is,” said Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab….

“You can think of it as an energy field. We believe there is a Higgs energy field spread out in the whole universe,” Lykken said. Photons — light particles — are unaffected by this field. But as other elementary particles move around, he explained, “they feel this energy field as a kind of sticky molasses that slows them down and keeps them from moving at the speed of light.”

When enough of that field is packed into a small enough space, Lykken said, it manifests as a particle — the Higgs boson.

A group of researchers will leave today to mount a search for the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s plane.

Organizers hope the expedition will conclusively solve one of the most enduring mysteries of the 20th century – what became of Earhart after she vanished during an attempt to become the first pilot, man or woman, to circle the globe around the equator.

A recent flurry of clues point to the possibility that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, ended up marooned on the tiny uninhabited island of Nikumaroro, part of the Pacific archipelago Republic of Kiribati.

“The public wants evidence, a smoking gun, that this is the place where Amelia Earhart’s journey ended,” said Richard Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). “That smoking gun is Earhart’s plane.”

The expedition was scheduled to begin yesterday, but the group’s departure was postponed because of an administrative issue. The trip will last 16 days, with 10 days spent on the search for the wreckage.

One of my cousins works in the White House, and her power has been out since that big storm the hit the mid-Atlantic states. According to my mom, many people in Indiana are also without power. Hundreds of thousands in the Eastern U.S. are in the same boat, and there is a likelihood of more blackouts. During a heat wave like this, that can be more than inconvenient–it could be dangerous.

Electrical utilities are advising customers in and around Washington that it may well be a whole week before all power is restored after the unusually potent storm that ravaged the mid-Atlantic region on Friday. Many customers are outraged as to why it would take so long.

More than two million people in the eastern United States, including more than 400,000 in the greater Washington area, were still without power on Monday.

The storm, which claimed at least 22 lives, shuttered businesses, stores and gas stations and littered the region with fallen tree limbs and downed power lines, many of which are still strung along poles above ground.

It hit during a period of record-breaking heat and immediately shut down air conditioning systems across an area well known for its hot, humid summers and poor air quality.

As evidence grows that Chief Justice John Roberts changed his vote on the Affordable Care Act case at the last minute, Republicans are gnashing their teeth and cursing their former idol as a traitor to the cause: Scorn and Withering Scorn for Roberts

The day after Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the Supreme Court’s four-member liberal wing to uphold the health care overhaul law, he appeared before a conference of judges and lawyers in Pennsylvania. A questioner wanted to know whether he was “going to Disney World.”

Chief Justice Roberts said he had a better option: he was about to leave for Malta, where he would teach a two-week class on the history of the Supreme Court. “Malta, as you know, is an impregnable island fortress,” he said on Friday, according to news reports. “It seemed like a good idea.”

The chief justice was correct to anticipate a level of fury unusual even in the wake of a blockbuster decision with vast political, practical and constitutional consequences. The criticism came from all sides. And it was directed not at the court as whole or even at the majority in the 5-to-4 decision. It was aimed squarely at him.

Read the rest at the link. The NYT tried to “balance” their story by claiming that liberals are angry too. Seriously? Even they admit the wingers are “particularly bitter.”

Former Dubya speechwriter Michael Gerson describes “John Roberts’ alternate universe.” And Marc A. Thiessen asks, “Why are Republicans so awful at picking Supreme Court justices?”

While conservatives agonize, a new Kaiser Health Tracking poll finds that 56% of Americans “would like to see the law’s detractors stop their efforts to block its implementation and move on to other national problems.” More evidence that conservatives are out of touch with reality and headed for disaster in November unless they can manage to buy a clue.

CNN also ran a poll on reactions to the ACA decision–also asking respondents about their attitudes toward the Supreme Court.

According to a CNN/ORC International survey released Monday, the public is divided on last week’s ruling, with 50% saying they agree with the Supreme Court’s decision and 49% saying they disagree. And there is the expected partisan divide, with more than eight in ten Democrats agreeing with the decision, more than eight in ten Republicans disagreeing, and independent voters divided, with 52% disagreeing and 47% agreeing…..

“Despite howls of protest from many Republican leaders, only about one in five Americans – and only 35% of the Republican rank and file – say they are angry about the decision,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “And despite victory laps by many Democratic leaders, only one in six Americans – and only one in three Democrats nationwide – say they feel enthusiastic about the court’s ruling.”

But attitudes toward the Court generally have changed.

“As recently as April, Republicans and Democrats had virtually identical positive opinions on the Supreme Court. But not any more,” adds Holland. “That’s the biggest change that the court decision has created.”

The court’s approval rating among Democrats jumped by 23 points; to 73%. Among Republicans, it fell by 21 points, to 31%. Approval of the Supreme Court among independents edged up five points, to 53%.

I’ll end with a story that is a few days old, but still interesting: Mormons quit church in mass resignation ceremony.

