Hey, when was the last time you heard a union President accurately quoted in the media?
I can’t remember a union President ever being accurately quoted. Prior to this week, I can’t recall a union President being accurately or inaccurately quoted in the media. It’s as if unions don’t exists in this country except to be occasionally vilified for ruining the economy.
Tonight, at the regular monthly meeting of the Progressive Democrats for Delaware (PDD), the PDD will also form its’ 2012 Endorsement Subcommittee from its membership and begin discussions on requirements for political endorsements by PDD. The PDD is a grassroots Liberal action group pledged to support a wide range of progressive legislation and candidates at the local, state, and federal levels, and our monthly meetings are open to all like-minded voters. Thus, this is a golden opportunity for those interested in progressive politics who want to be involved in the 2012 electoral process. Members of the Endorsement Committee not only formalize the endorsement criteria candidates need to meet in order to get a progressive endorsement, but they will also have the opportunity to meet with and interview interested candidates during the upcoming year.
Also, PDD will feature a review of the first half of the 2011 Delaware State Legislative session with State Rep John Kowalko (D-Newark).
Later this month, Senator Chris Coons will be our guest at a special meeting on September 27th, at 6:30 p.m., also at the Delaware Democratic Party Headquarters.
The meeting tonight will start at 7 pm at 19 E. Commons Blvd, in New Castle.
You probably have already read this post, but if you haven’t please do.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
Now go read it.
Celia writes with the ennui of someone who has lived through a golden age. She no doubt feels that at this point in her career, she should be breathlessly reporting on the temples being dedicated to the Gods who walked among us; DuPont, Roth, Castle, Carper. She basically comes out and says it:
This was the last of the country club Republicans, the ones who dominated the state in the 1970s and 1980s when Pete du Pont and Mike Castle were the governors and Bill Roth was the senator with breathtakingly national stature, famous for the Roth-Kemp tax cut and the Roth IRA.
Instead of reporting on monuments and signs of apotheosis, she looks over a blighted landscape with squinted eyes, trying to see what she once saw. Instead of the dedication of monuments, she is an ashen courtesan writing about a political party with no candidates.
I have this theory about President Obama. All the negotiations, inclusion and “meeting half way” with the whacked out psychos who run the GOP are based on his noble belief that the executive branch is a co-equal branch of government with the legislative and judicial branches.
He is going out of his way to try and reset the balance envisioned by the founders and expressed in the set of norms and traditions which accrued over 200 years. Bush brutally raped those traditions and the founders vision for the executive, and Obama is trying to unrape them. If I’m right, it is a virtuous, but completely fucked and misguided waste of a presidency.
For one thing, the Republicans will always obscenely abuse executive powers, so this Obama reset will only apply to Democratic Presidents. For another, he doesn’t get that modern Republicans are insurrectionist and terrorists who are completely unencumbered by notions of honor.
In Santa Cruz, police are using computer models to predict when and where crime is likely to occur. They’re using algorithms that are related to software that predicts aftershocks.
The current, real world test of the software involves generating a map of the city areas most likely to be burglarized, the time of day they are most likely to get hit, and deploying personnel accordingly. The software is recalibrated every day when burglaries from the previous day are added to the dataset.
[snip]
The police officers arrived at the parking garage in downtown Santa Cruz and spotted two women behaving suspiciously. No crime had been committed, but peering through the windows of the parked cars was sketchy enough. The officers questioned the women: one had outstanding warrants; the other was in possession of illegal drugs.
What’s strange about this scenario is that no one had called the cops. In fact, the cops didn’t even know that the women would be there, just that the probability of a crime being committed at that location, at that time of day, was especially high. In one of the first cases of ‘predictive policing,’ law enforcement were able to calculate where the criminals would be and arrest them before the crime could be committed.
USA Today wrote the following:
“That raise actually might not be as good as it looks. The extra money is nice, but it could very well bump you into the next tax bracket, possibly leaving you with less money than you had before the raise.”
Hmm, that’s not the way it works.
No, no and 286,000 times no! The tax system brackets give marginalrates. This means that if the raise bumps you into a higher bracket then you pay more taxes only on the income in the higher bracket. Suppose that the tax bracket for income under $200k is 25 percent, and for income over $200k is 33 percent. If you get a raise that pushes your income from $195,000 to $205,000 then you only pay the higher 33 percent tax rate on the $5,000 that is above the $200k threshold not your whole income. Therefore, there is no (as in none, nada, not any) way that getting more money, and being pushed into a higher tax bracket will leave you with less money after taxes.