A group of about 150 Mormons quit their church in a mass resignation ceremony in Salt Lake City on Saturday in a rare display of defiance ending decades of disagreement for some over issues ranging from polygamy to gay marriage.

Participants from Utah, Arizona, Idaho and elsewhere gathered in a public park to sign a “Declaration of Independence from Mormonism.” [….]

The Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is known for its culture of obedience, and the mass ceremony was a seldom-seen act of collective revolt.

After gathering in the park, participants hiked a half-mile up nearby Ensign Peak, scaled in 1847 by church President Brigham Young to survey the spot where his Latter-day Saints would build a city.

At the top, those gathered gave three loud shouts of “Freedom,” cheered, clapped and hugged.

The reasons participants gave for leaving their religion included the Mormon church’s political activity directed against the LGBT community, racism and sexism in the church, and the church’s efforts to cover up its own troubling history, which includes violent acts and polygamy.

Now what are your reading recommendations for today?

Tuesday Reads

Posted: March 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, birth control, Mitt Romney, morning reads, New Orleans, Newt Gingrich, psychology, Reproductive Rights, Republican presidential politics, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 46 Comments

Good Morning!!

Let’s get right to the news. I’m going to start with a couple of items that should particularly interest Dakinikat. First, Charlie Pierce wrote a post yesterday about Bobby Jindal’s campaign for VP.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal wants to be your vice-president. (He may also want to be your president, too, but being your vice-president first is an easy way to do that.) His first audition for the second slot was to become the prime surrogate for the relentless juggernaut that was the Rick Perry campaign.

(This was a juggernaut only in the sense that people watched Perry speak in the debates and asked each other, “Is he hitting the jug or not?” Thank you. I’ll be back for the late show.)

Once he rode that baby straight into the ground, Jindal decided to campaign for the job on his own, all the while hoping that nobody in the country remembers his memorable “reply” to the president’s State of the Union address back in 2009, during which Jindal looked like a 12-year old wearing his grandfather’s suit, the one in which Jindal scoffed at federal spending on “volcano monitoring” a little more than a year before a big hunk of Iceland blew up and nearly destroyed the airline industry in Europe.

Pierce is reacting to Jindal’s op-ed at the WSJ: Obama’s Politicized Energy Policy

With rising energy costs making it more expensive to drive our cars, heat our homes, and fuel our sputtering economy, many Republicans are criticizing the Obama administration for a failure to adopt a comprehensive energy policy. I believe that critique lets the president off too easily. His administration does have a national energy policy—it’s just a subservient by-product of his radical environmental policy.

This administration willfully ignores rational choices that would lower energy prices and reduce U.S. reliance on foreign energy sources.

Bla, bla, bla…”rational” advice from a guy who believes in exorcism.

We all lost an hour of our lives a couple of days ago when the government made us “spring forward” into daylight savings time (DST). I love it, because it means it stays light a little longer at the end of the day here in New England, but Dak hates what it does to her down in New Orleans. Of course up here in the north, I don’t have the problem of darkness in the early morning.

The Christian Science Monitor had an interesting article on DST yesterday. CSM reports on a psychological study that found that workers are sleepy the next day after the time change (duh!) and are more likely to waste time on the internet at work. “Global productivity losses from a spike in employee cyberloafing are potentially staggering,” the researchers conclude.

CSM says that the origins of DST go way back. It was “originally proposed by a 19th century butterfly collector who wanted more time at the end of the workday to scour fields for insects,” and was first implemented “during World War I (peacetime standardization came in 1966).”

The most recent real adjustment in the US came in 2007, when the change was moved up to the second Sunday in March from the first Sunday in April to lengthen “summertime” and gauge potential energy savings. Polls showed farmers, perennial DST opponents, grumbled, and sports retailers (who benefit from the extra hour of daylight for play time after work) rejoiced.

If you’re worried about lost sleep, you might want to read this article at Alternet: The 8-Hour Sleep Myth: How I Learned That Everything I Knew About Sleep Was Wrong. Apparently it’s not really natural for humans to sleep through the night. The author read about this in a BBC article. Here’s the gist from the Alternet piece:

Turns out that psychiatrist Thomas Wehr ran an experiment back in the ‘90s in which people were thrust into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. When their sleep regulated, a strange pattern emerged. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before drifting off again into a second four-hour sleep.

Historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech would not have been surprised by this pattern. In 2001, he published a groundbreaking paper based on 16 years of research, which revealed something quite amazing: humans did not evolve to sleep through the night in one solid chunk. Until very recently, they slept in two stages. Shazam.

In his book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, Ekrich presents over 500 references to these two distinct sleep periods, known as the “first sleep” and the “second sleep,” culled from diaries, court records, medical manuals, anthropological studies, and literature, including The Odyssey. Like an astrolabe pointing to some forgotten star, these accounts referenced a first sleep that began two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

This waking period, known in some cultures as the “watch,” was filled with everything from bringing in the animals to prayer. Some folks visited neighbors. Others smoked a pipe or analyzed their dreams. Often they lounged in bed to read, chat with bedfellows, or have much more refreshing sex than we modern humans have at bedtime. A 16th-century doctor’s manual prescribed sex after the first sleep as the most enjoyable variety.

That makes me feel a lot better, since I’ve rarely ever been able to sleep through the night, and in my later years, I have a terrible time falling asleep in the first place.

In political news, President Obama’s approval rating has suddenly tanked, supposedly because of gas prices.

Despite improving job growth and an extended Republican primary fight dividing his would-be opponents, President Obama is heading into the general election season on treacherous political ground, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

At a time of rising gas prices, heightened talk of war with Iran and setbacks in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama’s approval rating dropped substantially in recent weeks, the poll found, with 41 percent of respondents expressing approval of the job he is doing and 47 percent saying they disapprove — a dangerous position for any incumbent seeking re-election.

Which is kind of scary because of the horrifying Republican presidential candidates. It’s still early, so I’m not panicking just yet. Speaking of the clown car crew, there are four primaries today–in Alabama, Mississippi, Hawaii, and American Samoa. I’m not sure if we’ll have a live blog, because the last one was a bit of dud. If you’d like to have one, please say so in the comments to this post. We’ll definitely post the results tonight though.

As of last night, Romney was in the running in both Alabama and Mississippi, where the polls show Romney Gingrich, and Santorum all running neck and neck. The worst news is that Romney is now leading Obama by 5 points nationally.

The next item drew a {heavy sigh} from me. A new PPP poll found that a whole lot of voters in Alabama and Mississippi think President Obama is a Muslim. {{Heavy sigh….}}

The poll of Mississippi Republicans found that 52% said they believed Obama is a Muslim, 36% weren’t sure and only 12% said they believed he is a Christian. He fared slightly better in Alabama, where 45% said he is a Muslim, 41% weren’t sure, and 14% said he is a Christian.

Some folks in these two deep South state don’t care for interracial marriages like the one that produced Barack Obama.

67% of Alabama Republicans saying they believe interracial marriage should be legal, though 21% said it still should be against the law. In Mississippi, 54% said it should be allowed, while 29% said it should remain illegal.

The preferred Republican candidate of those opposed to interracial marriage? Newt Gingrich. In Mississippi, Gingrich led Romney among that group 40% to 27%, and held a 38%-27% advantage in Alabama.

I am soooooo glad I don’t live in Alabama or Mississippi! Alexandra Petri of the WaPo calls it “the time traveler vote.” She says that voters must have just arrived from the 1920s.

I don’t know why it didn’t strike me sooner. So many of the issues at stake this year are Issues I Thought We Resolved Several Decades Ago. This is 2012, with lots of economic distress and voter unrest to go around. Why are we suddenly prioritizing Taking Back Control Of Women’s Bodies For The State?

But if you consider the Time Traveling Vote, it all makes sense.

I am not sure how big the vote is. But if the recent actions of many state legislatures are to be taken into account, it is surely substantial.

To visitors from the past, these issues are still pressing and vital. They don’t care about jobs! Once the election’s over, they’re headed back to 1926, where the economy is still roaring and everyone is flapping and doing the Charleston.

It certainly makes more sense than the assumption that they’ve simply been ignoring all the headlines, most of the textbooks, the entire women’s rights movement and the scientific consensus for decades.

Some love letters between the young Richard Nixon and his future wife Pat will be displayed at the Nixon Library. They are said to show Nixon’s “sensitive side.” A sample:

“Every day and every night I want to see you and be with you. Yet I have no feeling of selfish ownership or jealousy. In fact I should always want you to live just as you wanted – because if you didn’t then you would change and wouldn’t be you,” Nixon wrote in one of the letters, part of a rotating display at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

“Let’s go for a long ride Sundays; let’s go to the mountains weekends; let’s read books in front of fires; most of all let’s really grow together and find the happiness we know is ours,” he continued.

Whatever happened to that guy?

Finally, have you heard that Arlen Specter has a memoir coming out? Naturally, it’s full of complaints. Harry Reid stabbed him in the back after promising to give Specter seniority as a Democrat if he switched parties. Obama and Biden didn’t help him in his primary campaign against Joe Sestak. The most interesting revelation in the article in The Hill is that Bob Dole told Specter he (Dole) would have switched parties too.

“Dole told me I had done the right thing, that I had done a terrific job as a senator, been involved in a lot of projects, been very active, and hadn’t gotten credit for a lot of the stuff I had done,” he wrote.

“I said, ‘Bob, I think that it’s very meaningful when you say that I did the right thing, in the party change.’

“He said, ‘Well,’ and then paused and thought for a few seconds. Then he said, ‘I probably would have done the same thing.’ ”

Never mind all that. I want to read about Specter’s role in the Warren Commission and how he dreamed up the “single bullet theory.”

That’s all I’ve got for now. What are you reading and blogging about today?

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