If the main-stream media doesn’t understand this, than how can we expect Tea Baggers to comprehend it?
At a rally in Detroit this weekend, the union crowd chanted “Four more years” throughout his speech. Maybe they understand where we’d be with President McCain and Vice-President Palin.
Here’s what he did say about the plan: Roads and bridges “need rebuilding,” companies are ready to do it, and there are “more than one million unemployed construction workers ready to get dirty right now.”
The problem, Obama said, is the usual suspect: Congress, and particularly Republicans. Dropping his “g’s” as he does in his enthusiastic campaign speeches, Obama said: “We just need Congress to get on board. Let’s get America back to work.”
And as the Detroit crowd chanted “four more years,” Obama set his sights on the GOP.
With the GOP horse race seemingly between Romney and Dick Perry, the Republican establishment is in a quandary.
With elites hesitating over both the painfully cautious, independent-voter-friendly Romney and the blustery, activist-charming Perry, their affections could still turn either way in the next two months.
Put another way: It’s shaping up as a choice between one candidate who looks electable and another who might be inevitable.
“People being more careful and looking for a candidate that has sustainability,” said Cathy Bailey, a major George W. Bush donor who served as ambassador to Latvia.
“They’re gonna bet on that candidate that’s gonna be able to take it across the finish line,” she said, referring to both the primary and the general election. “If you see a horse really pulling away, you have people fall in line behind that person.”
Today, Sanders announced that he will introduce legislation that would strengthen Social Security without cutting benefits to any of its beneficiaries. Sanders’ legislation would eliminate the income cap that currently exists in the payroll tax that does not tax income above $106,800:
To keep Social Security strong for another 75 years, Sanders’ legislation would apply the same payroll tax already paid by more than nine out of 10 Americans to those with incomes over $250,000 a year. […] Under Sanders’ legislation, Social Security benefits would be untouched. The system would be fully funded by making the wealthiest Americans pay the same payroll tax already assessed on those with incomes up to $106,800 a year.
It is easy to explain and makes sense to every voter in American who does not make $106,800 per year.
Well, it’s that time of year when beauty pageant contestants, excuse me, scholarship contestants, take the stage to model evening gowns, bathing suits, and show their knowledge of world subjects.
Here is a video of this year’s Miss USA contestants talking about evolution.
Personally, I like the second video much better.
Have a great Labor Day weekend. Remember what this weekend is about – the working man and woman and the rights workers have achieved over the years. Also remember what dickheads like Scott Walker are trying to do to public employees.
You just can’t make this shit up.
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.
[snip]
Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn’t about helping the poor. It’s about helping the poor to help themselves to others’ money. It’s about raw so-called social justice. It’s about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers.
via TPM
Oh my, this is a good one. This post at Respectful Insolence first delves into two principles of homeopathic care: the Law of Similars and the Law of Infinitesimals. First the Law of Similars:
The concept is that the way to choose a homeopathic remedy is to choose something that causes the symptoms the practitioner wants to alleviate. Of course, there’s no general scientific or biological principle to support the Law of Similars. In reality, it’s nothing more than a variant of ancient concepts of sympathetic magic. Yet it is the main basis of all of homeopathy.
And it gets funnier with the Law of Infinitesimals.
This is the most famous principle of homeopathy that states that the way to make a remedy stronger is to dilute it, a principle that laughs at chemistry, physics, and biology. Indeed, common dilutions of homeopathic remedies (for example, 30C, which is 30 serial 100-fold dilutions, or a dilution of 1060) have been diluted so much that the odds that even a single molecule remains in the remedy are, well, infinitesimal.
But let’s get on the main topic of this post – the memories of water. But first a little about “proving”.
One of the sillier aspects of homeopathy that skeptics frequently forget is how homeopaths determine which remedies are appropriate for each disease or condition. This is accomplished through a mechanism known a “proving.” In a homeopathic proving, healthy subjects take the remedy and then report their symptoms, and through these reports the profile of a homeopathic remedy is discovered. Of course, given that most provings use the highly diluted form of the remedy, rather than the undiluted form, what is being described are reactions to ingesting water.
A company provides a product that is supposedly new water. From their website
By way of example, we are coming to appreciate that water as well as being the best solvent at a chemical level, is also a ‘solvent’ at a subtle level, being exquisitely impressionable to influences: it carries memories. So, how to find water that has not a trace of memory, so that the proving should be of H2O untainted by the reminiscences of where it has been or what it has touched? Is this possible?
Facepalm. I coud on and on, but you really should read the article. But I’ll leave you with this little video.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0[/youtube]